yet not improved, in Pound’s judgment,
which is why he took a scalpel to the
entire passage. His decisiveness, in
grasping what was essential and what
superfluous in Eliot’s conjurings, re-
mains a scrupulous feat of creative at-
tention, outdone in generosity only by
his praise for the finished product.
“Complimenti, you bitch. I am wracked
by the seven jealousies,” he wrote to
Eliot. “The Waste Land” was, he an-
nounced, “A damn good poem.”
For the centenary, Valerie Eliot’s
edition has been reissued, with extra
material. If you badly wish to know
how much Eliot spent on breakfast at
the Albemarle Hotel, Margate, on the
north coast of Kent, in October, 1921,
your craving can now be satisfied, be-
cause his hotel bills are shown in all
their glory. I feasted upon them, hav-
ing long ago made the trek to Mar-
gate, in tribute to the town’s cameo ap-
pearance in “The Waste Land”—“On
Margate Sands./I can connect/Noth-
ing with nothing.” Some of the poem
was composed there; the following
month, much of its finale was brought
forth, with a fluency verging on the
trancelike, in Lausanne, on the shore
of Lake Geneva. (It’s a natural spot,
beside the water, for beginnings and
conclusions. Edward Gibbon com-
pleted “The Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire” there, and Dickens
started “Dombey and Son.”) To Swit-
zerland, therefore, I made my sombre
and illogical way, this summer, and re-
traced the route that Eliot used to take
from his hotel to his appointments with
Dr. Roger Vittoz, the author of “Treat-
ment of Neurasthenia by Teaching of
Brain Control.” Downhill to one’s
shrink, then an uphill struggle on the
walk back: a very Eliot-like odyssey.
Of such madness there shall be no
end. I have a memory of moving house
and of thanking the men who had spent
a day boxing up the contents of my book-
shelves. One guy replied, in a tone of
rueful defeat, “If I never see another
book on T. S. Eliot, it’ll be too soon.”
That was thirty years ago. Since then,
the secondary and tertiary literature on
the poet, and on “The Waste Land,” has
swelled beyond reckoning. We have had
Eliot’s letters: nine volumes and count-
ing, and taking us only to 1941, with
twenty-four years of his life to go. We
have had his collected prose, too: a mere
eight volumes, but sufficient to test the
wrists of an elderly reader. All the mat-
ter within is available online, for a sub-
scription, but a lightweight Eliot means
flirting with convenience, and where’s
the fun—the necessary pain—in that?
Meanwhile, the critical and bio-
graphical stampede continues. Is it nos-
talgia alone that makes me doubt the
calibre of the current beasts? Back in
1972, “Eliot in His Time: Essays on the
Occasion of the Fiftieth Anniversary
of ‘The Waste Land’” sported contri-
butions from figures as substantial, and
as energetically articulate, as Richard
Ellmann, Hugh Kenner, and the poet
Donald Davie. To skip ahead forty years,
to a volume such as “‘The Waste Land’
at 90,” is to bump into a mass of inele-
gant formulations, doomed, or perhaps
designed, to block off the work more
securely than ever against the incursions
of an amateur reader—the very last fate
that “The Waste Land,” of all poems,
either deserves or needs. Without a tool
kit of literary theory, none of us could
unpick this, with its telling typo:
Instead of using realism, with its epistemo-
logical intention to totalize and represent the
reality of a whole world and life, the poem fa-
vors textual anarchism (a kind of rhizomatic and
destablizing structure) in order to create a work
which is intrinsically and openly incomplete.
“The Waste Land” is already diffi-
cult enough; we should not make itmore so. Less and less, after forty years
of living with the poem, am I tempted
to regard it, or shun it, as a cryptogram.
Rather, in Eliot’s own words, from an
earlier work, “I am moved by fan-
cies/That are curled around these im-
ages, and cling.” We talk of a friend
having had a difficult childhood, or en-
during a difficult marriage, and that is
a more constructive model, I think, for
drawing near to the intractability of
“The Waste Land.” It is a brave imag-
ination that can keep to order while
exploring the terrain of its own tor-
ments; rarely has a nightmare—not
wholly comprehended by the dreamer—
been dramatized with such variety and
wit. One of the first people to hear the
poem was Virginia Woolf, and her ju-
dicious response, as outlined in a jour-
nal entry of June, 1922, has lost none
of its honesty:Eliot dined last Sunday & read his poem.
He sang it & chanted it & rhythmed it. It
has great beauty & force of phrase: symme-
try; & tensity. What connects it together, I’m
not so sure.Woolf added, “One was left, however,
with some strong emotion.” Indeed.A
s Benedict Cumberbatch prepared
to read at Charleston, in May, a
festival assistant who was working that
day told me that—unlike the paying
audience, most of whom looked three