22 THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER3, 2022
times her age—she did not know “The
Waste Land.” At last: the ideal recip-
ient, as unencumbered as Eliot would
wish. After the reading, I asked what
had struck her most about the poem.
“The landscapes,” she said, without
hesitation. “The rocks and the rivers.
All that dryness.” Not for her the un-
real city, or the mob of languages, but
a natural world under clear and pres-
ent threat. “The Waste Land,” in short,
can speak to the ecological dread of
her generation as it spoke to the social
and political anxieties of those who
had weathered the First World War.
The poem, which is prefaced with the
words of a Sibyl, is fated to tell each
of us, from one era to the next, what-
ever it is that we most fear to hear.
Desiccation was in the air, as Eliot
toiled on the poem. A “London Let-
ter” that he wrote for the July, 1921,
issue of The Dial begins in meteoro-
logical mode, with a typical touch of
the smilingly sinister. “The vacant term
of wit set in early this year with a fine
hot rainless spring; the crop of mur-
ders and divorces has been poor com-
pared with that of last autumn,” he re-
ported. “A new form of influenza has
been discovered, which leaves extreme
dryness and a bitter taste in the mouth.”
We are close to the stonescape of “The
Waste Land,” hostile and ungreen,
“where the sun beats,/And the dead
tree gives no shelter.” Later, amid “dry
sterile thunder without rain,” we hear
a plainsong of the unbearable:
If there were water
And no rock
If there were rock
And also water
And water
A spring
A pool among the rockI remember sitting in a classroom,
next to a friend of mine (the only one
with a serious ear for music), who lis-
tened to those lines and said, “I feel so
thirsty.” He had got what Eliot planned
for: the shock of the dry.
How far back the parching goes is
not easy to gauge. Can a want of water
be traced to its source, like a river?
Lately, I have come across a path that
has not, to the best of my knowledge,
been traced or trampled on before. Rob-
ert Crawford glances briefly at it, then
moves on. What took me there was a
letter from Eliot to his mother, in May,
1919, in which he asks that she send
him “the Rollo books,” adding, “I was
anxious that they be preserved.” He
then adds, “If there is anyone else in
the immediate family who would trea-
sure them as much as I (for I think
highly of them), let them have them.”
Pressing his claim while denying it,
Eliot is awkwardly eager to have what
he calls “the beloved Rollo books” in
his clutches.
The Rollo books, in fourteen vol-
umes, were popular tales of moral in-
struction, playful and severe, by a pro-
lific children’s author, Jacob Abbott.
Published in the eighteen-thirties and
forties, and frequently reprinted, they
revolved around a young boy, Rollo,
and his adventures. We know that the
stories were read and reread by Eliot
and his siblings, because three of the
volumes—frail and almost spineless,
crudely colored in as cherished books
often are, and cocooned in protective
boxes—sit in the London apartment
where Eliot lived with Valerie, and
where he died. It is now the home of
the T. S. Eliot Foundation.
The Rollo books are a portal into
the imaginative world of the poet, be-
fore he became a poet; I believe them
to be a part of that becoming. Picture
the young Eliot reading the admoni-
tions that are handed down to Rollo
by his father: “You cannot at first con-
trol your imagination entirely; but if
you steadily exert yourself to keep your
mind on other objects, you will soon
learn to do so.” (A portent of Dr. Vit-
toz.) Think of the doleful invocations
from “Four Quartets”—“This is the
death of air,” “This is the death of water
and fire”—and you will be dumb-
founded, as I was, to learn that the last
four Rollo books, on “Rollo’s Philoso-
phy,” are subtitled “Water,” “Air,” “Fire,”
and “Sky.” Most pertinent of all is “Rollo
at Play,” one of the three surviving vol-
umes at the Eliot Foundation. In one
ominous chapter, “Who Knows Best,
a Little Boy or His Father?,” Rollo
wants to “go a blueberrying” with his
cousin Lucy. His uncle puts the damp-
eners on the plan:
“I am in hopes we are going to have some
rain.”
“In hopes,” thought Rollo; “that is very
strange.”Rollo grows grouchy, refuses to join
Lucy in alternative games, and earns a
Biblical broadside from his father:“Your heart is in a very wicked state. You
are under the dominion of some of the worst
of feelings; you are self-conceited, ungrateful,
undutiful, unjust, selfish, and,” he added in a
lower and more solemn tone, “even impious.”Rollo tries to defend himself:
“I did not know that there was need of rain
in the fields.”
“Did not you?” said his father. “Did not
you know that the ground was very dry, and
that, unless we have rain soon, the crops will
suffer very much?”
“No, sir,” said Rollo.
“It is so,” said his father; “and this rain,
which you are so unwilling to have descend, is
going down into the ground all over the coun-
try, and into the roots of all the plants grow-
ing in the fields.”At last, as ever, the child is rebuked,
and the lesson learned. Seeing the soil
“drinking in the rain with delight,” he
ponders his own selfishness. “In a word
Rollo was now beginning to be really
penitent. The tears came into his eyes;
but they were tears of real sorrow for
sin, not of vexation and anger.” Here
is Eliot in waiting: the self-laceration,
the guilty submission to chastisement,
and, above all, the belief in aridity as
the natural—even preferable—state of
affairs. Dryness is what Rollo wants.
Redemption and relief are so distant,
and so inconceivable, that it’s better
not to pray for them at all.
The extraordinary fact is that, at the
other end of Eliot’s life, the drought
was eased. Having all but died in body
and spirit in his time with Vivienne,
he found himself revived by unforesee-
able love. It was in recognition of that
new life—his vita nuova, befitting a
perennial reader of Dante—that he
presented Valerie with a book, on Feb-
ruary 17, 1958. It was a first edition of
“The Waste Land,” from 1922, and it
still exists in the couple’s home, in Lon-
don. The words that Eliot inscribed at
the front of the poem have never been
seen in public, until now:This book belongs to Valerie, and so does
Thomas Stearns Eliot, her husband. He could
not give her this book, for he had no copy to
give her. She had wanted the book for many
years. She had possessed the author for over a
year, when the book came. She had made his
land blossom and birds to sing there.