Hollis - THE WASTE LAND - A BIOGRAPHY OF A POEM - First Pass Proofs July 2022

T HE WA STE L A ND
by the same author
ground water
now all roads lead to france
T H E WAST E L A N D.
A Biography of a Poem
//
matthew hollis
First published in the UK
by Faber & Faber Limited
Bloomsbury House, 74–77 Great Russell Street
London wc1b 3da
Typeset by Samantha Matthews
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, cr0 4yy
All rights reserved
© Matthew Hollis, 2022
The right of Matthew Hollis to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988
A CIP record for this book
is available from the British Library
isbn 978–0–571–29721–4
2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1
for Claire
There is always another one walking beside you
– The Waste Land
I think of a friend who, in the early days, was as much concerned
with the encouragement and improvement of the work of
unknown writers in whom he discerned talent, as with his own
creative work; who formulated, for a generation of poets, the
principles of good writing most needful for their time; who
tried to bring these writers together for their reciprocal benefit;
who, in the face of many obstacles, saw that their writings
were published; saw that they were reviewed somewhere by
critics who could appreciate them; organized or supported little
magazines in which their work could appear – and incidentally,
liked to give a good dinner to those who he thought could not
afford it, and sometimes even supplied the more needy with
articles of clothing out of his own meagre store. To him, several
other authors, since famous, have owed a great deal.1
– T. S. Eliot, 1949
Recollections? let some thesis-writer have the satisfaction of
‘discovering’ whether it was in 1920 or ’21 that I went from
Excideuil to meet a rucksacked Eliot. Days of walking –
conversation? literary? le papier Fayard was then the burning
topic. Who is there now for me to share a joke with?
Am I too right ‘about’ the poet Thomas Stearns Eliot? or my
friend ‘the Possum’? Let him rest in peace. I can only repeat, but
with the urgency of 50 years ago: READ HIM .2
– Ezr a Pound, 1966

Contents
List of Illustrations xiii

Armistice 5
T H E WA S T E LA N D 15
Acknowledgements 391
Notes on Sources 395
Notes 441
Index 00
xi
Illustrations
[List to come]
xiii
Morocco 1960.
Winters were becoming harder. Each year the chill reached deeper
into his chest, each year the breathing tightened. Doctors urged
for warmer climes, and in the biting cold of an English January he
finally left London for Marrakesh. But the recuperation was not to
go as planned. Two hundred miles to the south-west, the dogs of
Agadir howled in unison and rats were driven up on to the streets;
a column of fire shot into the sky.3 The earthquake unleashed at
that moment was so forceful that it would shake the foundations
of his hotel more than a day’s journey away, whipping up debris
and dust clouds that threatened to suffocate his airways. His evac-
uation north through the night came too late: particles of rubble
had entered his lungs and would trigger an attack of emphysema
that would incapacitate him for months. T. S. Eliot had five years
of life ahead of him, but he would spend those years in poor health.
He told Ezra Pound that nowadays he had to put most of his
energy into breathing.4 But Pound faced trials of his own. Released
after more than a decade’s incarceration for treason, he expressed
to Eliot his sense of a life in extreme failure: sitting in my ruins,
he wrote, a sick mouse on a rubble heap.5 He was disgraced by war
crimes, discredited as man and poet, ‘and heaven comes down like
a net / and all my past follies’.6 Eliot would cable in correction: ‘i
never forget my own great debt to you to whom all
living poets are indebted stop’.7 And he would open his
arms in empathy: ‘I have known well enough states of mind similar
to yours,’ he wrote.8 But Pound’s state of mind was not stable. A
judicial pronouncement of insanity may have been all that saved
1
him from a death sentence in 1945; fifteen years later, he told a
caller in a faltering voice, you – find me – in fragments.9 For Eliot,
in contrast, the foundations were secure. He had no more poems
left to write, but his standing as the eminent poet of the age was
assured. Decades ago, he had left behind the formative style with
which he had made his reputation, but from North Africa in that
winter of 1960, he found himself returning to the one piece that
had become the most influential of them all. Struggling for breath,
Eliot began to transcribe, from memory, to raise funds for a Lon-
don library, his poem of four hundred lines.10 In capital letters he
penned its title, and beneath it he wrote ‘1922’, and beneath that
he signed his name. His hand faltered as he recalled the epigraph,
but for twenty-three pages it moved fluently. As it did, something
remarkable took place: he recollected a line that had been culled
from the drafts of the poem four decades before. Then, he had
excised it at the insistence of his wife, Vivien, for whom it had been
too painful a portrait of their troubled marriage. Now, he restored
the words that once had been considered so hurtful. The ivory men
make company between us. In writing out the poem, he had returned
in mind to the company of those who once had worked alongside
him. To Vivien, who had tuned his ear and lent a voice of her own,
and who, through her marriage to Eliot, had accelerated the con-
ditions that would bring the poem into being. And to the more
forensic reader besides: one who had cleared the undergrowth of
the poem in order to uncover its heart; one whose own life lay in
tatters, and who looked to Eliot for his salvation. To him, Eliot
inked the dedication for the last time: for Ezra Pound, he wrote,
and, below it, il miglior fabbro. The better craftsman.
2 | t he wast e l an d
Ez Po and Possum
Have picked all the blossom,
Let all the others
Run back to their mothers11
Armistice.
The runner was breathless when he finally caught up with the 157th
US Infantry Brigade on the furthest reach of the Western Front. It
was 10.44 in the morning and he carried with him the news that the
ceasefire brokered overnight would begin at eleven o’clock. Further
runners were urgently dispatched to inform the other companies;
but with no clear instruction on how to proceed in the sixteen
minutes that remained, the Brigade Commander of the 157th took
the decision that there would be no let-up in fighting until eleven.
Private Henry Gunther was pinned with his company beneath a
cover of fog on the rise of Côté-de-Romagne. The war had divid-
ed the loyalties of many of those fighting, but for Gunther it had
been more divisive than most. A German-American from East
Baltimore, his neighbourhood were people from the old country;
when war broke out he found himself the subject of racial abuse.
He cared more about his job in the National Bank of Baltimore,
and about Olga, the girl he wanted to marry, than he did about the
war, but he was drafted into the infantry regiment dubbed ‘Bal-
timore’s Own’ for the Maryland men who served in it. A supply
sergeant, he witnessed harrowing conditions at the front and wrote
to a friend at home urging him to stay out of the conflict if he
possibly could. An army censor reported his letter and Gunther
was broken to the rank of private; his fiancée ended their engage-
ment, and with it the last of his morale. In the final minutes of the
war, he lay face down on the ground occupied by his unit, bayo-
net fixed to his rifle, preparing to advance. Shells exploded in the
boggy ground around him, sending up founts of iron and mud. On
5
the slope above him, two squadrons of German machine-gunners
counted down the minutes; they knew the armistice was imminent
and could not believe their eyes when Gunther’s company rose
and began to approach through the fog. Had they not received the
message of ceasefire? The Germans fired a round of warning shots
overhead and the advancing troops dropped to find cover. Gunther
alone rose to his feet and continued his advance. Perhaps he was
driven to avenge his demotion, or perhaps to prove himself to Olga
– perhaps he had lost all sense of having anything left to salvage;
whatever it was that urged him on, he ignored the call of his ser-
geant to stay down. A German gunner waved him back, but he
would not turn, and was fired upon. Gunther was killed by a bullet
to the temple. Sixty seconds later, the war to end all wars ended.1
Henry Gunther was the last of ten million soldiers to fall in
the Great War: a sad, senseless end, his hometown newspaper
remembered.2 Six million civilians had also died, and the influenza
that was to follow would kill tens of millions more. The world had
never witnessed destruction on such a scale or such wastage of life,
and with the signing of the armistice a search to comprehend the
conflict would begin.
Up and down the length of the British Isles, towns and villages
lay bereft of young men. The loss of ‘pals battalions’, where friends
and neighbours were in service together, had wiped out the men of
some communities almost entirely. Many who survived returned
physically maimed and were unable to work; some wore masks to
hide their terrible injuries, others were crippled by what was then
known as shell shock. Those who were physically able came home
to a landscape of rationing, recession and unemployment. Social
patterns had changed in the workplace and at home; women had
substituted for men in the factories and the fields. Labour disputes
built towards the General Strike of 1926; in Ireland, the War of
Independence was followed by a vicious civil war. As old empires
crumbled across Europe, some gave way to modes of communism
sweeping out of the east. New countries emerged within old bor-
ders, nation states replaced kingdoms. Terrorist bombings in the
United States fuelled a ‘Red Scare’, leading to round-ups of sub-
versives. The General Strike in Seattle of 1919 was denounced as
a Bolshevik revolution, one of thousands of walkouts nationwide;
race riots swept through the Midwest. The prohibition of alcoholic
drinks polarised the national debate and financed organised crime,
while agriculture began to collapse. The ‘roaring’ economy of the
early 1920s would overheat on the road to the Great Depression.
And the reparations inflicted on Germany by the victorious Allies,
and the treaty that defined them, would cripple that country and
dismay the world, laying the foundation for disaster. Civilisation
and progress – watchwords of the pre-war era – seemed emptied
of meaning, robbed of certainty or value.
T. S. Eliot had spent the months leading up to the armistice trying
to enlist in the U nited States Army. A childhood hernia and tach-
ycardia had made active duty impossible, though he felt sure that
he had something to offer military intelligence and had pursued
applications with the Navy and the Army. But on 11 November
1918, he had returned to his job at Lloyds Bank in London, his
efforts to enlist, he said, having ‘turned to red tape in my hands’.3 As
an American citizen (he would not become a British subject until
1927), the obligations upon him were not those of the Englishmen
he had lived among since 1914. Then, he had felt unassimilated: ‘I
don’t think that I should ever feel at home in England’;4 but as the
war progressed, Eliot came to understand it through the eyes of
those who fought in it, ‘as something very sordid and disagreeable
which must be put through’.5
Ezra Pound had spent Armistice Day wandering through Lon-
don, in order, he said, to observe the effect of the ceasefire upon the
city’s people; but instead of gaining insight he caught a cold from
loitering in the November rain.6 ‘I know that I am perched on the
A r mist ic e | 7
rotten shell of a crumbling empire,’ he had told an English audi-
ence in 1913, ‘but it isn’t my empire, and I’m not legally responsible,
and anyway the Germans will probably run it as well as you do.’7
But as the conflict ground on and on, he had worried about Eliot
persistently and went so far as petitioning the American embassy
to spare his friend from service. ‘If it was a war for civilisation (not
merely for democracy)’, he told the ambassador, ‘it was folly to shoot
or have shot one of the six or seven Americans capable of contrib-
uting to civilisation or understanding the word.’8 The armistice that
spared his friend from service might have afforded some relief, but
instead it brought only friction and unease. He remarked to James
Joyce that the returning troops were ‘competition’ with which he
must now contend.9 London had been the ‘place of poesy’,10 but
now he felt a growing disgust towards a country that had offered
up so many of its young men for slaughter, as he would put it in
‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’, for ‘an old bitch gone in the teeth, / For
a botched civilization’.11 He would repeatedly tap his Adam’s apple
and announce that this was where the English ‘stopped short’: in
their failure to speak out, to engage their minds.
‘Everyone’s individual lives are so swallowed up in the one great
tragedy’, wrote Eliot, ‘that one almost ceases to have personal
experiences or emotions, and such as one has seem so unimpor-
tant!’12 And yet with so many lost and disfigured, few lives were
untouched, and Eliot’s and Pound’s were no exception.
Jean Verdenal was a medical student of twenty when he boarded
in Paris with Eliot in 1910. The young men bonded over the verse
of Jules Laforgue, and found in one another a brother-in-arts of a
kind rare in English–American letters. Verdenal was killed on the
battlefield at Gallipoli, attempting to dress the wounds of a fall-
en officer.13 Eliot would dedicate his first book, Prufrock and Other
Observations, ‘To Jean Verdenal, 1889–1915’, adding in time ‘mort
aux Dardanelles’.14 And he would carry a grief that he was hesitant
to unburden, one that would cast a shade across the initial years of
his life in London. Only later would he admit to what he called
a ‘sentimental’ sunset: ‘the memory of a friend coming across the
Luxembourg Gardens in the late afternoon, waving a branch of
lilac, a friend who was later (so far as I could find out) to be mixed
with the mud of Gallipoli’.15
Pound had lost an artistic ‘brother’ of his own. Henri Gaudier-
Brzeska was twenty-one when he met the American poet at an
exhibition at the Albert Hall in 1913: ‘a well-made young wolf ’,
recalled Pound, as he attempted to pronounce from the cata-
logue what he called the appalling assemblage of consonants
that comprised the sculptor’s name (‘Brzxjk——’, he slurred,
‘Burrzisskzk——’; ‘Jaersh-ka’, corrected the sculptor himself from
behind the pedestal with a voice of ‘the gentlest fury’). Pound bought
pieces at a sum that would have been ridiculous, he admitted, had
Gaudier any market and he any income. ‘At any rate,’ said Pound,
‘he was the best fun in the world.’16 Gaudier-Brzeska was killed in
the trenches south of Vimy Ridge, at Neuville-Saint-Vaast, one
month after Jean Verdenal; ‘a great spirit has been among us, and a
great artist is gone.’17 The loss would fire in Pound such undirected
and retributive fury that he would make an attempt of his own to
enlist.18 His belief in England and America would be forever poi-
soned, the poet Charles Olson believed, by his wish to avenge the
young man’s death.19 It would seed in Pound a despair to which he
would return in his darkest times. ‘The instinct to kill is not extinct
or even decently weakened,’ he wrote, chillingly, of the armistice.
‘The instinct to kill is still wakenable in nearly all men.’20
In November 1918, in its first peacetime issue, the Little Review
of New York ran an edition ‘Devoted Chiefly to Ezra Pound’ –
sixty-four pages in which Pound was talisman: poet, translator,
critic, polemicist, essayist, and author of unsigned articles. He was,
it appeared, master of all he surveyed. In nine poems he stretched
out across its pages, magnificent and domineering as the beast
of his opening line: ‘The black panther lies under his rose tree’.21
A r mist ic e | 9
(Wyndham Lewis had once watched Pound approaching strangers
‘as one might a panther’: showing no fear, expecting attack.)22 But
appearances were not quite as they seemed. The address for the
journal’s so-called ‘Foreign Office’ was Pound’s own Kensington
flat, and its ‘London Editor’ none o ther than himself. The issue
was in part a pretence, leading Poetry magazine in Chicago to sneer
that the Little Review had fallen ‘under the dictatorship of Ezra
Pound’.23 And the last of its showcased poems would preview a
different kind of trouble, riddled with an anti-Semitism that was
soon to deform Pound’s thinking.24 He had turned thirty-three
with the armistice. He had published athletically: a dozen vol-
umes of poetry, translation and plays, three critical books and two
anthologies, almost two hundred reviews in two years. But it was
in his role as a literary impresario that he had been more influential
still. In the years before the war he had been kingmaker: aide to W.
B. Yeats, envoy to Rabindranath Tagore, publisher to James Joyce
and Wyndham Lewis, agent and editor to H. D. (Hilda Doolit-
tle), Richard Aldington, Robert Frost. He was a cultural supremo
‘booming’ his writers, and when he recommended, others listened.
For Ezra Pound did not make polite suggestions; instead he would
‘pass on the benefit of his discoveries to o thers’, Eliot noted diplo-
matically, forcefully and without ambiguity: a style, said Eliot, that
could lend Pound the appearance of someone attempting to tell a
deaf man that his house was on fire.25
Everything had been going Pound’s way, observed Richard
Aldington, but somehow Pound had ‘muffed’ it: whether through
conceit, folly or plain bad manners, the literary crown to which he
aspired had begun to slip from his grasp.26 Many who had resist-
ed his presence at the heart of literature seized the moment to
push him to its fringes. Virginia Woolf admitted to having read
fewer than ten words of Pound’s but her conviction of his ‘humbug’
was unalterable.27 For years he had advanced an army of artists,
but in the wake of the armistice he was to tell Marianne Moore
that his days of boosting American poets in London were now
behind him.28 To James Joyce he wrote that he seemed better at
‘digging up corpses’ (by which he meant translating) than tackling
‘this bitched mess of modernity’ (poetry).29 And he was stymied
by the recognition in his own work that he had been unable to
find a more ‘ample modus’ than either formal or free verse could
allow him. Eliot identified in Pound the ‘temporary squatter’ that
made him a restless figure. ‘Every room, even a big one, seemed too
small for him,’ he observed. ‘In America, he would no doubt have
always seemed on the point of going abroad; in London, he always
seemed on the point of crossing the Channel.’30
As Pound began to look further afield, Eliot’s gaze sharpened
its focus upon London. Three years younger than Pound, he had
no achievements to match his friend’s. He had witnessed, under
Pound’s direction, the printing of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Pru-
frock’ in Chicago, 1915, after it had been dismissed in London as
‘absolutely insane’,31 and had seen, with thanks again to Pound, the
same poem open his debut collection of poems from the Egoist,
two years later. But the reception of that book had been under-
whelming, and left Eliot feeling that he was regarded merely as a
satirist, and hardly as a poet at all. Armistice Day had brought an
introduction that might change all of that. It was an invitation to
dinner for the coming weekend in Richmond, on the Thames, with
Leonard and Virginia Woolf at their newly established Hogarth
Press – a first encounter that Virginia recorded in her diary with
pin-point insight:
Mr Eliot is well expressed by his name – a polished, cultivated,

elaborate young American, talking so slow, that each word seems
to have special finish allotted it. But beneath the surface, it is fairly
evident that he is very intellectual, intolerant, with strong views of
his own, & a poetic creed. I am sorry to say that this sets up Ezra
Pound & Wyndham Lewis as great poets, or in the current phrase
A r mist ic e | 11
‘very interesting’ writers. He admires Mr Joyce immensely. He
produced 3 or 4 poems for us to look at – the fruit of two years, since
he works all day in a Bank, & in his reasonable way thinks regular
work good for people of nervous constitutions. I became more or
less conscious of a very intricate & highly organised framework of
poetic belief; owing to his caution, & his excessive care in the use of
language we did not discover much about it. I think he believes in
‘living phrases’ & their difference from dead ones; in writing with
extreme care, in observing all syntax & grammar; & so making this
new poetry flower on the stem of the oldest.32
Making this new p oetry flower on the stem of the oldest. Of all the
learned analyses that Eliot would go on to receive, was there ever a
more intuitive description of his art than this? She did not expand
upon the nervous constitution she had identified, for she could not
yet know the depth to which Eliot’s mental health had plunged;
but she undoubtedly sensed the trouble within.
‘It’s only very dull people who feel that they have “more in their
lives” now –’ Eliot had written in the war; ‘other people have too
much.’33
Too much was a phrase that recurred again and again in his let-
ters. His mind was too much filled with practical worry; his private
anxieties were too much; too much effort might be taken out of
him; his financial outlay was too much.34 He needed release.
I have a lot of things to write about if the time ever comes when
people will attend to them.35
Even the shade of ‘the one great tragedy’ could not disguise the
unhappiness he felt at home. His marriage to Vivien Haigh Wood
in 1915, two months after they had met, had brought only strain
and near constant illness. In the year that followed the marriage,
Eliot felt dazed and numbed, and would say that he could not
yet see the price he had paid.36 By the war’s end, the Eliots had
been serially unwell with one physical ailment after another, and
from the deterioration of Vivien’s mental health that had begun to
materialise in the first winter of their marriage. With the coming
of the armistice, Pound knew that Eliot was ‘in a bad way’, and
that he had been ordered by his doctor to have a complete break
from the strain of writing.37 Bank work by day, literary work by
night: the combination had exhausted his mind and body. But it
was the mental distress that he found most debilitating, unable to
right the increasing imbalance in Vivien’s erratic behaviour: ‘I do
not understand it,’ he confided in his mother, ‘and it worries me.’38
Once, Vivien had been the anchor of E liot’s decision to make a life
in England, but another presence had disturbed their union almost
from the start. Suspicion and doubt and wrongdoing had worked
into the heart of the marriage and was a torment that he could
not bear. As the world began to rise from its knees in the autumn
of 1918, Eliot had begun sinking to his. He worried that his mind
no longer acted as once it did, and acceded to Vivien’s insistence
upon a period of what she called complete mental rest.39 He would
suspend writing critical prose early in 1919, and sign off the last of
his wartime poems. When the moment came to renew his art, it
was with two poems that pointed to a new mode: more open and
allusive in style, more expansive in line and gait, guided by the
phrase and not the metronome of formality.
For more than a year, there would be no further p oetry. Work
pushed, family pressed, the scar of matrimony deepened. ‘Horror
and apprehension’ – ‘the old symptoms’, as he would come to call
them – would lock into his daily condition, and nowhere more so
than in his splintered and whirling life with Vivien.40
‘To her, the marriage brought no happiness,’ wrote Eliot. ‘To me,
it brought the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land.’41
A r mist ic e | 13
I
At a particular date in a particular room, two authors, neither

engaged in picking the other’s pocket, decided that the dilution
of vers libre, Amygism, Lee Masterism, general floppiness had
gone too far and that some counter-current must be set going.
Parallel situation centuries ago in China. Remedy prescribed
‘Émaux et Camées’ (or the Bay State Hymn Book). Rhyme and
regular strophes.
Results: Poems in Mr Eliot’s second volume, not contained in
his first (‘Prufrock’, Egoist, 1917), also ‘H. S. Mauberley’.
Divergence later.1

I.
Rain came to London in torrents. The snow that followed would

harden to ice as the month grew colder and the streets began to
freeze. Vivien had woken on New Year’s morning to a migraine; by
the evening her condition had deteriorated. She lay prostrate in the
darkness, listening to her husband talking in the lounge with Ezra
Pound; the sound of their voices through the thin walls drove her
to distraction.1 The migraine endured for twenty-six hours: ‘worse
ever yet had’, she would report. When Dorothy Pound called on
her two days later, she would discover Vivien near exhaustion.2 The
visit of the family doctor brought neither comfort nor hope. ‘Am
losing confidence,’ she wrote in her diary.3
Daily, Eliot commuted the four miles from Crawford Mansions,
the Eliots’ claustrophobic flat in London’s Marylebone W1,4 to an
office building in EC3 that stretched between the City’s Lom-
bard and Threadneedle streets. There, between 9.15 and five o’clock
with an hour for lunch, he worked in the Colonial and Foreign
Department of Lloyds Bank: ‘documentary bills, acceptances, and
foreign exchange’ was awarded to him, he said later, under the false
pretences that he was a linguist.5 It was an unrelenting workload
that encompassed weekdays and Saturdays, and he said that he
came to know no scenery but that of EC3.6 When Aldous Huxley
later visited, he found Eliot not on the ground floor, nor even on
the floor beneath that, but sitting in ‘a sub-sub-basement’, in a row
of co-workers, ‘the most bank-clerky of all bank clerks’.7 Eliot had
been with the firm for less than two years, but in that time the
methods of work had modernised unrecognisably. Telephones were
17
now installed on every desk, photostats made duplicates in their
hundreds, while addressographs stamped automated mailouts and
telewriters sped handwritten memos between departments. Most
notable of all were the typists – women who had largely replaced
male clerks in the war – who were now ubiquitous in every echelon
of business. It was a workplace that was instrumental and mech-
anised: ‘in a word,’ a colleague of Eliot’s recalled, ‘the epitome of
modern banking and efficiency.’8
Eliot had found refuge in such efficiencies. A year-and-a-term
of teaching in schools had left him worn thin: underpaid, endlessly
preparing lessons, unable to pursue his writing – losing, he sensed,
in every way.9 The bank by contrast provided structure: it brought
conventional hours, and gave him evenings in which to write; it
also paid him £360 a year, more than twice his teaching salary, a
development that pleased E liot’s father.10 ‘My Tom is getting along
now and has been advanced at the bank so that he is independ-
ent of me,’ wrote Henry (‘Hal’ to his friends) Eliot Snr in a new
year letter from St Louis to his brother, adding: ‘Wish I liked his
wife, but I don’t.’11 It had been three and a half years since his son’s
marriage to Vivien and still the family had not met her. Hal had
not approved of the union, nor of his son’s decision to abandon an
academic career for literature, nor, for that matter, the decision to
leave America to settle in the old country. The diplomatic pilgrim-
age Eliot made to Missouri in the wake of his wedding in 1915 had
done little to ease the tension: he was, he learned, to be marginal-
ised from the family’s estate in light of the marriage, and father and
son parted in bitterness.12 But if he hoped that the life he returned
to with Vivien would offer consolation, he would be disappointed;
it was becoming ‘the most awful nightmare of anxiety that the
mind of man could conceive’.13 It would take a wall around his
working life for Eliot to preserve his sanity. So when, on 8 January
1919, around about midday, a telegram arrived at Crawford Man-
sions from Eliot’s mother – a telegram most terrible – Vivien knew
better than to interrupt her husband at work and waited instead
for his return that evening. Hal had died from a heart attack; he
was seventy-five. ‘A fearful day, & evening,’ recorded Vivien in her
diary.14
For four days Eliot could not find it in himself to acknowledge
his m
other’s message; when he did he was able to write little more
than that he loved her. He longed for her to sing him the songs
he knew in childhood.15 With his brother he could be candid: all
was dreamlike, nothing seemed real, and yet he feared waking to
find the pain intolerable.16 As a silence descended between mother
and son it would fall to Vivien to break what she described as the
inadequacy of correspondence between them. She would relay her
husband’s profound shock and upset at the news, and convey the
couple’s own thoughts for Mrs Eliot herself: ‘These days are very
awful for Tom,’ wrote Vivien, ‘he would give anything to be with
you now.’17 A further week would pass before Eliot would commit
his own feelings to paper. Little, very little, of what one feels can
ever filter through to pen and ink, he wrote.18 Should he, he asked,
return to be at his m other’s side in St Louis? No, do not come
now, his brother Henry counselled, not while the family’s plans
were uncertain.19 And so Eliot informed his mother that he would
continue at the bank while it was short-handed and travel home to
her when things became settled. When, a week later, he wrote to
her again, he did not mention his father at all. He would not return
to Missouri for more than a decade, and by that time his mother,
too, was dead.
A service for Henry Ware Eliot Snr took place at the Unitarian
church on the corner of Locust Street, where his own father had
once been pastor.20 He was born, died and cremated a citizen of St
Louis, the city to which he gave a good part of his life. His ashes
were laid under evergreen shade in Bellefontaine Cemetery near
the broad banks of the Mississippi River, in a modest plot not far
from that of the Prufrock family, close by his father, beside the
I | 19
grave of his infant daughter, in ground into which his wife would
follow. Eliot wrote in later years: ‘they all lie in Bellefontaine now.’21
Fourteen years would pass before Eliot visited his father’s grave.22
It was then that he confessed, ‘I shall be haunted by my last sight
of him until my last day.’23
//
One bedroom, one bathroom, a sitting room, a kitchen (sort of ),

plenty of steps and a view from the top of them. Number 1 Hat-
field House, Great Titchfield Street, Fitzrovia, the top-floor flat
adopted by Wyndham Lewis after his return from the war – the
‘jolliest suite of rooms’, said Herbert Read, with something not
found on any floorplan. ‘He had a girl there “to pour out the tea”,’
explained Read. ‘I did not catch her name but she is a young
poetess who has not yet published,’ Iris Barry, whose affair with
Lewis would be summarised by him in a whistle-stop story of that
year: dinner, drinks, pregnancy in a taxi, and a refusal to marry
him.24 But it wasn’t quite true that Barry was unpublished: Harold
Monro had printed four pieces for his journal, Poetry and Drama,
in the Christmas of 1914, and Pound, who had work of his own
in the same issue, had spotted them.25 He wrote to Barry in his
self-appointed capacity as talent scout for London, so initiating an
education-by-correspondence that led to her move from Birming-
ham to ‘enrol’ in an exclusive course at what Pound liked to call his
‘Ezuversity’ (he was prone to a splash of eponymy). (A typical tuto-
rial: the whole of art can be divided into the need for concision and
construction – concision, ‘saying what you mean in the fewest and
clearest words’; construction, ‘an image, or enough images of con-
crete things arranged to stir the reader – and the glue to bind them
was the sensual pulse: ‘one must have emotion or one’s cadence
and rhythms will be vapid and without any interest’ – objects are
the aim, not statements or conclusions.)26 By then Pound had sub-
mitted her work to Poetry magazine in Chicago (‘I enclose 14 brief
poems by Iris Barry. I want you to print the lot’), and published
it in the Little Review, for which he was the London editor.27 He
provided her with a reading list of writers to avoid: Wordsworth (a
dull sheep), Byron (rotten), Kipling (debased), Yeats (sham Celti-
cism); only with the Roman poets did we share genuine concerns,
and he urged upon her the works of Catullus and Propertius, and
if she couldn’t find a decent translation of either, well then – in
words that would have more significance for him than he knew – ‘I
suppose I shall have to rig up something.’28
It was as a life coach that Pound’s attention went still deeper.
By the time Barry arrived in London in February 1917, she knew
precisely what her expenditure would be on heat and bus fares, that
alcohol lamps were cheaper than electricity, and how to breakfast
on a budget. She knew this because Pound had calculated it to the
penny, and secured for her the best available room in Chelsea, with
an open fireplace, a gas ring and wash cupboard on the stairs, an
electric-metered light and ‘a bawth with a penny in the slot gey-
ser’.29 He even found her a landlady who was accustomed to ‘the
ways of literature’, meaning that she wouldn’t suspect a single lady
like Barry of fornication, provided she kept a shawl on the bed
and called it a couch, and remembered to serve tea at weekends.
And most important of all, he made introductions: a tea party with
Eliot on her first Sunday, a soirée with Yeats on her first Monday,
and in between he fed her dinner.30
First in an Italian restaurant on Old Compton Street, Soho,
and then, when Zeppelins forced its closure, on to the New China
Restaurant on Regent Street (‘quite cheap . . . quite nourishing)’,
owned by the uncle of the notorious underworld boss Brilliant
Billy Chang: a remarkable cast of talents would assemble for a
weekly dinner through the war years and after.31 There Iris Barry
learned Pound’s most important instruction of all – how, in con-
versation, to be always intimate, never personal.32 There she set eyes
I | 21
on Wyndham Lewis, washed out, on leave from the front. There
she saw Eliot, tall, lean, silent, formal as a bank clerk should be.
There was May Sinclair, small, dark-eyed, crisply spoken, invaria-
bly dressed in raspberry pink. Ford Madox Ford (he had changed
his name in 1919 from the Germanic ‘Hueffer’), his voice booming
from beneath his moustache on the subject of Victorian literature.
Violet Hunt, loquacious, oblivious, sharp-tongued, telling how she
peeled snails off the bust of Pound by Gaudier-Brzeska that she
kept in the back garden (her parrot sounded only the words ‘Ezra,
Ezra’).33 Richard Aldington in military uniform looking every bit
the country farmer, besides H. D., his haunted wife. Harriet Shaw
Weaver, proprietor of The Egoist, upright like a bishop’s daughter,
arch hat and nervous air, and alongside her the Ovid Press in the
form of John Rodker and his vermilion-haired wife, Mary Butts,
authors and printers both. W. B. Yeats was an honoured guest, a
lock of hair flopping into his soup. But by far the most essential
and imposing of the regulars were Ezra and Dorothy Pound, who,
Barry later wrote, never so much as arrived as entered.
Into the restaurant with his clothes always seeming to fly around
him, letting his ebony stick clattered to the floor, came Pound
himself with his exuberant hair, pale cat-like face with the greenish
cat-eyes, clearing his throat, making strange sounds and cries in
his talking, but otherwise always quite formal and extremely polite.
With him came Mrs Pound, carrying herself delicately with the air,
always, of a young Victorian lady out skating, and a profile as clear
and lovely as that of a porcelain Kuan-yin.34
In wartime the table talk was of air raids and literary squab-
ble, the explosion at Alfred Mond’s munitions yard; in peacetime:
social reform and continuing squabble, Catullus, sculpture, Amy
Lowell, translation out of the Orient, Keats, ragtime, the Ballets
Russes, even a row of stone houses in Earl’s Court guarded by a
row of stone dogs. And whatever the year, whenever the occasion,
whether with a debutante such as Barry or a statesman like Yeats,
the talk of the poets never strayed far from the important matter
of getting published.
In January 1919, Eliot had only one volume of p oetry to his
name: a slim collection comprising just a dozen poems in a modest
print run of 500 copies. But these were no ordinary poems. Pru-
frock and Other Observations had been published in London in 1917
at the Egoist. Its lyrical intelligence ought to have set the literary
world alight, but instead it had met mostly with condescension
and a soured bemusement (‘erudition is one thing, the diction-
ary another, and p oetry different from either of them’, typified the
response). Notices had been more forgiving in New York than
35
they had in London, but the book had been published solely in
Britain, and that had proven a hindrance to Eliot of two kinds.
For one, he was an American poet who lacked an American read-
ership; for another – and this was the more pressing concern – the
lack of a US publisher left him unable to establish copyright in
America, which was only conferred upon books manufactured in
(and not merely imported into) that country. No American cop-
yright, no American royalties, and Eliot could hardly earn money
as an author if he had no US sales. And if he could not generate
earnings from his writing then how could he face his family after
all that had happened and call himself an author? By the turn of
1919, the quest had become urgent: he required an American book
with an American publisher if for no o ther purpose than what he
now didn’t mind admitting were ‘private reasons’.36
Four months had passed since Ezra Pound delivered a type-
script of Eliot’s to Alfred Knopf, New York, without so much as an
acknowledgement of receipt.37 The silence worried Eliot, as it did
Pound, who had irons of his own in the publisher’s fire. Pound had
put before Knopf a selection of his own prose, Instigations, a sequel
to his Pavannes and Divisions which the same publisher had issued
in 1918. That book had been a colourful hybrid of prose and poetry,
I | 23
a manifesto for Pound’s early art, and the first publication of ‘A
Retrospect’, his revisitation of Imagism; it also located his sense of
a tradition in troubadour and Elizabethan verse, and articulated his
long-standing belief that humanity’s hope for social improvement
lay with the arts, and that artists were the antennae of the race.38
It would be ‘a miscellany of the outlandish’,39 as one review would
call it, and that was an approach that similarly suited Eliot, who
had not enough original verse for a full collection of poems, only
what he called ‘the overworked, distracted existence of the last two
years’, but which marked a pragmatic response to the dual challenge
of finding an imprint and creating a copyright. ‘This book is all I
have to show for my claim,’ he confessed: ‘it would go toward mak-
ing my parents contented with conditions – and towards satisfying
them that I have not made a mess of my life, as they are inclined to
believe.’40 The day after he wrote this, Eliot’s father died.
Eliot had been desperate to show some evidence that his
chosen career was not a failure. Four and a half years had passed
since he had left behind a promising academic career at Harvard
University for the life of an unknown writer in Europe. His father
had then deplored the decision, but even so trusted his son to
make a success of himself. A single edition of twelve poems from
an avant-garde London press had seemed a poor return to both
men. By 1919, Eliot was a young man under pressure exhibiting
an unusual patience. ‘The only thing that matters is that these
should be perfect in their kind,’ he acknowledged of his poems
that spring, ‘so that each should be an event.’41 (A poem does not
say something, it is something, he would write in 1948.)42 He was
demonstrating the exacting approach to his poetry that he would
maintain throughout his life; in time, he would say that the most
important thing for a poet to do was to write as little as possible.43
Even so, some tangible validation of his art was sorely needed,
and with his father’s passing Eliot was burdened with a debt he
suddenly felt unable to repay. ‘If I can think at the end of my life
that I have been worthy to be his son I shall be happy,’ he wrote
in a letter to his mother.44 He had failed in his father’s lifetime: he
must not fail within hers.45
But Eliot’s hopes for literary preferment were about to be dashed,
as were Pound’s for his Instigations. At the end of January, Alfred
Knopf replied that he was turning down both typescripts. Pound’s
last book had been far from a commercial success, and Knopf had
no wish to follow on in kind, nor for that matter to sponsor the
hybrid offered by Eliot, when what he really wished to see was an
adequate volume of p oetry. For both Pound and Eliot this was a
significant blow. Knopf had been the publisher of Pound’s last three
books and of an anonymous booklet by Eliot on Pound: it seemed
to make every sense for the publisher to move forward with both
writers, but it wasn’t to happen. Pound told his father wearily that
Knopf had ‘given out’; for the remainder of their working lives,
they would have no further dealings.46 But Eliot could not bear to
share a similar disappointment with his mother, and had disclosed
little more to his brother by February, save to say euphemistically
that his typescript was yet to find a berth.47 The rejection seemed all
the more remarkable against the background of boom in new verse
that the bigger houses of New York had published since the end
of the war: Edgar Lee Masters and Amy Lowell with Macmillan;
Sherwood Anderson with Huebsch; Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
publisher of the young Robert Frost, would see the Pulitzer Prize
for poetry shared between volumes by Carl Sandburg and Mar-
garet Widdemer (the inaugural award had just gone to E liot’s St
Louisan neighbour, Sara Teasdale). With avenues closing before
them, Eliot and Pound now turned as one for assistance: to a law-
yer, art collector, patron of the arts in New York, a man who would
not only find a publisher in the US for both books, but would in
time secure a publishing contract for The Waste Land.
*
I | 25
‘If there were more like you,’ quipped Pound in 1915, ‘we should
get on with our renaissance.’48 The ‘you’ was John Quinn, whom
Pound had identified as a prospective patron worth his attention.
And get on with it they did: not only with Pound’s advance-
ment but with that of James Joyce and W. B. Yeats. Each would
benefit from a tailor-made patronage by Quinn that included
the funding of appointments and publications, the purchasing
of typescripts, and literary and legal representation. Quinn was
a collector of contemporary European painting and a corporate
lawyer of Irish descent; he took a special interest in the old coun-
try and had assisted Yeats in the founding of the Abbey Theatre
in Dublin. His republican sympathies earned him the friendship
of Sir R
oger Casement, who had been arrested by the British gov-
ernment three days before the Easter Rising in April 1916 and
hanged four months later in Pentonville Prison for his efforts to
import German munitions. Quinn’s campaign for a posthumous
pardon was unsuccessful, but then his own position was not with-
out complication: he repudiated armed conflict, and reported to
British intelligence on Irish revolutionary activity in the U nited
States. He was a man in need of direction, suspected Pound, who
took it upon himself to ensure that Quinn didn’t fritter a single
dollar further in supporting the outmoded and defunct, but would
redirect his capital to where it was needed. From London, Pound
undertook for Quinn a sweeping survey of everything discern-
ing that came to his attention – what he called his ‘encyclopedia
Ezraica’ – and it was in one such letter, in August 1915, that Pound
first mentioned T. S. Eliot. ‘I have more or less discovered him,’ he
boasted to Quinn – and with some justification.49
Eliot had arrived in London in 1914, knowing no one, with a
sheaf of loose poems in his bag. ‘The first recognition I received
was from Mr Ezra Pound,’ he said later.50 It was an encourage-
ment that proved decisive at a moment when a career in the
academy awaited him. Pound got to work on finding a publisher.
He sent ‘Portrait of a Lady’ to the New York periodical Smart Set,
and then, when it was turned down, to the New Jersey magazine
Others, where it was accepted.51 He sent ‘Preludes’ and ‘Rhapsody
on a Windy Night’ to Wyndham Lewis, who took them for the
second (and, as it turned out, final) instalment of his excoriating
journal Blast in July 1915.52 By then, the first and most important
of his publications had been achieved: ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock’ had appeared in Poetry, Chicago, in the summer of 1915,
after six months of haranguing by Pound (‘Do get on with that
Eliot’).53
When Pound tested a full collection of E liot’s work on his
own London publisher, Elkin Mathews, he received only a grum-
ble about the price of paper, and a request for a financial subsidy,
and so took it instead to Harriet Weaver. ‘“The Egoist” is doing
it,’ he told John Quinn at the time, or rather The Egoist in name,
as Pound had borrowed the printing cost and was to take on the
publisher’s risk himself. ‘But Eliot don’t know it, nor does anyone
else save my wife, and Miss Weaver of the Egoist. & it is not for
public knowledge.’54 It would take four years to sell the print run;
there would be no reprint.
Two years passed between the publication of ‘Prufrock’ the
poem and Prufrock the book. But one critic hadn’t been willing to
wait. Arthur Waugh was a veteran literary reviewer for the Daily
Telegraph, but it was in the Quarterly Review that he pronounced
Eliot to be exemplary of a generation who had traded beauty for
‘incoherent banalities’, and in so doing had released a literary anar-
chy upon readers from which only the Georgians (corralled under
the direction of one J. C. Squire) could save them.55 In what was
intended as a sermon to youth, Waugh warned readers repetitively
of ‘the banality of a premature decrepitude’ (here he meant Eliot),
and of ‘wooden prose, cut into battens’ (here he meant Pound), and
likened his own literary duty to that of a Spartan father who knew
that to make an exhibition of a delinquency was the best deterrent
I | 27
for any son. As it would transpire, this particular father’s son
would be undeterred. Evelyn Waugh would title one of his novels
A Handful of Dust after a line of The Waste Land, and in another
would have a character declaim it from a balcony megaphone; a
third novel would recall the poem and its author once again.56
Arthur Waugh typified a stance echoed by the likes of The
Times, who found the poems ‘frequently inarticulate’, barely above
triviality (‘they certainly have no relation to “poetry”’), and the
Boston Literary World, which suggested that this young revolu-
tionary would be better served ‘on traditional lines’.57 And for each
condemnation there was a rebuttal by Pound. Eliot had abandoned
beauty for strangeness, came the charge; quite the reverse, coun-
tered Pound, his melody rushes out. The craft was untidy; you will
hardly find such neatness (Pound). The poems lacked emotion; rub-
bish – Pound fumed – there is no intelligence without emotion. Eliot
was guilty of cleverness; Pound insisted on his genius.58
‘Silly old Waugh’, said Pound, relentless in Eliot’s defence.
‘His practice has been a distinctive cadence, a personal modus of
arrangement, remote origins in Elizabethan English and in the
modern French Masters, neither origin being sufficiently apparent
to affect the personal quality.’59 In three short phrases, Pound had
distilled E liot’s craft: an original rhythm, an inventive form, a per-
sonal take on tradition.
A distinctive cadence. When Eliot said of Dante in 1929 that
‘genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood’, he
would describe something close to a central nervous system for
poetry: that a poem has a pre- or para-linguistic pulse – a pattern
of emotive sound that suggests a tonal meaning before the words
arrive.60 He went on to call this the auditory imagination, a ‘feeling
for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels
of thought and feeling’.61
A personal modus of arrangement. A modern form: neither Victor
ian nor Georgian, Parnassian nor Symbolist, and not Imagiste or
‘free verse’ either, but a lineation and phrasing of his own, born of
a studied craft. ‘To put it briefly,’ Eliot would advise younger poets
in time, ‘learn the rules before you start breaking them.’62
Remote origins, a personal quality. Tradition, but with an individ-
ual talent. ‘Never attempt to do something that has been done, in
your own language, as well as it can be done,’ said Eliot, the result
of which is mimicry; and ‘never aim at novelty’, the result of which
is conventional vision; find a path between imitation and original-
ity that will allow the only thing that can be said in the only way
to say it.63
There was not a thing that was incoherent or banal about the
craft that Eliot applied, as even a glance at just the opening three
lines of the ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ would confirm.64
Let us gó then, yóu and Í,
Here began a formal metre: a trochaic tetrameter catalectic – a

