20 THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER3, 2022
from the most disheartening direction—
not yielding to it as a spell by which to
be struck and charmed, like Ariel’s song
in “The Tempest,” but confronting it as
a code to be cracked. That was my ex-
perience, in high school. Grim with be-
wilderment, I tried plowing through
Jessie Weston’s “From Ritual to Ro-
mance” and J. G. Frazer’s encyclopedic
“The Golden Bough” because Eliot
deferred to them at the
start of the Notes, and be-
cause Colonel Kurtz, ab-
surdly, keeps them on his
bedside table, in “Apoca-
lypse Now.” When Mar-
lon Brando groaned “The
horror! The horror!,” he
was quoting the same
words, from Conrad’s
“Heart of Darkness,” that
Eliot had originally cho-
sen as an epigraph to “The Waste Land.”
If Francis Ford Coppola could wander
down a rabbit hole, so could I.
There is much that the Notes leave
unsaid. Take the loneliest lines of the
poem:
I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the keyWe are ushered, by the Notes, toward
two relevant passages: one from Dante’s
Inferno, and one from “Appearance and
Reality,” a work of 1893 by the British
philosopher F. H. Bradley, on whom Eliot
had written his doctoral thesis at Har-
vard. But something else haunts Eliot’s
vision of incarceration, and I would wager
a solid sum that he is summoning, con-
sciously or otherwise, a sentence from
“The Adventure of the Speckled Band,”
as told to Sherlock Holmes: “She smiled
back at me, closed my door, and a few
moments later I heard her key turn in
the lock.” Eliot was a confirmed and ar-
dent Sherlockian; the cry of “What! are
you here?,” in the deserted street of “Four
Quartets,” recalls an urgent question posed
by Sir Henry Baskerville—“What, are
you coming, Watson?”—in “The Hound
of the Baskervilles,” from which Eliot
would pinch the murky word “grimpen.”
Admirers of Eliot should take care,
though, not to dwindle into detectives.
To hunt for clues in “The Waste Land”
is, however gratifying, to risk shutting
ourselves in, and there is a liberating
pleasure to be had in looking outward
from the poem, and onward. The key
to the key, that is, lies not just in Dante,
Bradley, and Conan Doyle but also in
what the image opens up, for the pur-
poses of later creative endeavors. Fran-
cis Bacon, for example, was much ob-
sessed by Eliot, and his 1971 triptych,
“In Memory of George Dyer,” shows a
solitary figure, beside a stair-
case, feeding a key into a lock.
Likewise, in the plainly titled
“Painting” (1978), a violet-
fleshed foot stretches toward
a door, with a key gripped
tight between its toes. Tem-
peramentally, Eliot, who
dressed like a banker because
he was a banker, could
scarcely be more distant from
the chaos-smeared Bacon,
but there’s no accounting for influence.
If Eliot steals from Ophelia at the end
of the pub sequence in “The Waste
Land”—“Good night, ladies, good night,
sweet ladies, good night, good night”—
who can begrudge Lou Reed his own
theft, in “Goodnight Ladies,” the final
track of “Transformer”?
The most resourceful homage paid
to “The Waste Land,” and the most
biting, is a work of 1990 by Martin
Rowson, prized as a cartoonist for the
Guardian. He reconfigures the poem,
in the format of a graphic novel, as a
riff on Raymond Chandler’s “The Big
Sleep” and on the ensuing Howard
Hawks film: a notion so perfectly at-
tuned to my interests that Rowson
should have invoiced me directly. The
conceit is sustained in beguiling style,
with a Bogart-like hero, Chris Mar-
lowe, sleuthing his way through the ar-
cana of the poem—“Then I saw the
Hyacinth Kid”—and straining, like
every reader, to lend them some sem-
blance of a plot. The cinematic, liter-
ary, and art-historical allusions are fired
off like gunshots, and the result, de-
spite finding no favor with the Eliot
estate (the British edition was sternly
censored and altered), digs up some-
thing tense and tenebrous in “The
Waste Land” that had previously passed
unobserved: here is a poème noir.
Eliot’s words are everywhere, in other
words. The more closely you map “The
Waste Land,” the more it assumes theshape of an isthmus; so much of the
past, both public and personal, streamed
into its making, and so much has flowed
from it ever since. When one of its most
resonant quatrains is declaimed through
a megaphone by Anthony Blanche, the
resident dandy of “Brideshead Revis-
ited,” he is obviously signalling the fash-
ionable status of the poem, as its fame
increased through the nineteen-twen-
ties and thirties, but there’s more to it
than that. He is restoring, as it were,
the adamantine beauty of the rhyming
lines—pentameters in parenthesis,
which embed the travails of the pres-
ent day inside the remoteness of myth:(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all
Enacted on this same divan or bed;
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall
And walked among the lowest of the dead.)E
liot died in 1965. His wife Vivi-
enne had passed away in 1947, hav-
ing spent almost a decade in a psychi-
atric hospital. In 1957, to the surprise
of many friends, Eliot married his sec-
retary, Valerie Fletcher, and found with
her a private contentment that had
hitherto eluded him. Another miracle,
of sorts, arrived in 1968. A trove, long
thought lost, was unearthed in the Berg
Collection at the New York Public Li-
brary: a sheaf of Eliot’s drafts of “The
Waste Land,” some handwritten, some
typewritten, with wordless loops and
slashes scrawled across the text and
brusque observations at the side. Ed-
ited by Valerie Eliot, the keeper of the
poet’s flame, the sheaf was published
in 1971, under the formidable title “The
Waste Land: A Facsimile and Tran-
script of the Original Drafts, Includ-
ing the Annotations of Ezra Pound.”
To encounter the book, at college,
was to feel like an Egyptologist, break-
ing into a sealed tomb. As for the writ-
ing on the walls, there were three scribes
in all: Eliot himself; Pound, his fellow-
poet and, on this occasion, his indis-
pensable midwife; and Vivienne. It was
thus our privilege to see that, next to a
splintered piece of domestic repartee
(“‘What is that noise?’ The wind under
the door”), Vivienne had pencilled the
word “WONDERFUL.” Also, we now
realized, the fourth and leanest part of
the poem, “Death by Water,” had been
much bulkier to begin with, filled out
with a lengthy nautical narrative—filled