Even if you flinch at the idea of a poem demanding a biography, an exception has to be made for The Waste Land. No other work of literature of the past century, or perhaps any century, feels quite so much a vivid breathing thing – ironically, since it is so consumed with death. Partly, crucially, that is the result of the extraordinary find in 1968 of all the drafts of Eliot’s poem in the Berg Collection of papers at the New York Public Library. Three years after the poet’s death, here were the living pages that made his reputation – mixing memory and desire – in the notes and annotations of the poet, his friend Ezra Pound and his first wife, Vivien. The publication of the facsimile of those drafts, the holy grail for a generation of English literature students, painstakingly edited and collated by Eliot’s second wife, Valerie, gave the poem a second coming in time for the 50th anniversary of its genesis.
Another 50 years on that rebirth shows no sign of flagging. This year’s centenary has been marked with a series of readings and events in the UK, the US and across the world. It has seen the second volume of Robert Crawford’s beautifully weighted biography of the poet (Eliot After the Waste Land) and also, this month, the publication of Lyndall Gordon’s The Hyacinth Girl. This is based on the new trove of 1,131 letters that Eliot sent to Emily Hale, the drama teacher he fell in love with while at Harvard in 1912, who became his confidante and lover again in the 1930s. Those letters cast some retrospective light on Eliot’s own sense of the creation of his era-defining poem. “I was never quite a whole man,” Eliot wrote to Hale. “The agony forced some genuine poetry out of me, certainly, which I would never have written if I had been happy: in that respect, perhaps, I may be said to have had the life I needed.”
Matthew Hollis’s book is deeply and brilliantly concerned with all the tendrils of that unhappiness, and Eliot’s triumphant creative response to it. He sifts and rakes over the dead ground of the poet’s broken relationship with his American parents, his disastrous infertile marriage, and the no man’s land of London decimated by Spanish flu after the great war. His quest is for all the seeds of intellectual and emotional pressure that shaped the poem. Such is the energy and engagement of Hollis in this task that you find yourself rooting for the emergence of the poem along with Eliot and his supporters, willing it into life as the book progresses.
The Waste Land lends itself so well to this kind of social narrative because it was almost a collective project. As Pound remarked to a friend prior to its publication: “Eliot’s Waste Land is I think justification of the ‘movement’ of our modern experiment since 1900.” Pound, “il miglior fabbro” – the greater craftsman – in Eliot’s famous formulation, is once again characterised in these pages as the tinder box spark for his friend’s genius, as well as his brutal editor. Before his shameful seduction by fascism, Pound was clearly among the most selfless egomaniacs going. Even while his own work was being trashed in the press – the Observer’s view of the first publication of The Cantos was that “Mr Pound is not, never has been and never will be a poet” – Pound was indefatigably concerned with both the health and wealth of Eliot, desperate to create a space in which his friend might escape from his office life at Lloyds Bank and devote himself to writing.
Hollis sketches deftly the expatriate anxieties of the pair as they endeavour to make tradition new, navigating on the one hand the English elitism of the Woolfs and Bertrand Russell – who betrayed Eliot’s friendship in a brief, cruel affair with Vivien – and on the other American avant garde rivalries with the likes of William Carlos Williams. These tensions, as he shows, were mostly played out in literary quarterlies whose circulation was almost exclusively friends and rivals.
Though often plagued by ill-health – nearly all the characters in The Waste Land cough their way through “the brown fog” of London’s winter dawns – the Eliots inhabit their times with surprising physical vigour. They periodically try to escape their London life by sea-swimming and sailing at Bosham in Sussex – “Vivien could handle a boat” – while Pound is described as “boxer, fencer, master of the tennis court” (he could return serve like “a galvanised agile gibbon”, Ford Madox Ford observed). Despite such excursions, the “agony” of the Eliots’ marriage increasingly expressed itself in their nerve endings. “Vivien has been lying in the most dreadful agony with neuritis in every nerve, increasingly – arms, hands, legs, feet, back.” When Eliot included a fragment of that marital neurosis in The Waste Land – “My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me. Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.” – Vivien, as ever convalescing by the coast, wrote alongside it, “Wonderful”.
The poem itself, Hollis details and dramatises, broke out of that tortured silence in 1921. At the beginning of that year, in which Eliot turned 33, he was still describing himself in a prospectus as “Banker, critic, poet”. By the year end, Hollis notes, “the priorities would be reversed”. The weather seemed a part of it. In his “London Letter”, written for the American review The Dial in July 1921, Eliot noted: “The vacant term of wit set in early this year with a fine hot rainless spring.” And “a new form of influenza has been discovered, which leaves extreme dryness and a bitter taste in the mouth”.
By the autumn, after a disastrous visit by his mother, Eliot has taken refuge in the Albemarle hotel in Margate to recuperate from a breakdown. The drought of early summer had not given up – every day in the first week of October, Hollis notes, was unseasonably hot; “the desert year”, as it came to be known. Out of that dryness, out of his own desiccation, Eliot made progress on the poem that he’d had in mind for many months.
The evolution of those pages – Pound striking out the whole first section, Vivien’s remarks on English idioms – have become folkloric among Eliot’s readers, but still Hollis invests them with fresh life. At times he has you looking over Eliot’s shoulder, in Margate and in a subsequent mental health clinic in Lausanne, as the words progress slowly on the white pages. “I compose on the typewriter,” Eliot said, as if it were a harpsichord. And you almost hear the keys of his Corona – “my wretched old one” – striking the ribbon. By Remembrance Day 1921, the first in which red poppies were sold on the pier, Eliot was sensing his poem finding its proper form, despite his ongoing despair: “On Margate Sands/ I can connect/ Nothing with nothing,” he wrote. Hollis’s compulsive book helps to fill in a few more of those white spaces.
The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem by Matthew Hollis is published by Faber (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