stressed–unstressed four-foot line, clipped of its final syllable. Pro-
pelling and directive as it is, no sooner do we tune our ear to it than
it alters:
When the éveníng is spréad oút agáinst the sky
All that has been learned from the first line is cast out in a heart-
beat. The delicacy of the unstressed pyrrhic that muffles the
opening steps; the sturdy mid-line spondee stress spreading out
over spread out.
Like a pátiént étherised upón a táble;
It has been said of this third line that upon reaching the word
etherised the history of modern literature began, so surprising and
juxtaposed and electrifying was its introduction. Here was distanced
intimacy for sure – a chemical word from outside the emotional
register of the poem registering emotively within it. It is from the
pull and push of predictive rhythm that a line receives its charge:
I | 29
and etherised was a dynamo, lighting a line of hexameter that was
like no known hexameter.
And to think they called it free verse.
In 1929, after a reading of ‘Ash-Wednesday’ at the Oxford Poet-
ry Club, an undergraduate asked Eliot: ‘Please, sir, what do you
mean by the line: “Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper
tree”?’ Eliot looked at him and said: ‘I mean, “Lady, three white
leopards sat under a juniper tree.”’65
If you experience the cadence then you animate the image, and
if you can do that then you have communed through your s enses
with the poem before it has been decoded by the brain phenom-
enologically. The rest – intention, allusion, tradition, context – is
additional, and is something that happened around the event of
the poem, but which is not the poem itself. The meaning of a poem
is its sensory event: imagined pictures cast on received sounds.
‘Mr Eliot is one of the very few who have brought in a personal
rhythm, an identifiable quality of sound as well as of style’: of this
Ezra Pound was in no doubt. ‘And at any rate, his book is the best
thing in poetry since . . . (for the sake of peace I will leave that date
to the imagination).’66
//
18 Crawford Mansions, Homer Row, Marylebone W1, was the

compact, three- roomed apartment into which the Eliots had
moved in the spring of 1916, a year after the property was built; it
would remain their home until November 1920. Vivien said it was
the tiniest flat imaginable: ‘just a dining room – a drawing room
– a large bedroom – a kitchen and a nice bathroom’, a modest 700
square feet in all. She decorated the place herself, with wallpapers
of black and white stripes in the hall and orange in the dining
room, which doubled as Eliot’s dressing room and the study from
which he worked with his back to the fireplace.67 Running hot
water meant that the property was a cut above the neighbourhood,
while a small iron balcony accessed from the kitchen allowed just
a little of the outside in. Vivien had taken to the place at first, and
considered it the Eliots’ ‘remote tower’, a parapet where neigh-
bours were strangers and living was anonymous: she came to think
of it as ‘a wilderness’.68
The apartment overlooked the boisterous Laurie Arms (now
Larrik) public house in what Vivien described as ‘a little noisy cor-
ner, with slums and low streets and poor shops close around’.69 The
noise would bother the Eliots. When Osbert Sitwell visited the
flat, he reported that the neighbours below were two ‘actresses’ who
spent the evenings singing around the piano or playing the gramo-
phone loudly or hollering down into the small hours to ‘gentlemen
friends’ in the street below. Eliot when he complained was given
a patient explanation by the landlord: ‘Well, you see, Sir, it’s the
Artistic Temperament.’ Osbert Sitwell would later say that in the
calls of the ‘actresses’ and the response from the street he could
hear the voices of The Waste Land.70
‘It is rather noisy,’ Eliot said despairingly in 1919, three years
into their residency: the flat had become very dirty, in need of
re-papering and paint, and the Eliots were fatigued from living
out of just three rooms.71 Neither the neighbourhood nor the
neighbours were quite what they should like, he confided to his
brother, but a good flat in a good part of town was beyond their
current means.
The situation was given a quasi-imagined life by Eliot in a dia-
logue for the Little Review, in which an Eliot-like Eeldrop and a
Pound-like Appleplex surveyed the street from their rooms above.
Each had known ‘evil neighbourhoods of noise’ and ‘evil neigh-
bourhoods of silence’, and preferred the silence as being the more
evil of the two; but this imagined neighbourhood overlooked a
police station, which, like the real pub of Eliot’s Crawford Street,
would periodically become the centre of excitement, bringing the
I | 31
residents onto the street to spectate at some dramatic row in their
dressing gowns. At such moments,
Eeldrop and Appleplex would break off their discourse, and rush
out to mingle with the mob. Each pursued his own line of inquiry.
Appleplex, who had the gift of an extraordinary address with the
lower classes of both sexes, questioned the onlookers, and usually
extracted full and inconsistent histories: Eeldrop preserved a more
passive demeanor, listened to the conversation of the people among
themselves, registered in his mind their oaths, their redundance of
phrase, their various manners of spitting, and the cries of the victim
from the hall of justice within.72
Eeldrop was a bank clerk, a theologian and a sceptic with a taste

for mysticism; Appleplex was an anthropological criminologist,
who studied human science and recorded it in a large notebook;
together they smoked from the balcony, watching for acts of cru-
elty on which to focus, like crows eyeing carrion or the ‘tyros’ that
Wyndham Lewis would invent in 1921, ‘all their villainies in this
seductive glow’.73 Eliot said that the figures were little more than a
‘useless celebration’, but Pound, who had commissioned the work
from Eliot, believed ‘his two queer chaps are quite real’.74
Two miles south-west from the neighbourhood of Marylebone,
across the plains of Hyde Park, Ezra Pound was certain that he
had located the centre of literary activity. Kensington: Pound’s
home since 1909, and, since his marriage to Dorothy Shakespear in
spring 1914, 5 Holland Place Chambers, Kensington W8, a gloomy
and chilly three-roomed curiosity of architecture that Pound told
Wyndham Lewis had been ‘designed by an imbecile or an Eski-
mo’.75 There was no bathroom, and the toilet was positioned beside
the front door, so an improvised wash corner was erected once a
geyser and gas had been installed in the largest room. That room
was almost too dark to eat in, let alone write, so Pound set up a
triangular writing table in the corner of the tight, ‘eight by ten
pentagonal room’76 that was the reception, whose regular guests
included Richard Aldington and H. D., whom Pound referred
to as Faun and Dryad, and who lived in the flat next door with
not even enough sugar to borrow.77 ‘Remember, I can’t do a thing
myself,’ Dorothy had warned her husband-to-be: she hadn’t learned
to cook, and so meals were prepared by Pound (‘he is an excellent
cook’ – Lewis) by gaslight in one corner of the dark main room.78
‘Why do we stop here?’ he would ask her from time to time. ‘That
I have often wondered myself,’ would be her reply.79
‘If anyone in America did do anything good, he, she or it would
come here.’80 London had been the heart of the matter ever since
Pound had removed his pince-nez in a Kensington ‘bun shop’ in
1912 and informed Aldington and H. D. that they were Imagists.81
And so it was still in 1919, he told his father, as he caught him up on
the gossip. W. B. Yeats had asked him to be a godparent; Aldington
was bored of army life now that the conflict was over; Wyndham
Lewis was about to have an exhibition in Regent Street’s Goupil
Gallery. Pound himself had completed his prose book Instigations,
and had taken the opportunity to restate that Lewis was one of
the three writers ‘In the Vortex’ who were worthy of readership:
he was ‘the man with a leaping mind’, and, with him, James Joyce,
so far beyond his contemporaries that he was ‘utterly out of their
compass’, and, with them both, T. S. Eliot, whose work (along with
his own renditions of the Roman poet Sextus Propertius) he had
just sent out for publication: ‘Confound it, the fellow can write –
we may as well sit up and take notice.’82 But disturbing news of his
friend had just arrived.
‘Eliot’s father just dead,’ Pound wrote to his parents; Vivien
had called by with the message. ‘Dont know whether he will be
going to America or not.’83 The doubt troubled Pound, for with-
out an emissary in the States he knew that Eliot’s opportunity
might founder, and he asked his father in Philadelphia to contact
Alfred Knopf in New York for news.84 Eliot, meanwhile, had been
I | 33
concerned for Pound: he had detected a shift in the reception of
the man and his work, and he was worried.
He is well known, exciting various reactions of harmony or irritation;

but there is no tradition in English verse which might have prepared
for the general acceptance of his work; and England in 1910 could
have been no more ready for him than in 1890; and perhaps there is
even less to respond to him in 1918 than in 1910.85
//
For some time the Woolfs had searched for a manual activity that
might release Virginia from the relentless pressure of her writing; by
1915 it was decided that this activity could be printing.86 But wishing
and doing were different things, as they soon discovered that the
printing trade was a closed shop for unionised labour: there were no
apprenticeships available to people like them, and their aspirations
to become publishers seemed thwarted before they had begun.
On a blustery March day in 1917, the Woolfs passed beneath
the arches of the Holborn Viaduct where they found the Excelsior
Printers’ Supply Company, 41 Farringdon Street, whose windows
were crammed with elegant machinery of every kind: hand presses,
accompanied by all the cases, chases, sorts and furniture that any
self-starting printer could need. ‘We stared through the window
at them,’ recalled Leonard, ‘rather like two hungry children gazing
at buns and cakes in a baker shop window.’87 They explained their
predicament to the proprietor, who assured them cheerily that no
apprenticeship was needed: he could sell them the equipment they
required, including a pamphlet of instructions, ‘Everyone his own
printer’; they would be making books in no time.88 The Woolfs
purchased a small platen machine: a device large enough to print a
single demy-octavo page some 8½ × 5½ inches, but small enough
to be worked from their dining-room table, where it would be
delivered one month later.89
‘We unpacked it with enormous excitement,’ recorded Virginia,
‘set it on its stand – and discovered that it was smashed in half !’
The mechanism had shattered in transit and would have to be
repaired before they could begin. The scale of the task was not
lost on Virginia: it would be ‘the work of ages’, she told her sister
Vanessa Bell, especially if she continued to muddle the hs and ns
as she had in distributing the sorts. ‘I see that real printing will
devour one’s entire life’.90
A new press had acquired a new home: Hogarth House on Par-
adise Road in Richmond, then Surrey, now Greater London, just
a few hundred yards from where the oldest standing bridge across
the Thames arced into Alexander Pope’s Twickenham. It was by
far the nicest house in England, said Virginia.91 The ground-floor
drawing and dining rooms had light, high ceilings; there was a first
floor with a bedroom for each of them and a cast-iron bath; four
small bedrooms on the floor above, quarters for the servants and
nurses, glimpsing the canopy of Kew Gardens; and the heart of
the industrial hive: the basement, the vaulted roof under which the
press worked amid the cellars and scullery, the household kitchen,
and a door leading out to a high-walled garden. It was most likely
here that the press began its tradition of using old galley proofs
as toilet paper in the ramshackle loo.92 Virginia was undergoing
psychiatric care for depression when the Woolfs moved in during
the spring of 1915. She had visions of sunlight on the bedroom wall
quivering like gold water, and heard the voices of the dead while
lying in her bed quite ‘mad’.93
The Woolfs had purchased their press together with a range of
sizes of Caslon Old Face roman and italic type – Long Primer
(10pt), Small Pica (11pt) and English (14pt), to which they soon
added a large, Double Great Primer (36pt) in Old Face Titling
for the covers and the display. When Virginia ran out of sorts, she
would travel to the Caslon foundry that had stood in Chiswell
Street EC1 since 1737 to purchase whatever was needed: on one
I | 35
day, 1s 6d of lowercase ‘h’, other days a replacement of worn or
frocked sorts. William Caslon’s type had become so firmly estab-
lished with printers that by his death in 1766 he was described as
the most widely read man in the world, and his roman face was
known as the script of kings: the thirteen colonies of the uniting
states of America chose Caslon for the Declaration of Independ-
ence in 1776; almost two hundred years later, E
liot’s Faber & Faber
would launch the career of a young Seamus Heaney with it. The
face was so dependable that it carried a printer’s maxim: when in
doubt use Caslon, which was soon adopted as a catchy marketing
slogan. And it would become the first face of The Waste Land.
‘My wife and I have started a small private Printing Press,’
Leonard wrote to Eliot in October 1918, ‘and we print and publish
privately short works which would not otherwise find a publisher
easily.’94 Roger Fry had mentioned to them that Eliot might have
some poems: could they take a look? Three or four were tentative-
ly proffered by Eliot (the fruit of two years, noted Virginia), and
on 29 January 1919 he returned the pages that had by then been
set in proof, describing them as ‘admirable’ (in fact it carried set-
ting errors missed by both the Woolfs and Eliot), and accepting
an invitation to dine at the end of the week.95 There they would
discuss the cover stocks, which would be individually mixed papers
emblazoned with a label denoting in bright red ink the title of the
work, ‘POEMS’, and, beneath that, its author: ‘T. S. ELIOT’.
//
The Paris Peace Conference had opened on 18 January, and the

treaty that would be signed in Versailles that summer placed
the blame for the war exclusively at the door of Germany and
her allies. It would impose a schedule of punitive reparations – a
‘Carthaginian Peace’, warned John Maynard Keynes, that would
enslave the German economy and begin ticking a future of conflict
from which ‘the clock cannot be set back’.96 Nor could the clock
be stopped in Britain and Ireland, where pressure from the regions
and nations was mounting and the political centre struggled to
hold. The general election of December 1918 had been the first in
which women (over the age of thirty) and men (of twenty-one or
over) had been permitted to vote, but it had been bitter and divi-
sive; the governing Liberal Party was terminally weakened and the
new Labour Party had become the opposition. It had been called
a ‘khaki election’ for its demobbed electorate and the campaign
for post-war reconstruction, but after the armistice unemployment
had swept through the munition factories and port towns. Strikes
erupted on the Clyde and the Lagan, and riots ensued; on 31 Janu-
ary 1919, tanks rolled onto the streets of Glasgow to face down vast
crowds of protestors. In Dublin’s Mansion House, Dáil Éireann,
an Irish parliament, convened for its historic first session while its
president, Éamon de Valera, was detained in England’s Lincoln
Gaol (he would be broken out by Michael Collins that Febru-
ary). Sinn Féin had won an electoral landslide, and on 21 January
it would fulfil the Proclamation made during the rebellion of 1916
to declare an independent Irish Republic. Under driving rain that
day, in Cranitch’s field in the townland of Soloheadbeg, in a quarry
north of Tipperary town, a horse and cart bearing gelignite was
ambushed by a small group of the Irish Volunteers, who were act-
ing without the authorisation of the nascent Irish government or
their own military leadership. The two officers of the Royal Irish
Constabulary escorting the cart were Catholics; both were shot
dead. Their deaths at the hands of republican forces signalled the
beginning of a vicious struggle between the IRA and the British
government.
‘There has been a great deal of pneumonic influenza about,’ Eliot

told his brother on 27 February, ‘and if one of us got it he would
have to go to a hospital.’97 Eliot may have been neurotic about his
I | 37
health and Vivien’s, but on this occasion his concern was justifiable.
The influenza that had torn around the world in 1918 had arrived
in London for a third time that winter. It had ridden with the war.
From an army mess tent in Camp Funston, Kansas, it had spread
in March 1918 to the Eastern seaboard where the US Army was
mobilising for embarkation to Europe. It crossed the Atlantic with
the troops, overrunning the ports of France by April, and reach-
ing the Western Front shortly afterwards. Throughout the summer
of 1918, troops invalided to their home countries carried the virus
with them into the lives of their loved ones. A second strain rose
in New England in September 1918: this time it swept west, with a
greater virulence than before, killing two hundred thousand Amer-
icans in a single month, before spreading worldwide: East Africa,
West Africa, South America, China, Russia, Iran and on to the
Pacific countries. The crowds that gathered in European cities in
November 1918 to celebrate Armistice Day accelerated the spread
of the disease cruelly, as did the demobilisation that followed. The
virus attacked indiscriminately and worked with ruthless speed:
symptoms in the morning could lead to death by the evening, and
it killed even the young and healthy. In France and Russia, almost
half a million lives were taken; one to two million Iranians died;
estimates of deaths in India would vary between twelve and sev-
enteen million. Indigenous populations with little immunity were
devasted: Western Samoa lost more than a quarter of its popu-
lation. The War to End All Wars had killed upwards of twenty
million combatants and civilians, but as many as five times that
number would perish in the pandemic of 1918 and 1919.
In Marylebone, influenza reached right into the Eliot home, to
Ellen Kellond, the Eliots’ maid, who collapsed with fever early that
February. Without an additional bedroom in which to be treated
(the Eliots used their second bedroom as a dining room), Ellen
was put to bed on the living-room couch, where she was nursed
by Vivien for five days and nights: ‘We thought she would die on
our sofa.’98 The Eliots were convinced that they too would con-
tract the virus. They had only just recovered from a bout of flu that
had laid them low before Christmas, but it was exhaustion rather
than influenza that each of them succumbed to that February.
Eliot was consigned by his doctor to a week’s rest in bed, and slept
throughout the first two days, attended by Vivien, herself already
exhausted from her intensive care of Ellen.99 She had been manag-
ing the housework and the cooking, and was also looking after her
mother in Hampstead, North London, who had been taken ill at
the same time. ‘I have been and am still afraid of Vivien breaking
down,’ Eliot told his own mother.100
St Louis, where Eliot’s mother and sisters resided, had watched
the second wave of influenza rolling out of New England, and had
taken precautions that would suppress the spread of the virus. But
Philadelphia, home to Ezra’s parents Homer and Isabel Pound,
was closer to the epicentre and had precious little time to react;
worse: it had been fatally complacent. The city government and
the newspapers told citizens that 99 per cent of the clean-minded
and the calm would be spared, and only the fearful and unclean
would fall ill. The decision to permit the annual Liberty Loans
Parade on 28 September 1918 would ignite a devastating contagion
that would later be described as the deadliest parade in American
history. Homer sent his son clippings from the papers: it made for
reading, said Pound, that amounted to ‘constant testimony to local
imbecility’.101 He reported on his own health: ‘Am suffering from
cold contracted on Monday in observing the ceremonies of armi-
stice,’ he told his mother in November. ‘Have not yet succumbed
to influenza.’102 And nor did he intend to, for Pound was writing
in the Little Review almost as if weak health was the submission
of a weak mind. Wisdom, he suggested, could travel through the
senses, an osmosis between body and soul, but it required a strong
body to do so.103 But in London preparations for the second wave
of influenza had been little better than those in Philadelphia. The
I | 39
government had issued few guidelines on prevention, and those
that were published had sowed confusion: brush your teeth, said
a Westminster official; eat porridge, advised the Daily Express. On
the streets of Eliot’s and Pound’s Kensington in 1919, one in four
deaths would be from influenza. By the time this third wave had
rolled on, almost 250,000 Britons and 700,000 Americans were
dead.
‘I have simply had a sort of collapse,’ Eliot told his brother Henry
on 27 February.104 Two days of continuous sleep were followed by
a week confined to the flat as Eliot was released from the bank on
doctor’s orders; he was not ‘fit’ when he returned to work the next
week, reported Vivien, who while he rested had been ‘picked up’
by three Canadian servicemen at the Elysée Galleries, Bayswater,
and danced as she had never done since before the war.105 The death
of his father, the grind of daily bank work, the maid’s influenza,
Vivien’s swings between fatigue and euphoria, the disappointment
of Knopf ’s rejection: the strain had been overbearing – the result
of what he told his m other were ‘the trying events and worries of
the past two months’.106 His mind had been turning on Locust
Street, his childhood home in St Louis, and Gloucester, Massa-
chusetts, where the family would summer in a house overlooking
the sea. And most of all he had been thinking on his father. He
wished that his father might have taken more satisfaction from his
children, but then he had never appreciated success in their terms,
he reflected, only by his own, which were derived from a world of
commerce into which none of his children had followed him. Eliot
told Henry that, in spite of their affection for one another, he felt
that their m other and father were lonely people and that father
was the lonelier of the two. ‘In my experience everyone except the
fools seem to me warped or stunted.’107 Their physical reserve had
been crippling.
//
‘St Louis affected me more deeply than any o ther environment has
done,’ said Eliot in 1930.108
Dark streets and mud ways, sickbeds and flooded cellars, fever at
every turn: such was the frontier town to which Eliot’s grandparents
settled from New England in 1837.109 Rev. William Greenleaf Eliot
had come with his new wife, Abby Cranch, to found a Unitarian mis-
sion among families who had gambled with their lives to reach so far
west and who lived accordingly – drinking hard, gambling to ruin,
duelling to settle their debts.110 Those who could owned slaves; those
who could not aspired to such possession. Cholera killed thousands
during the 1860s, and the city sewers were little improved by the time
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in 1888. Putrid air clung beneath the
gas lamps, coal dust plumed from the factory flues to blanket the city
in poisonous fog. This was the yellow smoke through which J. Alfred
Prufrock would wander, rubbing its muzzle on the window-panes,
lingering in pools and drains; the purple shadows of Sara Teasdale’s
‘St Louis Sunset’.111 To Tennessee Williams it was ‘St Pollution’, its
buildings the colour of dried blood; he said the city made him want
to drink.112 To Maya Angelou, it brought a childhood of crowded,
soot-covered, choking buildings: ‘a new kind of hot and a new kind
of dirty’.113 What the city lacked in clean water, Walt Whitman had
written, it made up for in ‘inexhaustible quantities of the best beer
in the world’.114 Brewing boomed, but it also brought crime. Politics
became bedevilled by corruption and cronyism. To one journalist at
the turn of the century this was ‘the shamelessness of St Louis’: a
city of blackmail, kickbacks and extortion, of payrolls padded with
non-existent workers – where the banks were bursting with ‘boo-
dle’, the hospitals crammed with rats, and the hotels churned liquid
mud from the taps: governance ‘by the rascals, for the rich’. When
St Louisans complained that the streetlamps were out, the mayor
replied, ‘You have the moon yet – ain’t it?’115
Before Eliot had reached his first birthday, the city’s first electric
streetcar had made its inaugural run along Lindell Boulevard, so
I | 41
beginning a ‘white flight’ from the West End to the suburbs by the
middle classes. Racial enclaves grew entrenched. On 29 February
1916, St Louis became the first American city to pass a residential
ordinance by popular referendum decreeing that no persons were
allowed to move into a neighbourhood in which 75 per cent of
residents belonged to a race o ther than their own. The separation
of communities defines the city to this day.
St Louis was never an ordinary town. The refugees who came in
waves from Europe’s 1848 revolutions carried with them a language
of radical collectivism. The defence of the city during the Civil
War was entrusted to Joseph Weydemeyer, former officer of the
Prussian Army and declared communist, a friend and publisher to
Karl Marx: like many in the Union army, he thought the abolition
of slavery a precondition of the emancipation of all men. Freedom
flowed into the arts. By the 1890s, St Louis was so crowded with
musical venues and musicians that Missouri native Scott Joplin
had trouble securing work. He wrote ‘The Entertainer’ in the city,
but it was his turn-of-the-century ‘Maple Leaf Rag’ that would
sell a million sheets for the pianola rolls that played in parlours
across America; he became the King of Ragtime, a music named
for the ragpickers who scoured the city’s refuse for salvage, and the
first African American music to find acceptance in white society.116
It was the sound of the city that a young Eliot heard emanating
from the nearby honky-tonk bars, and one he would return to in
The Waste Land. The city would long continue as a radical nursery
for musicians. Josephine Baker was born and grew up there; Chuck
Berry and Miles Davis were born on facing banks of the city’s
Mississippi River; so were the house guitarist of the Blue Note
jazz label, Grant Green, and the soul singer Fontella Bass, whose
producer Ike Turner would begin a career of his own in St Louis
with Tina Turner.
Writers, too, found in the city a rich inspirational seam. When
Marianne Moore said in 1962 that she could think of no city more
cultured than her home town she had in mind the artists who had
lived and worked in the city.117 Mark Twain (Sam Clemens) had
worked ‘a solid mile’ of riverboats before the railways obliterated
the trade.118 The novelist Kate Chopin was born and died a St Lou-
isan: she attended the elite women’s society, the Wednesday Club,
and knew Eliot’s mother. So too did the poet Sara Teasdale, who
attended the Mary Institute, founded by E liot’s grandfather next
door to the family home on Locust Street.
The land was old before it was new. Cahokia, centre of the Mis-
sissippian culture, an eleventh-century city on the eastern bank,
was the largest settlement on the continent, on a scale beyond
even the London of Harold II, last Anglo-Saxon king of Eng-
land. It was a mound dwelling, with as many as 120 man-made,
ritual earthen piles, some towering to 100 feet, overlooking land
that would later be named for King Louis IX of France; it would
remain in the memory as the Mound City long after the levelling
of its earth structures in the nineteenth century.
St Louis was a city closer to Chicago than to Nashville, but its
rivers ran south, and so did its history, and ‘A river,’ wrote Eliot, ‘a
very big and powerful river, is the only natural force that can wholly
determine the course of human peregrination.’119 St Louis was
cradled in the arms of not one but two such powerful waterways.
There’s a saying, sometimes given to Mark Twain, that the Mis-
souri River is ‘too thick to drink, and too thin to plough’; even
so, its vast watershed was home to fifty and more separate native
cultures, as well as the roaming great bison, when Lewis and Clark
began their colonising expedition from the city in 1804. They
carried with them army rifles and handguns, trading where they
could, ruthlessly imposing their will where they could not. The
meandering, springtime swells of Eliot’s youth have since been
tamed by embankments and dams, but still today the river carries
the name of ‘Big Muddy’ for the sediment swept off the hills of
western Montana and carried through ten states before circling
I | 43
the northern perimeter of St Louis and emptying into the mighty
Mississippi.
It was this second river that flowed with such force through the
heart of the settlements on either bank of the settlement. The ‘Old
Man’ of American rivers made a vast entrance upon the city: from
its headwaters in Minnesota, it drew upon more than one million
miles in the great basin between the Rocky and the Appalachian
mountains before discharging into the Gulf of Mexico. For Mark
Twain it was ‘that lawless stream’, for Eliot ‘a treacherous and
capricious dictator’.120 He loved to watch it from the Eads Bridge
in flood-time.121 His grandfather, caught in the Great Flood of
1844, once stepped from a second-storey warehouse window onto
the upper deck of a ferry boat in order to escape drowning.122 And
though he said his people were New Englanders, and though his
adopted country became old England, Eliot felt an incommuni-
cable bond with the big river. ‘Missouri and the Mississippi have
made a deeper impression on me than any o ther part of the world.’123
Igor Stravinsky said that no meeting with Eliot was ever complete
without him returning in conversation to the Mississippi.124
By 1861, St Louis was the slave trade’s most northerly enclave,
bordered to the south by the Confederacy and on all other sides
by free states. Its people were heavily divided between Germanic
Unionists in the city boroughs and Confederate settlers in the rural
hinterland. People were compelled to declare themselves, recalled
Eliot’s father: ‘Life long friends were separated; families were
divided among themselves – children following father or mother
according to preference or influence.’125 When E liot’s grandfather
preached against the ‘vile traffic’, parts of his congregation walked
out.126 ‘The institution of slavery is the greatest obstacle,’ he pro-
nounced, ‘perhaps the only great obstacle, by which our moral,
social, and general advance as a people is hindered.’127
Missouri had experienced some of the most atrocious violence of
the Civil War: and vengeful executions and impromptu massacres
continued in the Ozarks long after the war had ended. On 27 Sep-
tember 1864, twenty-three unarmed Union soldiers on leave were
captured on the North Missouri Railroad by an irregular Confed-
erate force led by the notorious ‘Bloody’ Bill Anderson; they were
stripped, shot and their bodies mutilated, their train set alight and
sent flaming down the tracks. The Union reinforcements that went
in pursuit were massacred at Centralia; it is said that the decisive
shot was fired by a young Jesse James. No wonder that to the youth
T. S. Eliot, it was ‘to me, as a child, the beginning of the Wild
West’.128
Ulysses S. Grant had been the commanding general in the
Union Army; he made the city his marital home before the
war (‘we are not so intolerant in St Louis as we might be’).129
As President of the United States he sponsored the Fifteenth
Amendment of the Constitution that prohibited any state from
denying the right to vote based upon ‘race, color, or previous con-
dition of servitude’. But the former Confederate states responded
with Jim Crow laws, and the parks of St Louis remained racial-
ly segregated in Eliot’s day, while the few Black schools that
managed to operate were often attacked and burned and white
supremacism marched annually in the streets in the city’s Veiled
Prophet Parade.
On 6 April 1917, when Woodrow Wilson had taken the United
States into the Great War, Ezra Pound gave an appreciable shrug:
‘America is doing what she damn well ought to do, and what so
far as I can see, she ought to have begun doing sooner.’130 Eliot
wondered how St Louis might take it all – what the different
nationalities and social groups might feel. He could imagine,
he told his m other, a mob rising to smash the windows of Tony
Faust’s elite oyster restaurant on Broadway and Elm Street, where
Adolphus Busch and Eberhard Anheuser, owners of the powerful
brewery, dined at its so-called ‘millionaire’s table’ daily.131 But ‘the
mob’, as Eliot had termed them, would have more impoverished
I | 45
targets in their sights that summer, and would do far worse than
break windows.
As the June temperatures rose across the city in 1917 so did the
heat of labour disputes. When a predominantly white, emigrant
workforce walked out from the Aluminium Ore Company in East
St Louis, the owners hired strike-breakers from the South, many
of whom were Black. On the evening of 1 July, a group of white
men in a dark Model T Ford drove through the South End, fir-
ing indiscriminately into African American homes. The bell of the
True Light Baptist Church on Tudor Avenue rang out a warning
that triggered the dispatch of an unmarked police car, an identical
dark Model T Ford that was mistaken in the lamplight for the
shooters’ own. The occupants were five plainclothes officers; Ser-
geant Samuel Coppedge and Detective Frank Wodley were killed
when residents fired on their car. For three hot days and nights in
July 1917, on the Illinois bank of the Mississippi, some of the worst
racial atrocities in the country’s history were perpetrated.
African American men from Missouri had been among the first
sent to fight in Europe that year when the US joined the war;
while they served their country abroad, their wives and children
were being boarded up in their homes by white rioters and burned
alive. Newspapers recorded escapees being thrown back into house
fires. Those who fled were shot down from the railway tracks by
snipers. A lynched man swung from a telephone pole on South
4th and East Broadway; bodies were thrown from the new Free
Bridge; one woman witnessed a beheading. Gangs of white men
and women and even children torched and clubbed and shot their
way through the streets and homes of East St Louis while police
and army looked on. No tally for the number of African Amer-
ican deaths has ever been agreed upon, but estimates of one to
two hundred victims have been advanced, with some six thousand
burned from their homes.132 It became known as the Massacre at
East St Louis: ‘a pogrom’, wrote The Crisis that autumn, and ‘the
shame of American democracy’; in the words of Marcus Garvey,
‘one of the bloodiest outrages against mankind’.133 By 20 July, the St
Louis Argos had reported a mass evacuation of the few remaining
Black families.134 Eight hundred miles east, in the White House,
President Wilson refused to condemn the violence.
Later, in 1950, when T. S. Eliot wrote how the Mississippi could
sweep away lives, he told of its carrying off ‘human bodies, cattle
and houses’ in Mark Twain’s floodwater. But his source for those
words had been his own Four Quartets that described something
more brutal and graphic: ‘Like the river with its cargo of dead
negroes, cows and chicken coops, / The bitter apple, and the bite
in the apple.’135
Less than three miles separated the riots from the Eliot family
home, but it might have been three hundred. Eliot’s mother and
father were summering at Eastern Point, Massachusetts, on the
day the violence began in 1917. Eliot wrote to them there from
London to say that he had just played tennis with Pound.136 In the
letters of that summer, the Eliots passed no comment on events
in East St Louis, but W. E. B. Du Bois, sent by The Crisis, would
report the horror he found in the days that followed. In 1903 he
had prophesied that ‘the problem of the Twentieth Century is the
problem of the color-line’.137 Amid the rubble of East St Louis he
sounded a warning for all America.
Eastward and westward storms are breaking – great, ugly

whirlwinds of hatred and blood and cruelty. I will not believe them
inevitable. I will not believe that all that was must be, that all the
shameful drama of the past must be done again today before the
sunlight sweeps the silver seas.138
//
Check trousers, thick overcoat, top hat, fur for neck, long coat or
cloak for term, rough coat for country, and day dress for term and
I | 47
day dress for country:139 Bertrand Russell had been hounding Vivien
for the return of his possessions, and Eliot had become impatient. ‘It
is not the case that Vivien “won’t reply”,’ he wrote brusquely to Rus-
sell on 3 February. ‘I have taken the whole business of Marlow into
my own hands, as she cannot have anything to do with this or with
anything else that would interfere with the success of her doctor’s
treatment.’ Eliot had called a meeting: ‘I have a great deal to talk to
you about.’140 That conference was, on the face of it, to release Russell
from the contract of a shared cottage at Marlow, in Buckingham-
shire, although the ‘great deal’ to which Eliot alluded was not about
real estate matters. But the interview with Russell didn’t go quite to
plan, or at least not to E liot’s plan. Rather than relinquish his hold,
Russell had identified the cottage as a retreat for himself and his
lover, Constance Malleson, telling her ‘I fancy Eliot would like to
be rid of it.’141 His unexpected offer to take over the property wrong-
footed Eliot, who swiftly embraced the proposal as a resolution to
a situation that he had come to find unbearable. But on relaying
the offer to Vivien, Eliot realised that he had underestimated her
attachment to the place and how unprepared she was for the rupture
of letting it go. She had worked hard at the house and at the rose
garden, and looked to it to aid her recovery: ‘I should be wretched
without it,’ she implored. ‘I do love it.’142 Eliot was left to back-pedal
in his negotiation with Russell, and wrote again, implying that he
had been so overrun with worry that Russell’s proposition had taken
him by surprise. ‘So that I think after all we must go on as we are, and
hope that there will be fewer misfortunes in the future.’143 Between
Vivien’s claims and Russell’s, Eliot’s defeat was unmistakable.
Tired. Misunderstood. Tortured. Tortuous. Four words that opened

the four stanzas of an ‘ode’ that Eliot completed early in 1919:
When the bridegroom smoothed his hair

There was blood upon the bed.144
The Eliots had followed their honeymoon in Eastbourne in the
summer of 1915 with a second in the autumn in the same place,
but it had not gone well.145 Eliot had worn a truss since child-
hood, Vivien was menstruating. Her brother Maurice reported
that Eliot slept in a seafront deckchair.146 When Vivien carried
home to London the soiled sheets for cleaning, the guest house
accused the couple of theft. ‘It seems their sort of pseudo-
honeymoon at Eastbourne is being a ghastly failure,’ Russell
had reported at the time from his flat in Holborn. ‘She is quite
tired of him, & when I got here I found a desperate letter from
her, in the lowest depths of despair & not far removed from
suicide.’147
Eliot had been an ‘extraordinarily silent’ postgraduate student
in Russell’s seminars at Harvard when they met in the spring of
1914, but he made a remark on Heraclitus so good that Russell
wished that he would make another.148 On meeting [him] again
in London that autumn, Russell had taken a growing interest in
Eliot (‘exquisite and listless’), and, in turn, Vivien (‘light, a little
vulgar, adventurous, full of life’), so much so that by the autumn
of 1915, to ease their finances, he had taken the couple in to his flat
in Bury Street, London’s Bloomsbury.149 ‘I was fond of them both,
and endeavoured to help them in their troubles,’ he recalled, ‘until
I discovered that their troubles were what they enjoyed.’150 Eliot
returned the personal warmth, although his veiled portrait of Rus-
sell as ‘Mr Apollinax’, written at that time, recorded ‘His pointed
ears . . . He must be unbalanced,’ and his laugh ‘like an irresponsi-
ble foetus’. The sound of that laughter, sinking through sea water,
sinking like the cries of the Lusitania, sinking beneath coral, like
that of the old man of the sea, like the Phoenician Sailor:
Where worried bodies of drowned men drift down in the green

silence,
Dropping from fingers of surf.151
I | 49
Russell responded that he would come to love Eliot, ‘as if he were
my son’; he told his then-lover, Lady Ottoline Morrell, that what
he extended to the young couple was ‘the purest philanthropy’,
perhaps even believing it himself.152 But his feelings for Vivien were
moving in another direction. He had begun to observe her, hawk-
like, admiring in her an effervescence that among Eliot’s friends
had earned her the nickname of the River Girl; and he particularly
admired her moments of what he regarded as a coquettish cruelty
towards Eliot. ‘I myself get very much interested.’153 Vivien, in turn,
was not unresponsive. ‘He is all over me, is Bertie, and I simply
love him.’154
Ottoline Morrell understood all too well where this was headed:
she urged him to desist, warning that he risked the Eliots’ marriage
by entreating Vivien to fall in love with him.155 But Russell’s invest-
ment in Vivien had already outstripped friendship. He would dine
with her when Eliot was away from town and he would pay for
her dance lessons, and, according to Morrell, began sending Vivien
‘silk undergarments’.156
For a year the flirtation continued, heating and cooling, ris-
ing to the brim and then falling back. Russell spoke in 1916 of
the ‘end of the readjustment’, and soothed Ottoline that matters
were to be put on a better footing, and that everything would be
all right.157 But Russell had misjudged feelings, and a crisis was
coming.
In the autumn of 1917, the Eliots had been looking for a retreat in
the country in which to spend their weekends, somewhere within
easy reach of London, but rural enough to write in and to ease
recovering nerves. Vivien had taken rooms at Sewhurst Farm on
Abinger Common, in the Surrey Hills, as a base from which to
house hunt: it was the last of sixteen places that she had tried, or so
liot’s mother.158 But the site was almost certainly found
she told E
not by Vivien but by Russell, who knew the farmers personally,
and who may have stayed for a while at the neighbouring Lemon’s
Farm.159
On the weekend of 20 October 1917, baked in sunshine and blue
skies, the Eliots took up lodgings at the farmhouse which was
tucked into a picturesque hollow high on the Greensand Ridge
of the Surrey Hills. A brook descended through the grounds on
its way into the Tillingbourne, where it crossed under a sandstone
cart track that climbed from the valley. Two footpaths branched
around the farm: one banked south-west to Sewer’s Copse, a sec-
ond climbed south-east into the pine woods of High Ashes Hill
and the birch forest beyond that opened onto the summit of Leith
Hill.160 The farmers, Alfred and Annie Marie Enticknap, didn’t
take boarders, but they were once gardeners at nearby Shiffolds to
the poet R. C. Trevelyan, who was known to Eliot, and were happy
to take in friends of his and spoil them with homemade butter,
fresh eggs and fowl. It was, thought Eliot, an idyll – a ‘fairy tale
farm’, wrote Vivien161 – but what transpired there would initiate a
living hell for Eliot.
The farm was more cut off than Vivien said she had expected:
six miles from the nearest railway station, she told Mrs Eliot – in
fact three, but far enough that Eliot would have to shorten his vis-
its to allow for the longer commute to London. No sooner had he
returned to Lloyds on that first weekend than a north-west wind
blew in, sending temperatures plummeting toward freezing; it was
then that Vivien was joined at the farm by Russell.
‘At last I spent a night with her’, Russell confided to Constance
Malleson, who had succeeded Morrell as Russell’s lover.
I intended to be (except perhaps on very rare occasions) on merely

friendly terms with Mrs Eliot. But she was very glad that I had
come back, and very kind and wanting much more than friendship.
I thought I could manage it – I led her to expect more if we got a
cottage –162
I | 51
There had been a quality of loathsomeness about the night to-
gether, he said, that he found difficult to describe, but describe it
he would to Malleson, on whose mercy he now fell. ‘It was utter
hell,’ he confessed: he felt imprisoned in his own egotism, sick
with himself and the pain that he spread everywhere, and felt a
devouring hunger within him that was, he admitted, ‘ruthless &
insatiable’.163
It was Vivien who had found the cottage in Marlow soon after-
wards, in December 1917: a narrow, three-storey terrace and former
post office with a neat walled garden in the street where Shelley
once lived, Eliot would be heard to say.164 It had been rented to
restore the Eliots’ fragile health, and had burdened their expenses
hugely; but a solution to that had been found in Russell, who came
in on the lease and also provided the furniture. It was an arrange-
ment that promised something to them all. To Eliot, it offered a
weekend retreat from his day job at Lloyds, his evening work for
The Egoist and his twice-weekly lectures. For Vivien it would pro-
vide the rural recuperation that she had been seeking. For Russell
it promised a writing sanctuary to finish his book, Roads to Free-
dom; with Eliot largely in London, he envisaged a working life
there ‘with Mrs E’.165
But arrangements had been disrupted almost at once when, in
January 1918, a pacifist article by Russell appeared in The Tribunal
warning of the imperial threat of American militarism, in a rousing
echo of Karl Marx: ‘All that we hold dear will be swallowed up in
universal ruin.’166 The revolution in Russia was less than a year old,
and the British government was not about to tolerate Bolshevism
in its own backyard. Russell was charged with interfering with the
war effort, and sentenced to six months’ incarceration in Brixton
Prison, a deterrent that did not entirely have the desired effect: ‘I
found prison quite agreeable,’ he recorded. ‘I wrote a book.’167 It
was there in the summer of 1918 that he had decided to withdraw
from the Marlow arrangement, leaving Eliot to find a replacement
tenant for his share of the property, which he had done by the time
of Russell’s release in the middle of September.
Eliot may never have known for certain what transpired between
Vivien and Russell, and it is unlikely that he ever confronted them.
But then worse than knowledge may have been suspicion itself,
which for Eliot would have grated against the pride of his well-
made manners and his belief in respectability and composure. By
the summer of 1918, with Russell still confined to Brixton Prison,
Eliot appeared overcome by doubt. It was then that he made an
unexpected call on Russell’s mistress, Constance Malleson, who
felt perplexed as to the motivation of his visit. She experienced
the detached and ‘cat-like’ presence of his eyes observing her, and
beneath them what she sensed as ‘a curiously deep despair’.168 Per-
haps the call had been little more than a personal courtesy, or a
promise fulfilled to Russell; but perhaps Eliot had come to find out
exactly what Malleson knew.169
On 26 November 1918, a fortnight after the Armistice, Russell
took Vivien to dinner and told her that he was unlikely to renew
contact for some time. The conversation passed off without disaster,
he reported with relief, but it had been a heavy-handed manoeuvre
that undoubtedly stirred in Vivien a sense of rejection.170 She told
Russell in January 1919 that she disliked fading intimacies and that
she was breaking off contact entirely. Russell maintained that it
was not a matter of any distress to him, and yet he continued to
paw and peck at the Eliots’ arrangements, demanding the return of
items that were impractical to retrieve now that the house was let
furnished. But the coffee-grinder, he badgered, the tea-table: these he
wanted as soon as possible . . .171
Russell had been a cuckoo in the nest of the Eliots’ short mar-
riage. He had dazzled and spoiled and harried Vivien, and had
taken something very precious in the form of the couple’s fidelity
to each o ther. The cottage at Marlow would cast a shadow over
the marriage until Eliot was able to release himself from the rent
I | 53
entirely in the summer of 1920. By then, the events had triggered
in Eliot a despair that was to reach a crisis while he was in the
company of Ezra Pound in France in the summer of 1919.
II.
Eliot had followed the poems of Prufrock with a silence that lasted
almost two years. By the spring of 1917 he was ‘rather desperate’,
believing that he had dried up completely. But he discovered could
still compose in French, and that writing in a second language
alleviated a pressure to take himself seriously; he had written five
poems when the impulse to write in English returned. Edited and
abetted by Pound, he began in 1917 a run of English poems in
a ‘French’ style, drawing upon the formal example of Théophile
Gautier’s Émaux et Camées, a work from 1852 that would, for the
next three years, become a model for both Eliot and Pound. Said
Eliot later: ‘We studied Gautier’s poems and then we thought,
“Have I anything to say in which this form will be useful?” And we
experimented. The form gave the impetus to the content.’1
The form was battened down. Gone was the melodious expanse
of the Prufrock poems, and in their place a tightened lyric tetram-
eter, in nimbly stitched quatrains, with end rhyme clasping shut
every second and fourth line. By early 1919, Eliot had half a dozen
pieces in final draft, and was finishing two more. Opening on a
cavernous waste shore, ‘Sweeney Erect’, completed that Febru-
ary, was anything but cavernous. Like its predecessors in form,
it emphasised technical precision above linear expanse, objective
observation above personal declaration, and was delivered in a
style that was a reaction to the perceived excess of Romanticism.
It was a form given further impetus by the mode of drafting: Eliot
had recently begun composing on a typewriter, which he said had
the effect of shaking off all his sentences that he used to dote upon,
55
and leaving him with a style that was ‘short, staccato, like mod-
ern French prose’.2 The typewriter had made for lucidity, he told a
friend, but he wasn’t sure that it encouraged subtlety. Amused with
amusing, archly mischievous, it should have surprised no one that
the work would be accused of cleverness: l’art pour l’art was, after
all, a point of principle for the Parnassians who followed Gautier.
But cleverness was not the only accusation that the work of this
period would have to face. For the culmination of Eliot’s French
form was about to produce the poem that he said he liked the most
of all of them, but which included the most repellent lines that
Eliot would ever write.
Ezra Pound didn’t much care for how the draft of ‘Bleistein with
a Cigar’ had ended (the longer title was still to come); he didn’t
much care for how it opened, come to that. He marked ‘Diptych’
on the top corner of the first draft, indicating that he thought the
poem should comprise not one part but two. And he targeted its
second line – ‘And Triton blew his wrinkled shell’ – for sounding
too little of Gautier and too much of Wordsworth: ‘if you / “hotel”
this / rhythm shd. be / weighted a bit, / I think’, he wrote in the
margin, and Eliot took up the suggestion. ‘And Triton blew his
wrinkled shell’ became Descending at a small hotel, modernising the
poem in a heartbeat. Pound then scored a double line between
the second and third stanzas, marking ‘OK. from here anyhow’.
But it wasn’t OK, not yet, and he further queried ‘punctuation?’,
and prompted quotation marks (‘for clarity?’), before making a
directing intervention in the final stanza, which had opened with
a question, ‘Who clipped the lion’s mane?’, until Pound changed
‘mane’ to wings, deepening the mythic dimension of the piece.3
These were good, renovating and clarifying interventions by
Pound. But about the lines that would become most notorious,
he had been silent. For the draft contained three stanzas on the
title character Bleistein, a ‘Chicago Semite Viennese’, described
in the poem as bent-kneed, his palms outstretched, mired in an
associative language of degradation: lustreless, protrusive, protozoic
slime, money in furs. Other names signalled a diminishment: a sala-
cious Lady Volupine (from the fox-like vulpine) ‘entertains’ a Sir
Ferdinand Klein (German: small); but it was the name of Bleistein
around which the poem’s deepest disgust would be built, a name
meaning ‘leadstone’, an element weak in its metallic character,
toxic at critical levels. Bleistein’s appearance in the poem included
the following two lines:
The rats are underneath the piles.

The jew is underneath the lot.
What was Eliot thinking? He would not elucidate; but then he didn’t
believe that any writer held an executive position when it came to
interpretation. ‘The only legitimate meaning of a poem is the meaning
which it has for any reader,’ he would remark in 1927, ‘not a meaning
which it has primarily for the author.’4 Intention, in o ther words, is
unimportant: all there is in the end is effect. It was a neat sidestep, but
it left the lines exposed without an authorial voice to defend them.
For some readers, no defence was required: the lines were a benign
or even affirmative exploration of hatred, whose weapon was irony,
whose subject was subjugation itself; other readers have felt that the
reference was inoffensively particular: to a Jew, and not to all, a stroke
of character and not therefore general to a people.
‘Beauty is difficult,’ wrote Pound in ‘Canto LXXIV’.5 He had
made the point once before, in 1914 with Wyndham Lewis in Blast.
‘The Art-instinct is permanently primitive.’ That had been statement
seven, of their manifesto; statement eight read: ‘In a chaos of imper-
fection, discord, etc., it finds the same stimulus as in Nature.’6 Namely,
art born from a war-torn world could – should – find inspiration in
subjects not previously thought beautiful. That p oetry should be a
meeting ground for beauty and not-beauty was a thought engaging
Eliot in 1919. In his ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, written
II | 57
that year, he would identify in seventeenth-century literature ‘an
intensely strong attraction toward beauty and an equally intense
fascination by the ugliness which is contrasted with it and which
destroys it’.7 Soon after, in the spring of 1920, he would write: ‘The
contemplation of the horrid or sordid or disgusting, by an artist, is
the necessary and negative aspect of the impulse toward the pursuit
of beauty.’8 At the same time, he cautioned against a modern ten-
dency for frivolity in literature by which ‘the sensation of enjoying
something ugly is more amusing than the worn out enjoyment of
something beautiful’.9 This was a calculated judgement for Eliot to
make in this moment, for it was the very charge that critics were
making against his p oetry. ‘He has forgotten his emotions, his values,
his sense of beauty,’ The Times was shortly to write of his poems.10
But Eliot would persist, and would refine his pursuit to its most
clear and elegant position in an essay on Matthew Arnold in 1933,
stating: ‘The essential advantage for a poet is not, to have a beautiful
world with which to deal: it is to be able to see beneath both beauty
and ugliness; to see the boredom, the horror, and the glory.’11 Was
such panoptical vision Eliot’s achievement with Bleistein? Was its
purpose an attempt to look beyond the superficiality of prejudice
and scrutinise the horrific?
Few readers have thought so. Most have found it hard to pass
beyond two insistent readings of the poem: that the ‘the jew’ is
lower than vermin, and that ‘the jew’ conspires behind all the neg-
ative tendencies in modernity. And compounding both readings is
a further grievance: a lowercase ‘j’ that was not capitalised in print
until 1963 and which has served only to deepen the wound of dis-
respect and prejudice.
Travelling on a tourist visit to London in 1911, Eliot recorded in
a letter the sights that he had seen: the British Museum, the City,
St Paul’s and ‘Whitechapel (note: Jews)’.12 For the next decade and
more he makes a small number of references in passing to someone
or other’s Jewish origin – ‘an Irish Roman Catholic Jew!’ or ‘a Jewish
lady in Whitechapel’ or ‘a small Jewish messenger boy’ – observing
rather than condemning – all made to family (with one exception
to Pound), where Eliot had first encountered anti-Semitism. ‘I have
an instinctive antipathy to Jews,’ wrote E liot’s mother in 1920, ‘as I
have to certain animals.’ Anti-Semitism had been a commonplace
13
in his Missouri childhood home, and it was prevalent in England.

On visiting the home counties in 1917, Vivien would describe ‘hor-
rible Jews in plush coats by the million’.14 Dorothy Pound could
likewise state that ‘rich, stockbroking Jews are not nice company’.15
In certain friendship groups and literary circles anti-Semitism was
ubiquitous. G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc and Rupert Brooke
were open in their prejudice, while John Maynard Keynes – who
would become so admired by Eliot – complained of civilisation
being trapped under the thumbs of ‘impure’ Jews.16 Lytton Stra-
chey wrote to Leonard Woolf to bemoan the ‘placid, easy-going
vulgarity of your race’,17 and Virginia, disparaging her husband’s
own family, said, ‘I do not like the Jewish voice; I do not like the
Jewish laugh.’18 Leonard, when asked to weigh the matter of E liot’s
prejudice, would say in 1967, ‘I think T. S. Eliot was slightly anti-
Semitic in the sort of vague way which is not uncommon,’ adding,
‘He would have denied it quite genuinely.’19 Few in these circles
spoke out expressly against the tide of what E. M. Forster would
call ‘this anti-Jew horror’. Writing on the eve of the Second World
War, Forster warned of a danger that many had failed to challenge:
‘To me, anti-Semitism is now the most shocking of all things. It
is destroying much more than the Jews; it is assailing the human
mind at its source.’20
Eliot and Pound depended upon Jewish figures to bring their
work to print. In London, Leonard Woolf ran the Hogarth Press,
John R odker was starting the Ovid Press, Alida Monro managed
the Poetry Bookshop and Sydney Schiff underwrote Arts & Let-
ters: all these publishers were Jewish. In New York, Alfred Knopf ’s
family were Polish Jews; Benjamin Huebsch, who published Joyce,
II | 59
was the son of Hungarian Jewish immigrants; Albert Boni and
Horace Liveright, who would publish The Waste Land, were from
Russian and German Jewish families respectively. Each of these
men encountered exclusion and prejudice in publishing, but it was
Liveright whom John Quinn singled out for a bilious stream of
abuse in correspondence that overwhelmed many of his letters to
Eliot and Pound. Ezra Pound was the one who corrected it. ‘The
by-you-so-scorned Liveright is the best of ’em,’ he told Quinn in
1922. ‘He is still young enough to think an author ought to be
paid a living wage. NO elderly publisher even does think that.’21 It
wouldn’t be the last time that he defended Liveright to Quinn, or
the last time that Quinn raged against Jews. Eliot, too, absorbed
a tide of racist ranting from Quinn: Liveright was a crook and
vulgarian, a grubby publicist and a money grabber, and not – not
– to be trusted. If Quinn’s sentiments, articulated extensively over
many letters across many years, tapped bigotries shared by Eliot,
he did not show it. Not once. Until he did. In the winter of 1923,
Quinn had written a letter which, even by his standards, represent-
ed a low in his racial bigotry. He told Eliot of the ‘infested’ streets
and sidewalks of Broadway with swarms of horrible looking Jews,
low, squat, animal-like.22 By then, Liveright had reprinted The Waste
Land, and had sold the first run, said Quinn, without advancing
a cent in royalties. Eliot’s veneer now cracked. ‘I am sick of doing
business with Jew publishers who will not carry out their part of
the contract unless they are forced to.’23 And there was more. ‘I
wish I could find a decent Christian publisher in New York who
could be trusted not to slip and slide at every opportunity.’
‘My own views are Liberal,’24 Eliot would write in 1919, and
yet it’s difficult to read a subtle interrogation of prejudice into
Bleistein, or admire an examination of ugliness. Instead it is ugly.
Ugly to its core.
//
As for booze . . . Ezra Pound was once again taking aim at America
that February . . . personal liberty in that country had been done in. On
16 January 1919, the Eighteenth Amendment of the US Constitu-
tion had been ratified, prohibiting the production, transportation
and sale of alcohol in a belief that the removal of temptation would
lead to the removal of poverty and vice. It would take a full year
for the change in the law to come into effect, and would remain
in force until 1933, when it became the first and only amendment
in American history to ever be repealed in its entirety. But already
Pound’s antennae were twitching for an America that he thought
was sleepwalking into disaster. Having always been ‘free’ (the scare
quotes were Pound’s), the country had lost any sense it once had of
the value of individual liberty, or any feeling for the sheer ardour
needed to maintain it. ‘Having got rid, supposedly of Prussianism,
oppression, tyranny,’ he told his father, ‘you are in for a worse era.’25
’Twas 1919 that brought down the Rum Trust –

LIGHT OF THE WORLD, our grand-dads took it neat.26
Smuggling and speakeasies and rum-running and bootlegging:

a new age had brought a new language. Bill McCoy had grown up
on the Delaware River, the son of a bricklayer, with a longing for
the sea. His passion for sailing needed a subsidy, and so he began
to smuggle. He became known as a gentleman crook, a self-styled
‘honest lawbreaker’, who, alone among traffickers, didn’t water
down his contraband liquor, earning the moniker ‘the real McCoy’.
He was at the Gloucester pier of Eliot’s youth when he first laid
eyes on a schooner called the Arethusa: she was elegance from keel
to truck, he said, a craft that could ghost under full sail, and enter
a harbour like an aristocratic lady gracing a room; he said he fell
in love at first sight. He refitted her hold to carry five thousand
cases in burlap wrapping, and mounted a Colt-Browning machine
gun on the foredeck to stave off the pirates who patrolled for easy
pickings. He saw himself as a swashbuckler against Prohibition,
II | 61
trading at the designated three miles offshore that constituted
international waters, thereby allowing him to escape US law. This
was the infamous ‘rum row’ – a stretch of water between the penin-
sulas of Montauk, New York, and Cape May, New Jersey – which
became a floating distribution centre for the liquor that would irri-
gate the speakeasies of New York City. It became a settlement on
the water, with floating bars, VIP tours and jazz musicians shipped
in for ambience. A symbol of resistance in a puritanical age, a
strike against Prohibition, a subject that would in time give Eliot
the opening to The Waste Land.
//
If there had been an opinion maker in London, until now it had

been Pound. In 1918, he had published well in excess of one hun-
dred articles in what had been the most prolific publishing year
of his life (more than six times the critical output of Eliot that
year); and for the first half of 1919 his reviews would flow out in
the New Age at a rate of four a month under the pseudonyms of
William Atheling on music and B. H. Dias on fine art. But of liter-
ary reviews in his own name there were almost none, and of those
that were signed there was little of E
liot’s growing edge and rigour
about them. Pound, who had been prophet to Imagism, assassin to
Georgianism, reviver of Rome and the lost Langue d’Oc, traveller
on the Silk Road and trader in the Occident and Orient – he who
more than anyone else had been the modernising voice par excel-
lence – was engaging in criticism that seemed thin, unfocused,
rolled out aimlessly to order.
One piece alone in the Little Review announced itself that
spring as though it might set itself apart. ‘The Death of Vorticism’
was a teasing title intended by Pound to showcase the movement’s
achievements and was anything but an elegy.27 Vorticism attempt-
ed to represent the industrial world of objects in art, led by Pound
in ink and by Wyndham Lewis in paint. But Lewis lay in End-
sleigh Palace Hospital with double pneumonia, and there was no
sign that what he had practised so dynamically in the arrange-
ment of colour – what Pound had aptly named ‘planes in relation’
– had been adopted by younger artists.28 Pound had intended to
give one last and deserved spin of the vortex to its embattled art-
ists, but with Lewis ill and Gaudier-Brzeska dead, what instead he
appeared to honour were the wounded and the fallen. In 1914, Blast
had anticipated a world made grotesque by the horror of a looming
war; Lewis and Pound had seen it coming and as visionary art-
ists would congratulate themselves (‘very well acted by you
and me’, Lewis had written in a short Vorticist play of 1914).29 But
the war that followed brought devastation on a scale that no print
journal could reflect: the scale of the trauma was simply too vast.
Vorticism had been a clarion call, of that there was no doubt; but
as a herald it had been obliterated by the ferocity of the experience
about which it warned. The astuteness of Pound’s criticism was
failing, while Eliot’s only sharpened.
John Middleton Murry did not know Eliot personally, but he
knew of his work. In 1917, he had listened transfixed to Katherine
Mansfield as she read aloud ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’
at a party hosted by Ottoline Morrell at her Garsington Manor,
in Oxfordshire; now that Murry had taken up restoration of the
ailing journal The Athenaeum, he had decided that Eliot was the
man to help him in his task. On 12 March 1919, he invited Eliot to
become assistant editor, as he currently was at The Egoist, only this
time at a salary of £500 per annum for two years, a sum generously
above his earnings at the bank. It seemed the literary opportunity
that Eliot had been craving: respectable, lucrative, a door to the
respectable literary life that he had so wished to open for his fam-
ily. But unexpectedly he turned down the post, telling his m other
that he feared that the need to produce copy mechanically would
exhaust the creativity he needed for his writing. It would never be
II | 63
his first interest, any more than finance was; but banking at least he
could leave behind at the end of the day, whereas reviewing would
be an endless companion. ‘I could not turn it out mechanically and
then go to my own work.’30
The setback to Murry’s plans was immense. He could think of
no one else in England whose literary judgement he might trust;
and so he didn’t: he went without any editorial assistance, and
instead employed Eliot as a freelance critic, in a series of reviews
that would delight Murry and expand considerably the literary
standing of the journal. By April, Murry had enthused that he
hoped their collaboration would not cease until the two men had
‘restored criticism’.31 Eliot would make three dozen contributions
in a little over a year , and would regard them as his finest pieces
to date, ‘longer and better’ than anything he had written before;
and the Observer agreed: as a critic, he was now ‘known to the
world at large’, unmatched in British or American letters.32 His
literary ascent had been sudden, and for a moment, Eliot’s prac-
tised modesty slipped. ‘I really think that I have far more influence
on English letters than any other American has ever had,’ he told
his mother, ‘unless it be Henry James.’33 He said he knew a great
many people, but there were a great many more who now wanted
to know him.
In 1919 Eliot would double his critical output of each of the
last three years in a series of articles that were no mere summaries
of books under review, but ever more precise outlines on poetry
itself.
Emotion. The Elizabethans’ vice was rhetoric, but seldom did
they let sentiment ruin their writing.34
Style. A writer should not adhere to a creed or a party in style,
but be simply and solely themselves: an Individual.35
Material. Poe, Whitman and Hawthorne were the keys to Amer-
ican literature, but theirs were the works of an immature society.36
Audience. The mistake of a writer was the attempt to address a
large readership, instead of a small one. ‘The only better thing is to
address the one hypothetical Intelligent Man who does not exist
and who is the audience of the Artist.’37
Criticism. A reader must be enticed into a receptive mood and
provided with a personal point of view if a critical book is to hold
together.38
These were cornerstones for any young poet in thinking about
how to write and of what to write and for whom to write. Eliot was
just thirty-one, but already be expressed a veteran’s foresight when
he emphasised the need of writers to strike out on their own. To
all writers Eliot now gave an ultimatum: hang together in groups
and ‘schools’ as a footnote to fashion, or chance going it alone and
risk oblivion, and maybe, just maybe, find a higher place beyond
the vagaries of public taste. Refusal to distinguish oneself from the
literary clique was to threaten writers if not quite with a literary
grave then with a ‘Bloomsburial’ of their genius.39 Aldous Huxley
had been the target of those remarks, although with his tireless
advocacy of peers and groupings – Imagist or Vorticist, of Joyce,
Lewis and even himself – Eliot must have hoped that his friend
Pound, the great gatherer of literature, was listening in. But Pound
was already more exposed than even he knew, for he was about
to strike out into the open, unflanked and alone, and with catas
trophic effect.
//
‘You will remember all the fuss about Ezra Pound’s Propertius,’
Eliot warned Robert Lowell in 1961: ‘Keep the word translation
out of it.’40 The ‘it’ to which Eliot referred was Imitations, render-
ings by Lowell of renowned European poems into his own idiom,
a work on the eve of publication at Faber & Faber that would
come to mark a creative fusion of original writing and translation.
Lowell had heeded E liot’s warning and withheld the word from
II | 65
the title, but he hadn’t kept it from the introduction, and review-
ers would seize on an approach to ‘translation’ that they found
imperial and opportunist, a robbing of the graves of the great for
self-advancement (reading for schoolboys in salt mines, mocked
one review).41 But in recasting existing work into modern idiom,
there was in his approach, Lowell admitted, ‘nothing new’: he
had taken Thomas Wyatt as his guide, he said, although he might
also have added John Dryden, who had used the word ‘imitation’
almost three centuries before to describe a form of translating in
which the writer ‘assumes the liberty, not only to vary from the
words and sense, but to forsake them both as he sees occasion; and
taking only some general hints from the original, to run division
on the groundwork, as he pleases.’42
In his rendition of the Latin of Sextus Propertius, published
in the March of 1919, Ezra Pound had most certainly run the
groundwork as he pleased. Sextus Propertius was a rebel and a
hero to Ezra Pound. An Umbrian, and therefore an incomer to
the citadel, he had ridden on the acclaim of his first collection of
Elegies, circulated in Rome around the year 25 bce. The work won
him attention which, like his friends Virgil and Horace, brought
him under the patronage of Gaius Cilnius Maecenas, minister
of culture to Emperor Augustus. But an eminent place in the
Augustan court was not without a price: patriotic homilies and
political odes were among the tributes expected, thereby begin-
ning for Propertius many years of cat-and-mouse evasion to elude
propaganda and find the true subject of his work, a mistress he
called Cynthia, in a move in which, wrote Pound, ‘S. P. ceased to
be the dupe of magniloquence’.43 Instead he became a strategist,
an outsider bending the centre to his favour: a model, thought
Pound, for his own quest to construct not a single translation,
but what he called a composite character – of Propertius certainly,
but also ‘something of Ovid’, and the spirit of any young man of
the time of Augustus, ‘undeceived by imperial hog-wash’.44 And
it was this spirit of an independent youth in which Pound placed
his investment.
‘All ages are contemporaneous,’ Pound had written in 1910. ‘The
future stirs already in the minds of the few’.45
If a single thought could capture Pound’s approach to trans-
lation, if not all literature, it might be this remark from his first
book of prose, The Spirit of Romance. It would anticipate his
relation to Propertius exactly, in which the passage of time was
not so much a river flowing in a single direction but a pool in
which the past and the modern met and mingled freely. ‘This is
especially true of literature, where the real time is independent
of the apparent,’ he wrote, ‘and where many dead men are our
grand-children’s contemporaries.’ The thought that all literature
happens at once was one on which Eliot was about to elucidate,
but for Pound, this implied a unique relationship between a poet
in one time and a translator in another: one not based upon def-
erence or fidelity, and most certainly not upon textual pedantry,
but something closer to collaboration – something like the mind
of the poet voiced through the mouth of the translator. ‘Tain’t
what a man sez, but wot he means that the traducer has got to
bring over,’ wrote Pound.46 And the key to that transmission is
not scholarship but something more akin to a personal presence,
an ability in the translator to convey a temporary identity, to
adopt a mask, and be both ‘traducer’ and poet at once. And that
was exactly the art of the ‘Homage’, as Eliot would later express
it: ‘It is not a translation, it is a paraphrase, or still more truly (for
the instructed) a persona.’47
‘It’s you,’ Robert Lowell told Pound in the 1950s, but a ‘you’
refracted by modern light: ‘You are a man writing in the Occident
of the first World War – humorous, skeptical, shocked that such
a thing could happen, quia pauper amavi.’48 And that meant the
tone could never be classical, nor quite modern, but awkwardly in
between, resistant to description: in its design a way to defy the
II | 67
grasp of the academy, and in humour and irony to suck its thumb
at authority. And there is no high-road to the Muses, the ‘Homage to
Sextus Propertius’ insisted. And that was never a provocation that
a self-respecting academy was ever likely to tolerate.
‘Please punch my face in order to save my soul,’ Pound told Har-

riet Monroe in 1913: in criticism, Pound expected the treatment he
received to match that which he dispensed.49 But with the publica-
tion by Monroe of four parts from ‘Homage to Sextus Propertius’
in the spring of 1919, what Pound would experience was no mere
slap in the face. For no sooner had the passages appeared in Poetry
magazine then a response was delivered, in the very next issue,
by William Gardner Hale, a professor of Latin at the University
of Chicago. Undignified. Flippant. Incredibly ignorant. Unintelligi-
ble. Absurd. Identifying as many as sixty ‘errors’ of translation in
a mere four sections, Hale went to town on what he saw as fun-
damental incompetence. In his ignorance, Hale declared, Pound
had confused the Latin verb canes (from cano or canto, to sing)
with the noun canes (canis, dog), and compounded his error in cou-
pling it with the neighbouring nocturnaeque (nocturnal); and so
rather than giving Propertius’ you will sing . . . of midnight escapade,
Pound instead had returned the inadvertently comic night dogs.50
‘For sheer magnificence of blundering this is unsurpassable,’ Hale
pronounced, although he did what he could to give that blunder
a run for its money by citing an extended list of mishaps.51 He
concluded, ‘If Mr Pound were a professor of Latin, there would be
nothing left for him but suicide.’
‘Cat-pisss and porcupines!!’52 Pound exploded in response.
Hale had misunderstood the mode of the p oetry, he protested,
and wrote fiercely to Harriet Monroe exhorting her to let the
readers of Poetry magazine know this to be the case. ‘Allow me to
say that I would long since have committed suicide had desist-
ing made me a professor of latin,’ he began.53 And he continued:
Hale was the embodiment of a spirit (the ‘high road’) that kept
the classics out of reach: so petty and pedantic and fixed in his
reading that it left no room for the fluency of p oetry, and it was
Hale and not Pound who was exemplary of a deep disrespect to
its subject. Pound’s retort was a plausible one, but he had failed
to make it clearly. His tone seemed petulant, juvenile even, when
what he might have said is that the ‘Homage’ should have been
understood in terms of what Dryden described as ‘something
new produced’, as something which is ‘almost the Creation of
another hand’, and as ‘a Liberty to be allowed’.54 Instead, he
seemed caught unexpectedly on the back foot. Which is when
something rare and remarkable happened to Ezra Pound: he lost
his nerve. He did not send the letter he had drafted to Poetry;
instead, he repeated the same retort, only this time privately to
a friend, saying that Hale’s own errors should sentence him to
the fate he assigned to Pound (‘He has NO claim to refrain from
suicide if he errs in any point’).55 And he made the remark yet
again, this time to his family: ‘As Hale has nothing by his syntac-
tical accuracy to stand on he had better lie down.’56 He began a
second letter to Harriet Monroe, but on this occasion in a briefer
form for publication. ‘The thing is no more a translation than my
“Altaforte” is a translation,’ he protested, in a reference to his cel-
ebrated reworking in 1909 of a poem by the troubadour Bertran
de Born.57 But Monroe did not print the letter, and Pound’s voice
went unheard. Silenced, he turned instead to A. R. Orage, editor
of the New Age: ‘There was never any question of translation, let
alone literal translation. My job was to bring a dead man to life,
to present a living figure.’58 And to Felix Schelling, his former
professor at Pennsylvania, Pound said again: ‘No, I have not done
a translation of Propertius. That fool in Chicago took the Homage
for a translation.’59 The floundering grew more tangible with each
comment.
Harriet Monroe did not believe, as Pound charged her, that
II | 69
her selective printing of just four of the poem’s twelve parts con-
stituted a mutilation (‘the left foot, knee, thigh and right ear of
my portrait of Propertius’, said Pound), and as late as 1930 she
would state that it was not she, but Pound, who had ‘mutilated’
Propertius through his excisions and additions.60 Pound knew the
attack to be ‘unanswerable’, said Monroe, one that could neither
be forgiven nor recovered from.61 And when, on 1 November 1919,
after a silence of nearly seven months, Monroe replied to Pound’s
April letter, she chose to interpret his signature ‘In final commis-
eration’ as a formal resignation from the post of foreign editor
to the journal, and with that Pound’s formative connection with
Poetry came to an end.62 If that had been an act of subterfuge, it
was not Monroe’s only one. Professor Hale was a personal friend
of hers: she had shared the translation with him before printing,
and then encouraged him to write his attack upon it; Pound, it
seemed, had been caught in an inexplicable ‘sting’ orchestrated by
his own publisher and employer, and William Carlos Williams
was not alone in raising his voice in anger to discredit Poetry as
‘a ragbag’.63 In 1920, he would lead a group of poets from that
journal into the pages of The Dial in New York, an act that would
send the circulation of Monroe’s journal tumbling by more than
a third.64 E. E. Cummings and Marianne Moore would join Wil-
liams and Yeats in taking new work to The Dial. That Pound had
been badly damaged, there can be no doubt; but so had Poetry
magazine, and Harriet Monroe’s reputation would never fully
recover. ‘Hale is a bleating ass and Harriet Monroe another,’
summarised Pound.65 She took extended leave from 1922, and was
absent from her post when the rival Dial secured the coup of its
era, in acquiring a poem that might otherwise have conceivably
gone to Poetry magazine: The Waste Land.
Eliot himself would wade into the argument that autumn of 1919:
‘It is one of the best things Mr Pound has done.’ He announced:
‘It is a new persona, a creation of a new character, recreating
Propertius in himself, and himself in Propertius.’66 But for Pound,
Eliot’s defence – six months after publication – was too little, too
late. His state of mind had become so exacerbated that it seemed
even his friend and literary ally could not do enough, and he told
John Quinn that E liot’s response amounted to ‘granite wreaths,
leaden laurels’. 67
Belittled by the academy, betrayed by his editorial peers, it wasn’t

clear where Ezra Pound could turn. He told Joyce of his ‘com-
plete stasis or constipation’.68 The time had come for a new era in
Pound’s life, for a new idea, and, if nothing else, a new place to live.
An exit was sorely needed, and at last it came. A friend had found
the Pounds a room on the rue Ste Ursule, in Toulouse, which they
would make their own for the next three months. From there they
would travel to Bordeaux in the summer, and, in the autumn, to
Paris. On 22 April, Dorothy and Ezra crossed the English Chan-
nel. ‘Hope Eliot can also come out,’ he told his father. ‘Time I had a
let up; time he had a let up.’69 For the next five months the Pounds
disappeared entirely from England – ‘vanished’, said Lewis, into ‘a
mist of recuperation and romance’.70
//
The collapse of Pound’s arrangement with Poetry in Chicago had

been as spectacular as it was painful, but it was just one of three
such relationships that would end in 1919.
For two years, Pound had run the ‘Foreign Office’ of the
New York journal the Little Review, founded in 1914 by Mar-
garet Anderson with the purpose of rekindling what she saw as
a dwindling enthusiasm for literary criticism. Her opening edi-
torial became a manifesto for the fifteen years of the journal’s
life: ‘criticism, after all, has only one synonym: appreciation’.71
Modernising in outlook, anarchist in politics, it published poetry
and polemics, and was unapologetically elitist: ‘making no
II | 71
compromise with public taste’, its masthead proclaimed proudly,
‘the magazine that is read by those who write the o thers’. When
Jane Heap became an editorial partner in 1917, Anderson relocat-
ed the journal from Chicago to 31 West 14th Street, Greenwich
Village, New York City, from where she accepted a suggestion
by Ezra Pound to engage him as an international talent scout:
‘Why stop at New York?’ he had asked her, ‘London and Paris
are quite interesting.’72 Pound had seen in the journal an ethos
that matched his own (Heap said of the Little Review that it
was ‘a trial-track for racers’), and he was in no doubt about the
direction he wished the journal to go.73 ‘I want a place where I
and T. S. Eliot can appear once a month (or once an “issue”),
and where Joyce can appear when he likes, and where Wynd-
ham Lewis can appear if he comes back from the war.’74 The first
of twenty-two issues under Pound’s direction appeared in May
1917, carrying work from three of the four men (‘a magazine is
made with FOUR writers’, Pound insisted in 1936).75 From now
on, poetry would be as important to the journal as criticism; the
entirety of Eliot’s Hogarth collection Poems (1919) would find its
initial home in the review, as well as a sweep of new work from
W. B. Yeats, beginning with ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’.76 But the
crowning glory of Pound’s tenure at the Little Review – and, as it
turned out, the journal’s undoing – would come with his seriali-
sation of James Joyce’s Ulysses.
The Little Review had encountered controversy before it
encountered Joyce. An issue from 1917 was destroyed by the
United States Postal Service as anti-war and obscene because of
a story by Wyndham Lewis, in which a young girl is seduced by a
disaffected soldier. When Pound agreed to serialise six thousand
words from Joyce in March 1918, the journal was already under
scrutiny. He couldn’t have known the scale of the book that Joyce
would go on to write: a work so vast that it would have required
four years of monthly instalments to cover it. Nor could he have
known that publishing Joyce would signal the beginning of the
end for both the Little Review in New York and the London
Egoist, and would trigger a dispute that, in 1921, would lead all the
way to an American courtroom.
It was cold comfort, but the Little Review was not alone in its
legal troubles. In London, beginning in the new year issue of 1919,
Pound had serialised five instalments of Ulysses in his other venue,
The Egoist, an act designed to give Joyce a readership on both sides
of the Atlantic and, just as importantly, to establish his copyright
(and therefore earnings) in each territory. In England the prob-
lem was the printers, who, under the ageing but still enforceable
Obscene Publications Act 1857, were jointly liable with the pub-
lisher for any materials deemed by a court to be offensive; when
the foreman printer read the pages he was typesetting, he downed
tools and refused to continue for fear of prosecution. By the time
the proprietor Harriet Shaw Weaver had found a printer willing
to set what she called ‘an unmutilated copy’ in type it was too late:
the financial threat to her publishing had become too great, and
she announced that from now on there would be no further issues
of the journal, only books.77
The Egoist had run monthly in journal form in London from
1914 to 1919 under the benefaction and direction of Weaver: ‘a
quiet little Quaker’,78 as Pound condescendingly described her,
an ardent campaigner for social justice, communist and a vol-
untary social worker to boot. The Egoist succeeded the New
Freewoman, a feminist monthly edited by Dora Marsden, whose
actions in support of women’s suffrage had included arrest for
assaulting a policeman, derailing a public address by Winston
Churchill, and being among the first of Britain’s female uni-
versity graduates. Pound had succeeded Rebecca West at the
New Freewoman in 1913, and initially worked with Marsden in
renaming and repositioning it as a literary–philosophical journal
II | 73
that believed the real force for social change lay in the ego’s
ability to think individually and not in the collectivist mantras
that were emanating from the east. But the two editors quick-
ly discovered that they were too individualist to combine upon
a method: Marsden stopped reading her own contributors in
order, she said, to maintain the purity of her ego for her editori-
als (result, said Pound = ‘four pages of slosh on the forehead of
every number’).79 She would be the target of Pound’s patronising
judgement, but Marsden had been brought up to stand up: the
daughter of a single-parent seamstress in Manchester, survivor
of an impoverished childhood, she was not about to be pushed
around by international literary types of ‘the gadding mind’,
who suffered from what she called ‘cultural brain-rot’.80 It wasn’t
a partnership built to last.
Eliot met Marsden only once and said that he ‘frothed at the
mouth with antipathy’.81 But he and Pound would prosper not
only under her stewardship but on the rafts provided by other
literary women: Poetry, Little Review, New Freewoman, The Ego-
ist – all were edited by women, as was the house of Shakespeare
and Company, the publisher of Ulysses, and in time The Dial, too.
It was a position about which the men struggled to be graceful.
Pound longed for what he called a ‘male review’ and Eliot said
that he did what he could to put The Egoist ‘in Male hands’ as
assistant editor, ‘as I distrust the Feminine in literature’.82 And
yet each man prospered incalculably in the employment of these
pioneering women, and under no one more than Harriet Shaw
Weaver herself, who, in taking control of The Egoist, brought
H. D., Richard Aldington and Eliot onto her payroll, and Pound,
too, though he divided his salary between Lewis and Joyce.83 She
published A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in winter 1917,
then Prufrock and Other Observations that same summer, and a
string of new voices: a young Robert Frost (Pound: ‘Have just
discovered another Amur’kn’), Amy Lowell, D. H. Lawrence,
F. S. Flint, William Carlos Williams’s epic of alienated labour,
‘The Wanderer’, Charlotte Mew’s ‘The Fête’, Marianne Moore’s
‘The Fish’.84 But its crowning achievement – which was also
its terminal disaster – would begin in 1919, with the serialisa-
tion of Joyce’s Ulysses, and with the two-part printing of Eliot’s
essay, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’. When it folded in
December 1919, it was sustained by a mere four hundred sub-
scribers. Not everyone was sad to see it go. Aldous Huxley called
it ‘the horrid little paper’ filled by ‘whatyoumay-callem-ists’.85
But for Eliot and Pound, the announcement in July 1919 that
The Egoist was to close was an unenviable blow. ‘It robs Pound
and me, of course, of any organ where we can express ourselves
editorially or air any affair such as this of Joyce,’ wrote Eliot.86
And for Pound it would mark the third successive termination
of employment, leaving him to reflect upon a year in which ‘I
deceased, d escended, departed, excerpted and otherwise wholly
severed official connection.’87
Huxley’s whatyoumay- callem-ists were Imagistes, writers to

whom Weaver and Marsden had offered a privileged platform.
Rebecca West would introduce Pound’s poems in 1913 with an
overlooked description of the task in hand: ‘Poetry should be
burned to the bone by austere fires and washed white with rains
of affliction,’ she wrote: ‘the poet should love nakedness and the
thought of the skeleton under the flesh.’88 Printed alongside her
account were seven of Pound’s poems from the period, including
a reprinting from Poetry of what would become his most singular
example of Imagist verse:
IN A STATION OF THE METRO.
The apparition of these faces in the crowd :

Petals on a wet, black bough .89
II | 75
In 1911, Pound had stepped out of the Paris Métro at Concorde to
see the face of a child, and the face of a woman, and then another
face and another, striking, he thought, each beautiful. Day long,
he had wondered how best to translate what the eye had seen into
what the page might hold. In the end, he said, he found not words
but an equation – or what he called little splotches of colour – a poem
of a single picture painted across a metrical structure. It was a sim-
ple formula that obscured the complex ardour behind it. The poem
began in the shape of thirty-nine lines that were destroyed by
Pound for their lack of focus; six months later, the poem returned
in a draft of half its original length; a further year would pass before
it found the two-line, hokku-driven form that survives. There was
nothing accidental about the process, and he was never in doubt
about his goal. ‘In a poem of this sort one is trying to record the
precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms
itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective.’90 The work that
followed showed Pound at his most delicate and lyrical, forging a
unique meeting place of Western rhythm and Eastern sensibility.
A lyric for Dorothy from the same time invited her with great
poise to be in him as the eternal moods: not the sweep of grand
romance, but prone to the real, and therefore lasting, toughness of
life ‘as transient things are’, while a later epigraphic poem captured
faultlessly his style of the period:
And the days are not full enough

And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
Not shaking the grass.91
It was a method – the movement of the outward and objec-

tive towards the inward and subjective – that would be adopted
by Pound and Eliot alike, though Eliot would find a different
language for it when he came to express the idea in his essays of
1919, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ and ‘Hamlet’, when the
expression he used was ‘objective correlative’. That spring of 1919,
Eliot posed the writer and literary hostess Brigit Patmore a ques-
tion. ‘Do you think it is necessary to subdue your personality to
that of the person you are with, in order to understand them?’92 It
was a question for which he already had an answer: no, subduction
was not a requirement, it was instead a case of being interested
enough to forget oneself, which was a different quality altogether, he
said. A need, in other words, to depersonalise.
//
Homer Pound had seen many things in life, but a double-decked

owl was not among them. A month below the Pyrenees in Haute-
Garonne and his son reported seeing two, marvelling at their
remarkable optics; to that count of misidentifications he added
five bald eagles of the ‘dollar models’.93 Ornithology was not his
forte, but Pound’s tone was relaxed and all was quiet as he enjoyed
a month of rest. ‘Nothing doing,’ he told his father with an air of
satisfaction.94
The Pounds had made the city of Toulouse their home that
spring, the first of multiple civic disappointments ‘steeped and soggy
in boredom’ that Pound would detail in eighteen articles that ran
in the New Age that summer, a series that would tire long before
the column ceased that November.95 Nevertheless, the city became a
comfortable base from which to travel for the next three months as
Dorothy painted and Pound rattled off his journalistic commitments.
Meanwhile he kept his literary affairs turning over in London and
New York. He received an instalment of proofs from John Rodker
of his handmade edition of poems, Quia Pauper Amavi, and learned
from John Quinn that his essay collection Instigations, turned down
by Knopf, might at last have found a berth with Horace Liveright in
New York.96 It was bits and pieces, but a rebuilding of sorts at a pace
that suited him perfectly at that moment.
II | 77
James Joyce had sent to Pound a draft of ‘Sirens’, his eleventh
episode of Ulysses, for comment ahead of submission to The Ego-
ist and the Little Review. Hard to follow had been Pound’s first
impression, too long his second, and he suggested to Joyce that the
reader might benefit from a few more signposts and a little more
focus: ‘One can fahrt with less pomp & circumstance.’97 He sensed
that Joyce had placed himself under pressure to deliver the chapter
and the hurry in his writing was discernible. ‘If you want more time
take it,’ urged Pound, but Joyce had taken five months to write the
chapter and was not pleased with what Pound had called a ‘record
of uncertainty’; he ignored the remarks as ‘not legitimate’.98
Early on the morning of 24 July, Ezra and Dorothy left Tou-
louse and by the following evening had a new address to share
with family:
Hotel Poujol
Excideuil
Dordogne
‘It is a small village with lovely ruins,’ Dorothy wrote on a postcard

of the castle, ‘of towers & a château, & this entrance gate.’99 Ezra
had been there once before, on a walking tour of 1912. He wrote
then of the calm in encountering Excideuil after sunset, silhouett-
ed, ‘carefully fashioned’ by fields, ‘& the great gentle tower // clear
edged, / unascendable,’ and,
for no known reason

these things wrought
out a sort of perfect mood
in things,100
‘Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics,’ wrote Pound, ‘which

gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, squares, and
the like, but for the human emotions.’101 It was a special kind of
poet of whom Pound was thinking when he wrote these lines in
1910, one associated with the ‘perfect mood’ of Périgord into which
Pound had settled. The troubadours wrote in Occitan, Provençal,
between the early twelfth and mid-fourteenth centuries, in the
days before the Black Death ravaged the continent. They com-
posed not only the p oetry of the court but its music, and included
in their number women (trobairitz) as well as men, although what
survived in manuscript was overwhelmingly written by the men,
from whom we understand their tropes and codes.
A man is in nature. A man is in love. He is defined by his nature
and his love, and is in service to each. It is a love separated by dis-
tance or by duty (in the case of the Crusades by both), and so he
sings across space. His object is elevated, superior, above the fray;
he cannot match it, so his love remains insatiable. But in singing
of it he is made whole, made pure. And in singing he sings of inti-
macy: love of a love, love of ideals, love of the flesh, ‘courtly’ love.
These are no homilies to the Catholic Church but heretical hymns,
a stance on life that won the lasting admiration of the young Ezra
Pound, student of medieval Provençal in upstate New York, who
had placed its p oetry at the centre of his first prose book, The Spirit
of Romance, 1910.
Guilhem IX of Aquitaine, grandfather of Eleanor, is the first of
the troubadour poets whose works survive, and a person of political
as well as literary power who ‘brought the song up out of Spain’.102
Pound called him the ‘great crusader, and most puissant prince’,
but he was a disastrous leader on the battlefield whose army was,
but for six men, annihilated by the Turks at Heraclea in the Cru-
sade of 1101.103 His fame lay instead as ‘a man of many energies’, in
Pound’s gentle euphemism for the bedchamber (‘He was, as the
old book says, “of the greatest counts in the world, and he had his
way with women”’).104
If Guillaume was first, finest of all was Arnaut Daniel, the most
delicate in thought, the most artful in craft, the perfect gift from
the twelfth century.
II | 79
Ieu sui Arnautz, q’amas l’aura I am Arnaut who love the wind,
E chatz le lebre ab lo bou And chase the hare with the ox,
E nadi contra suberna. And swim against the torrent.
(trans. Pound)105
In these words alone, wrote Pound, Daniel earned his fame; but
it was for a single line that he held Daniel in deepest affection,
where, in a half-lit bedchamber, the poet’s love reveals herself with
greatest delicacy: E quel remir contral lums de la lampa. (‘And its
glowing against the lamplight’).106
Arnaut Daniel was, in Dante’s tribute, il miglior fabbro, the better
craftsman – a tribute that was to become Eliot’s to Pound. He was
every bit the model for the poet Pound wanted to be. Independence
of thought, refinement of sensibility, attention to the character of the
natural world, the pursuit of love over tyranny, one man fencing with
the Catholic Church: ‘a corresponding excellence’.107 Pound cher-
ished this poet of pioneering rhythm, inventive rhyme and distinctive
vocabulary, a poet who eschewed courtly politics, who composed in
the last moment in history that p oetry was actually sung, when words
and music were indivisible, and triumph lay in ‘an art between litera-
ture and music’.108 So it was the highest accolade when, in Excideuil
that summer of 1919, Eliot would become ‘Arnaut’ in The Cantos.
‘Hope Eliot will join us somewhere for a few weeks,’ Pound had writ-
ten wistfully to his parents on 30 May.109 He asked Dorothy’s m other
at the same moment to forward the preface to the translations that
he had prepared: ‘Arnaut Daniel to T. S. Eliot 18 Crawford Mansions
Crawford St. W1.’110 It was a private recital of Arnaut for Eliot, and an
overture to his friend to join him in the hills of Provence.111
//
As the pages of T. S. Eliot’s Poems came off the press on Paradise
Road, Richmond, 19 March 1919, Leonard Woolf was convinced
that they marked ‘a new note’ in p oetry. It was only the fourth pub-
lication of the fledgling Hogarth Press, and they printed ‘rather
fewer’ than 250 copies, but they were pleased with the inking
which marked ‘our best work so far by a long way’, said Virgin-
ia.112 But just as the final touches were being put to the printing,
the relationship between poet and publisher came under sudden
strain. The first Sunday in April the Eliots had gone to dinner in
Richmond with the Woolfs: ‘sharp, narrow, & much of a stick’,
Virginia described Eliot in her diary; ‘washed out, elderly & worn’,
she recorded of Vivien.113 But the business had proceeded well
enough over dinner: Eliot chose cover materials for his forthcom-
ing book, while Leonard and Virginia asked him for a list of names
and addresses of people they might inform of the imminent publi-
cation. Vivien wrote to E liot’s mother the next day to tell her that
they were happy in the people they knew: ‘Tom has a splendid
social position here, and we belong to quite the most interesting
set.’114 Eliot followed up amiably on his review list by sending the
Woolfs an invitation of his own to come to dinner at Crawford
Mansions following its forthcoming redecoration at Easter. But
when by early in May no reply had been received and no circular
for the book issued, Vivien sensed trouble. Not for the first time,
the Bloomsbury set, it seemed, had been talking, and not for the
first time Mary Hutchinson, Bloomsbury hostess and cousin to
Lytton Strachey, appeared to be at the centre of the intrigue.
Eliot had told her that he ‘disliked’ Virginia, or so it was reported to
Virginia by Clive Bell, Vanessa’s husband and Mary’s lover.115 Only
it wasn’t true: someone (most likely Bell himself ) had been stirring
the Bloomsbury pot, and by the time John Middleton Murry had
stepped in to calm the tensions, damage had been done.116 Murry
assured Virginia that Eliot had nothing but praise for her, but she
now mistrusted E liot’s motivations, which had the curious effect
of piquing her interest in him even further. She resolved to ‘draw
the rat out from his hole’, as she told Duncan Grant, and to set
II | 81
a little bait of her own. She withheld a reply both to the dinner
invitation and to the list of circulars, allowing the Eliots to fear
that publication had been shelved at the last moment.117 For Vivien
this was too much: other journals had been denied her husband’s
poems so that Hogarth could have them, and now where were
they? And what were they to do? People were expecting the book
and its absence would be a humiliation to Tom, she said, and he
should just go abroad to be rid of this dreadful company. Joyce was
a lucky man to be out of such gossip, and as for Pound, well, she
told Mary bluntly, Pound was ruined by it. ‘See what he has become.
A laughing stock. And his work all bad.’ Only a hide as tough as
Wyndham Lewis’s could withstand such treatment. And it was a
marker of the sudden increase in temperature that she threatened
to terminate her friendship with Mary should she repeat any of
this to Clive Bell and make the situation worse. She had seen Tom
become ill with it all, she insisted, and it had to stop: ‘He hates
and loathes all sordid quarrelling and gossiping and intrigue and
jealousy, so much.’118
Eliot, meanwhile, wrote to Leonard Woolf in an attempt to clear
the air, and received a slightly curt reply (‘it could not have been
curter’: Vivien) that the list of names for publicity had been mis-
placed and requesting that he provide another.119 Woolf enclosed
an advance copy of the publication both to prove the existence of
the book itself, and to honour E liot’s request for an edition to send
on to Sydney Schiff; there was no additional author copy for Eliot
himself. ‘Think of this sort of thing as going on continually in a
society where everyone is very sensitive, very perceptive and very
quick,’ he told his cousin Eleanor Hinkley, ‘and you will see that a
dinner party demands more skill and exercises one’s psychological
gifts more than the best fencing match or duel.’120 But a bout with
your new publisher on the eve of publication was hardly an ideal
beginning to the life of a book. Virginia, it seemed, couldn’t help
but descend to poisoned praise. ‘Mr Eliot is an American of the
highest culture,’ she told a friend, ‘so that his writing is almost
unintelligible.’121
As the emotional temperature began to cool, Eliot was able to
tell John Rodker in June that he thought the Woolf edition was
‘very well done’.122 The poems it contained were all from 1917 and
1918, each first published by Pound in the Little Review; more than
any gathering they would bear the fruits of his management of
Eliot’s work. Not only did Pound give the poetry its life in print, but
he worked on the draft typescripts, and nurtured the seed of E liot’s
interest in the mid-nineteenth-century work of Théophile Gautier,
whose inspiration seemingly provided almost everything else. Of
the seven pieces that comprised the collection, four assumed the
Gautier form (one, ‘The Hippopotamus’, went so far as to serve
as a parody), while the remaining three were written in French as
evidence of the effort that had helped Eliot to ‘get started again’.123
Pound had delighted in discovering in Eliot a man who by 1914
had ‘modernized himself on his own’ (at last, he exclaimed, some-
one he didn’t have to tell to wash his face and wipe his feet . . .),
but redirecting that training through mid- nineteenth- century
foreign-language form had not been without its challenges for
either man.124 ‘Whispers of Immortality’ was a scrappy and feeble
affair in need of remodelling, Eliot confessed to Pound, too much
in the shadow of Jules Laforgue.125 He wondered about the title
‘Try This on Your Piano’, but Pound, bringing it back to the task in
hand, suggested ‘Night thoughts on Gautier’, which seemed only
to worsen the effect. Yet Pound had seen opportunity where Eliot
had seen failure, and pushed his friend through five drafts until
they arrived, or so he considered, ‘nearer the desired epithalamium
of force, clearness and bewtie’.126 Of all the poems, this was the two
men’s most collaborative effort, from the micro level of articles and
pronouns, to a trial of titles and entire stanzas. Pound introduced
a partition, he challenged Eliot on his ‘maccabre predilections’,
and he attempted to strike a balance in the poem’s attention to
II | 83
eroticism and death. Lust, asked Eliot: ‘Should I avoid using the
word twice?’ Pound thought so. ‘Wash the whole with virol and
leave in hypo,’ he remarked: an invitation, presumably, for Eliot to
sterilise the poem before he set it in photographic fixer.127
It wasn’t the only such instruction by Pound, who likewise
bristled at the sexual explication of ‘Mr Eliot’s Sunday Morning
Service’ (‘menstrual’ became the Poundian mensual, ‘castrate’ ener-
vate), in a poem that Pound said was ‘lacking syntactic symplycyty’,
as well, it seemed, as tact.128
Looser and lighter, the three pieces in French brought just
such an ease. ‘Le Spectateur’ made mockery of literary London,
while the two other poems – ‘Mélange adultère de tout’ (‘Adul-
terous Mixture of Everything’) and ‘Lune de miel’ (‘Honeymoon’)
– heightened further the already sexually charged atmosphere of
the book.
The pamphlet opened with ‘Sweeney among the Nightingales’,
a poem which became a favourite of Eliot’s, his choice, he once
said, of those from the period of 1917–20.129 It followed the ungov-
ernable figure of Sweeney from Boston’s South End where Eliot
had once learned to box, and began with the animalistic Sweeney
spreading his knees in a bordello and his ending mired in bird
droppings. It was a poem intent on foreboding, Eliot said later, and
indeed it would provide an atmosphere that he would return to in
the opening scenes of The Waste Land; but even here, its presenti-
ment seemed fully realised, where the nightingales were shorthand
for prostitution, and where, in an epigraph from Aeschylus, Agam-
emnon is murdered in his bath by his wife (Alas, I have been struck
deep a mortal blow). The Hogarth printing featured an additional
epigraph that would appear only here and once afterwards, from
Edward III, ‘Why should I speak of the nightingale? The night-
ingale sings of adulterate wrong.’130 Troubling themes and forces
had coalesced: a predatory male, a prostituting woman, mariticide:
all in a poem written in the wake of Vivien’s relationship with
Russell. Katherine Mansfield would say that when she read Eliot
at this time she saw a man torn open in self-examination: ‘He is
seeing why he fails and how he can separate himself from Sweeney
through Sweeney.’131 But it was a loathing, loathsome poem, and in
its image of one ‘Rachel née Rabinovitch’, suspect and conspirato-
rial and tearing ‘with murderous paws’, he would once again revert
to a derogatory and stereotyped portrait of a Jew.132
On May Day, a week before the release of Poems, one further
piece, not collected in the Hogarth edition, appeared in a new
journal called Coterie. ‘A Cooking Egg’ was a poem once again
in ‘French’ form to which Pound had taken his blue pencil and
struck out two stanzas entirely (‘used before’).133 Eighteen months
had passed since Eliot had read the poem at a literary soirée in
London in December 1917, at which Aldous Huxley and Robert
Graves (‘big wigs’, said Eliot) were fellow speakers, as were the
Sitwells, Osbert and Edith (‘Shitwells’, he sniggered to Pound),
and Pound’s future nemesis Robert Nichols.134
I shall not want Capital in Heaven,

For I shall meet Sir Alfred Mond,
We two shall lie together, lapt
In a five per cent. Exchequer Bond.135
It was when Eliot reached these lines, according to Richard

Aldington who was also present that evening, that ‘there was a
rumpus in the audience, and Lady Mond sailed indignantly out of
the room’.136 Alfred Mond was the Liberal MP for Swansea West,
but he was also an industrialist, whose chemicals company Brun-
ner Mond made munitions during the war, fifty tonnes of which,
improperly stored in railway wagons, had exploded in January 1917,
destroying his London factory at Crescent Wharf, West Ham,
taking seventy-three lives and destroying nine hundred homes. A
gasometer caught light across the water on Greenwich Peninsula,
creating a vast fireball; the blast was heard for a hundred miles
II | 85
and blew out the windows in the Savoy Hotel on the Strand.137
An inquiry critical of Mond was mothballed, and in 1926 he was
permitted to oversee the creation of the giant chemical conglom-
erate ICI. For some, Mond was a war profiteer, whose German
heritage raised questions about his loyalties: he became the centre
of conspiracy rumours of gun batteries installed in his back garden
and carrier pigeons sending intelligence to the Fatherland. But it
was his position in Lloyd George’s wartime government as First
Commissioner for Works and Public Buildings that brought him
to the attention of artists and architects alike. Lewis and Pound
had identified his wife as a target of ‘blasting’ (‘may we hope for
art from lady mond?’), while E liot’s contrast of the financier
with the Elizabethan national hero Sir Philip Sidney – a contrast
between ‘Capital’ and ‘Honour’ – has been read as a resentment
that the Monds were not only industrialists, but Jewish.138
Throughout the Hogarth Poems caricatures wearily reappear:
predatory males, wanton females, unscrupulous outsiders, untrust-
worthy Jews, each one seemingly an expression of a paranoia
darkening E liot’s mind in 1919, each one a symbol of an ‘otherness’
that he considered himself not to embody. Through such figures
Eliot walked a line between misanthropy and bigotry, observing
a piety to which his own religious upbringing seemed to offer
neither enlightenment nor resistance. Eliot’s Unitarianism might
have brought tolerance, but to him it seemed only to offer a god-
less world, concerned, like both his Hippopotamus and his Sunday
Morning Service, with petty vagaries, such as ‘the religion of the
blue sky, the grass and flowers’.139
After the expansive, experimental leap of Prufrock and Other
Observations – their bold musicality and vocal dexterity, their
nimble athleticism – these new poems seemed constrained in
comparison, as conservative in form as the ‘spectateur’ that they
mocked. Gone was the daring to disturb; in its place came a claus-
trophobic formality buttoned up in iambic tetrameter. This was
thought that had yet to find its best expression in form and music.
The review that appeared in The Times put it in starker terms. It
described verse that was ‘fatally impoverished of subject matter’:
hesitant, handicapped by inhibition to the point of paralysis, in
short, ‘very laboriously writing nothing’. And there was a moral
repulsion besides, in which Eliot ‘carries the game of perversity as
far at least as anyone has ever carried it’. But p oetry was a serious
art, continued the review, too serious for such games, and the sat-
irising Eliot was satirised: ‘he is in danger of becoming silly.’140 It
was, acknowledged Virginia Woolf, ‘a severe review’ that in turn
triggered a severe response.141 The anonymous assessment that fol-
lowed a week later in Middleton Murry’s Athenaeum seemed a
welcome riposte. It commended Eliot for possessing ‘the rare gift
of being able to weave, delicately and delightfully, an echo or even
a line of the past into the pattern of his own poem’.142 Here was a
writer in search of something new, it surmised, something evolved
from the inheritance of what had gone before. Instinctively, it
understood Eliot’s particular pathway to be one guided – to use
his own terms – between tradition and individual talent. In fact,
so closely had it anticipated the language of the essay that Eliot
was shortly to publish, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, that
it was almost as if the reviewer had privileged access to the poet’s
own mind. Eliot was suspicious, and asked his publisher, Virginia,
if she were the anonymous author. ‘I have to confess that it was
not I who reviewed your poems in The Athenaeum,’ she replied,
‘but my husband.’143 If that were not awkward enough, the pub-
lisher’s review of Eliot’s output hinted at some dissatisfaction with
it. ‘Is this p
oetry?’ it had asked, before concluding with an under-
whelmed yes: it was, but it risked becoming a second-rate variety,
‘the product of a Silver Age’.144 In a tortuous turn, the ‘rebuff ’ to The
Times was a scam, and an ambivalent scam at that.
And that was all the meagre coverage E liot’s new collection
would receive. Admittedly, it was barely more than a pamphlet
II | 87
– what he called ‘Woolf ’s small book’ – and it had only half the
print run of his debut, Prufrock; but the critical gulf in the level
of interest between the two was undeniable.145 Rate of sales aside
(by November 140 of the 240 c opies had sold), it had caused bare-
ly a ripple, backed by a fraudulent review. A whiff of corruption
was beginning to surround Eliot in the eyes of some, not least
William Carlos Williams. He had written of Prufrock and Other
Observations that it was the work not of a radical but of ‘a subtle
conformist’; the charge then had seemed unfair for that dazzling
first book, but it appeared to fit the Hogarth Poems of 1919, which
seemed the more obvious European enterprise.146 Eliot had ‘fled
the rigors of an American application’, as Williams would later put
it – he was ‘a maimed man’ – a European poet without any care for
local culture. ‘He should be branded for the worst possible influ-
ence in American letters.’147
//
Boni and Liveright had been swift to accept Pound’s prose Instiga-
tions and would move quickly enough to bring it out in 1920. But
the path into print for Eliot’s first American book was altogether
rockier. Horace Liveright now informed Quinn that he would be
postponing a decision on Eliot’s work for two or three months; he
did not offer an explanation, although his request for a subsidy of
$150 suggested he might have been wishing to test E liot’s financial
resolve. It was, said Quinn, a ‘damned impertinence’ – he could
think of no good reason for the delay and contacted yet another
New York publisher, John Lane, offering him the personal subsidy
that he had been so angered to be asked for by Liveright. But Lane
did not embrace the proposal, writing that ‘Mr Eliot’s work is no
doubt brilliant, but it is not exactly the kind of material we care to
add to our list.’148 In frustration, Quinn then reopened discussions
with Alfred Knopf, using an additional typescript of poems and
prose that Eliot had supplied in July. This time Knopf responded
swiftly and affirmatively, and by August had committed not to a
‘hybrid’ edition of p
oetry and prose, but to a volume exclusively of
poems. The breakthrough that Eliot had sought for so long had
finally come. Knopf insisted that the book should not reuse the
title Prufrock, which would undermine sales, but be simply and
clearly presented as Poems by T. S. Eliot. Quinn negotiated a 12
per cent royalty (Pound’s last book with Knopf had received only
10 per cent, he told Eliot indiscreetly), and a publication date of
spring 1920. The process of finding an American home for E liot’s
poetry had taken six months, but it was settled in time for Eliot’s
visit that summer to see Pound in France.
//
On 19 May, Eliot had been sent by the bank on a tour ‘for some
weeks’ of the English provinces. Lytton Strachey teased him play-
fully that he might seize the opportunity to ingratiate himself
with rural clergymen; the two had just enjoyed one another’s com-
pany at Garsington and had followed with a dinner in London
(‘altogether not gay enough for my taste,’ wrote Strachey to Dora
Carrington. ‘But by no means to be sniffed at’).149 Eliot replied
stiffly that his thoughts were taken with matters more important
than ever entered the heads of deans, such as how it was that steel
could be bought more cheaply from America than Middlesbrough,
or by the exchange rates of sterling and the rupee. He said that he
had divided humankind into supermen, wireworms and termites,
and that he was sojourning among the termites.150 Eliot may have
misjudged the tone, for Strachey told Mary Hutchinson that he
found it a ‘grim’ letter from a man suffering from ‘devitalisation’;
rather ill, and rather American, was the description he gave Car-
rington.151 Strachey was not yet familiar with the mannered style
of Eliot’s correspondence, which included a statement on proso-
II | 89
dy that might have been expected to tempt the playfully minded
Strachey into engagement:
Whether one writes a piece of work well or not seems to me a

matter of crystallization – the good sentence, the good word, is
only the final stage in the process. One can groan enough over the
choice of a word, but there is something much more important to
groan over first. It seems to me just the same in poetry – the words
come easily enough, in comparison to the core of it – the tone – and
nobody can help one in the least with that.152
London seemed to Eliot a place of disdain at that moment, from

which he was glad to be away. Left behind, Vivien was feeling very
much alone. She was struggling with her nerves, and had used her
husband’s travels to go into what she called ‘a sort of retirement’,
partly in Marlow, from where she laboured back to London with
yet more of Bertrand Russell’s possessions.153 There she had received
from Ottoline Morrell a letter that upset her greatly, accusing her
of ‘a quick change etc. affair’ – with Russell no doubt, but possibly
having heard about a new flirtation that Vivien had begun with
Mary Hutchinson’s brother, James Strachey Barnes. ‘Believe me it
wasn’t,’ Vivien protested: she had suffered terribly over the collapse
of her relationship with Bertie, she wrote; she would try never to
see him again, though she was still fond of him – after all, he had
been so generous to her, given more to her than he had anyone
before her. Morrell had been Russell’s lover at the moment that he
had first taken an interest in Vivien, whose letter now could only
have struck Morrell as tactless. She had dubbed Vivien ‘a spoilt-
kitten’; but, pleaded Vivien, couldn’t Ottoline now see how ‘beaten
upon and worn’ she had become by even the smallest amount of
‘human intercourse’?154
Bertrand Russell waited until Eliot was absent on his tour to
call by the Marylebone flat to collect the last of his possessions.
Arriving earlier than expected, he found Vivien not yet dressed,
leaving her to conduct their conversation through the bathroom
door. She said that she had hoped that they might reach ‘amicable
relations’, or at the very least take tea, but found him in short tem-
per. She would make no further attempts at civility with him, she
resolved. ‘But it is strange how one does miss him! Isn’t it hard to
put him quite out of one’s mind?’155
Such a spectacle, played out through a locked door, might have
seemed like a drawing-room farce, were it not the source of such
pain to Eliot. Russell was becoming, to Eliot, ‘one of my lost illu-
sions’, who in 1953 would publish a story in which a Mr Ellerker
and a Mr Quantox were competing rivals for Mrs Ellerker’s atten-
tion. Quantox, who had ‘a roving eye’, would seduce Mrs Ellerker
in the library; in time, she would be removed to an asylum – the
hapless victim, recorded the story, desolate and alone. Russell entitled
it, ‘Satan in the Suburbs or Horrors Manufactured Here’; he later
denied the affair.156 ‘He has done Evil,’ Eliot would write in 1933.157
Eliot returned from his tour in June, for once making the final
leg by motor car, which was not a journey without its perils. Trav-
elling through the South Coast plain, his car punctured and then
broke down entirely. With almost no traffic on the empty roads, he
was left to walk the remaining distance, passed only by a wagon of
Boy Scouts, and pursued by a line of three ducks.158
//
The house overlooked the tidal Hards on Bosham Channel in the

Chichester Harbour. Twice a day high water swept over the estu-
ary to the sea wall directly beneath the front door. Since 1916, the
Eliots had been coming to the South View, the detached Geor-
gian cottage on Shore Road, run as a guest house by the ‘bouncing
kindly’ Miss Kate Smith, whose cooking was excellent, and whose
brother-in-
law offered the guests daily weather forecasts that
invariably predicted rain.159
II | 91
Life in the village charmed the Eliots. Fishermen with ringed
white beards played bowls on the green or quarrelled contentedly in
the harbourside tavern (Better to have been / A fisherman at Bosham
– Tennyson).160 Through their deferential manner and the twang of
their accent, these men reminded Eliot of childhood in Missouri
and Massachusetts, but seemed to be remnants of a much older
time. Bede had recorded the village surrounded by woods and sea;
it was the site of a humble monastery, Bosanham, where a small
band of brothers served in ‘a life of humility and poverty’, a life
that Bede believed was quite lost upon the local inhabitants.161 As if
to test the point, it was at Bosham that King Canute is said to have
attempted to demonstrate the limit of his omnipotence against the
encroaching tide: ‘Let all the world know that the power of kings
is empty and worthless.’162
Eliot was not one to linger over naturalistic description (he told
Conrad Aiken that the tide was either very much in or very much
out), but he must have heard the arrival of the curlew, whose calls
began to fill the estuary by the month’s end, with whimbrel and
redshank soon to follow.163 He sailed from the old Raptackle barn
on the quayside almost every day, regardless of the weather, not
minding a bit if he took a soaking or a falling wind left him with
a lengthy row back; he cycled, too, and walked the Sussex Downs,
or picnicked with Vivien.
London friends rented in the area, none nearer than St John and
Mary Hutchinson, whose summer home lay behind the shingle
spit named Ella Nore in the mouth of the estuary at nearby West
Wittering, reached by a donkey trap or via a curmudgeonly ferry-
man who sometimes could and sometimes couldn’t be summoned
from over the water at Itchenor.164 The Hutchinsons’ home, which
they called Eleanor House, was serviced by a well, and decorat-
ed by Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell, who lit it with lamps and
candles, and furnished it with a copper bath – every bit the art-
ist’s retreat, though Bell complained that being open to the lane, it
prevented guests from going about naked on the lawn.165
St John and Mary Hutchinson led a busy social life at their
London home, River House, in Hammersmith. Mary ran her
romantic life at a similar pace: Clive Bell, Vanessa’s husband, was
her longest-running entanglement, Aldous and Maria Huxley the
most complex. Katherine Mansfield observed of Mary that she
moved between the men at her parties like ‘a spilt liqueur’, and
observed her with an eye on Robert Graves and an eyebrow on
Eliot (‘who grew paler and paler and more and more silent’ as the
evening wore on).166 Virginia Woolf wondered if Eliot and Mary
had become more than merely friends, and probed Ottoline Mor-
rell on what she called ‘the case of Mary Hutch. & Eliot’, though
Morrell seemingly had her hands full corresponding with Vivien
and Russell.167
The atmosphere between the Eliots had been tense and scratchy
on their arrival at Bosham that weekend of mid-June, and they
didn’t get along at all well. They walked around the peninsula the
two miles down to the foreshore at Ferry Hard, but it was hot, and
they were tired, and fell asleep in the ryegrass on a bank of tree
mallows before they reached Eleanor House. Tom returned on the
train to London, where Ellen Kellond, the Eliots’ maid, had taken
a fortnight’s break, leaving him in sole charge of a Yorkshire terrier,
with a shelf of hair overhanging its eyes, that had followed him
home as a stray through Marylebone one day and whom they had
subsequently named Dinah Brooks. Vivien remained in Bosham,
and confided to Mary that she felt ‘very dull and tired’, and had
a great longing to speak to her if she could summon the energy.
‘But I must wake up first. Now, I am asleep all the time.’168 With
the passing days on the Sussex coast, her energies began to return.
She bathed daily in the harbour, and met with Mary for walks
and picnics, and, on one occasion, a soaking in the woods during a
downpour. By month end, even the sudden rain couldn’t suppress
her lifting spirits: she was away from what she told Mary were the
II | 93
‘wars in town’, and said that she never wanted to go back to Lon-
don, where she knew both Eliot and Russell to be.169
After a week she did briefly return to the city, and found Eliot
‘looking very ill’.170 He was reluctantly entertaining an old Harvard
roommate, Harold Peters; the two men had turned the Maryle-
bone flat to a horrible mess. Eliot had exhausted himself guiding
Peters across miles of the East End and Greenwich docks, a guest
who had turned up ‘so suddenly’ that he had forced Eliot to forgo
an invitation to Garsington with Virginia Woolf, arranged by
Ottoline Morrell in order to ease tensions between poet and pub-
lisher.171 ‘Think of Virginia, Tom, & Ottoline! O think of it,’ Vivien
told Mary – but it wasn’t to happen: Eliot was obliged to his guest,
and could feel improved relations with his publisher slipping from
his hands.172
Vivien sensed that her husband was now at the limit of his
capacity, and that a breaking point was coming; Tom’s return to
her in Bosham on the coming weekend was a critical juncture for
them both, she understood: ‘we must MUST have a G O O D
T I M E,’ she told Mary in capital letters.173 But a restorative
sailing trip from Itchenor to Eleanor House didn’t go quite as
planned. With Mary and her guests Sacheverell and Osbert Sit-
well aboard, the journey had begun well enough: Eliot took them
out over the Bell Hole at Bosham Deeps (where Norsemen were
said to have sunk the great stolen bell of Bosham church); with
the tide making, they sailed effortlessly towards East Head, put-
ting the boat up on the sands before the Ella Nore shingle spit
before the Hutchinsons’ house in good time for lunch. But Eliot
had misjudged the tidal conditions. The new moon was just two
days old and he’d breached at the height of a spring tide; by the
time they had eaten at Mary’s they returned to a falling tide and a
headwind that would test even the most experienced sailors. They
grounded on a sandbank in the estuary. Eliot snapped the boat-
hook and Vivien jumped out to push, before they gave up and
waded ashore, laying planks across the saltmarsh to prevent them-
selves from sinking. They abandoned the boat at anchor, no doubt
to the fury of the ferryman at Itchenor from whom they had hired
the craft, and left Mary to make the arrangements for its return.
‘He thinks its friendly to ask people to clear up his muddles for
him,’ Vivien apologised.174 Eliot had to be driven to the station to
catch his London train: the sailing had, he admitted, been ‘rather
disastrous’, and left the ferryman to be ‘settled with’; yet to Vivien
it had been ‘pure joy’ – ‘glorious – but I’m never sure that anyone
else sees things with my eyes’.175 For once, Eliot may indeed have
seen things with Vivien’s eyes. The sight of her stripping off her
stockings and jumping overboard in an effort to free their stricken
craft seemed for a moment to wake something in Eliot’s heart.
Vivien is splendid in a boat, he wrote admiringly to his m other, as if
the memory of the River Girl had been briefly woken.176
But then Vivien could handle a boat. On her penultimate day
there, with Eliot in London, on the morning of 9 July, she took a
dinghy out single-handed from Bosham harbour for a day’s sailing
with Mary. It was slack tide and windless when she cast off, and
she had to row three and a half hard nautical miles to Eleanor
House to collect Mary before the breeze rose sufficiently to fill
the sail. From there she navigated the two of them up the rithes to
Hayling Island, where she bathed and listened delighted as ‘Mary
told me her life’. She returned to Itchenor before sailing back alone
to Bosham, exhausted but electrified by her day.177 ‘Mrs Eliot in
a boat,’ Lytton Strachey exclaimed, impressed, having heard the
admiration expressed by Mary.178 For a moment, all of her own,
Vivien found her strength again and her serenity.
Wonderful impression of Bosham in the evening, last thing. Full

moon, & only half dark at 10, & a mist. The water like glass.179
II | 95
III.
The Pyrenean mountain town of Foix was furled in banners, swol-

len with crowds and musicians when the Pounds passed through
on 22 June, the summer solstice, days before the celebrations to
mark the signing of the Treaty of Versailles on 28 June. Their des-
tination was the rock of Montségur, once the stronghold of the
Cathars, a site ruined and rebuilt and ruined once more, where, in
the shade of the equinox, Pound climbed with Dorothy. There are
tales that connect the castle to the Holy Grail, but it is its align-
ment to the sun that compels most visitors. Yearly, on the morning
of the summer solstice, light blazes through the old east windows
and illuminates the ruins spectacularly. Pound arrived a day late
for this event, but then his fascination wasn’t so much with the
sunrise but with the Cathars themselves – deistic Christians whose
faith in twin gods of the spiritual and the physical worlds set them
against the Catholic Church. At the foot of the hilltop castle lies
the field of the burned. It is said that the perfecti – the Cathar
adepts – went voluntarily into the flames, more than two hundred
in number, r ather than renounce their faith. An Occitan memorial
marks the present day: Als catars, als martirs pur amour crestian. To
the Cathars, to the martyrs of pure Christian love.
‘A religion is damned’, wrote Pound that summer, ‘. . . the day
it burns its first heretic.’1 Montségur had withstood a Crusade, but
it couldn’t survive the combined assault of the Catholic Church
and the French crown, who in 1244 arrived with an army of ten
thousand men to correct the ways of the heretics. Montségur,
temple of the spirits of nature, the ward of the troubadour poets,
96
was violently razed by the forces of orthodox religion. In Pound’s
mind, it became the setting for a series of historical, criss-crossing
pathways that would run throughout The Cantos. A Cantabrian
sun temple, ‘Sacred to Helios’.2 An alignment to ‘the city of Dioce’
otherwise known as the ancient and mythical Ecbatana in Persia.3
‘An altar to Terminus’, god of boundaries.4 Mithras, born of rock,
conqueror of bulls, sun god, before whom the sun knelt down, to
begin – or is it to end? – the world: ‘and in Mt Segur there is wind
space and rain space / no more an altar to Mithras’.5 Pound named
such confluences ‘snippets’, and believed that in such fragments
the wrongs and rights of history are illuminated. And this would
be the method of The Cantos.
The sacrifice of the perfecti haunted him. ‘Liberties as easily
acquired have been as easily lost,’ he wrote: the American people
would squander theirs, trading liquor for the soda water of Prohi-
bition.6
Time in waves, and waves in stone.
‘And went after it all to Mount Segur, / after the end of all
things.’7
//
No further reviews of Eliot’s Hogarth pamphlet appeared, although

‘Burbank’ and ‘Sweeney Erect’ were reprinted in Sydney Schiff ’s
Art & Letters, and the first parts of Pound’s Propertius were rerun
from Poetry magazine in the New Age.8 With respectable journals
printing their work, these should have felt like successful days for
them both; but Eliot felt sidelined, and Pound had received the
kind of attention for his Propertius that no writer would seek for
themselves. In the early summer of 1919, it was no longer clear
where either man’s writing would go next.
But a new venture was offering a crack of light. John Rodker
had started the Ovid Press and would present each man with a
III | 97
new publishing opportunity. On 1 June Eliot advised Rodker that
to assemble a new edition of his poems, the contents of both Pru-
frock and the Hogarth Poems would be required, as well as the two
pieces from Art & Letters, the Little Review’s ‘Dans le Restaurant’,
Coterie’s ‘A Cooking Egg’, and, with an added note of mystery, ‘one
half-finished one’.9 Pound, too, had a project for the new press: a
broadsheet of The Fourth Canto – forty copies, foolscap, folded and
then folded again to make a four-page quarto printing, ‘set up and
printed by John Rodker at his press’. Privately printed, Pound cor-
rected the title-page proof.10 Perhaps after Propertius, he was not
quite ready to resume the public spectacle of print.
//
Remote, extreme, foreign: such was the mind of W. B. Yeats. Sub-

tle, erudite, massive: that of James Joyce. The occasion of E liot’s
remark was the English publication of Yeats’s essays, The Cutting
of an Agate, published in New York before the war, but not issued
in London until earlier that spring of 1919.11 Eliot used The Athe-
naeum to measure quite how far he had come to mistrust the work
of Yeats, and to take the opportunity to ‘boom’ Joyce.12 Yeats was
no longer of this world, wrote Eliot, but a citizen of one inhabited
by ghosts, mediums, leprechauns, sprites and seances – his senses
were no longer earthed. Powerful feeling is crude, admittedly, but
in Yeats it was crude without being powerful, wrote Eliot. Joyce,
by contrast, harnessed power: Eliot had now seen the ‘Scylla and
Charybdis’ section of Ulysses, and told John Quinn: ‘I have lived on
it ever since I read it.’13 It seemed that Eliot was clearing a literary
pathway, sweeping out the old to make room for the new.
The Cutting of an Agate was one of two books that Yeats pub-
lished with Macmillan that spring. It had followed on from his
volume of p oetry, The Wild Swans at Coole, published that March in
a print run of 1,500 c opies for each book that was half as big again
as Pound’s publication with Elkin Mathews, and three times the
printing that he and Eliot had been granted at the Egoist press.14
And for the two Americans, The Wild Swans at Coole had that most
envious quality of all about it: it was published simultaneously in
New York and in London. It would reprint within the year.
For Ezra Pound, Yeats was an avuncular figure whom he aided
secretarially and editorially, printing his poems in the Little
Review; it was with affection that Pound sent up a memory of
overhearing the noise in the chimney at Stone Cottage Sussex of
‘Uncle William’ composing his poem ‘The Peacock’ in 1913 (‘that
had made a great Peeeeacock / in the proide ov his oiye / had
made a great peeeeeeecock in the . . . / made a great peacock /
in the proide of his oyyee’).15 Eliot adopted an altogether more
formal and cautious approach to Yeats, a man twenty years his
senior, though Eliot considered him his contemporary.16 He said
that he never witnessed the arrogance attributed to the Irishman
(on the death of Swinburne in 1909 Yeats announced that he was
now ‘King of the Cats’), and insisted that he never saw him meet
other poets on any level other than equality.17 And yet despite the
respect, Eliot maintained a feline distance from Yeats, regarding
his early work dimly, and scribbling in his preparatory notes for
his notorious American lectures of 1932–3, After Strange Gods, that
he was ‘slow to develop – a sign of magnitude’.18 But Eliot would
come to admire the later work, and give the first memorial lecture
for Yeats at the Abbey Theatre, in Dublin 1940, when he praised
the impersonality of his mature years. No poet had shown a longer
period of development, he would say: a charge that in the hands
of another commentator would have appeared a slight, but which,
in Eliot’s, was sincere praise. In 1935 he would call him the greatest
poet of his time.19 At the same moment, Yeats dismissed Eliot’s
art as ‘grey, cold, dry’, the work of a bureaucrat; he would never let
go of the belief – so painful to Eliot in 1919 – that he was a ‘sat-
irist rather than a poet’.20 ‘[H]e and Tom are ← →,’ Vivien would
III | 99
acknowledge in the winter of 1919. ‘He hates Tom’s poetry.’21
If Yeats became great, Thomas Hardy, by contrast, the second
of the towering reputations, never made it to greatness, thought
Eliot. That he was a minor poet was all Eliot ever said of the verse,
but of his prose and personality Eliot would say that they were
‘uncurbed’. Hardy wrote with ‘extreme emotionalism’, with dec-
adence and self-absorption, and worst of all, was swamped by
feeling, leaving nothing of substance with which to engage: ‘Unless
there is moral resistance and conflict there is no meaning.’22 But for
many readers, Hardy’s poems teemed with meaning: demand for his
wartime poems was such that his 1917 volume, Moments of Vision,
was reprinted by Macmillan in 1919. Like many of Hardy’s poems,
his ‘Going and Staying’, published that November, fused private
grief and public grievance: ‘The silent bleed of a world decaying,
/ The moan of multitudes in woe / These were things we wished
would go; / But they were staying.’23 That the poem appeared in J.
C. Squire’s London Mercury said everything necessary to Eliot.
Hardy in return met E liot’s poems with suspicion, and wrote
warily beside a stanza from ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’
in his notebooks, ‘T. S. Eliot – a poet of the vers libre school.’24 It
was a school certain to fail in England, Hardy would tell Robert
Graves in 1920: ‘All we can do is to write on the old themes in
the new style, but try to do a little better than those who went
before us.’25 For all their differences, what Hardy said here antici-
pated Eliot’s own discoveries: as Thom Gunn would later remark,
‘A work is not the same as its source’26 – an appreciation that Eliot
would make in discussing ‘Gerontion’, a poem of his own that he
was about to circulate to friends. Even so, Eliot believed he was on
a very different path from either Hardy or Yeats by the summer of
1919, and he didn’t underestimate the task before him.
To communicate impressions is difficult; to communicate a co-

ordinated system of impressions is more difficult; to theorize
100 | t h e wast e l an d
demands vast ingenuity, and to avoid theorizing requires vast
honesty.27
//
In The Athenaeum that July, Eliot began to sketch a vocal technique
that he would soon employ for the long poem he was contem-
plating. He dispensed with what he called the ‘conversational’
in poetry in favour of something more polyphonic: ‘If we are to
express ourselves, our variety of thoughts and feelings, on a variety
of subjects with inevitable rightness, we must adapt our manner to
the moment with infinite variations.’28 Shakespeare was a master of
rhetorical variance, wrote Eliot, quoting in quick succession three
plays that would serve as source matter for his poem, among them
a passage from Antony and Cleopatra in which Enobarbus describes
Cleopatra in ‘her infinite variety’, and from which Eliot recorded
in his review from just half a line: ‘The barge she sat in . . .’ The
quote trailed off, the ellipsis Eliot’s . . . as if this were a thought to
be continued.29
//
Saturday 19 July was Peace Day. A vast crowd had begun to assem-
ble in London from three o’clock that morning to celebrate the
signing of the Versailles Treaty, taking up position along a seven-
mile route that began and finished in Hyde Park. The fanfare of
brass bands was heard along the route. Led by the Allied high
command – General Pershing, Marshal Foch and Field Marshal
Haig – a victory parade of fifteen thousand troops passed through
Whitehall, where a new monument to the fallen by Edwin Lutyens
had been unveiled, and where King George told the wounded that
their scars inspired in their countrymen ‘the warmest feelings of
gratitude and respect’.30
III | 101
Solid rivers of silent people, mute hordes of shabby workers:
such were the bedraggled crowds described by Richard Alding-
ton, who had each suffered the war in their way, unsure what it
was they were celebrating.31 The Woolfs’ household staff watched
from Vauxhall Bridge a procession that took two hours to pass –
‘Generals & soldiers & tanks & nurses & bands’.32 Virginia Woolf
stood in the Trafalgar Square drizzle the day before, and described
the gathering mass of people as sticky and torpid, like a cluster of
drenched bees. ‘There’s something calculated and politic and insin-
cere about these peace rejoicings,’ she recorded in her diary; ‘some
thing got up to pacify & placate “the people”.’ But in Luton, Bed-
fordshire, the people could not be so easily pacified: servicemen
angry at the lavish cost of the London parade rioted, and the town
hall was burned to the ground. A summer rain fell on the nation’s
celebrations until evening. Virginia Woolf climbed Richmond Hill
to take in the atmosphere. Fireworks struggled against the damp
weather; some lit up the Star and Garter military hospital beneath,
where lamed soldiers lay, backs to the crowd, smoking and waiting
for the noise to pass.33
The Eliots had left London to its celebrations, and taken a Friday
afternoon train to stay with Sydney and Violet Schiff at East-
bourne – ‘very nice Jews’, Eliot would tell his mother.34 He seemed
in no mood to celebrate. ‘Tom is IM possible,’ wrote Vivien to
Mary Hutchinson, ‘full of nerves, really not well, very bad cough,
very morbid and grumpy’, adding: ‘I wish you had him!’35 He was
needled by what she called ‘the money trouble’, worried that the
couple were once again living beyond their means, which provoked
him to flashes of anger. Even so, Eliot adapted better to the com-
pany of his hosts than Vivien, who complained that she found
them fatiguing and irritating, and said summarily of the weekend
that it had been ‘rather unsatisfactory’.36 It was, as it turned out,
a curious phrase for Vivien to have c hosen: despite the stressed
and spiky mood, the ‘Peace weekend’, as Vivien referred to it, had
brought a temporary truce in the couple’s fractious relations. In
a letter the following month, Vivien confided in Mary that the
weekend had quite unexpectedly rekindled a sexual intimacy with
her husband. ‘I had rather an affair with him, for one thing,’ she
confided. ‘Don’t you yourself find that staying in people’s houses
together is very conducive to reviving passions?’37
//
‘I have several times recently felt impelled to write you my admi-

ration of your critical articles and put it off in the hope of meeting
you.’38 Richard Aldington had decided that at last the time had
come to introduce himself to T. S. Eliot. Although he had been
neighbour and ‘Imagiste’ to Ezra Pound (‘Unkil EZ’) since 1912,
and husband to H. D. since 1913, inexplicable as it seemed, the
microcosm of London literary life had somehow contrived to keep
Aldington and Eliot apart. Each would come and go at the din-
ners at the New China restaurant without their paths crossing,
nor did they meet at Kensington when Eliot would come calling
for Pound, nor did they meet at The Egoist when Eliot inherit-
ed the editorial role that Aldington vacated on enlisting in June
1916. When Aldington had demobilised in February 1919, he was
already exhibiting the signs of a painful struggle with his wartime
experience, and had nearly broken down under the strain of it. He
was suffering from headaches, trench throat, insomnia, and pains
in his arms and neck that had been explained to him as a form of
delayed shell shock. Nursed by her new friend Bryher, H. D. had
left London for Cornwall to have a child with the music critic
Cecil Gray, and Aldington found himself without a place to live.
‘There are thousands upon thousands of ex-soldiers in a similar
predicament, while large houses in Mayfair and Kensington stand
empty for years, because the owners won’t let them out in flats!’
he told Amy Lowell that autumn. Discontent was widespread, he
III | 103
reported, labour was in disarray: ‘It will be at least five years before
we approximate to normal conditions, if we escape a revolution.’39
A profound and possibly suicidal pessimism swept over him and
his work (‘And I am tormented, / Obsessed, / Among all this beau-
ty, / With a vision of ruins, / Of walls crumbling into clay’); he
issued melancholic collections with The Egoist and Elkin Mathews
that year of 1919.40
Aldington never would be able to abide E liot’s verse – he said
that he found it ‘over-intellectual’, and ‘afraid of those essential
emotions which make p oetry’, and told Eliot upon introduction,
‘I dislike your p
oetry very much’ – but he was in no doubt of the
singular importance of his criticism.41 ‘You have a power of appre-
hension, of analysis, of the dissociation of ideas, with a humour
and ease of expression which make you not the best but the only
modern writer of prose criticism in English.’42 With their shared
roots in European literature, Aldington saw in Eliot – and Pound
– a common ground that he could share; and he was full of admi-
ration for the words of Eliot’s he read in The Egoist that July.
We do not imitate, we are changed; and our work is the work of the
changed man; we have not borrowed, we have been quickened, and
we become bearers of a tradition.43
‘In 1919 to admire his poetry was daring and revolutionary,’ wrote
Aldington, looking back in 1941.44 And this, he said, had triggered a
counter-attack by the guardians of the status quo to discredit Eliot.
On more than one occasion, he stood up for both Eliot and Pound
when their names were taken in vain – as they frequently were – at
Harold Monro’s dinners at the Poetry Bookshop. He never lost
his affection for Pound, the man he called ‘a small but persistent
volcano in the dim levels of London literary society’ and ‘one of
the problem children of modern poetry’.45 But he had no answer
for Yeats when asked, ‘How do you account for Ezra?’ – a man so
distinguished in his art but so uncouth in life, said the Irishman; it
was only later that a friend provided him with it: ‘In real life Pound
is himself – in his best poems he’s always someone else.”’46 For a
time, the relationship with Eliot would blossom along the same
lines. Eliot would call upon his support more than once after the
blooming of their friendship, which would reach its height dur-
ing his breakdown and recuperation in Margate in the autumn of
1921. But Aldington would have struggles of his own over which
Eliot could offer little help, and a time would come when he would
round on his new friend with castigating force.
//
The Pounds had travelled south west to Montréjeau, and by the

middle of July had reached the foot of the Pyrenees, where Dorothy
sketched the mountain tops and Pound pondered the couple’s next
move. A lecture commitment in Newcastle (‘the northern wilds’)
demanded their return to England that autumn (when the time
came, more than seven hundred people would hear him speak on
the troubadours), but Pound admitted to his father that he didn’t
in the least know where he would be or what he would do after his
French sojourn had come to an end.47 A fifth and sixth instalment
of ‘Homage to Sextus Propertius’ ran in The New Age in London
that July, and England, however unreceptive it appeared, remained
the most likely base for him at least until the new year.48 But his
time away had nurtured peripatetic instincts: he told his m other
that he now felt ‘very much at home in Toulouse’, and that he
had an eye on o ther places besides: Venice, Verona and the Sirmio
promontory on Lake Garda. And for a third time he uttered in his
letters the fervent wish: ‘Hope Eliot will get out next month.’49 A
few days later, Pound was at last able to confirm the good news
with reasonable certainty: ‘Eliot probably coming out in August.’50
In London, the Eliots returned from their ‘Peace weekend’
at Eastbourne to attended the first night of Manuel de Falla’s
III | 105
Three-Cornered Hat, performed by Leonid Massine and the Ballets
Russes, with costume and stage sets by Picasso.51 It would run for a
week and be the talk of the town, and it seemed that half of literary
London turned out for its opening: Jack and Mary Hutchinson
were there with her brother James Barnes, as were Ottoline Mor-
rell, Herbert Read, Richard Aldington, and figures from art circles
including Nina Hamnett, Clive Bell and Viola Tree. The wealthy
young socialite Nancy Cunard was there that evening, ‘head whirl-
ing with the music’, she wrote in her diary, ‘longing’ to see Eliot,
who, to her disappointment, ‘did not appear’.52 But Eliot was there
with the Sitwell siblings, and with Vivien, who felt unwell and
looked horrible, she thought, and stayed home with a migraine
when Eliot went to the performance for a second time the follow-
ing evening with the Hutchinsons. Yet despite such society, Eliot
like Pound was finding that life in England was not without its
difficulty. ‘London is something one has to fight very hard in, in
order to survive,’ he told his brother in July:
Don’t think that I find it easy to live over here. It is damned hard
work to live with a foreign nation and cope with them – one is
always coming up against differences of feeling that make one feel
humiliated and lonely. One remains always a foreigner.53
There could be no assimilation for him, he said: he felt he was on

constant dress parade, a strain from which he could never relax. He
was very glad to be getting out of London, he told Mary Hutchin-
son. ‘Perhaps I won’t ever come back!’54
It was time for both Eliot and Pound to shake off the city for a
while.
//
Eliot was finding it difficult to keep in front of him the things that
he most wanted to do, he told John Quinn in July, and he lived
under constant pressure to meet his daily needs.55 Even so, he had
managed to maintain his drive for publication in America, and had
sent Quinn an additional typescript of Athenaeum columns and
four poems, the titles of which he didn’t specify, but which were
probably ‘Burbank’, ‘Sweeney Erect’, ‘A Cooking Egg’ and ‘Dans
le Restaurant’. But he left out a poem that he was just about to
circulate to friends.
It was almost certainly at a picnic at Itchenor woods on 6 July
that Eliot first mentioned ‘Gerontion’ to Mary Hutchinson. ‘Here
is the poem for which you asked, out of politeness I dare say,’ he
wrote after returning to London on 9 July. ‘I don’t feel at all final-
ly satisfied with it, so please don’t let anyone see it, but let me
have your candid opinion upon it when you will.’56 Mary showed
her husband St John, who must have disregarded E liot’s instruc-
tion, for on 14 July he carried the draft with him when he went to
see Nancy Cunard at Turks Croft, her summer cottage of old low
roofs near Crawley, Sussex.57 The two of them wandered together,
walking through what she called a respectable calm country (more
sleep than dream), reading ‘an amazing new poem by Eliot’ that
she described as ‘very intense and good’.58 The two of them devised
pet names partly in light of it: he was to be the ‘religious arith-
metician’, and she the ‘romantic weevil’ in an ‘intricate’ reference
to a line late in the poem. The Hutchinsons, it seems, were not to
be trusted as literary confidants, but Eliot had at least now had
back from Sydney Schiff his comments on the draft, and thanked
him for them on 16 July, telling him, in an echo of the poem’s
opening line, ‘Here, I am an outsider.’59 A few days later he told
Mary that he thought everyone must make their own estimation
of their power of assimilation.60 Foreigner, outsider, assimilator: in
the space of a fortnight, Eliot had spoken of each.
All of the English-language poems that Eliot had written since
1917 had relied for effect upon the control of the four ‘French’ feet;
‘Gerontion’ was different. Formal rhythm was now replaced by an
III | 107
open cadence that rolled across the measure and back in waves of
loose pentameter. Nor did the new work have anything like the
comfort of the rhyming refrains of the Prufrock poems: ‘Geron-
tion’ was out on its own, between styles, neither ‘French’ nor ‘free’
but something found by Eliot himself. ‘The title means “little old
man”,’ he said, and was a revision of ‘Gerousia’, the council of elders
in ancient Greece that had given Eliot his first title.61 By 1 June
1919, the poem was ‘half-finished’, and by early July had reached a
level of completion that allowed Eliot to alert Wyndham Lewis to
its presence for tentative inclusion in the third issue of Blast, then
in preparation. He also mentioned it to John Rodker, saying that
he would supply it for their planned publication together, once he
knew that it was wanted.62
‘Gerontion’ was the first of E
liot’s poems to be saturated in the
Great War: the Siege of Antwerp, whose ‘estaminet’ cafe life had
been so violently destroyed in the autumn of 1914; ‘blistered’ Brus-
sels, abandoned to the Germans in August 1914 after the fall of
the last forts on the River Meuse; the city of London, ‘patched
and peeled’ under the air bombardment that had begun in May
1915. These would be the sites of the poem, as would the woman
sifting the fire grate, sneezing at evening, like so many sufferers
of influenza. It was not a commemoration of the kind conferred
by the soldier poets upon the fallen; it was instead a memorial to
the ageing, to the incapable, the non-combatant, those who were
‘neither at the hot gates / Nor fought in the warm rain / Nor knee
deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass, / Bitten by flies’. It was
resonant with the humiliating reparations that were Eliot’s job at
the bank to solicit, and with the treaty signed on 28 June 1919 at
Versailles, in a wilderness of mirrors, the palace’s Galerie des Glaces
de Louis XIV, with its contrived corridors and whispering ambitions.
Decrepitation, decay, lives without culture or belief: history was a
collapsing roof, Europe fallen utterly. In the words of an essay Eliot
was writing on Pound at the time: ‘The present is no more than the
present existence, the present significance, of the entire past.’63 Its
setting could only have been Europe in 1919, from the opening of
its ‘hot gates’ to its finale of ‘fractured atoms’. The Times had report-
ed on 7 June that the physicist Ernest Rutherford had successfully
‘disintegrated’ the nucleus of nitrogen through a bombardment of
radioactive alpha particles to emit fast protons: in plain language,
he had split the nitrogen atom, launching humanity into the nucle-
ar age. After such knowledge, asked Gerontion, what forgiveness?
Even so, the ending of the poem wasn’t in place by midsummer:
De Bailhache, Fresca, Mrs Cammel, whirled

Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear
In fractured atoms. We have saved a shilling against oblivion
Even oblivious.
Tenants of an old man’s house,
Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.64
With their ‘fractured atoms’ the draft lines would anticipate

those still to be written in The Waste Land, where ‘saved’ would
become shored; ‘a shilling’, fragments; ‘against oblivion’, against my
ruins. The shillings, with their distended line, would disappear
from ‘Gerontion’ long before The Waste Land was written, but for
the time being, Eliot just couldn’t find his ending, and would wait
for the eye of Ezra Pound.
‘And of course you are unjust to Pound,’ Eliot told Mary
Hutchinson that July. ‘One must learn to appreciate his “literary-
appreciative” style as a medium for expressing something of his
own.’ Literary-appreciative was an exacting capture of Pound’s pas-
sion for the writing of others. ‘I daresay he seems to you derivative.
But I can show you in the thing I enclose how I have borrowed
from half a dozen sources’.65 Among the borrowings to which he
referred was undoubtedly ‘The Dream of Gerontius’, a poem by
John Henry Newman written in 1865 after his conversion to Roman
Catholicism, that follows a life through death into reawakening
III | 109
before God; ‘a tiresome footling little Anglican parson’, said Joyce,
who had also become a discernible presence.66 Eliot had admired
the second episode of Ulysses, ‘Nestor’, when it was published in
the Little Review in 1918, and more deeply still when he found
himself proof-reading it for a printing in The Egoist in the new
year of 1919. ‘I am a struggler now at the end of my days,’ Joyce had
written, ‘old as I am’.67
But something even more explicit had been borrowed, for Eliot
had, in his words, ‘lifted bodily’ from an existing source: in this case
from a 1905 biography of Edward FitzGerald by A. C. Benson.68
Here he sits, in a dry month, old and blind, being read to by a

country boy, longing for rain. (Benson)
Here I am, an old man in a dry month,

Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain. (Eliot) 69
‘Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.’70 Eliot’s words in

1920. He continued: ‘Bad poets deface what they take, and good
poets make it into something better, or at least something different.’
Theft, in other words, is not really theft if fused with something
unique of the borrower’s own; at that moment it becomes a con-
tributor to the greater conversation of literature.
Borrowing was not the poem’s only controversy. For ‘Gerontion’
would become infamous for a solitary line, ‘the jew squats on the
window sill’ (like ‘Burbank’, ‘jew’ was left in minuscule by Eliot
until 1963) – a figure who may or may not be ‘the owner’ of the
decaying house, depending upon a pair of succeeding and ambigu-
ous commas that serve as a set of points to send readers in differing
directions. Taken in one bearing, the Jew is the dispossessed of the
poem, taking temporary shelter in the crumbling house owned by
a refugee from Europe’s war-torn cities; taken in another, the Jew is
‘the owner’, a slum landlord, a rackman: spawned and blistered and
peeled in the same cities that may now be thought of as financial
capitals. For other readers again, there can be no meaningful dis-
tinction in the ambiguity: read either way, ‘the jew’ is subject and
object of ruin and decomposition, singled out in decrepitude,
languishing in lowercase contempt; the mere presence of such a
symbol is odious in itself.
As July progressed, Eliot had not found his ending, but then nor
had he been able to work on the poem: both his ribbon and carbon
copies were out of his hands, and on 6 August, with his walking
tour with Pound imminent, he wrote to Mary to request that she
urgently return hers.
Important.
Please send Gerontion back to me at once. I leave Saturday

night, and I must revise it in France, so just put it in an envelope
and send it by return.71
//
At five o’clock on a sweltering72 Saturday afternoon, 9 August,
Vivien saw Eliot off from Waterloo for the midnight ferry at
Southampton. It would dock at Le Havre at eight o’clock the
following morning, but the stamping of passports took so long
that Eliot missed his train to Paris and had to improvise an
onward route, hitching along with a French couple aboard a local
steamer to Trouville-sur-Mer in pursuit of an alternative con-
nection. The overnight train pulled out from Paris Austerlitz at
nine that evening: Eliot dashed – ‘just caught it’ – and settled
in for a long and unhurried journey – even the express didn’t
travel much above forty-five miles per hour, but he didn’t mind:
he was excited and could hardly get himself to sleep.73 At four
in the morning, he pulled into Limoges and waited for an hour
on the platform between trains; when he pulled out again, he
found himself sharing a compartment with two French soldiers
on leave who played the accordion relentlessly and urged Eliot
III | 111
to sing along. As daylight began to fill the carriage Eliot could
see for the first time the rolling woodland of the Périgord. He
arrived at half-past seven on the Monday morning, tired, hungry
and hot, at the station stop of Périgueux, where he was met by
Ezra Pound. The scent of garlic was in the air and he could hear
the clatter of ox-carts and donkey hooves; he had travelled for
more than thirty-six hours, but felt as though he had reached the
South in one instant.74
Excideuil was a troubadour village on the River Loue, but as
the town troubadour, Guiraut de Bornelh (or Borneil), had not
met with the approval of Dante, he hadn’t met with the approv-
al of Pound either (‘facile, diffuse, without distinction of style,
without personality’ – adding, to put the matter beyond doubt,
‘over-praised’).75 But Bertran de Born, at nearby Hautefort, was
a poet Pound did rate: it was with his ‘Sestina: Altaforte’76 in
1909 that Pound had been able to make a powerful first impres-
sion upon London, and it was he whom Dante had portrayed
dramatically in the eighth circle of hell raising his severed head
like a lantern. Bertran de Born had stood in opposition to the
marauding Richard Coeur de Lion, whom he nicknamed Oc-e-
Non (Richard Yes-and-No) in description of his rival’s autocratic
rule. Three times the castle at Excideuil had withstood the siege
of Coeur de Lion.
“Here such a one walked.

“Here Coeur-de-Lion was slain.
“Here was good singing.
“Here one man hastened his step.
“Here one lay panting.”77
The castle, like de Born himself, stood to Pound for resistance and
timelessness: everything he would come to see symbolised in a
single block of limestone that he noticed embedded on the high
parapet, carved with a wave pattern.
In July 1919, the Pounds had taken rooms in a pension that
Ezra had first visited in 1912, with a hospitable proprietor, Mme
Louise Poujol. Eliot fell asleep there at once, and woke at lunch-
time to sit out with the Pounds in the hotel garden through the
remainder of the afternoon. He seemed to them thin and dis-
coloured, and they prepared for him a restorative course of ‘sun,
air & sulphur bath’ in the mineral waters at nearby Brive.78 As the
days passed, Eliot improved. It was his first significant journey
abroad since the war, though he couldn’t help but see London’s
bombed-out sites reflected in the Roman ruins around him.79 It
was also the first time since 1915 that he had put real distance
between himself and Vivien. Pound now stood in place of all
his ambivalent English acquaintances: reader, guide, counsellor,
friend. As they spoke of the old Occitanie – of the pilgrimages
they were about to make – the two men must have felt like trou-
badours themselves, immersed in Provence, outsiders and rebels
to most causes, talking the good fight. Pound would publish a
quartet of ‘Malatesta’ Cantos in Eliot’s Criterion in 1923, from
which a draft typescript, subsequently cut, pictures Eliot and
Pound and Dorothy there:
As we had sat, three of us at Excideuil

over Borneil’s old bake-oven
. . that was three years ago . . .
on the roman mound
level with the town spire,
‘e poi gli affina’ for you.80
E poi gli affina, ‘and then purifies them’: a homage handed down
through history.
It was Arnaut’s homage to the poet Guido Guinizelli, who
‘vanished in the fire’ (Purgatorio, 26.134); it was Dante’s to Arnaut,
Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina (‘Then hid him in the fire that
purifies them’), quoted by Eliot in The Waste Land; it was Pound’s
III | 113
to Eliot, ‘for you’: a breaking of bread at the site of the old bakery
that was said to belong to Guiraut de Bornelh’s father.
By Saturday, Eliot felt sufficiently recovered to undertake the
short walking tour he had prepared with Pound, and on 16 August,
the two men left Dorothy at the hotel and set out on their jour-
ney. They covered thirteen miles to Thiviers that day, a hilltop
climb from an old Roman road, where they took rooms for the
night and from where Pound sent Dorothy a postcard to let her
know that their first stop had been reached without incident. The
next morning broke thick with mist. That day they went further
than before: seventeen miles to Brantôme, which they reached by
the afternoon; pleasing, wrote Pound simply in a second postcard
to Dorothy. But there was nothing to please Eliot’s feet, which
were already a cause of concern. ‘T. has 7 blisters,’ wrote Pound.
‘Will probably proceed by train tomorrow.’ When Monday came
it wasn’t by train that they set off, but once more on foot, navigat-
ing the seven miles to Bourdeilles with E liot’s sore feet wrapped
in in le papier Fayard blister papers. Fewer than forty miles, but
three days of climbs in hot weather: ‘intensely’ (Eliot), ‘very very’
(Dorothy).81
The walking tour ended at Bourdeilles, from where – despite
Eliot’s insistence that he was on foot the whole time82 – the two
men probably took advantage of the steam tramway that trundled
the sixteen miles towards Périgueux in order to rest Eliot’s tender
feet. At the Place Francheville, beneath the shadow of the Tour
Mataguerre, last of the city’s walled defences, the friends would
have parted. A tramway led Pound north and east to Dorothy and
Excideuil for the couple’s preparations for their final departure
for Paris. ‘Eliot went on to the Fonts de Gaume, & Les Eyzies
grottes,’83 reported Pound, although whether that was before or
after he had made his defining visit to Périgueux cathedral Pound
didn’t reveal. What is known is that what took place at the cathe-
dral would be a turning point in Eliot’s life.
‘St Front of Périgueux! St Front. What a cathedral,’ repeated
Pound – ‘what a cathedral!’84 The enormous Byzantine tower and
the five soaring cupolas of the Basilique Saint-Front had left a
dramatic impression upon his visit of 1912. He had marvelled at
its ‘domes of Byzant, & pattern of the east’, and what he called
the ‘fine immoral music of its streets’, and its ‘whirl for dance’.
A twelfth-century fire had consumed the site almost entirely,
and it is said that the bells in the tower and its precious orna-
ments roasted in a conflagration that took with it a great many
lives as a punishment for its people’s sins. It was this moment,
or probably a conflation with the Cathars going to their deaths,
that Pound depicted in the eerie lines of a 1915 poem, ‘Provincia
Deserta’:
I have walked
into Périgord,
I have seen the torch-flames, high-leaping,
Painting the front of that church,
And, under the dark, whirling laughter.85
It was a cathedral named, it is said, after the legendary St Front,

sent by St Peter to preach in the lands of Aquitaine; although it
was a successor, Paternus, who might have stirred Eliot’s attention:
he had been deposed as the Bishop of Périgueux in 361 ce for the
Arian heresy that Jesus was begotten from God, and therefore a
subordinate being unequal to Him. Paternus, along with the dio-
cese of Arles, would be fiercely punished by St Hilary of Poitiers,
the Nicene ‘Hammer of Arians’, who restored, in the words of one
later history, ‘the Ancient Faith’ of a Jesus co-eternal with God the
Father, and so ‘procur’d the Condemnation of Saturninus Biſhop
of Arles, who oppos’d this Deſign, as well as Paternus, Biſhop of
Périgueux.’86 Other bishops who ‘acknowledg’d their Fault’ were
pardoned, history records, but Paternus would make no such
acknowledgement. To deny the Trinity was not only a folly, but
III | 115
a heresy, believed Hilary. ‘To undertake such a thing is to embark
upon the boundless, to dare the incomprehensible,’ to attempt to
speak of God with more refinement than He has provided us with.
It is enough that He has given His nature through the Trinity of
Father, Son and Holy Spirit. ‘Whatever is sought over and above
this is beyond the meaning of words, beyond the limits of percep-
tion, beyond the embrace of understanding.’87 Hilary was writing
in the fourth century in language that would resonate in the twen-
tieth with Eliot’s arrival at Trinitarianism in Four Quartets. But
that was a journey Eliot was still to travel, and it must surely have
been the vision of a man choosing condemnation over survival that
would shake Eliot to his foundations.
In Périgueux, that summer, Eliot was a son separated from the
love of a father in death and in life, and had yet to find the guidance
of a holy spirit with which his joining of the Church of England
in 1927 would allow him to commune. In the chronicles of the
building before him, and in his walking conversations with Pound,
Eliot could trace the accounts of martyrs and heretics alike who
had gone into exile – or gone into the fire – for their convictions
or their sins, people who had found a measure to live by and even
to die for, who had found a family of higher calling. What had
Eliot to offer compared to such commitment? Not the ‘one great
tragedy’ of the war in which he was denied a part. Not the daily
negotiations at the bank for a treaty that he considered immoral
and unjust, and altogether ‘a bad peace’.88 Not the wedding vows,
taken before God, that seemed to him to have turned to ashes in
his hands. He found he had no direction, no ideological frame-
work from which to respond. The Unitarianism of his childhood
seemed to him a poor man’s fuddle: a culture of humanitarian-
ism, of ethical mind games rather than a passionate adherence to
Incarnation, Heaven and Hell; in The Athenaeum that May he had
dubbed it ‘the Boston doubt’.89 And in the absence of a religious
conviction, his writing simply could not bear the weight: regarded
merely for its satire and wit, it had yet to find the ground from
which to respond to the intensity of the emotions he was experi-
encing. He was a son who had failed a father, bereft of the father
who had failed a son.
The train that left Périgueux climbed past the ruined fortress at
Mauzens before descending into the Vézère valley to cross the
river that marked the entrance to the small town of Les Eyzies.
There, the station hotel was plain but good, and only a short walk
to the cave of Font de Gaume, a prominent headland rising above
a canopy of holm oaks in the Beune valley. The recent discovery
by a local schoolmaster of Magdalenian wall art had become a
sensation: a treasury of polychromatic cave paintings dating back
nineteen thousand years – bison, mammoths, ibex, woolly rhi-
noceros, a wolf, a lioness, a leaping horse, an antlered reindeer
grooming the forehead of a doe. Many of its beasts were painted
in an iron-rich ochre of heated sienna and umber deposits, that
under the shadow and flicker of firelight would appear to turn the
caves crimson. On the cave walls, under the shadow of this red
rock, Eliot witnessed a connection between art and instinct that he
would elucidate in an essay for The Athenaeum that autumn:
And as it is certain that some study of primitive man furthers our

understanding of civilized man, so it is certain that primitive art and
poetry help our understanding of civilized art and poetry. Primitive
art and poetry can even, through the studies and experiments of
the artist or poet, revivify the contemporary activities. The maxim,
Return to the sources, is a good one.90
The artist is conscious of both the civilised and the primitive

mind, and is therefore the person best placed to understand how
the primitive mind brings the clearest illumination of its own time,
and how its understanding can be improved upon in the time of
civilisation. In a review of Wyndham Lewis some months before,
III | 117
Eliot had identified what he had called the thought of the mod-
ern in the energy of the caveman; but now he took the challenge
a step further.91 The duty of the poet should be no less than the
following: to know everything that has been accomplished in art
since the beginning, in order to understand what real accomplish-
ment might be. In the cool air of the Font de Gaume cave, it was
clear to Eliot what he had to do. To return to the sources, to know
everything, to understand tradition in order to release contempo-
rary talent. In the rock drawing of the Magdalenian draughtsmen
he now saw the key to understanding the change in what he was
about to call ‘the mind of Europe’.92
Eliot must have spoken with animation to Pound of his experience

in the caves on their reunion in Brive, for he sketched a map of
the route from the station to the cave in case Pound should ever
wish to find his way there and experience it himself. Pound never
returned, but Eliot’s encounter there lingered in his imagination
and in a draft of ‘Canto II’, from Paris 1920 or 1921, he projected
himself there, ‘At les Eyzies, nameless drawer of panther’:
So I in a narrow cave, secret scratched on a wall,

And the last reader, with handshake of departing sun93
And he would recall Eliot’s presence there in lines written two

decades later:
so his eminence, the eminent Possum

visited Dordogne cavernes94
Even if he had made the journey himself, it is doubtful that Pound

would have come away agreeing with his friend on the need for
an all-seeing poet. ‘One can’t read everything,’95 he grumbled in
an article of 1934: the art of p
oetry after all was discernment not
comprehension, and it was not, despite Eliot’s moment at the
Font de Gaume, desirable or possible to digest it all. ‘With one
day’s reading a man may have the key in his hands,’ he wrote in
the Pisan Cantos.96 Contra Eliot, the poet cannot know it all, but
should instead train the mind to hunt selectively, as the panther
hunts selectively, taking no more than it needs to survive and
prosper.
The cathedral and the cave had brought revelation to Eliot twice
that summer, but he was still to experience one further encounter,
and that was to take place at Excideuil castle. It was on a visit to
the ruins there that Eliot faltered in the company of Pound.
The caretaker of the ruins was an elderly lady who occupied
two small rooms on the castle grounds, beside a dilapidated well
in the forecourt. Touched by her plight, Pound carried up to the
castle from the town below a beam and a chain, and laid the
former over the curbstone and tied the latter around it, and so
enabled her to once again draw water from the ancient well. It
had been no small task on his part: a climb so elevated that the
castle courtyard was level with the tips of the nearby poplars and
a distant church spire. The old lady gave thanks with what she
could: some tilleul leaves from the linden tree from which to brew
tea.97 Pound remembered her as the Madame Pierre who returns
in ‘Canto CVII’:
as tenthril thru grill-work

wave pattern at Excideuil
A spire level the well-curb,
Mme Pierre bought a lamb in that market.98
But it was neither the lady nor her well that left the deepest
impression upon Pound, but the ‘wave pattern’ of small interlacing
grooves carved into a parapet of the castle limestone. Pound was
captivated by it. Again and again he came back to the wave stone
image in The Cantos, interpreting it as a motif for time and time-
lessness in equal measure, a fluid connection between all places
III | 119
– specifically, the ancient cultures of Provence, Greece and Rome
interleaved with those of modern France, Britain and America.
‘Canto LXXX’:
And the wave pattern runs in the stone

on the high parapet (Excideuil)
Mt Segur and the city of Dioce.99
To Pound, it was a symbol of eternal movement, and it should

perhaps be no surprise that the stone that he and Eliot saw has
itself since moved: ‘the high parapet’ on which Pound encountered
the stone can no longer be found after dereliction and fire caused
many of the castle’s blocks to topple, and they were reassembled
haphazardly. Today, a stone with a pattern of waves incised into it
guards an outer archway to the chateau.
It was here, in August 1919, tracing the wave-like carvings, that
Eliot told Pound, suddenly and unexpectedly, that he feared a life
after death.100
Pound recorded the moment, in ‘Canto XXIX’, published in
1930, in a scene in which he pays Eliot the ultimate compliment
in naming him ‘Arnaut’ – a compliment that by then Eliot had
advanced in his dedication of The Waste Land.
So Arnaut turned there

Above him the wave pattern cut in the stone
Spire-top alevel the well-curb
And the tower about that, saying:
‘I am afraid of the life after death.’
and after a pause:
‘Now, at last, I have shocked him.’101
And he had. Pound would return again and again to renew the
moment in his writing. He would continue the conversation with
Eliot in person, in Verona the following summer, sitting on the
steps on the amphitheatre when Pound’s Confucianism and Eliot’s
wakening Anglo-Catholicism met head on.102 Confucius, Pound
recorded in ‘Canto XIII’, ‘said nothing of the “life after death”’, and
to him the investment in an afterlife was all but incomprehensible,
whether by Eliot or the Cathars.103
And I, ‘But this beats me,

‘Beats me, I mean that I do not understand it,
This love of death that is in them.’104
But to Eliot a series of tracings had been overlaid one on another,

for he had seen something else in the Provençal story of the per-
fecti who went willingly to the flames beneath Montségur in 1244:
a purgatorial suffering. These were once a mysterious people, he
wrote soon after his conversion to the Church of England in Dante
(1929), who ‘had a religion of their own which was thoroughly and
painfully extinguished by the Inquisition’.105 These were a people
who understood, as Dante himself wrote in La Vita Nuova (1294),
what Eliot now called sublimation and also called the philosophy of
disillusion: ‘not to expect more from life than it can give or more
from human beings than they can give; to look to death for what
life cannot give’.106 As he would write many years later, in ‘Little
Gidding’, as though resuming his talk with Pound:
Whatever we inherit from the fortunate

We have taken from the defeated
What they had to leave us – a symbol
A symbol perfected in death . . .107
The fire, the rock, the wave, a final breath. A surrender so elemen-
tal, so truly immense, that Eliot had fallen in the face of it.
‘There are moments,’ wrote Eliot in 1935, ‘perhaps not known to

everyone, when a man may be nearly crushed by the terrible aware-
ness of his isolation from every other human being.’108
Marlow, he said, had been one such moment. There, he had
III | 121
experienced what he called a ‘dispossession by the dead’,109 an expe-
rience that he would have only once again in his life, in P érigord
that summer.
This sense of dispossession by the dead I have known twice, at

Marlow and at Périgueux.
To say that Eliot’s choice of words is enigmatic is to leave a great

deal unsaid. What did he mean by them exactly, and what exactly
happened at Marlow and at Périgueux to call them into being?
A dispossession was a casting out: a confiscation of occupancy,
of property or land. It is traced in the Old Testament Deuter-
onomic word yarash: to seize, inherit or disinherit, drive out, to
become impoverished or brought to ruin. But a dispossession was
also an exorcism: a word to describe the purging of demons, as
applied by the Catholic Church from as early as its second century:
it is a removal of the bad by the good. But that wasn’t exactly what
Eliot had said. A dispossession not of the dead but by the dead:
not an action undertaken by him, but one done to him. From what
exactly was Eliot expelled, and by whom? His Unitarianism did
not permit demons, nor have any call for exorcism; his church had
nothing to say to him on the subject of dispossession, nothing. He
was simply powerless in response.
Unitarianism, the religion of his father, and of his father’s father,
had not equipped him for the undertaking that he now faced.
It left no room for refinement, for purgatory, it left no room for
atonement. It had stripped him of a capacity to chart an independ-
ent morality. And through the quarrel of beliefs and values with his
father, it had even stripped him of an independent income. Eliot
knew that he wasn’t to inherit from his father’s estate as his siblings
would: his marriage to Vivien had seen to that, and what inher-
itance was to come to him would do so in the form of a trust that
would be restored to the family in the event of his death, so that
it could not be bestowed by him upon her.110 For a married man of
thirty, living and working professionally a continent apart from his
family, to have his financial arrangements manipulated in such a
way was a humiliation. He felt isolated and expelled, cast out by
the dead for both the actions he had taken and those he had failed
to take. And that he called it a dispossession signalled at the depth
of his devastation. The departed, it seemed, were calling him out.
What transfixed Eliot in this moment was not heaven and hell,
but purgatory, the temporary suffering or expiation for the pur-
pose of spiritual cleansing. ‘In purgatory the torment of flame is
deliberately and consciously accepted by the penitent,’ he wrote in
his 1929 Dante. And he made his own translation of the moment
in the Purgatorio in which Dante is approached by souls from the
flames:
Then certain of them made towards me, so far as they could, but
ever watchful not to come so far that they should not be in the fire.111
The emphasis was E liot’s own. The souls in purgatory suffer

‘because they wish to suffer, for purgation’, he wrote, because they
wish to be in the fire, because ‘in their suffering is hope’.
In such a moment of isolation, Eliot would write in years to
come, he felt only pity for the man who found himself alone, as he
had, ‘alone with himself and his meanness and futility, alone with-
out God’. For it is only in the moment that we are alone with God,
he continued, that we can truly appreciate the awareness of what
he called ‘our membership’. To be without the company of God,
Eliot would later write, is to be abandoned to the wilderness, to an
endless seesaw between anarchy and tyranny: ‘a seesaw which, in
the secular world, I believe has no end’.112
By Friday 22 August, the Pounds were in Brive, where Eliot joined

them, staying at the town’s Grand Hôtel de Bordeaux, a renowned
railway stopover for travelling dignitaries (‘good’, Eliot’s Baedeker
summarised austerely; ‘a real hotel with stationary’, Pound punned
III | 123
– or possibly misspelled).113 Through the heat of another Saturday,
the two men walked again, this time east through to Malemort,
‘so fine & sinister name’114 (Pound), where the lords of Limousin
put to the sword the army of Richard Coeur de Lion, two thou-
sand strong by legend. The next day, on Sunday 24 August, after
two weeks together, the poets parted company. The Pounds headed
north that night on the sleeper to Orleans, reaching Paris at mid-
week, where they treated themselves to a fortnight’s stay at the
Hôtel Elysée, on the Left Bank: ‘a large room from which we see
the Seine & Pont Royal and a corner of the Louvre & windows
of rue de Rivoli, on the opposite side’.115 Eliot headed north-east
into Corrèze for his final week of walking; he was bearded and
sunburnt and, for the first time in a long time, happy: ‘melons, ceps,
truffles, eggs, good wine and good cheese and cheerful people’, he
scribbled on a postcard to Lytton Strachey. ‘It is a complete relief
from London.’116
Indeed it must have been. In the three weeks that he had been
away, he had found reclusion not possible for him in England. He
had been made by his doctor to promise that while away he would
not read or write, and it was with a wounded sense of grievance
that Vivien confirmed to Mary Hutchinson that he had obeyed
medical instruction: France had really swallowed him up, she wrote
gloomily, the strain of their separation showing.117
‘To the Landsdowne again,’ Vivien noted in her diary. On the

day that Eliot delivered himself into Pound’s hands in Périgord,
Vivien had returned herself to the same room of the same hotel in
which the Eliots had spent their troubled honeymoon in 1915. She
recorded that it was nice to be back, the faces friendly and familiar,
and that she looked forward to a fortnight’s rest accompanied by
her friend May Pacy. But she was journeying through her life in
reverse as Eliot was moving forward in his. Her brother Maurice
joined her briefly: they had a roaring time dancing; but her return
to London on 24 August quickly dispelled any hope that a recov-
ery in her health had been effected. ‘Now I am ill,’ she wrote to
Mary Hutchinson. ‘I have got influenza: the minute I got back.’
Once again she was prostrate, sneezing violently and with pulsing
headaches. And then she wrote something more telling. ‘In future
I am going to simply wash my hands of Tom and refuse politely
to explain him or interpret him or influence or direct him,’ she
wrote abruptly. ‘I mean to have some sort of individual existence,
and Tom must manage his own muddles.’118 It seemed that changes
were on the horizon.
As Eliot sailed across the English Channel he seemed a man
altered by his travels, a man closing in on home and yet somehow
just embarking on a journey. But any newfound sense of himself
would quickly dissolve. On Sunday 31 August he was at home at
Crawford Mansions. ‘Very nice at first,’ wrote Vivien in her diary,
but ‘depressed in the evening’.119
Eleven days later, the Pounds, too, returned to London.
III | 125
IV.
‘My trip was a complete success,’ wrote Eliot of Périgord in

September: ‘I feel much better for it.’1 But to Vivien he seemed
dishevelled now that he had grown a beard, his mood more vol-
atile than before. He had returned to London to find Vivien in
bed with bronchitis, having concealed her illness in the hope of
preserving his holiday. Rumours abounded that pets could trans-
mit influenza (Yancia, a five-year-old Boston bulldog, had found
national fame when she appeared masked on the second page of
the Seattle Star),2 and Vivien was worried about both her health
and that of their dog, Dinah Brooks, who was confined to the flat.3
Daily, she recorded the dog’s deteriorating condition. Tuesday,
worse. Wednesday, very ill indeed. Thursday, worse. Friday, ‘Took
Dinah to a vet, in a taxi with Tom. Nothing could be done. Put her
to death at once.’4 Saturday, ‘Frightful day of misery.’5
The Eliots were back in Bosham that Saturday, 6 September.
Vivien was almost too distressed to travel, but Eliot felt as sure
as ever that what she needed most was to escape London. For the
fifth time in three years they looked to the little Sussex harbour
for their recuperation, only this time they hadn’t given enough
notice to secure their regular room in South View, and for ten
days took interim accommodation until it became available. But
if Vivien had hoped to draw strength from her husband’s com-
pany she was soon disappointed. He stayed only for one night
before returning to London, leaving her to manage an acute pain
in her right side and a state of feeling ‘very very nervous’.6 Eliot
felt he had little option. He had taken up a new position with the
126
Information Department at Lloyds on returning from France, in
an imposing room with a large south window overlooking the
Mansion House. For the next fortnight he stayed in London,
establishing himself in his new role by day, and working by night
on an essay on Hamlet. He was, too, covering the absence at The
Athenaeum of John Middleton Murry, who had accompanied his
wife Katherine Mansfield to Ospedaletti, on the Italian Riviera,
for her treatment for pulmonary tuberculosis, diagnosed two
years before.
Vivien bathed off the quay at Bosham and attempted sketch-
ing; she felt her spirits beginning to return with the good weather,
marking her diary perfect and perfect, glorious and glorious.7 When
the weather broke mid-September so did Vivien’s recovery. A
stay with Mary Hutchinson overnight at Eleanor House left her
washed out; the next day she sheltered from a storm in Mary’s
outhouse, which creaked like an old ship while the gale roared
round and about. Eliot returned after a fortnight, and met Vivien
in Chichester on the Saturday afternoon, 20 September, where
she had been running errands for Mary, to whom she scribbled
a tense and hasty pencil note. ‘I feel you are right about T. & he
must somehow be tamed,’ it read. ‘You dont know it but he is
often very unkind to me, in that way, & often makes me wretch-
ed.’ Vivien’s anxiety at her husband’s arrival was palpable, but
may also have been motivated by actions of her own that may not
have been regarded as entirely proper. She signed off her note
with a cryptic trail: ‘Don’t tell Jack about Jim it would not do I
assure you.’8 Jack was Mary’s husband, and the Jim she didn’t want
him to know about was James Strachey Barnes, Mary’s brother,
who worked in the Foreign Office, who would in time become
infamous for his proselytising fascism – ‘a queer bird’, said Eliot,
in whom Mary may have encouraged Vivien’s interest.9 When
Vivien returned to London a fortnight later, she complained to
Mary that she wanted to go shopping for a new outfit but ‘I
IV | 127
don’t know what will please Jim most either!’ And she went fur-
ther, telling Mary, ‘You must begin laying foundation stones for
me with Jim,’ and ‘Meanwhile I have no underclothes.’10 The gulf
between Vivien and Eliot was widening, and his arrival in Chich-
ester was not about to narrow it. He went out the same evening
to see the landlady’s brother-in-law, ‘Capn’,11 leaving Vivien alone
with her tiredness and nerves, and describing the evening in a
now familiar phrase as ‘rather unsatisfactory’.12 But the Eliots had
at least now moved into South View on the harbour, and the next
day went slightly better: they blackberried after a picnic with the
Hutchinsons, before he returned to London in the evening on
the eight o’clock train.
Eliot’s birthday, his thirty-first, arrived on 26 September; the
couple spent it apart. He worked at the London bank all day, she
struggled with head pain in Bosham. As the day wore on Vivien
began to wish that they had spent it together, and became eager to
leave behind an estuary that had now begun to turn wintry. But her
headache had become a migraine and her face had swollen and she
was menstruating painfully. She overheard that Mary Hutchinson
had spoken of her own exhaustion following Vivien’s overnight
stay, and this proved too much. She expected to feel exhaustion
herself but couldn’t understand it in Mary, and she lashed out at
her in a churlish note.13 No sooner had she sent it than she regret-
ted it: it was a ‘silly’ and ‘unfortunate’ letter,14 she admitted, and one
which she said drew from Mary in turn a ‘nasty’ response. Vivien
called her ‘little cat’,15 and spikily signed off her next letter, ‘“Your
loving” Vivien’, with inverted commas, and below that, ‘The Wom-
an’s Friend’ – and below that ‘Damn you’.16 But escaping Bosham
was not as easy as Vivien had expected. A railway strike had begun
on 26 September (the government had reneged on a wartime pay
promise), and would last for nine days. ‘Going home’, she crossed
out in her diary, and gave up on the effort for the rest of the week-
end. By Monday she could bear Bosham no more, and hired a
private car at thirty shillings for the ride: a wild drive with a man
with false teeth. She cabled Eliot, but her message failed to reach
him in time: he went to meet her train at London Bridge while
she was driven by motor car to Putney; she waited there two hours
for him, he waited for her at London Bridge for nearly four. By
the time they converged at the flat, both were in tears. And she
had left part of her luggage behind at Putney Bridge and part in
Chichester.17
Tom was ‘IMpossible’, the weekends were ‘rather unsatisfactory’,

and then came the unexpected intimacy of ‘Peace weekend’: the
Eliots’ time together in July and early August had been tumultu-
ous. Between E liot’s bank tour in mid-May and Vivien’s return
from Bosham at the end of September – a stretch of some twenty
weeks – the couple had spent only those three summer weeks
together, with just weeks two either side: one, in June, when Eliot
had been occupied with a ‘furiously laboured’ article, and another
with the illness and death of their dog. There had been weekends
where he would visit her in Bosham, and those where she would
return to him in Marylebone, but even so the daily business of
living and being together had been all but suspended for more
than four months. Not that the Eliots were alone in their troubles.
Mary’s marriage to St John had come under strain that autumn:
he was spending more time with Nancy Cunard than he should,
and when Clive Bell departed suddenly for Paris in November,
Mary felt abandoned. How sad that Clive was going to France,
Vivien sympathised: was Mary going with him? She was, came
the reply, which brought out a strange and worrying response
from Vivien. ‘I also have a gun-powder plot in preparation,’ she
wrote, ‘but mine is not timed to go off until the New Year, so
perhaps it will be a case of he who laughs last laughs loudest.’18
The undated message from Vivien was most likely written in late
October, a week or so before bonfire night: what exactly was her
IV | 129
‘plot’? Was Mary’s brother Jim her conspirator? She never dis-
closed; and that might have been the end of it, though Vivien’s
relationship with Jim maintained a charge for some time to come.
In 1926, after the Eliots by chanced upon him at a tennis club in
Rome, Vivien sent Mary a wistful postcard saying that she had
watched him watching world number one Suzanne Lenglen play
‘but at a distance’; on the reverse of the card was a portrait of Ben-
ito Mussolini. 19 A dinner with Jim and the Hutchinsons at the
Eliots’ home in 1931 ended in disaster after Eliot accused Vivien
of keeping secrets; her efforts to call Jim back went unheeded,
and the gunpowder plot failed to go off.20
//
‘What else was to be expected?’21 The day after the Pounds returned
to London on 11 September, Eliot had scribbled a hasty note: he
was to call by at their flat on Holland Place Chambers the next
evening to show off his beard, and if his hosts were out, n’impor-
tante. What was expected was presumably the drafts that Pound
had not yet seen but which Eliot had promised in France to deliver
on his return: among them, ‘Gerontion’. But the Pounds had found
the journey back from Paris tiring, and had accepted an invitation
to the country from the illustrator Edmund Dulac and left that
morning before E liot’s note arrived.22 His call that Saturday must
have gone unanswered.
Eliot had abandoned in ‘Gerontion’ a draft epigraph from Dante
in which a dead soul wanders dazed upon the earth – ‘How my
body stands in the world above, I have no knowledge.’23 But Pound’s
attention passed straight to the opening lines. A. C. Benson had
been among a litany of names that Pound had excoriated in 1914,
and whether or not he had actually read the biography of Edward
FitzGerald that Benson had written, he didn’t a bit like the lines
that Eliot had drawn from it:24
Here I am, an old man in a dry month,
Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.
Pound ringed and partially deleted the first line, and took fright
at the ‘b – b – b’ consonants of the second and their accompanying
prepositions, before turning his focus to the interior of the poem.
From there he worked diligently, circling, underlining, cancelling
and re-punctuating as he went. Eliot had just pencilled a new end-
ing on the back of the draft that he was yet to incorporate, tearing
up the shillings that had followed his fractured atoms, and replacing
two lines with five:
In fractured atoms. Gull against the wind, in the windy straits

Of Belle Isle, or driven by the horn,
White feathers in the snow, the gulf claims,
And an old man driven by the trades
To a sleepy corner. Twitching with rheumatism [. . .]
Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.
Eliot had sailed the New England coast in childhood, only here
he had transposed the setting north to Newfoundland and Labra-
dor, and the last isle on the trade line between North America and
Britain. The plume in the snow returned the draft to the war and to
Périgord: the Order of the White Feather had been formed in 1914
to disgrace cowardice and pacifism; Gerontion had neither fought
at the hot gates, nor gone into the flames like the Cathars. Pound
gave these new lines his attention: not driven by the horn but run-
ning, he prompted, which Eliot duly accepted. He had pummelled
at percussive syntax, and steered the poem away from repetition or
refrain, urging upon it the kind of economy of phrasing that marked
the work of each writer in recent years. He bracketed articles and
conjunctives, and small linking p hrases – the – Think now – has many
– She – all sensitive and agile edits for what he had once called an
‘absolute rhythm’. But Eliot was lengthening his stride, and Pound
IV | 131
hadn’t quite kept in step. The tight intensities of the ‘French’ style
were moving behind Eliot now, and he was reaching for something
more oblique and musical – a hovering intelligence and a departure
from satire. ‘Gerontion’ spoke with a new seriousness that would
clear the way for the poem that was to come next, and Eliot was
beginning to resist the more controlling of Pound’s clippings.
Asked later if old age may be taken to be a symbol for a declin-
ing civilisation, Eliot replied that he supposed it might, but that
it was not an image that had been in his thoughts at the time.
Instead he said that in the construction of the poem (and here
he paused to spell out precisely what he meant by construction:
what he called ‘the mental operation of writing it’) there had been
no appearance of an ‘intellectual generalisation’, only mood, var-
iation and associative memory. That may have been keeping his
powder dry, but in doing so he rehearsed an increasingly familiar
position that no reader should look to an author for meaning,
whether or not it stands for a civilisation in decline. ‘It may cer-
tainly be what the poem “means”,’ he commented, ‘so long as
that is not identified with what the author is supposed to have
consciously meant when he wrote it.’25 Meaning, in o ther words,
lies at the discretion of the reader, and by the end of September,
having been through Pound’s hands, he had placed a final draft
of the poem with two readers who for the moment were serving
as his publishing gatekeepers: John Rodker at the Ovid Press
in London, and John Quinn in New York, who would pass the
poem on to Alfred Knopf.26
//
Eliot retained his beard deep into September. ‘He looked perfectly
awful, like one of those comic-strip caricatures of Southern hicks,’
said Aldington, convinced that it would prejudice the upcoming
introduction that he had arranged for Eliot with Bruce Richmond,
the editor of the Times Literary Supplement.27 In the event it didn’t:
Richmond invited Eliot to write a leading article for the paper
on Ben Jonson, which would be published that November. In it,
he would speak to the relationship of the present and the past, as
he would in most of this work that autumn. To understand Jon-
son, he would write, we must see him not in seventeenth-century
England, but as a contemporary in the London of our day: an act
that, like the art itself, required a ‘transfusion of the personality, or,
in a deeper sense, the life, of the author into the character’.28 But
for now at least, Eliot was able to take a moment to look out from
the mountain that he had climbed. ‘This is the highest honour
possible in the critical world of literature,’ he told his mother, ‘and
we are pleased.’29 But in fact he had already reached greater critical
heights that month.
Two of Eliot’s most influential essays were published that Sep-

tember: ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ in the first of two
instalments in Harriet Weaver’s Egoist, and ‘Hamlet and His
Problems’, which had appeared at almost the same moment in The
Athenaeum.
Tradition is not an inheritance but a labour, the work of our
common culture.
Every poem has ancestors. As readers, we tend to reward poets
for their differentiation from that which has gone before, where-
as if instead we simply read without judgement we might find
that the most individuating moments of our poets are those in
which they are in communication with the past. To be in posses-
sion of this insight is to be in possession of ‘the historical sense’,
which can open a portal that permits the poet to write not only
from their own era but in a common existence with ‘the whole of
the literature of Europe from Homer’. To do that is not only to
affect the literature of the present but – and this was E liot’s cru-
cial point – to alter the literature of the past. An existing order is
IV | 133
ever so slightly changed by the arrival of new work: what we learn
from the new alters how we look at the old, and the whole of art
readjusts – just fractionally – to admit a new presence and create
a new order. In that moment, all work converges simultaneous-
ly in a moment that is both temporal and timeless: this is the
thread of tradition that binds the endless community. ‘No poet,
no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone,’ and that’s
because the significance of contemporary art is co-dependent
and interactive with the art of the past. Art never improves, but
it is always aggregating, absorbing itself in what has come before,
and this amalgamation brought Eliot to what he called ‘the mind
of Europe’, an evolving consciousness from which nothing is
ever lost, be it Shakespeare or Homer or, he wrote, in a private
allusion to the Font de Gaume, ‘the rock drawing of the Magda-
lenian draughtsmen’. We know more than the past because the
past is what we know. And the channel for this – the pathway
through which the poet can commune – would culminate the
first instalment and be the subject of the second in November:
What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the

moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of
an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of
personality.30
Here at last was the critical concentration of all that Eliot

had put before his audience. Everything was now converging in
one place: the mind of Europe that lives equally in the caves of
Font de Gaume as the trenches of the Great War. The mind of
society that sacrifices the ego to serve with the termites in com-
mon good. The mind of the individual that accepts extinction,
like the Cathars going into the flames. And in ‘Hamlet and His
Problems’, an accompanying essay in Athenaeum that September,
Eliot gave a name to the process of transference and extinction
of self. He called it the objective correlative. It was a phrase that
didn’t seem to belong to the language of p
oetry, and that was
surely the idea.
The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding

an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation,
a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular
emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in
sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.31
//
‘All religions are evil,’ Pound had written in the months before
Eliot’s arrival in France. Whether or not a religion is founded upon
sound ideals, it eventually resorts to unsound principles – will to
power, speculation, sheer bluff, and, most evidently of all, an attempt
to impose ‘a thought-mould’; in that way, every religion becomes a
‘kultur’.32 Pound had protested that summer to the vicar of Kens-
ington that his church bells were disturbing his silence; he made his
complaint in the form of a letter written in Latin, which amused
the vicar sufficiently that he pinned it to his church noticeboard.
But Pound hadn’t intended humour, and the invasiveness of reli-
gious ritual continued to irk him. A second article in New Age that
autumn took aim at the warmongering of the Catholic church dur-
ing the Sixth Crusade (‘May the gods save us from the horrors of an
“age of Faith”!’).33 This was throwaway prose by Pound’s standards,
barely more than measuring out the words for his weekly column
of regional pastiche for the New Age; it was augmented in the new
year when he wrote that the two great obstacles to human fraternity
were religion and nationality, and of these obstacles religion was the
greater.34 This may not have been the most discerning critique of
organised religion, and Pound’s comments in the New Age of 1919
had gone seemingly unnoticed by readers; but one among them
had filed the pieces away as something to be dealt with, and in the
autumn of 1920, G. K. Chesterton would do just that.
IV | 135
//
Pound returned from France that September with a pressing need to

earn money. He secured work as theatre critic for the journal Outlook,
a role that lasted for all of two issues before he was fired (‘in the most
caddish manner possible’) for reasons he declined to share.35 But if
the search for an income was a challenge that autumn, Pound’s work
was at least finding publication. In October, Harriet Shaw Weaver at
the Egoist Press published a new volume of his entitled Quia Pauper
Amavi, named from the epigraph to his ‘Homage to Sextus Proper-
tius’: ‘Pauperibus vates ergo sum, quia pauper amavi’ (‘I am the poet
of the poor, because I was poor when I loved’) – as Pound clarified:
‘Pauper refers to subject. I am the pauper.’36 It gathered four long
poems previously printed in the Little Review, New Age and Poetry
in Chicago: the ‘Langue d’Oc’–‘Moeurs Contemporaines’ diptych,
‘Three Cantos’ and, most importantly, the first complete printing of
‘Homage to Sextus Propertius’. Weaver produced the edition well:
500 c opies, set in Caslon type with drop caps, elegantly printed at
the De la More Press in Hanover Square and priced at 6 s. Pound
was pleased with it, telling John Quinn it was the ‘best shaped book
of verse I have had since Personae’, his 1909 volume.37 But it almost
didn’t happen at all, after Elkin Mathews had refused to publish an
edition that included ‘Sextus’ and ‘Moeurs Contemporaines’, which
he regarded as an unacceptable attack on any number of things, but
most particularly upon the middle class; it was at this moment that
Weaver stepped in.
The book shook very little critical response out of literary
London: only Eliot wrote a review of it that autumn, in Athenae-
um. ‘The present volume of poems by Mr Pound is probably the
most significant book that he has published.’38 So began E liot’s
review boldly. ‘As to the Propertius there can be no doubt; it is
one of the best things Mr Pound has done.’ Eliot praised the
‘historic method’ of the author, having just written in The Ego-
ist of ‘the historic sense’: most poets could manage their present
existence and see the world immediately before them, but few
could integrate with the past; that took an immense capacity of a
kind that Pound possessed in abundance, although with a meth-
od that Eliot described euphemistically as ‘difficult to pursue’.
And here Eliot appeared to sow doubt into the review. The book
demonstrated, he wrote, that there was design and purpose in
Pound’s creative workings, confirming that the good moments
in his earlier writing were ‘more than accidental’. But whoever
had suggested that the good moments were accidental? Was this
praise or a sideswipe? Pound was not sure: it was then that he told
John Quinn that Eliot’s review amounted to granite wreaths.39
And he went a step further, writing to the journal’s editor, John
Middleton Murry, to say that although he was grateful for E liot’s
remarks he remained puzzled to know ‘whether T. S. E. has or
has not found my “Homage to Propertius” enjoyable’.40 The letter
was printed, and Eliot was backed into a response that was also
printed. ‘As for his suspicion that I did not enjoy his Propertius,
I did not think the question of public interest: his non plebecula
gaudet’ (these things do not delight people in general).41 Eliot
had sidestepped his friend’s examination with a suggestion that
such discussions were not for public airing, and his reluctance
to be drawn into greater clarity was understandable. Eliot’s gift
was for critical insight, not cheerleading, and what he had skil-
fully opined was an astute distinction between translation and
hybrid that might have saved Pound from his critical abuse had
others read the Propertius poems in the same way. ‘A new perso-
na’ was everything that needed to be said on the subject, and in
doing so Eliot had not only reset the tone for the debate on the
Propertius poems, he had respectfully out-manoeuvred Pound in
correspondence.42
But Eliot seemed uncertain, too, about the inclusion of three
IV | 137
Cantos, which, on their first appearance in Poetry in 1917, he had
described as ‘a rag-bag’ of reading and ‘reticent autobiography’.
Now he wrote that they were too early to appraise; they should be
regarded not as achievement but as promise – and here Eliot was
at his most perceptive – ‘as showing what the consummation of
Mr Pound’s work could be: a final fusion of all his masks, a final
concentration of the entire past upon the present’.43 As a summa-
ry description of the vast project of The Cantos to come, Eliot’s
words might have made for an artful blurb, but they didn’t please
Pound, whose trust in his friend had seemingly been rocked so
soon after their revelatory time in Périgord; that Pound voiced
his misgivings in public said much about the vulnerable position
that he found himself in. For Katherine Mansfield, the episode
left both men on shaky ground. Pound was most certainly a cheat
and a charlatan, she said, but Eliot’s defence of his friend made
him look silly, ‘carrying cannon balls for the prestidigitator’.44
And of Pound’s further rebuff to Eliot in print, well, for that she
reserved her most colourful description: ‘that arch-snorter, that
ludicrous old sea-lion Ezra blowing’ Quia Pauper Amavi had set
out on an uncertain path.45
Eliot may not yet have found his spiritual accompaniment that
autumn, but in Pound he had certainly found spirted company.
For Pound, as for Eliot, the walking tour had brought – in Pound’s
image from ‘Canto XXIX’ – a moment of turning. Just as Eliot
was gathering the miscellany of experience and critical vision from
which he would ultimately make The Waste Land, so too was Pound
laying out a scrapbook of his own. It was in southern France that
summer that he outlined the quest that he sensed was to be made
from those bits and pieces before him. ‘Once in a lifetime’, he wrote
in the New Age that August, ‘a man may try – without rhetoric,
without hankering after grandiose utterance – to straighten out
his ideas on history, the rise of nations, the developments and atro-
phies of civilization.’46 This sounded a little like E
liot’s experience
in the caves of Font de Gaume, but unlike Eliot’s projected poem
which was yet to be started, Pound was now bringing a fourth and
fifth sequence into his.
‘What do I mean by all this clattering rumble?’ Pound had
mused in an interim draft of ‘Canto IV’.47 That was a poem that
would evolve across eight years from 1915 to 1923, but which
would pause just long enough in October 1919 for John R odker
to publish at his new Ovid Press a version of forty c opies on a
single folded quarto sheet of Japanese vellum, decorated with an
initial capital by Edward Wadsworth.48 But Pound’s work that
autumn was the concentration of the experience of his French
summer, which would bring him the fifth, sixth and seventh
Cantos.
‘Great bulk, huge mass, thesaurus’, opened ‘The Fifth Canto’ in
a reflexive allusion to the first four.49 Pound had begun it on the
eve of departing for Toulouse in April 1919, and had worked on it
in E liot’s presence through the summer of 1919; on 6 October he
told John Quinn that it was done.50 With its ticking and fading
clock and with its clutch upon ‘the barb of time’, the canto soaked
itself in the bloody and murderous crimes of Renaissance Europe,
and did so at the same moment that Pound published an article
from France in which he professed to a growing hatred of violence,
an increasing contempt for destruction, even of an empire’s cher-
ished monuments: he would not, he said, even lay a hand on, of all
things, the Albert Memorial.51
//
Late in October, Eliot lectured to the Arts League of Service in

a bustling Central Buildings, Westminster on the subject that
occupied him that autumn: impersonality. It was necessary, he
told his audience, for the poet to study the poetry of the past
IV | 139
every bit as for the scientist to know the history of their subject.
Both must affect ‘a complete surrender’ of themselves to their
work, channelling their personality into their subject matter in
such a way that outcomes seem all but impersonal, even though
it would take a powerful force of personality to effect as much.
The poet, like the scientist, should exhibit ‘a trained sensibility’;
but with a distinction: poetry is not in the end a science, and
this is most apparent when we encounter the problem of writing
about emotion. A reader cannot be expected to take interest in
the poet’s emotion, only in the expression of emotion through a
form common to both reader and writer alike, namely the senses.
This transfer of emotion from feeling to the s enses Eliot called
the ‘objective equivalent’ – another naming of the ‘objective
correlative’ that he had outlined in ‘Hamlet’) – and in doing so
he affirmed the theory for which he would become renowned,
where through a knowledge of tradition and the impersonality
of objects, a force of individuality can uncover an expression per-
sonal to the poet and understood by the reader:
the great poet is prolonging the work of the people who preceded
him, and laying out the work for those who follow him; the greater
the poet, the more evident his hand in every line, and the more
elusive his personality.52
Pound had just returned to London from a lecture of his own

to the Literary and Philosophy Society of Newcastle: 714 people
heard him speak on the troubadour poets of Provence.53 He told
his parents that his portrait had been finished by Wyndham Lewis
and he hoped to have it photographed for them, and that Yeats and
family were in town ‘enveloped in celto-spiritist fog’.54 But Eliot by
contrast seemed free of such haze, his writing full of directive drive
that autumn. So creatively had his criticism been developing that
he now had a hope of producing ‘a small book’ to which he hoped
to give the title The Art of Poetry. The Egoist Press went so far as to
announce its publication for the spring before Eliot changed his
mind. When the idea re-emerged in a new form with Methuen, it
became the book that would occupy him through the summer of
1920, The Sacred Wood. In the meantime, he told John Quinn that
he pressed on with his debut article for the Times Literary Supple-
ment on Ben Jonson; but more significant still was what Eliot said
next: ‘When that is off I hope to get started on a poem that I have
in mind.’55
Just at that moment there was a loss in the family. ‘Aunty Emily
died at 3 a.m,’56 Vivien recorded in her diary of the same day, 5
November. The news came as a terrible shock: she had been with
her aunt in Eastbourne in October, and found her well. When
Eliot went to the Hutchinsons’ party in Hammersmith the next
evening, Vivien didn’t come, but instead prepared funeral arrange-
ments at her parents’ house in Hampstead. The service was on the
morning of 8 November. ‘Terrible day & experience.’57 Once again,
the Eliots were returned to turmoil.
//
November the eleventh marked the first Remembrance Day.

Among the records of that day, the report of the Manchester
Guardian:
The first stroke of eleven produced a magical effect.

The tram cars glided into stillness, motors ceased to cough
and fume, and stopped dead, and the mighty-limbed dray horses
hunched back upon their loads and stopped also, seeming to do it of
their own vlition.
Someone took off his hat, and with a nervous hesitancy the
rest of the men bowed their heads also. Here and there an old
soldier could be detected slipping unconsciously into the posture
of ‘attention’. An elderly woman, not far away, wiped her eyes, and
IV | 141
the man beside her looked white and stern. Everyone stood very
still . . . The hush deepened. It had spread over the whole city and
become so pronounced as to impress one with a sense of audibility.
It was a silence which was almost pain . . . And the spirit of memory
brooded over it all.58
//
If the friendship of Eliot and Pound had been tested by Quia
Pauper Amavi, by the middle of November it was back on a firmer
footing. Three times in a single week, the Pounds and the Eliots
dined together.59 It was after the third occasion, on 23 November,
that Eliot and Vivien went to the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith,
for the Phoenix Society’s revival of John Webster’s The Duchess
of Malfi.60 By all accounts it was a rotten production. The Times
reported the next day that, where suspense was required, the
audience had instead responded with ‘some tittering’, while
the critic William Archer was blunt: ‘three hours of coarse and
sanguinary melodrama’.61 Rather than restore the original play
from its ashes, the Phoenix Society had burned the piece to the
ground, in a production that would keep the play off the stage
for the next sixteen years. Eliot had recently praised Webster for
his ‘skill in dealing with horror’, but even so he found the per-
formance ridiculous and vogueish, criticising the performance of
Catherine Nesbitt in the title role for a failure to ‘transmit’ the
original lines of blank verse, but instead attempting to ‘interpret’
them.62 And in keeping with his critical direction of 1919, what
Eliot wrote next would be important for his own verse. ‘Poetry
is something which the actor cannot improve or “interpret”,’ he
wrote; ‘there is no such thing as the interpretation of poetry;
poetry can only be transmitted.’63 Nothing should come between
the poem and its reader – not the personality of the poet nor the
voice of the poet, and certainly not the voice of somebody else.
The ideal actor for a poetic drama, he continued, was one with
no personal vanity at all.
Despite the shortcomings of the production, one moment in
particular caught his attention, ‘a scene which always haunted
his imagination’, Valerie Eliot revealed in a radio broadcast of
1971: when the duchess sits at her dressing table, combing her
hair and talking into the void of a bedroom to a husband who
has departed without her noticing.64 For much of 1919, Eliot
had been working on a poem that he called ‘The Death of the
D uchess’:
‘But I know you love me, it must be that you love me.’
Then I suppose they found her
As she turned
To interrogate the silence fixed behind her.65
It was not the only moment that seemingly examined the tem-
perature of the Eliots’ marriage: the opening passages of the poem
had taken aim at the London suburb where Vivien’s parents lived:
The inhabitants of Hampstead have silk hats

On Sunday afternoon go out to tea
On Saturday have tennis on the lawn, and tea
On Monday to the city, and then tea.
These lines, and the four that followed, would not survive Pound’s
censorship, but they would be repackaged for ‘The Fire Sermon’: a
silk hat that would appear upon the head of a Bradford millionaire,
while Hampstead would be transposed to Highgate, Richmond
and Kew. The next four lines broke out of form:
But what is there for you and me

For me and you
What is there for us to do
Where the leaves meet in leafy Marylebone?
IV | 143
What indeed would autumn bring to the Eliots? Loneliness, love-
lessness, fearfulness, the poem appeared to imply: But it is terrible
to be alone with another person. And in ten lines towards the end of
the poem, an even longer shadow would be cast.
If I said ‘I do not love you’ we should breathe

The hands relax, and the brush proceed?
How terrible that it should be the same!
In the morning, when they knock upon the door
We should say: This and this is what we need
And if it rains, the closed carriage at four.
We should play a game of chess
The ivory men make company between us
We should play a game of chess
Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.
It would be from these tortured, torturing lines that ‘A Game

of Chess’ would soon draw for The Waste Land, in places word for
word; other lines from the ‘Duchess’ would also find their way into
the poem, but it was from this particular passage that Vivien would
ask of her husband in 1921 what she had never asked before: to
remove a line from his work.
The ivory men make company between us.
That moment was still to come, and for now Eliot would sim-
ply leave this poem in typescript, unpublished, and draw down
upon it, in time, stripped for parts. It was unkempt in places
and undoubtedly needed tidying, and it was frequently rough in
phrasing; yet its tone was compelling, its gaze was penetrating,
and in its portrait of domestic devastation it was utterly harrow-
ing.
‘What hideous noise was that?’ the terrified duchess asks in
Webster’s play, sensing that her death is near. ‘What noise is that?’
she repeats.66
‘What is that noise?’, Eliot will ask in The Waste Land. ‘What is
that noise now?’
‘The Death of the Duchess’ seems to have shadowed ‘Gerontion’
in its composition through 1919, and was probably given to Pound
alongside it in September 1919; and although Eliot had found his
ending to ‘Gerontion’ that autumn, for ‘The Death of the Duch-
ess’ there would be no such neat conclusion. With his final lines
in draft, Eliot may even have begun a passage in a new voice that
he realised he simply couldn’t finish.67 Against the suspicion of
Vivien’s affair with Russell, the draft’s last line of all, trailing into
elliptical silence, seems a haunting and moving evocation of the
mistrust within the Eliots’ own marriage.
But I know, and I know she knew . . .
//
The second and final instalment of ‘Tradition and the Individual

Talent’ ran in The Egoist in November with an opening note:
‘Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon
the poet but upon the poetry.’68 Just as Pound had once likened
the mind of poetry to the magnetisation of iron filings, so Eliot
now pursued a likeness with platinum. When oxygen and sul-
phur dioxide are put together in a chamber nothing will happen;
but adding platinum creates a reaction in the form of sulphuric
trioxide.69 The platinum, which remains unaltered by the com-
bination, is a catalyst for its creation. The poet’s mind is the
platinum.
Eliot knew that his catalytic poet of depersonalised self had been
expressed by o thers before him. He was aware that Keats, a century
earlier, had rejected what he called Wordsworth’s ‘egotistical sub-
lime’, preferring the ‘chameleon poet’ over the one who claimed the
authority of the speaking self (‘it is not itself – it has no self – it is
IV | 145
every thing and nothing – It has no character’).70 Keats, like Eliot,
sought to overturn the conviction of the Lyrical Ballads that ‘all good
poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’, and guided
Eliot to one of the most important paragraphs in all of his prose:71
There is a great deal, in the writing of p

oetry, which must be
conscious and deliberate. In fact, the bad poet is usually unconscious
where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be
unconscious. Both errors tend to make him ‘personal’. Poetry is not
a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the
expression of personality, but an escape from personality.
The passage would be among the most quoted of any Eliot would
write, but it was incomplete, and the next sentence would bring a
crucial if often unquoted addendum:
But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know
what it means to want to escape from these things.
In order to depersonalise, we must first have had the personal

experience; in order to transmit emotion, we must rely not upon
the personal history of the poet but upon the objects corralled and
correlated for the poem.
The poet’s mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up

numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all
the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present
together.
For a theorist of depersonalisation, Eliot sounded remarkably like

a man corralling his lived experience for the moment that his num-
berless feelings and p hrases – his heap of broken images – would
one day fuse into a poem. And with that, in the winter of 1919, the
journal life of Harriet Shaw Weaver’s Egoist came to an end.
//
Of all the subjects that came under the scrutiny of Eliot through-
out 1919, it was perhaps John Donne whom he illuminated most
brightly, and in a style that anticipated so much of The Waste Land.
Celebrating ‘the famous “Mundus Mare”’ passage of 1619, Eliot
wrote that Donne had distinguished his sermon with a rolling
refrain, in which existence was likened to a sea that was subject to
stormes, and tempests; that was bottomlesse to any line; that hath ebbs
and floods, like those of the tidal prose used to convey his oratory.
But just as illuminating as Donne’s original prose was the language
with which Eliot described it. Donne, wrote Eliot, had produced
a vivid figure of speech; an image developed at length; a reference to
spiritual truth; a life of flows, storms and tempests; he had given us
a world with no place of habitation, but a passage to our habitations.
Phrase on phrase, wave on wave, it was a literary style of analogy
and refrain, wrote Eliot, that had been used once before by a mas-
ter even greater than Donne: ‘the method of the Fire-Sermon
preached by the Buddha’, an utterance as important as the Ser-
mon on the Mount.72 He would single out a translation by Henry
Clarke Warren of 1895 from the Mahā Vagga, where the Blessed
One addresses the priests:
All things, O priests, are on fire. And what, O priests, are all these
things which are on fire?
The eye, O priests, is on fire; forms are on fire; eye-consciousness
is on fire; impressions received by the eye are on fire; And
whatever sensation, pleasant, unpleasant, or indifferent, originates
in dependence on impressions received by the eye, that also is on
fire.73
Eliot had written of Donne as the most self-aware of writers:

‘the artist as an Eye curiously, patiently watching himself as a
man’.74 How that expression might likewise have been applied to
Eliot.
Every ship that sails on this sea must have some part of itself
IV | 147
under water, Donne had written, just as some part of our hidden
endeavours must also be expended; but that part of the ship by
which we sail, the conscious part, like the conscious writer, is above
water, and that part brings us closer to God. And in this Sea, are we
made fishers of men, of all men, of that which makes them men, their
soules.
Buddha’s fire, Donne’s sea. Eliot’s waste land.
//
By December, Pound had completed Cantos V, VI and VII, ‘each

more incomprehensible than the one preceding it,’ he told his
father, ‘dont know what’s to be done about it’.75 He told John
Quinn that he was much distressed by his preoccupation with the
twelfth century, which he admitted was ‘very unfortunate from
point of view of immediate impact on general public’.76 The history
of Provence that had been likened to the Odyssey in ‘Canto VI’
would continue into the seventh. Pound left a draft of ‘Canto VII’
with Eliot, who replied in a note that he was sorry to have missed
his friend on a social call, but wanted him to know that he was
absorbing the poem slowly.77 ‘Eleanor’, the canto opened – daugh-
ter of troubadour William X, imprisoned in the Tower of London
by her husband Henry Plantagenet ‘(she spoiled in a British cli-
mate)’ – with a turn of swirling transitions now marking the style
of The Cantos themselves. Here was Helen of Troy with Arnaut
Daniel, here was Desmond FitzGerald, minister in the 1919 Sinn
Féin government, ‘the live man, out of lands and prisons’, jailed for
his part in in the defence of the General Post Office in Dublin,
1916. It was the most engaged and elusive of The Cantos so far, at
a height of fluency and lyric phrasing, finding metrical force in
the movement of the physical world around him – The sea runs in
the beach-groove, shaking the floated pebbles – in its way, as good as
anything he would ever write in The Cantos. In phrasing, it seemed
to share so much with Eliot, and at times it seemed hard to tell the
two authors apart:
We also made ghostly visits, and the stair

That knew us, found us again on the turn of it,
Knocking at empty rooms, seeking for buried beauty;78
To read ‘Canto VII’ across The Waste Land is to understand

something of the confluence that existed between the minds of
the two poets, something of their interests and their musical ear,
something in the tone of their address. It’s even possible to detect
a tide washing from canto to waste land. Pound’s opening with
Eleanor of Aquitaine will be harmonised in Eliot’s Mrs Equitone.
Pound gives us Homer blind, Eliot blind Tiresias; Pound grants
sea-surge, Eliot sea-wood, Pound Rome, Eliot Carthage; a rattle of
old men in Pound is in Eliot an old man wrinkled; Pound’s mar-
ble is narrow for seating, Eliot’s will glow from the splendour of a
burnished throne; Pound via Ovid: ‘if there is no dust’, Eliot will
have a handful of dust; Pound hears chatter above the circus, Eliot
clatter and chatter from a public bar; Pound’s ‘sightless narration’
is E
liot’s tarot card which Madame Sosostris is forbidden to see;
Pound through Dante sounds out ‘ciocco’, Eliot Co co rico. These
from just the first stanza of the canto alone. ‘People are inclined to
think that we write our verses in collaboration as it is,’ Eliot would
tell Pound by 1923, ‘or else that you write mine & I write yours.’79
When Pound came to draft his ‘Canto VIII’ in 1922, he would
begin it with a line from The Waste Land.80
As 1919 came to a close, Pound had written seven Cantos and
published four. For almost the next two years, he would pause and
set them aside; they were not yet his major work of the post-war
period. That distinction would belong to the poem that he was
about to write next.
//
IV | 149
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley – Pound’s antihero – was a pre-modern
poet in a modern age, a relic ‘out of key with his time’.81 His country
was ‘half savage’, speaking in a mantra and a metre that was partly
Gautier’s and which was adopted, said Pound, against the sluggish-
ness and swishiness of the British line.82 ‘He was done in Dec. &
Jan.’ said Pound: twelve sections and an envoi before Christmas;
five sections added in the new year.83 His name may have lain in
a tale told by Basil Bunting, that Hugh Selwyn Mauberley was
a hoax dreamed up by Pound and Eliot together one evening in
London as ‘an impossible poet’ (the phrase belongs to Pound’s later
editor, James Laughlin) invented to lampoon his literary enemies
with parodies in verse and prose; the project had to be abandoned
after the identity of the invented poet was leaked.84 It’s a plausibly
far-fetched story for a work fixated on forgery, whose very title is
troublesome to pin down. For although the poem has been almost
invariably printed under the title of ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’,
what Pound intended was probably the wording that appeared
on the title page and boards of the Ovid Press edition of 1920,
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley by E.P. – as if Mauberley were the subject,
E.P. the author, and Ezra Pound, whose name appears nowhere
in the edition, the publisher who had discovered them both. Then
there was also a slippery ‘subtitle’, as Pound later described it, ‘(Life
and Contacts)’, bracketed, subsequently reversed for ‘the actu-
al order of the subject matter’ – whatever that meant – a clarity
which was most certainly not aided by the ambiguous single word
‘MAUBERLEY’ appearing on the contents page in uppercase ital-
ics as neither title nor section, but a presence governing eighteen
sections, some numbered, some titled, some numbered and titled,
with an envoi between them.85
The epigraph had an edge of topicality: The heat calls us into the
shade. Nemesianus, flourished third-century Rome, but no Roman:
an outsider (and some say imitator), designated on his manu-
scripts Carthaginiensis, of Carthage – an allusion seemingly timed
to respond to the vast attention that John Maynard Keynes was
receiving for his book on the ‘Carthaginian Peace’ of Versailles that
autumn.86
E.P., the initial letters on the initial poem: neither a title nor
here an author, but a memorial; E.P., the representative of the writ-
er Ezra Pound, to whom Mauberley has come to pay tribute: a
figure who strove and failed to resuscitate the dead art, who fished by
obstinate isles but who has already passed from the memory of men.
As a literary disguise it seemed to some readers a barely veiled one.
But Pound would separate himself in saying, ‘Mauberley buries
E.P. in the first poem; gets rid of all his troublesome energies.’87
The second section broadened the scorn towards a period bereft
of literary subtlety:
The ‘age demanded’ chiefly a mould in plaster,

Made with no loss of time,
A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster
Or the ‘sculpture’ of rhyme.88
Then the poem turned to the Great War, to those who had died
‘learning love of slaughter’, pro patria, non dulce non et decor; who
‘walked eye-deep in hell / believing in old men’s lies’, then returned
home to old deceits and new infamies: ‘Daring as never before,
wastage as never before.’
It was then that came the clearest and most affecting elegy
for the war dead that Pound would ever write. The section in its
entirety:
v.
There died a myriad,

And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization,
IV | 151
Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid,
For two gross of broken statues,

For a few thousand battered books.89
A seventh section began with a line of Dante’s (Purgatorio V,

134): ‘Siena mi fe’, disfecemi Maremma’ (Siena made me, Marem-
ma undid me’), that Eliot would pick up with Highbury and
Richmond and Kew for ‘The Fire Sermon’. Other sections to o ther
grounds – among them a literary critic who instructed Mauberley
to ‘give up verse, my boy, / There’s nothing in it’ (the model was
Arnold Bennett, though it might equally have been J. C. Squire) –
and an ‘Envoi’, ending:
Siftings on siftings in oblivion,

Till change hath broken down
All things save Beauty alone.90
(In the draft of ‘Gerontion’ that Pound had just edited: ‘We have
saved a shilling against oblivion.’) And there, after twelve sections
and an envoi, the typescript would briefly rest, until Pound com-
pleted it early in the new year.
‘Of course, I’m no more Mauberley than Eliot is Prufrock,’ said
Pound of the question of autobiography, and he meant it: Mau-
berley was not Pound, but a projection of what Pound feared he
would become if he were to do nothing about his situation. He
called the poem ‘mere surface’, and to some degree he meant that
too: the image being the surface, just as the mask is a surface, as
it was for another of his personas, Propertius. But that Mauberley
was intended as a literary soldier like Pound there can be little
doubt, and Pound most certainly instructed his character for the
front line. ‘Shock troops. All right,’ he would tell his old univer-
sity professor. In 1919, he had told readers of the New Age that he
abhorred violence; by 1922, he felt differently. ‘There are things I
quite definitely want to destroy,’ he commented ominously, ‘and
which I think will have to [be] annihilated before civilization can
exist.’91
//
For the Eliots, Christmas was as usual: the two of them in the
flat with stockings and a small tree, though they found presents
expensive and in short supply.92 Vivien carried a gramophone from
Marylebone to her parents’ house in Hampstead for Christmas
dinner, and came home again not having enjoyed her evening,
any more than she enjoyed having them to the flat for new year.93
Eliot looked for a change of his own, and travelled to friends in
Wiltshire on Boxing Day, but the countryside helped little and the
return train ran late through the pouring rain; Vivien remained
behind, too exhausted to accompany him.94 Even a boozy din-
ner party at the Hutchinsons’ in Hammersmith failed to lift their
spirits. Vivien felt that she looked awful, Osbert Sitwell and Dun-
can Grant were there as old acquaintances, but newer faces were
also present: Iris Tree and her husband Curtis Moffat, as well as
a young, aristocratic socialite who would make a profound impact
upon the Eliots’ marriage, Nancy Cunard. ‘Glad this awful year
is over,’ were Vivien’s final words of her 1919 diary. And then she
added, ‘Next probably worse.’95 But Eliot had different hopes, and
he shared them with his m other: his new year’s resolution was, he
told her, ‘to write a long poem I have had on my mind for a long
time’.96 ‘I wonder if America realises how terrible the condition
of central Europe is,’ Eliot wrote to his mother in the new year of
1920. 97 He could never forget – no, he crossed that out – he could
never quite put out of mind Vienna, a capital of culture, a city on
its knees, with food rioters ransacking and looting its streets that
December, and a ‘red riot’ after the arrest of communist activists
claimed eight lives the previous summer.98 The Habsburg empire
IV | 153
that in Eliot’s mind symbolised the continuity of a European civi-
lisation inherited from ancient Rome had just been dismantled by
the peace treaty. ‘I am all for empires,’ he would write in 1924, ‘espe-
cially the Austro-Hungarian Empire’; but now it seemed that the
barbarians were the gatekeepers of Europe.99 The future of Germa-
ny, the future of the world, he wrote, looked bleak. Falling towers /
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria / Vienna London. ‘They say that there
is no hope unless the treaty is revised. I believe by the way that
J. M. Keynes: Economic Consequences of the Peace is an important
book, if you can get hold of it.’100
The book, published that December, had emerged from Keynes’s
attendance at the 1919 peace conference as chief representative of
the British Treasury. A brilliant economist – a ‘free mind’, said
Eliot in an obituary of 1946 – Keynes was a special adviser to the
British government, but he had no authority at the negotiating
table, and was horrified by the punitive direction in which the
Allies were headed.101 Germany was to be held solely accountable
for the conflict, and would be required to pay compensation to the
Allied states. Germany would be crushed, as once Carthage had
been destroyed by Rome, when its walls were razed and its soil was
said to have been sown with salt. Keynes resigned, warning that we
had become numb to the consequences of our own actions: ‘The
greatest events outside our own direct experience and the most
dreadful anticipations cannot move us.’102
Germany was to be disarmed, but it was also to be stripped of
territory that would be reassigned to new or reborn nations such as
Poland, or into Allied control. Its international empire and over-
seas accounts were confiscated, leaving a domestic economy in a
dire state with no international reserves to draw on, and no fea-
sible method of paying the costs imposed upon it. But Germany
had been wounded in a less obvious way besides, in its sense of
national pride. Although its naval fleet was commandeered, it was
the loss of control of its great rivers that had the more tangible
impact upon the national psyche. Rivers that rose or emptied in
lands o ther than Germany were now considered international ter-
ritory. The Rhine, the Danube, the Elbe, the Oder – Germany’s
four great waterways – were to be handed over to an international
administration which, Keynes estimated, was little more than a
pretext for wresting the river system of Germany out of German
control. ‘The events of the coming year’, he wrote in autumn 1919,
‘will not be shaped by the deliberate acts of statesmen, but by the
hidden currents, flowing continually beneath the surface of politi-
cal history, of which no one can predict the outcome.’103 The destiny
of Europe was out of anyone’s hands, leaving us to chaos and worry
– he quoted Shelley: ‘In each human heart terror survives / The
ruin it has gorged.’ Never has the human spirit burned so dimly;
‘We are at the dead season of our fortunes.’104
‘Keynes’ style is appalling,’ wrote Pound that February, and the
man himself quite simply ‘an ass’.105 Nevertheless, such was his
standing that he couldn’t be ignored, and so Pound issued him
with an invitation to meet with his own economic thinker of
choice, Major C. H. Douglas, an occasion which Pound parodied
in ‘Canto XXII’, with Keynes as a ‘Mr Bukos’ pleading ‘I am an
orthodox / Economist’ and Pound, in reply, exploding, ‘Jesu Chris-
to!’106 Douglas was ‘the real mind’, he told John Quinn afterwards,
a ‘blessed relief from fabianism and “nationalisation”’.107
Pound had met Clifford Hugh Douglas through the offices
of the New Age, where A. R. Orage had edited and serialised his
book, Economic Democracy, throughout 1919. Pound saw in Douglas
an anti-hero of a kind that he had come to identify with: an engi-
neer, not an economist by training, a man of industry r ather than
of the academy, and therefore a figure outside the establishment
and a natural ally to Pound.
‘Every industry creates PRICES faster than it distributes the
POWER TO BUY,’ Douglas theorised.108 Workers are not paid
enough to be able to buy back the goods that they produce, and
IV | 155
that’s because the price of a good reflects not only its labour cost
but also charges to the manufacturer of an external kind, such as
interest on bank loans and wastage. As a result, labour is always
unable to meet prices, which in turn creates a perpetual shortfall
into which the government must intervene with a national div-
idend to supplement salaries in parity with prices. This Douglas
called Social Credit, and it was, wrote Pound later, ‘the doorway
through which I came to economic curiosity’.109 He dedicated
‘Canto XXXVIII’ to the problem: ‘The mind of man was bewil-
dered’, he wrote, ‘and the power to purchase can never / (under
the present system) catch up with / prices at large.’110 The culprit of
this imbalance was not as the producer but the financier; ‘Canto
LXXI’:
Every bank of discount is downright corruption

taxing the public for private individuals’ gain.
and if I say this in my will
the American people wd/ pronounce I died crazy.111
Pound would pose the question ‘What is money for?’ And he

would answer: that the whole people shall be able to eat (healthi-
ly), that the whole people shall be housed (decently) and that the
whole people shall be clothed (adequate to the climate).112 Social
Credit became an economic response to a moral question of which
poetry could be the lasting document. ‘An epic is a poem including
history’: so Pound opened a 1935 pamphlet entitled Social Credit, in
the first of a two-point statement; the second: ‘No one can under-
stand history without understanding economics.’113 There, in two
short sentences, would be a model for The Cantos: the poem as
social history seen through the lens of economics. It was a hymn
to an earthly paradise that Pound would never stop believing was
possible, if only finance could be made to serve society.
Pound raged at economic disparity, and that individuals should
be allowed to profit in the transfer of wealth owned by the state on
behalf of its people; in the New Age on 4 March 1920, for the first
time he put a name to the focus of his ire. It was an angry name, a
hateful name: one that signalled an acceleration down a path from
which he would turn only too late. And it took a name that became
racially tinted from the moment he advanced it. Usury.114
It has been said of Ezra Pound that this was the moment that
anti-Semitism took hold of him. But Social Credit didn’t make
Pound anti-Semitic, it merely offered him an economic defence of
an existing prejudice, of which there had been flashes before. Three
times between 1912 and 1914 he had published offensive remarks,
only to seek redemption: one he tried to mollify with praise, a sec-
ond he revised out entirely on reprinting, and a third he corrected
to clarify that it was not Jews but moneymakers who were the target
of his ire. In those earlier days, Judaism didn’t particularly receive
special attention from a man whose approach to insult was to be as
inclusive as possible. A reference in 1917 in the Little Review’s fic-
tive series of imagined letters to the ‘vigorous animality’ of ‘yidds,
letts, finns, esthonians, cravats, niberians, alergians’ brought upon
its editors ‘countless letters from Jews, Letts, Greeks, Finns, Irish,
etc., protesting against Mr Pound’s ignorance and indiscrimina-
tion’ (Pound had concluded the letter praising each as the promise,
the vitality and the sap of the nation).115 But in the same journal in
November 1918, at the very moment that o thers were embracing
armistice, for the first time he brought the prejudice into verse, in
a smear of a poem he would attempt neither to correct nor collect.
In ‘Upon the Harps of Judea’, a noble but ‘unbearable Jew’ imposes
his short, rotund and balding body upon his dining company, while
a ‘younger semite’ companion ‘slides’ between restaurant tables and
a ‘smirking’ daughter inveigles herself upon a wounded (defence-
less?) ‘Tommy’.116 It was a poem without purpose, but it captured
a strand of racial denigration that was present even before it was
touched by the economics of Major Douglas.
More than once was Pound himself mistaken for being Jewish.
IV | 157
Wyndham Lewis had not yet met the American when one among
a lunch party in 1910 ‘pronounced him a Jew’; so it was with some
surprise that he was greeted by a red-bearded, blue-eyed ‘nordic
blond’ that day. ‘Most of those present felt that he was indeed a
Jew, disguised in a tengallon hat, I later heard – a “red Jew” it was
decided, a subtle blend, but a pukka Kosher.’117 In 1917, Pound was
told by his landlady that in a publicity photograph he bore a like-
ness to ‘the good man of Nazareth’, while a literary editor, on seeing
the same photograph, lowered his voice to whisper: ‘Il est Semite?’
(‘He was forcibly informed to the contrary,’ Pound recorded.)118
That January of 1920 Pound told readers of the New Age that
he considered himself fifteen parts English, ‘racially’, and that his
sixteenth and remaining part was Celtic. Anglo-Saxon ‘stock’ (his
phrase) was now said to be in a minority throughout the eastern
and central states, where people of continental and mixed origin
were in the majority: ‘I am therefore accustomed to being an alien,’
he wrote of his upbringing, ‘and it is just as homelike for me to be
an alien in one place as in another.’119
Intolerance in small- town Pennsylvania where Pound grew
up was common towards Jews, Italians and foreigners, and was
regularly represented in in the local pages of the Jenkintown Times-
Chronicle and Public Spirit. So when local proprietors announced
in 1892 that they were no longer taking Jewish boarders at their
Beechwood inn, one contemporary resident of Pound’s hometown
described the moment as little more than a materialisation of a
prejudice that was everywhere, like the dust, ready to be kicked
up at any moment.120 But not so in the Pounds’ household, which
would be sublet by his parents Homer and Isobel to the Jewish
Hospital Association, as reported publicly in the same paper, as
was Homer’s work with children in the Italian community of Phil-
adelphia. Unlike the situation of his friend Eliot, whatever the root
of what late in life Pound apologised for as his ‘suburban preju-
dice’, it was not inherited from his parents.
What Pound articulated was little different from that which was
then known as ‘American Nativism’ – not, as the term might sug-
gest, a concern for indigenous culture and peoples, but instead a
colonial claim of the early settlers to the mantle of the ‘first race’.
It was a politics of paranoia among so-called ‘Yankee’ Protestant
Americans of the nineteenth century towards the immigration of
German and Irish Catholics and diasporic Jews. But by 1920, it
was clear that Pound thought of himself as usurped twice over:
too Anglo-Saxon for Americans, too American for the Anglo-
Saxons. Despite his belief that he was equally alien everywhere, his
patience was beginning to run out with his Anglo-Saxon roots. He
could sense the clock ticking on his English stay.
//
The Eliots were shivering in their cramped Crawford Mansions

flat that new year. Both were unwell, Eliot from bronchitis, Vivien
from care of him. The burden of the additional Athenaeum business
upon Eliot had become apparent, and it was hard to work in a run-
down household. The writing of weekly articles, too, had taken its
toll, and he told Sydney Schiff that he had come to feel that he
was ‘losing both the energy, and the power of sustained thought
necessary for a longer piece of work’.121
‘We had Abigail Eliot to tea,’ wrote Vivien to Eliot’s mother on

3 January 1920, with more than an ounce of provocation. ‘She is
the first of Tom’s relations I have ever seen – it does seem strange,
after 4½ years.’122 Cousin Abigail was to spend the year in Oxford
and the Eliots were not going to let an opportunity for Vivien’s
familial ingratiation to pass. Vivien had always longed to meet an
Eliot, Tom reminded his m other a few days later: ‘I believe she
thinks every day about you.’123 Eliot told a friend once that he had
been brought to understand that there were ‘Eliots, non-Eliots and
I V | 159
foreigners’.124 And to the family, Vivien was never to be counted
among the Eliots of St Louis.
2635 Locust Street, a roomy, late nineteenth-century two-storey

mansion with decorous eaves and a wooden porch two miles to the
west of the Mississippi River. Hal, Eliot’s father, had not wished
to move from the property he built there, any more than Abigail,
Eliot’s grandmother, had wanted to leave the house her husband,
William Greenleaf, had built 800 feet away at 2660 Washing-
ton Avenue. And so the family stayed on long after friends had
moved west into the wealthier suburbs along the new tramlines.
The family home stood on the fringe of an area of poverty and
deprivation, on a plot that had been racially mixed in Greenleaf ’s
time, in a neighbourhood peppered with saloons, brothels and
heavy drinking – the perfect site, in o ther words, for the foun-
dation of Greenleaf ’s Unitarian church.125 ‘We lived practically in
a slum,’ Eliot told Emily Hale, or at the very least, ‘shabby to a
degree approaching slumminess’, he said in a later reminiscence.126
This was Eliot’s home for the first sixteen years of his life, before
the family moved to the more salubrious Central West End.127 It
was lit by dim gas lamps, and by brighter Welsbach mantles which
emitted an incandescent white light. On cold mornings, a tin bath
was brought out from under Eliot’s bed and filled by the maid
from a kettle lit by the fire.128 There was no alcohol and no smoking
in the house, and sweets were to be shared or not to be had at all.129
‘No one could say that the Eliots are much given to mirth and
whimsicality,’ Eliot told Emily.130 Tace et fac, the family motto: Be
quiet and do.
On a mound in the neighbouring schoolyard of the Mary Insti-
tute stood a large ailanthus tree of heaven, a scrub tree renowned
for growing through concrete dereliction, and for its ‘rank’ odour
(‘The Dry Salvages’).131 A high wall separated the Eliots’ back
garden from the schoolyard, so that he grew up listening to the
disembodied sound of unseen girls at play. There was a door in the
wall and a key to fit it, and when the pupils left at the end of the
school day, Eliot was given the run of the playground by his nurse
Annie Dunn. But the high wall and the drift of children’s voices
instilled in him a sense of isolation from playmates that left him
‘both conceited and timid; independent and helpless’ – the bookish
and withdrawn child that he pictured in his 1929 poem ‘Animula’:
‘The pain of living and the drug of dreams / Curl up the small soul
in the window seat / Behind the Encyclopaedia Britannica.’132 He
felt like an only child, partially mute. ‘I never talked, for who was
there to talk to? And I had no playmates.’133
Eliot’s parents were in their mid-forties at his birth and seemed
to him like ‘ancestors’.134 Hal had never considered himself the high-
flyer that his own father had been. That man, the Rev. William
Greenleaf Eliot, T. S. E liot’s grandfather, was a capable business-
man who seemed destined for entrepreneurial life, had a Unitarian
calling not taken him into the church. Greenleaf ’s achievements
were intimidating: a graduate of Harvard Divinity School, he had
been co-founder and the inaugural director of Washington Uni-
versity in St Louis in 1853, an institution that called itself the Eliot
Seminary in his honour until Greenleaf put a stop to that, believing
that secular scholarship should not be compromised by an associ-
ation with his religious work. (George Washington would instead
provide the eponym.) He founded nurseries, free and public schools,
as well as Smith Academy where a young T. S. Eliot would study,
and the Mary Institute. His mission was not mass literacy, remem-
bered Eliot’s mother, but the excellence of the few, a Platonic ideal
that would influence T. S. Eliot’s own thinking: ‘One best was more
than many good.’135 Although he died before grandson Eliot was
born, grandfather Greenleaf was ‘still the head of the family’, long
after his death, sovereign of the household’s ‘law of Public Service’
that was operant in three areas of religion, community and educa-
tion: the church, the city and the university.136
IV | 161
Hal didn’t follow his father into the church (‘too much pudding
choked the dog’), although his own achievements, hard won, were
not negligible.137 At the booming Hydraulic-Press Brick Company
on the banks of the Mississippi he prospered greatly. As Ameri-
ca’s cities soared skyward so did Hal’s rise through the company:
by 1890, it was producing more pressed bricks than any company
in the world (two hundred million of them across sites in eight
states), and Hal was to be its next president.138 T. S. Eliot retained
shares in the company until 1948.
Hal had described his relationship with Greenleaf as one of ‘rev-
erential awe’, believing his father to be infallible, but within his
own household Hal was held in mixed affection by his children.139
To the elder siblings, he was a man of sensibility and humour, who
took pride in being family chess champion, and who drew faces for
the children on their boiled eggs.140 Scarlet fever in his own child-
hood had left him all but deaf, although a heightened a sense of
smell enabled him to delight them in identifying which daughter
had dropped her handkerchief in the house by scent alone. But to
the youngest child, Tom, devotion to his father was less assured;
their relationship in adulthood would not survive Hal’s decision
to place his property in trust. As in the teachings of the family
church, Eliot the Son felt forsaken by Eliot the Father.141
Charlotte Champe Stearns Eliot was an incomer from Balti-
more, Maryland, who taught across four states before finding work
at St Louis Normal School, where she met Hal, whom she mar-
ried in 1868. She adopted the Greenleaf manner of corrective social
responsibility (one of her ancestors had been a judge in the Salem
witch trials), and was active in social work, and effective too: her
campaigning for young offenders contributed to the passing of the
1901 Probation Act, which professionalised the responsibility of
courts, police and the state towards children under sixteen.142 She
was also a literary woman, author of a pamphlet of poems and a
biography of her father-in-law (‘Written for my Children / “Lest
they Forget”’), and engaged in the elite literary Wednesday Club
of St Louis. She took the same approach to poetry as to religion
– namely that redemption lay in positive thinking and good deeds
(‘Ring out the doubts that like a cloud enfold us, / Ring in the faith
that clearer vision brings!’), although her pronounced anti-Semitism
was a poison that infected both her thinking and her deeds.143 Eliot
would aid her long poem Savonarola: A Dramatic Poem into book
form in 1926, and introduce it besides. It was a long, cumbersome
series of verses that were, as one reader recalled, not bad enough
to be comic but just serious enough to be a bore.144 Charlotte was
admired and feared. Eliot told her that he felt that the two of them
were alike more than they knew: anything good he had made in the
world was something that they had made together, he said.145 But
privately, he admitted that such words were, in his term, a white-
wash.146 He never experienced feelings of closeness towards her, and
confided to Emily Hale that he couldn’t feel ‘united’ with his par-
ents, nor could he ever have confided in them as he did her, ‘remote’
as they were to him. Instead he felt duty, obligation and a sense of
role play: ‘Sometimes one is just oneself, but for the most part one
is being hustled about (as well as such a lazy idle fuddler as myself
can be hustled) by one or another of a crowd of shadows.’147
Thomas Stearns was Charlotte’s seventh child; she was forty-
three. His upbringing was entrusted to Annie Dunn, a nursemaid
of Irish parents from Co. Cork, who heated the bath water for
Eliot each morning, and whose affectionate presence in the house
warmed the space in the young boy’s life that his m other left
vacant. It was Annie, said Eliot later, who was his earliest influ-
ence, and the household figure to whom he was greatly attached.148
She took him to school, and sometimes, at prayer times, to the
small Catholic Church of Immaculate Conception on the corner
of Jefferson Avenue and Locust Street (then Lucas Place), where
he would delight in the colourful statues, the bright paper flowers
and glowing lights, and swing on the miniature gates that latched
IV | 163
to the end of the pews.149 It was with Annie that he had his first
conversations about the presence of God.150 To a young boy of six
and seven, her religion was the vivid entertainment that his fami-
ly’s Unitarianism was not. ‘I was devoted to her,’151 he recalled, and
he liked to consider that he gave her the kind of run-around that
children do (‘Was ever a Nurse so put about!’, he wrote in a squib
of 1937).152 It was with Annie that Eliot saw in a children’s picture
book images of fellow infants naked; there was something wrong
with each of them, he told her: they weren’t wearing trusses like
the one he wore to support a childhood hernia.
Annie was required company when the young Eliot sum-
mered with the family at Gloucester, Massachusetts, on two acres
acquired by his father in 1890, and built upon a few years later: a
large, sturdy clapboard house known as The Downs, flanked on
three sides by a pillared porch, nestled between the granite out-
crops of the New England shoreline, Eastern Point. Every year,
for fourteen years, the journey east was made in some style: in a
gaslit Pullman carriage, with upper and lower sleeping berths and
a modest drawing room.153 High waters on the Mississippi would
partly re-route the journey upriver into Illinois, but at all other
times it was a modern crossing unrecognisable to the one made
in reverse by Greenleaf fifty years before. It was at Eastern Point
that Eliot learned to sail, accompanied by an instructor, named
Skipper, and, for the most part, by Annie and his mother, to pre-
serve the young boy from too much sunshine on warm days and
too much chill on cold ones.154 And it was here that he learned to
listen in on what he came to describe as ‘true narratives’: the fish-
ermen’s tales overheard on the harbour, stories like poems that
could ‘be learnt by word of mouth from the men between trips’,
he remembered, ‘as they lounged at the corner of Main Street
and Duncan Street in Gloucester’.155
//
A ‘good stiff punch’. That’s what London’s literary elite had taken
to its midriff, or so Pound told his father of an article that appeared
in French on New Year’s Day 1920.156 L’Art libre, a journal edited in
Brussels by the young pacifist Paul Colin, had proclaimed a new
path for Europe: antimilitarism over warmongering, humanity
over nationhood, and, above all, a social commitment to the arts. It
saw Belgium as ‘a crossroads of the Occident’, a place where inter-
national currents could meet,157 and this was a territory that suited
Pound down to the ground. ‘L’Art seems glad to get my stuff, and
I like the way they have translated the first article.’158 Pound told
his continental readers that the British literary establishment had
grown old and insular, guarding its narrow island from European
influence, while the turrets of academia repelled genuine discourse
and criticism. Three writers almost alone were worth the trouble of
continental readers, and he rehearsed the names that had become
almost a mantra: James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis and the ‘revo-
lutionary’ T. S. Eliot. Commending such writers had made him
enemies in London, he said, and left him precious little time for
his own writing, though taken as a quartet they constituted what
Pound called ‘the “opposition”’: those brave enough to go without
the favour of ‘the episcopate of the corpses of official English lit-
erature’.159 The remainder was mediocrity, and mediocrity, lest we
underestimate it, was a destructive force that reduces everything to
its own, devastating level.
But no one seemed to be listening to Pound any more. By Feb-
ruary, Pound shared with readers of Much Ado magazine in St
Louis that he now felt ‘frozen out of everything’.160 F. S. Flint, once
a collaborator on Imagisme, had been among the first of his old
allies to turn on him, in comments that now seemed prescient. ‘The
truth is’, he had written in 1917 to Harriet Shaw Weaver, ‘we are all
tired of Mr Pound. His work has deteriorated from book to book;
his manners have become more and more offensive; and we wish
he would go back to America.’ Flint dubbed Pound ‘the sinister
IV | 165
Charlie Chaplin’ of his generation. ‘Those of us who were once
associated with him are so no longer, for very good reasons, [and]
detest him with the heartiest of loathings.’161
At the Richmond home of the Hogarth Press, Virginia and Leon-

ard Woolf were barely over their winter illness before they resumed
their busy programme of literary dinner parties. Among their new
year guests was one John Collings Squire esquire and his wife, the
novelist E. H. Anstruther (Eileen Harriet). Renowned drinkers
(Squire was said to be responsible for the quip ‘I am not so think as
you drunk I am’), the Squires surprised the normally unshockable
Woolfs by a volume of intake which left Mrs Squire slouched in
the armchair (‘a jelly fish’, noted Virginia) ‘like some natural func-
tion, performing automatically’.162 Squire himself did little better,
and spoke of patriotism in a way that made his hosts mildly nau-
seous. But on literature at least he was intelligible: he intended to
position his new London Mercury in direct opposition to the hard
sceptical, elite tone of The Athenaeum, which was, he told Virginia,
a frost of death for all creative activity. And he was to be an unyield-
ing champion of the Georgians, hostile to the ‘disgusting insects’
who were the moderns, ‘scuttling about’ in all their forms.163
The London Mercury had been launched under Squire’s edi-
torship as a monthly in the weeks before the closure of Harriet
Weaver’s Egoist. His tenure would last for fifteen influential years,
and he published work by Robert Frost, W. B. Yeats, Siegfried Sas-
soon and Katherine Mansfield along the way. As literary editor of
the New Statesman in 1917, Squire had regarded himself as a Fabi-
an; he had lost his deposit in the 1918 general election as a Labour
Party candidate for the true-blue seat of Cambridge University (a
Manx cat would have stood a better chance, mused Woolf ).164 But
with his ascent to the new Mercury (or Murkury, as Pound referred
to it) his political views moved to the right. By the 1930s, he had
– as had Pound and James Strachey Barnes – met with Benito
Mussolini, and would become an associate of Oswald Mosley as a
founder of the notorious January Club of British fascists.165 By then
he had long been regarded as an odious figure in literary circles
– ‘fat, & consequential’ said Woolf by 1924 –tending to a thief-
dom of Georgian antiquity that was sentimental, nationalistic and,
worse still, ubiquitous.166 Through his editorial and critical work
he curated a garden for British p oetry of such tranquil abundancy
that it became known as the ‘Squirearchy’. But it was as a poet that
Squire was anthologised in the Poetry Bookshop’s hugely popular
Georgian Poetry series. ‘Now very quietly, and rather mournfully’
his poem ‘The House’ had opened his selection in 1918, with six
words that might have stood as an epithet for Georgian poetry
itself, only for his poem to collapse into the kind of pale, iambic
haze that had given Georgianism such a poor name: ‘In clouds
of hyacinth the sun retires,’ and many thought his p oetry should
go the same way. ‘Ridiculous’, Virginia Woolf said tersely; ‘plain
167
stupidity’, Eliot thought, and he hoped to see the Mercury with

its ‘small clique of bad writers’ fail.168 The failure of the Georgians,
said Eliot, was their self-sufficiency – they lacked the benefit of
the pollination of o ther languages and therefore lacked a lineage –
on which matter Eliot was unusually blunt: the word he used was
‘inbred’.169 Never to be outdone when it came to bluntness, Pound
went one further: Georgians = dry dung; London Mercury = wet
dung, he told William Carlos Williams in 1920.170
Named after the inaugural and highly popular 1911/12 anthology
of that name, ‘Georgian poetry’ was a form that trusted in naivety,
that affected simplicity and that conjured innocence. It was a work
that was plainer than the ornate Victoriana before it, and could in
the right hands be a discerning portrait of the human experience
in the natural world. But many of its most able proponents had
died in the war, and the hands that now carried it well were few.
As a form, it seemed immature when set against the precision of
the Imagists, and feeble-minded in the face of the horrors of war.
IV | 167
Robert Graves gave a demeaning list of its concerns: ‘Nature and
love and leisure and old age and childhood and animals and sleep
and other uncontroversial subjects.’171 The Georgians, said Richard
Aldington, were ‘in love with littleness’; it was, Ford Madox Ford
summarised, the poetry of safety.172
But Squire would be a cannier opponent than Eliot and Pound
supposed, for Eliot had returned from France in 1919 to find a
letter inviting him to become a contributor to the Mercury. Eliot,
who had by then publicly denounced Squire, replied diplomatically
that he wasn’t sure that he had room to take on another periodical
and that he was trying to protect his time for a book; but he would
be happy to talk about the possibility.173 Eliot never wrote for the
new Mercury, and nor would Pound, to whom Squire was ‘a time-
server’, a booster of ‘borrowed produce’ and, best of all, ‘a plague of
potato bugs’.174
If the London Mercury took a divisive approach to the modernising

and Georgian streams of writing, a second newcomer to the pub-
lishing scene attempted an ambitious union between the strands.
The Dial had begun its print life in 1840, and was in a tired state
when Scofield Thayer, a friend of E liot’s from Milton Academy,
Massachusetts, became its editor in the summer of 1918, while
James Sibley Watson took up the journal’s presidency. Thayer and
Watson wanted their publication to be eclectic, mixing both the
modernising and the Mercurian writers: they hoped to be nonde-
nominational. And they had something appealing to both camps:
money – they were wealthy men from wealthy families who would
privately subsidise the journal to the tune of almost $70,000, from
a circulation of fewer than ten thousand copies. Eliot had been
delighted to offer himself as a transatlantic correspondent at the
time: ‘Studies in European literature, by one on the SPOT! Reflec-
tions on American literature, by one NOT on the spot’.175 The
result, beginning in 1921, would be a column in the form of a ‘Lon-
don Letter’ for US readers. And Pound would help too, provided
that it didn’t offer Squire ‘an attempt to keep the aged corpses in
evidence’.176
The new Dial was relaunched from 152 West 13th Street in
Greenwich Village, New York, in January 1920, with something
that neither the London Mercury nor The Athenaeum could match:
for Scofield Thayer was not only a literary editor but also a collec-
tor of the visual arts, and he wanted his new journal to be a gallery
in which to exhibit all that was good in print, on canvas and in
other media. The January 1920 issue featured the work of sculptor
Gaston Lachaise and painters Charles Demuth and Boardman
Robinson, and would soon expand its coverage: Paul Cézanne
that spring, Constantin Brâncuși, Marc Chagall, Henri Matisse
and Pablo Picasso to follow. Critical prose came from Walter
Pach and Arthur Symons, while emerging and established poets
were granted space in equal measure: Evelyn Scott and Edna St
Vincent Millay had just one collection between them, but their
poems appeared alongside Pulitzer prize-winners Carl Sandburg
and Edwin Arlington Robinson. But of all the introductions
made in that January edition, none would make a more pro-
found impact than the seven poems and four line drawings by an
unknown twenty-five-year-old called E. E. Cummings, includ-
ing one of the poems that would make him famous for his wry
intelligence and typographic inventiveness, his spoofed homage
to the late pioneer-showman, Buffalo Bill.177 Cummings would
publish a dozen poems with The Dial before the summer was
out, and would do so in the company of Marianne Moore, Hart
Crane, Ezra Pound, AE, Djuna Barnes; he typified the vanguard
of a new style that seemed wholly at odds with the Squirearchy
in London. Even so, there were future contributors who were
not impressed: Eliot and Pound for two, who didn’t hide their
disappointment, each man summarising the production in the
same word, dull.178 And it was true that for all its commitment
IV | 169
to the visual and poetic arts the issue was choked by less than
interesting prose. But that balance was to change, and, despite its
grumblers, The Dial had taken a first step to become among the
most modernising journals of the era.
//
Work at the bank had become ever more demanding. Eliot had
now been put in charge of settling all of the pre-war debts between
Germany and Lloyds at a salary of £500 and with the help of vari-
ous assistants.179 It was important work, full of legal tangles, he told
his mother, but heavy going, too, in its efforts to implement what
he now quite openly called ‘that appalling document the Peace
Treaty’.180 Strains outside the bank were also showing. With not
one but two collections of poems imminent with the Ovid Press
in London and Knopf in New York, Eliot was eyeing the literary
community with caution. Getting noticed in print was no small
matter. In London, Eliot knew, the debutant writer would always
attract attention (‘while he is unknown he has no enemies’), but an
established writer needed the allegiance of the newspapers in order
to remain visible. Pound and Lewis were now the only writers in
London worth promoting, he believed: but Pound had not been
able to maintain even the most basic literary alliances. His lack of
tact had done him great harm, admitted Eliot: ‘He is becoming
forgotten,’ he said. ‘I am worried as to what is to become of him.’181
Pound had been photographed in shirt sleeves and necktie by

Malcolm Arbuthnot for Vanity Fair that new year, as one of the
‘Masters of English Prose Style’.182 He had a look of a hunter about
him, arms folded, watching for his moment, or was that the look of
a man who was now the hunted? 1919 had witnessed the savaging
of Pound the translator, and the dismissal of Pound the editor; the
new year began with the razing of his critical prose. Alfred Knopf ’s
edition of Pavannes and Divisions had been written off by the New
Republic as ‘a carefully enshrined series of trivialities, translations,
annotated exits, beauty submerged in banalities, criticisms smoth-
ered in a mixture of snobbery and bad temper’.183 Even supporters
such as Conrad Aiken had dismissed it as ‘without value’. (‘Did
he always write so badly?’) It had seemed almost a relief when
the reviews began to peter out.184 But Harriet Monroe’s Poetry, the
slayer of ‘Sextus’, had not yet had its say. Now, in January 1920, a
year and a half after publication, it savaged the book. Pound had
lost any common touch he once had, the reviewer wrote; he had
estranged himself from his readership to the point of provoking
irritation, and the review poured scorn on his ‘fierce little contempt
against America’, and mocked him accordingly: ‘Look! he’s throw-
ing pebbles at our skyscrapers.’185
Nor would there be shelter for his poetry. In January the London
Observer rounded on Quia Pauper Amavi with excoriating force. The
publication showed Pound at his ‘abominable worst’, not least in
its reprinting of the three 1917 Cantos, ‘a ragbag without synthesis’.
The review contained a string of epithets closer to libel than literary
criticism: ineptitude, vulgarity, incompetence, tedium, cocksureness,
perversity, the tatters of second-hand clothes – the ‘queer compost’
that made up the author’s personality. ‘Mr Pound is not, never has
been and almost, I might hazard, never will be, a poet.’186
The hazarding ‘I’ was that of Robert Nichols, a poet younger in
years than Ezra Pound but more old-fashioned in taste, who had
once shared a publishing house, Elkin Mathews, with his antago-
nist. Nichols had been a combatant in the trenches, who had signed
off the preface of his 1918 selection of war poems, The Assault,
declaratively from ‘The Western Front, January, 1918’. Strangely,
the vocabulary of Nichols’s poems came from preserved jars r ather
than from the battlefield of which he had actual experience: mist
‘bedews’ a soldier’s tunic, clouds are ‘melancholy’, the gulls below
them ‘reiterant’.187 In the diplomatic phrasing of T. Sturge Moore,
IV | 171
his poems ‘cannot be said to push beyond appearances’.188 Even so,
Chatto & Windus in London and Charles Dutton in New York
would take up and reprint the work with enthusiasm, while Edward
Marsh would include it in the Poetry Bookshop’s anthology Geor-
gian Poetry. At the time that Nichols was reviewing Pound’s Quia
Pauper Amavi with its challenging Latin title, the title page of his
own most recent book seemed to belong to a Church fete: Invoca-
tion and Peace Celebration, Hymn for the British Peoples, Year of Our
Lord Jesus Christ 1919. That book had opened with a celebratory
couplet that seemed to strike an unintended comic note: ‘A hymn,
a hymn for these our joys! / Peace is here: where is Alfred Noyes?’189
(Princeton University was the answer, where Noyes taught Eng-
lish literature and from where he had composed patriotic English
homilies for combatants at the Front.)
Nichols’s review was incendiary and drew an explosive reac-
tion. Wyndham Lewis called out the Observer for its ‘suffocating
and malignant rubbish’, explaining in no uncertain terms that it
was part of the same blind conservativism that Pound and his
circle had to break through daily simply to find an imaginative
space.190 And nor did Pound sit on his hands, either. He wrote to
the paper that Nichols had failed to understand the paradox of
his Propertius: ‘Are we to suppose that he was never ironical,’ he
questioned, and, turning to Nichols himself, said ‘that he was as
dull and humourless as the stock contributors to Mr Marsh’s series
of anthologies’.191
Nichols used a right of reply to rebuff what he called this
‘Poundian nonsense’, and repeated that what Pound displayed was
‘ignorance, incompetence, and vulgarity’; but he offered nothing
new of substance.192
Tempers were running high, and no one was emerging well from
the encounter. The retort by Pound and by Lewis at least may have
served to caution others, as there followed only one other caustic
review, by John Gould Fletcher, a friend and fellow traveller in
Imagism who might have been a bankable supporter; yet he wrote
in Harold Monro’s Chapbook that the poems ‘are almost valueless’.193
But a truce on the publication of bad reviews is not the same as
receiving a good review, and support remained desperately thin on
the ground. Even friends weren’t entirely sure how to help. Eliot’s
review in The Athenaeum had served only to cause a quarrel with
Pound, and now Richard Aldington, that most loyal of friends,
could be seen trying to bring every benefit of doubt to a review for
Poetry: ‘The writing is so elliptic, the thought so carefully hidden,
that I cannot imagine what the poem is about,’ he puzzled, adding
limply, ‘but it has delightful lines’.194 Only May Sinclair was une-
quivocal in support. It was true that Pound had let off some squibs,
she shrugged, and that one or two had hit respected persons in the
eye. ‘But in this immense and hospitable universe there is room,
not only for magic in delight and terror, but for the clear hardness,
the civilised polished beauty, the Augustan irony of Ezra Pound.’195
For Augustan irony read Propertius: a seemingly rare moment of
critical generosity. But there was surely now no breathing life back
into the failing body of Sextus Propertius, and there was surely
now no way back for Pound.
Ezra Pound brought ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’ to a conclusion

with five new poems in January. Like a variation on an aria, the
pieces of the second part revisited the subject of the first, reach-
ing back into the December poems for material and even drawing
quotation from them. But these new lines were sharper than their
predecessors, wiser, weathered in the skin, scolding of the febrile
poet of Part I, a figure of ‘no guts, balls, viscera’, as Pound told Basil
Bunting.196 They turned a knife in the heart of the beleaguered H.
S. Mauberley, belittling his craft and condemning his failure to
make a memorable self-portrait – ‘Not the full smile, / His art, but
an art / In profile’. Intervention passes, posterity passes, a life of
love slips by as the artist’s assurance crumbles into ‘non-esteem’,
IV | 173
and all roads lead to one destination: ‘his final / Exclusion from
the world of letters’. Mauberley in this final section drifts almost
unnoted towards annihilation, and is left to construct his own epi-
taph: ‘I was / And I no more exist; / Here drifted / An hedonist’. It
was not so much a culmination as a dissipation: of energy and art,
of hope. Mauberley’s is a life not grasped, of love unconsummated;
a shadow of the existence that his Roman or Provençal ancestors
lived. Pale and unmissed, Mauberley slips off the face of a world
he barely touched.197
‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’ had been Pound’s most sustained
experiment in a quatrain form that was now simply too rigid to
contain the volume of history that Pound poured into it. ‘In verse
one can take any damn constant one likes, one can alliterate, or
assone, or rhyme, or quant, or smack,’ wrote Pound to Ford Madox
Ford that year, ‘only one MUST leave the o ther elements irregu-
lar.’198 ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’ achieved the strength and energy
of such a balance more perfectly than Pound would ever be able to
repeat. ‘Thing is to cut a shape in time,’ he said later of the poem:
which it was, after a fashion.199 But fashions can be cruel, and the
poem would not sustain through time in the way that E liot’s work
would, even though his friend would champion it. In March, Eliot
told John Quinn of Pound: ‘He has just finished a new long poem
which I think has some very good things in it.’200 But Pound knew
where the limitations lay: thin, was how he described it to Thomas
Hardy, and although W. B. Yeats had approved ‘rather vigorously
of parts of Mauberley’, it had only been parts: the first five, in fact,
but not the remaining thirteen.201 For years he had pursued the
‘French’ quatrains, and encouraged Eliot to do the same, but never
again would he return to them. The experiment of Gautier was
over. It was, Pound knew, a failure: a good failure, in Mauberley’s
words ‘the best, among them’, but a failure nonetheless.
When Eliot called the poem ‘the last stage of importance before
The Cantos’, he didn’t in fact say as much as he might, for it was the
last stage of any kind before The Cantos, the last landmark before
the vast ocean. But when he added in 1928 that it was ‘much the
finest poem’ of Pound’s career to date, and that it was ‘a great poem’,
he undoubtedly meant it. It was the high-water mark of Pound’s
craft to date, the result of hard work to effect great simplicity, a
document of an epoch; ‘It is, in the best sense of Arnold’s worn
phrase, a “criticism of life”.’202
‘Mauberley’ was to have brought ‘shock troops’. It had targets in
sight, but it left them standing. What the poem saw collapse, in the
end, was a social bond, a form of trust, if not a wishful dream: that
a poet could exist in our society who would be talented enough to
define the age in an age intelligent enough to listen. ‘Humanity is
malleable mud,’ Pound would write of the poem in 1922, ‘and the
arts set the moulds it is later cast into.’203 If so, then not this art, and
not this mould. For ‘Mauberley’ would mark more than just the
end of an engagement with literary form: it marked, also, for Ezra
Pound, the end of an idea of England: an idea that literature could
be a force of change, an idea of poetry as an unignorable con-
science, an idea of a civilising culture. And in 1926, he underscored
what his friends in 1920 could already sense when he confirmed,
‘The sequence is so distinctly a farewell to London.’204
‘Meliora speramus’, Pound would say with resignation looking
back from the summer of 1922: we hope for better things. By then
‘Mauberley’, like ‘Propertius’, had been reprinted detrimentally in
extracted parts – ‘mutilations’, he called such extracts, and he had
learned a lesson. When the moment came, he wouldn’t permit the
same mistake to be made for The Waste Land: no, he would howl to
high heaven to ensure that was printed whole; he would say, ‘Drag-
ging my own corpse by the heels to arouse the blasted spectators.’205
That moment would be seized with the kind of literary selflessness
that had characterised Pound’s entire career; with it, he would re-
found his belief in humanity’s collective advancement through the
aiding of another writer’s work. ‘Eliot’s Waste Land is I think the
IV | 175
justification of the “movement”, of our modern experiment, since
1900,’ he would write to a former professor in July 1922. ‘It shd. be
published this year.’206
V.
‘I congratulate you on an admirable book,’ Eliot told John Rodker,

on 1 February.1 Eliot’s Ara Vos Prec had been printed on 10 Decem-
ber 1919 in a run of 264 artisan c opies on handmade paper from
the John Whatman mill in Maidstone, Kent: thirty igned by
the author, the remainder umbered but for ten out-of-sequence
copies destined for review. Every care had been taken with mater
ials. Edward Wadsworth, friend and collaborator with Wyndham
Lewis, provided the colophon and the ornamented initials that
opened each poem with the flourish of a five-line drop. His work,
together with Rodker’s typesetting, was praised in the Observer
as ‘one of the most beautiful productions of the modern press’.2
But closer inspection revealed a different story. The title page was
poorly letter-spaced; the contents page departed from the contents
in titles, spelling and running order; page numbers moved between
fore-margin and gutter or were absent without any pattern; and
the poems themselves moved between the head margin and the
baseline vertically as though the forme had broken loose in the
chase. Most disabling of all, the production was poorly inked by
Rodker on worn Caslon type that made some letters partly illegi-
ble.3 Despite his initial enthusiasm, Eliot would come to agree that
the volume had been badly printed.
But the most startling error of all was not of Rodker’s making,
but Eliot’s, and it lay in full view on the title page. ‘Vos’ had been
spelled as ‘Vus’ after Eliot reproduced an error in the edition that
he was working from. ‘I don’t know Provençal,’ he confessed, ‘and
I was quoting from an Italian edition of Dante the editor of which
177
apparently did not know Provençal either.’4 It was a title taken from
what he called ‘the superb verses of Arnaut Daniel in his Provençal
tongue’ – or, more accurately, from a rendering of Arnaut Daniel by
Dante in the Purgatario:
‘Ara vos prec, per aquella valor

que vos guida al som de l’escalina,
sovegna vos a temps de ma dolor.’
Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina. 5
Ara now, vos you, prec pray. When Eliot wrote that it was a
title ‘unintelligible to most people’,6 he may have included some
translators, who have rarely agreed upon a phrasing. Therefore I do
implore you; and I pray you; and To you we pray; and Now I beg you.7
Thomas Okey’s Temple Classics was the translation of the day:
‘Now I pray you, by that Goodness which guideth you to the sum-
mit of the stairway.’8 But Eliot himself, in a 1929 book on Dante,
would make a translation of his own:
‘And so I pray you, by that Virtue which leads you to the topmost of
the stair – be mindful in due time of my pain.’ Then dived he back
into that fire which refines them.9
Eliot had made that topmost moment of the stair his own. The
Cathars, Périgueux, the wave pattern at Excideuil: how the sum-
mer of 1919 must have returned to him when he retrieved that final
line of Dante’s diving back into the fire.
‘It would seem that there is no such word as Vus in that language,’
Eliot wrote dejectedly of his mistake.10 After all the anticipation of
a first full collection, he was left to correct each title by hand. He
inscribed the fifth of his personal copies for his brother Henry;
the third for Emily Hale. But the first of them was reserved for
his wife, and he inscribed it stiffly on the front endpaper, ‘Vivien
Haigh Eliot / February 1920 / from her husband / T. S. Eliot’.11
That formality and lack of ease may have been compounded by
a further typo that had crept into the epigraph of the already
charged ‘Sweeney Among the Nightingales’, where the ‘adulterate
wrong’ of the Hogarth Poems 1919 had been mis-set as ‘adulterous
wrong’: a humiliating correction to make by hand in Vivien’s copy,
but make it he did. It was after that that Eliot would excise the line
from the epigraph for ever.
At last, he had what was by any standards a full-length col-
lection: twenty-four poems across fifty-six pages, with a running
order that placed the newest pieces first, then those from the Hog-
arth Poems (1919) and finally those from Prufrock: ‘I always prefer
people to like best what I have written most recently, & in that
order backwards.’12 Mis-spelled or otherwise, the title had partly
served its purpose to be ‘non-committal about the newness of the
contents’, for a closer inspection would reveal it to be little more
than a gathering of Prufrock and Hogarth, where all but six of
the pieces had been published; of the remainder, four had already
appeared in journals, and only two were unpublished.13 It was just
such a familiarity with existing material that would contribute to
the sense of fatigue with which the poems were to be received, for
although the reviews that were more numerous than for his Hog-
arth Poems (1919), they were barely more generous.
‘What are we to make of him?’ came the perplexed question
from John Middleton Murry in The Athenaeum, for which he had
reviewed all year: ‘It seems that he is like the chameleon who
changes colour infinitely, and every change is protective.’14 The
Times continued where its despair for the Hogarth edition left
off: here was a p
oetry that was tired and bewildered, it announced,
a grubby verse of ‘endlessly recurring squalor’ by an author ‘fed
up’ with life – and if fed up, it posited, then ‘why write verse
about it; why not commit suicide?’15 (Eliot could at least now join
Pound in their critical invitations to self-harm.) The weary tone
of reception was nowhere better expressed than in the Observer:
‘The irony of things-as-they-are haunts the poet as it haunted his
V | 179
forerunner Laforgue,’ it reported, ‘and levies board-wages upon
all his emotions.’16
There were better reviews to come, but they were still a year
away, and for the moment the critical response was precisely the
disheartening one that Eliot had predicted. ‘Here I am considered
by the ordinary Newspaper critic as a Wit or satirist,’ he confided
in his brother Henry in February, ‘and in America I suppose I shall
be thought merely disgusting.’17
Alfred Knopf ’s edition, Poems, was released in New York two weeks
after Ara Vos Prec in London, at a price of $1.25. Its print run is
unknown, but as trade pressings for p oetry typically ran in batches
of five hundred copies it would have been by any measure by far the
most numerous of E liot’s printings. Unlike the Ovid Press edition,
Knopf had given the title page some care, and this time the con-
tents page married the contents, even if the cheap trade binding
reminded one reviewer of an ugly schoolbook.18 There were small
changes from the London edition: Prufrock’s dedication to Jean
Verdenal, absent from Ara Vos Prec, was restored; and while the
Knopf edition repeated the principle of placing the recent poems
first, Eliot had given a new attention to the texts and revised six of
the poems, as well as the order in which they appeared.19
But there was one significant difference between the London and
New York books that was not about production or revision. ‘Ode’,
which had appeared in Ara Vos Prec, was certain to upset his m other
with its rendering of menstruation and the marital bed. He had con-
sidered sending her a copy of the London book with the page torn
out, suggesting that there had been a printer’s error; his solution, in
the end, was not to mention the Ovid edition at all, but to replace the
poem in Knopf ’s edition with Prufrock’s ‘Hysteria’. With that he lent
his energies to other worries: ‘Do you think that “Sweeney Erect” will
shock her?’20 he asked his brother Henry, and said that he was think-
ing continually of his wish to see her. Might she come to England in
the summer, he wondered; might she finally meet Vivien? The desire
to release such long-standing pain was almost overwhelming. ‘Unless
I can really see her again I shall never be happy.’
Cipher. That was the word Henry had used to describe the Knopf
Poems to his m other – the book was written in cipher. It contained
nothing sensual, wrote Henry, only the occasional expression of
what he described to their mother as ‘a horror of sensuality’.21 But
there was another word that came to define not only the Knopf
edition, but all of E liot’s publishing to date. It was a word that a
review of 1916 had warned would be the ‘pitfall’ of all new p oetry
– a word that had come up in two reviews of Eliot in 1919 already,
but which from the early months of 1920 would become persis-
tent.22 ‘Clever’ (Athenaeum, February); ‘cleverness’ (Times, April);
‘very, very clever’ (Oakland Tribune, April); ‘extraordinarily clever’
(Freeman, June).23 In fact the word was so variously deployed that
in 1926, one critic decided to call time on it. ‘Over and over again’,
Louise Morgan observed in Outlook magazine, the critics had
repeated the charge that he was ‘merely clever, very very clever’, all
brain and no heart; but, she wrote, this was to misunderstand the
profound emotional quality of the work in this most misunder-
stood poet.24 Even so, one critic in the 1930s would look back with
hindsight on the time as ‘the “clever” period’ in E liot’s poems; there
seemed to be no getting away from it. 25
Now it was the turn of the American critics to be unimpressed.

The Prufrock poems were worth the volume, wrote the New York
Evening Post, in May, but the newer poems revealed an amateur
ironist, a scholar rather than a maker.26 The Boston Evening Tran-
script likened the experience of reading the poems to ‘a room of
foul air’, stale with exotic perfume and the memory of lust.27 Poet-
ry magazine in Chicago had been home to ‘The Love Song of J.
Alfred Prufrock’ and its view would surely matter. It wrote in June
that the poems were in a class of their own, but the compliment
was backhanded: their distinction was to be found in a labour
V | 181
of mystifying titles, coy complexities, line-consuming words and
whimsical pathos. Readers were told that they would benefit from
a dictionary, an encyclopedia and a martyr’s spirit.28
Not that condemnation was entirely unanimous: one young
writer, whom Eliot would one day publish at Faber & Faber, felt
differently. E. E. Cummings was serving in the US ambulance
corps in 1917 when he was arrested and imprisoned on suspicion
of espionage (he had declined an opportunity to say that he hated
Germans); his experiences of prison were reworked as an autobi-
ographical novel, The Enormous Room, in 1922. But in 1920, he was
still three years away from his debut collection of poems, though a
rising star of Scofield Thayer and Sibley Watson’s new Dial. But he
was already starting out as a critic with an unusual turn of phrase.
‘Not any of Poems’ fifty-one pages fails to impress us with an over-
whelming sense of technique,’ he wrote. His reading of Eliot was
first rate, even if the heightened language he deployed sometimes
obscured the quality of his insight (he praised the volume as an
‘uncorpulent collection of instupidities’).29 He wrote of a vocab-
ulary that was almost brutally tuned to attain distinctness: that well
described the hard-working ease for which Eliot was aiming. He
wrote of an extraordinarily tight orchestration of the shapes of sound:
that, too, well identified the intense sonic pressure under which
the poems were operating. And he wrote of their cadence in his
best phrase of all: the delicate and careful murderings of established
tempos by oral rhythms; in other words, a spoken cadence weaving
across the traditional rhythms of verse. Unexpectedly, Cummings
had brilliantly illuminated the formal skill that lay beneath these
supposedly post-free-verse poems.
//
Between Eliot and Quinn, an invitation had been wrung from

Scofield Thayer for Pound to serve as correspondent for the revived
Dial. ‘I don’t suppose we can ever be precisely your “spiritual
home”,’30 Thayer admitted to Pound, but would he be willing to
set aside some time to identify new materials for the journal at an
annual salary of $750 (£200)? Pound would. ‘I have no objection
to being your foreign editor or English agent, or whatever it is
to be termed, IF we can start on some sort of basis that will not
lead to constant misunderstandings.’31 Namely: realism about the
content he would supply. America was not a free country, he wrote,
and it made no sense for him to provide materials such as Ulyss-
es that would only lead to the journal’s suppression. Lewis would
be writing very little, Hardy even less, while D. H. Lawrence was
practically out of reach in Italy; Conrad was a question of price,
Beerbohm, price, George Moore, price, price, price. Who did that
leave? Yeats, essentially, but he would keep Thayer supplied with
Yeats ‘as fast as it is written’.32 And then of course there would be
Eliot and himself, ‘in homeopathic (very) doses’.33 In no time at
all the new Dial would be a ‘live periodical’.34 And so too might
The Athenaeum, for which, unexpectedly, Pound had just been
employed as the drama critic.35 After losing his editorial position at
Poetry, the Little Review and The Egoist, Pound was suddenly back
in the thick of it. It seemed like a lifeline. And the person he had to
thank for his positions with The Dial and The Athenaeum was Eliot.
//
The loss of Alsace-Lorraine in the west to France, of Northern

Schleswig in Jutland to Denmark, and the ceding of swathes of
East Prussia and Silesia to Poland and Czechoslovakia had had
a devasting impact on the economy, the morale and the identity
of Germany. Tens of thousands of square miles had been stripped
away – entire rivers with it – one tenth of all the land mass, and
more than two million people. To the north, the port of Danzig,
98 per cent German, was now a Free City to which the new Polish
V | 183
Republic had rights of access. To the south, Sudeten Germans
didn’t think of themselves as Czechs and resisted their incorpora-
tion in a state dominated by Slavs. As tensions grew, an effort was
made to overthrow the Weimar government, led by the nation-
alist civil servant Wolfgang Kapp and Walther von Lüttwitz, the
highest-ranking general in the German army. On 13 March, the
elected government went into hiding, from where it called on the
people to mobilise in the form of a general strike that brought the
coup to its knees. Among the armed supporters of the coup had
been the II Marine Brigade of Hermann Ehrhardt; the uprising
had been the first time the brigade’s new insignia had been seen in
public. Two bent crosses of chiral clockwise symmetry. A swastika.
//
At the Hogarth Press in Richmond, Virginia Woolf was ‘half blind’

with corrections. She had finished setting a 445-line poem that had
been with her since the previous summer, and on 2–3 March 1920,
she and Leonard ran off 175 copies on the basement hand press; six
weeks later they were bound.36 But the production hadn’t gone well
(the wrong year was printed on the title page), and by late April
Virginia was slaving over amendments to the finished c opies that
had to be inked by hand.37 It was the first p oetry publication by a
talented young novelist called Hope Mirrlees; the work was Paris:
A Poem, written in that city in the spring of 1919.
Within days of it rolling off the Hogarth Press, The Times had
dismissed it as ‘a futurist trick’, spluttering and incoherent down to
its title (‘it is certainly not a “Poem”’).38 It was almost possible to
forgive the reviewer their partial blindness – almost. It was a work
that lacked a recognisable form, that traded the security of metre
for a syncopated style, that failed to establish a lasting cadence,
that employed rhyme haphazardly; and yet there was something
about its wide-eyed peregrination through a night and day in Paris
that was worthy of Baudelaire’s flâneur. Only this time, for once, it
was not the gaze of a man but a flâneuse, and this time, for once, it
offered a woman’s tapestry of impressions; and if that wasn’t reason
enough to engage with it then it was, in addition, and without
doubt, a new note in English polyphony. Even a cursory glance by
the Times reviewer across the English Channel would have crys-
tallised its position as a bridge between new French literature and
the modernising spirit in English p oetry, as the reviewer of The
Athenaeum noted two weeks later in aligning the poem with ‘the
idiom of the younger French poets’ in its learning, wit, skill and
accomplishment.39 Therein, undoubtedly, lay a literary debt, for
while Mirrlees was writing her own poem in Paris, she had become
aware of the recent publication of Jean Cocteau’s Le Cap de Bonne-
Espérance – an extended fragmentary elegy to his friend the aviator
and war hero Roland Garros – that might also have been read in
French by Eliot, and was most certainly read by Pound, who would
become a friend of its author and help it into translation for the
Little Review in 1921.40 Whatever the sequence of reading, Mirr-
lees, Cocteau, Eliot and Pound were at that moment responding to
the forces around them in ways that bore common traits. They were
reading the same journals, attending the same galleries, watching
the same operas, meeting the same composers, and corresponding
with the same creative artists. It would not be a surprise if, under
such conditions, their works should bear what Eliot had recently
called ‘family features’.41
Paris: A Poem was a stablemate in the small Hogarth list only a
year after Eliot’s own Poems; he may have been aware of the book
from the notice in The Athenaeum if he had missed The Times.42 But
such was the limitation on print run and distribution that Eliot
would not have been likely to receive a courtesy copy or to have
seen it in any bookshop, nor was the poem serialised in any journal
that he might read; worse, poetry written by women was a blind
spot throughout his reading life, and it would have been surprising
V | 185
to learn that he had sought it out. Certainly, he didn’t possess a
copy at home, but if he had, he would not have agreed with the
reviewer of The Times that ‘it does not belong to the art of poetry’:
that would have been to set it the wrong test, which was never
one about belonging, but of quality.43 By those terms, Eliot would
go on to hold Mirrlees in high regard: a friendship would blos-
som between the poets in the years before and during the Second
World War, when they sheltered together from the Blitz at the
Mirrlees family home, and where Eliot would write the poems
that became Four Quartets. She would also find friendship with
Vivien, and say perceptively she saw in her the ghost of a woman
who had seen a ghost.44
For Virginia Woolf, Mirrlees was over-dressed, over-elaborate
and over-scented: ‘That is I like her very much.’45 She would come
also to like her intelligence, as Eliot would, but with few backers to
the edition, few reviews and few sales, attention was always going
to be in short supply. ‘Hope dribbles along,’ Virginia recorded in
the weeks after publication, ‘but she is a negligible matter.’46
//
Katherine Mansfield had wanted to get to know Eliot personally

ever since she had discovered ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Pru-
frock’. That poem was what she wished modern poetry to be, and
she believed that Keats would have admired it as much as she did.47
She imagined what meeting him would be like; the grey door of
her mind’s room kept on opening and opening as Eliot entered,
although Vivien she couldn’t see at all.48 Then they met: Friday 14
May, dinner at the Hampstead home she shared with her husband,
John Middleton Murry. ‘They are just gone – and the whole room
is quivering. John has gone downstairs to see them off. Mrs E’s
voice rises “Oh don’t commiserate with Tom; he’s quite happy.”’ It
was extravagant of her to pass judgement so soon, she knew, ‘but I
dislike her so immensely. She really repels me. She makes me shiver
with apprehension . . .’ Every nervous, busybody part of Vivien had
grated on her. Murry had dropped a spoon over dinner and Vivien
had jumped to cry: ‘I say you are noisy tonight – whats wrong.’
She smoked idly on Mansfield’s bedroom sofa, and shocked her
in commenting invasively on how much the room had changed.
This startled Mansfield: however had she seen it before? At a party
of Murry’s, came the answer, when she befriended (or was it invei-
gled?) him and he drank to overcome the state of nerves she left
him in. And worst of all, worse than her repulsion towards this
invasive lady, was the sight of Eliot, the ‘Prufrock’ poet, demeaning
himself: ‘leaning towards her, admiring, listening, making the most
of her – really minding whether she disliked the country or not . . .’
She felt an instinctive fondness for him, an instinctive sympathy.
But Vivien . . . ‘this teashop creature’ . . .49
//
Pound had played his offer of employment from The Dial with a
veteran’s cool (‘the Trial = I mean The Dial’, he joked of his new
employer to his father), but Eliot had noted ‘a great effect in rais-
ing his spirits’ now that he was once again employed.50 From Italy,
Pound engaged without delay, commissioning and cajoling new
work for the journal from the writers he had discussed with Thayer.
‘Remember they are two sets. / One lot wants all the cash it can
get. / The other lot wants to publish as little as possible; it wants
the Flaubertian luxury of producing only six books in a lifetime.’51
Thayer was delighted with the submissions, and had even received
the rare gift of a poem from Joyce.52 Pound in turn was delighted to
learn that efforts to partner with Squire and the Mercury had now
been set aside as ‘impractical’.53 Further encouraging news would
come his way in the form of an offer to reprint ‘Canto IV’ from
the limited Ovid broadsheet (even if it needed a little dynamite
V | 187
under it to get it done, Pound told Homer);54 but Thayer had made
his first mistake with Pound, too: he had returned Cantos V–VII
with the same submission, and though Pound said nothing of this
immediately, the rejection of the new works – the sum total of all
that he had unpublished – would begin to undermine the newly
found trust.55 And something even stranger took place with Boni
& Liveright’s Instigations, Pound’s prose published on 25 April in
a run of eight hundred copies. W. C. Blum, reviewing it in The
Dial that autumn, would observe that what Pound wrote wasn’t
prose at all but ‘funny oaths and insults’.56 ‘Who is Blum?? nom de
Plum, nom de Blum?’57 Pound asked Thayer of the mysterious writ-
er: he was ‘a wicked man’ and his statements ‘buncumb’, so Pound
would tell the Little Review.58 Thayer would not answer, because
‘Blum’ was a pseudonym for his co-editor at The Dial, James Sibley
Watson.
In London, E liot’s spirits were not in such good shape. He and
Vivien had at last taken the decision to find a new home with
more space for them both, but the search hadn’t gone well. He told
Pound that both he and she were near prostration, and with rents
at three or four times what they were currently paying, the pros-
pect of a swift move looked unlikely.59 The move would happen, but
it would occupy almost half a year of effort and worry.
//
Pound had been only too glad to leave London behind. On 26

April, he and Dorothy departed for Paris, and two days later had
reached Venice, treating themselves to a room they said they
couldn’t afford at the elegant Hotel Pilsen-Manin, close by the
Rialto Bridge.60 The city seemed so quiet: the Grand Canal wasn’t
lit at night, and theirs was the only gondola to venture out on it.
But Dorothy didn’t take well to the air of the lagoon; by 10 May
the couple had retreated to Verona, and ten days later they were in
Sirmione, which Pound had loved since his first visit in 1910. He
had come to cherish the little town that stretched out into Lake
Garda along a narrow promontory: he once likened it to living
on the edge of a large sapphire that certain damn fools mistook for
water.61 Or at least that was his superficial explanation, for what
really drew Pound to the place was its notable distinction as the
hometown of Catullus. He liked to say that he slept on Catullus’
‘parlour floor’ (the Hotel Eden), and he liked to believe that here
he could feel forgotten gods moving.62 So instantly at home was
he that he seemed almost to lose interest in reaching his intended
destination, and tried instead to see if his destination would come
to him. Trieste was the place he had in mind, and the man who
lived there a writer with whom Pound had corresponded, edited
and published since 1913, but not yet met. ‘I wish you would spend
a week here with me (“on me”, as my guest, or whatever the phrase
is),’ Pound wrote to his man in Trieste. ‘The place repays the train
trip.’63
‘O shite and onions!’ James Joyce had been suffering the straits
of his damnable boredom without a soul to talk to about Ulysses:
‘When is this bloody state of affairs going to end?’64 From the
beginning, Pound had identified James Joyce as one of the few
writers to have given a remarkable language to modern thought, a
man who possessed the necessarily active chemical of the mind so
valuable that it must be given its own ‘court yard’.65 And it wasn’t
only in prose that he believed that Joyce had achieved this rare feat.
Chamber Music, a 1907 volume of poems, had demonstrated Joyce’s
ability to invert lyric rhythm across traditional metre, matched
only by Pound’s brilliant description of the achievement: the cross
run of the beat and the word, as of a stiff wind cutting the ripple-tops
of bright water.66
Trieste had become a confinement since Joyce’s move there in
1904, and he sensed that Pound’s invitation might be just what he
needed to break the rut. But he couldn’t afford the clothes, he said,
V | 189
and was wearing his son’s old boots (too large) and his son’s old suit
(too small):67 he had just two chapters of Ulysses left to write, but
suspected Dublin was the place to finish them and not Trieste, nor
Sirmione for that matter. Pound had set aside a gift of 1,000 lire,
about enough to put Joyce and his family in two rooms for a fort-
night. ‘Take this stage of your journey now, and proceed to Ireland
later,’ he advised, and he added by way of a PS that clothing was
emphatically not a requirement of Sirmione.68 He prepared a wel-
come dinner, but Joyce didn’t arrive for it: a thunderous storm blew
in instead, and it seemed that the meeting of Pound and Joyce was
not to take place after all. It was then, on 8 June 1920, that Joyce
arrived in Sirmione, with his son Giorgio in tow, whom he brought
along, he said, as ‘a lightning conductor’.69 Pound preserved the
moment in ‘Canto LXXVI’: ‘In fact a small rain storm . . . / as it
were a mouse, out of cloud’s mountain / recalling the arrival of
Joyce et fils / at the haunt of Catullus.’70
The day following their meeting, Joyce told his Italian translator
Carlo Linati that he was in Sirmione col amico Pound, and Pound
told John Quinn of his equally pleasing company – stubborn and
cantankerous, admittedly, but beneath the bluff exterior was to be
seen a sensitive and delicate if exhausted genius.71 The next day,
Pound left for Paris, Joyce for Trieste, but the new companionship
was not over. Joyce had gone back to Trieste to collect his family
and few possessions, and would arrive to join the Pounds in the
French capital on 9 July. He expected to stay for a week; it became
his home for the next twenty years.
//
It was from Venice that Pound wrote the first of twelve weekly
articles for the New Age, under the title ‘Indiscretions; or, Une
Revue de Deux Mondes’;72 by the time he reached the Eden
pension at Sirmione, the first among them had been published
in London. The series would run for three months, and by their
completion in August, an unexpected portrait of the childhood
and ancestry of Ezra Pound had been revealed. For his parents, it
was just a little too revealing, and when they learned that their son
planned to gather them in book form, they objected, and in a rare
deviation from literary allegiance asked him instead to ‘HAVE A
HEART’, and not revive all the stories that served only to belittle
the family name.73 He went ahead, even so.
‘One hotel, one street, 47 saloons, and one newspaper.’74 Hailey,

Idaho, 1885, as Ezra Pound was born into it. A mining settlement
and frontier town, tucked within a narrow plain through which
the Big Wood River wound, beneath Red Devil Mountain, in the
shadow of the Sawtooth Range. Hard-drinking, cattle-rustling,
claim-jumping, gun-toting: Hailey was no place for faint hearts.
There, in 1883, Homer Loomis Pound ran the Land Office, filing
and assaying claims to ore – some of which were made in a friendly
manner, some at the point of a gun. Hearing such tales, Homer had
packed a revolver of his own as he set off from Wisconsin, only to
have it confiscated by a cousin, saying ‘Better not ’cause it might go
off and hurt someone.’75 He bought another on arrival, and took it
into the mountains for practice: he missed five shots at a sedentary
rabbit, and so on a meeting a mountain lion didn’t risk a final sixth
but turned on his heels and fled back into town. (Mother ‘always
regretted that lion skin’, said her son.) Five hundred dollars bought
Homer a new-built house and the plot it stood upon on the corner
of Second and Pine, three bedrooms and a music room, said to be
the first in all of Hailey with interior plaster.76
Ezra’s father’s father’s Thaddeus Coleman Pound was born in
a log cabin in Pennsylvania around 1832, give or take: the family
weren’t quite sure. Amassed and lost two fortunes by Ezra’s time.
Owned what Ezra described rather loosely as ‘a few silver mines’
in Hailey, which were prone to being ‘jumped’, and to where he
V | 191
had sent his lethargic son Homer to test both the honesty of his
employees and the backbone of his offspring. Third fortune lost
on his farm in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, reducing the length
of cow’s horns, and bottling sparkling spring water that he said
would make him a millionaire but which Ezra said tasted ‘only like
water’.77 Married into a family of horse thieves: good ones, and the
nicest people in the territory, said an elderly lady in Oneida Coun-
ty, but horse thieves nonetheless. Died penniless but with state
honours, after a spell in Congress for north-west Wisconsin: none
too shabby for a man from a line of whalers, rustlers and lumber-
men, with two great ancestors in between: the first, Captain Joseph
Wadsworth, stole the Connecticut Charter in 1687; the second, to
the enduring shame of great-nephew Ezra, the once popular poet
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whose mission in poetry to build
‘Some tower of song with lofty parapet’ would later provide a tar-
get for Ezra’s arrow-tipped Imagism.78
Hailey, Idaho. One hundred and ninety-nine nights below freez-
ing. Where snow stayed till May, and the air at five thousand feet
was too fine for Isabel Weston, newly wed to Homer, abandoned
by two waves of servants on account of her high style; and so the
Pounds packed up and headed back east through the blizzard – the
Big Die-Up was its name, for the devastation it caused to ranching
– behind the first rotary snow plough, the sickly, eighteen-month
Ezra coughing all the way: ‘and no one got any sleep in the sleeper’,
until the inventor of the rotary plough, whose day it was, stepped
forward to administer a sugar lump soaked in kerosene oil, which
sent the child to sleep.79
Isabel Weston Pound. Born 14th Street and Second Avenue, New
York City, 1860, aspirational, athletic social climber: ‘Early painting
lessons, penchant for the pretty – horror of all realism in art. Belief
in the pleasant.’ Ezra could barely conceal a mockery of his m other
in a letter of 1914 to his wife-to-be, Dorothy Shakespear. Would
have liked to see her son in the diplomatic corps, he said spikily.
‘Believes that I should be well clothed.’80 Remote, bewildered, erect,
immaculately turned out, remembered William Carlos Williams;81
every evening, she would greet her husband returning from work at
Jenkintown Station, Wyncote, Pennsylvania.
Homer Loomis Pound. Born 1858 in Chippewa country, north
Wisconsin, and named for a peripatetic vigour that never material-
ised, for he would spend forty years as an assayer at the Philadelphia
Mint. Quaker turned Presbyterian, social reformer in South Phil-
adelphia’s slums, founder of a College Settlement House for the
poor. Devoted to his son, believing there was nothing that his boy
didn’t know; ‘I’ve kept everything he’s ever written, I guess.’ Inter-
viewed in 1928, Homer asked the journalist: ‘Have you ever read
any of his Cantos? Well, I must admit I can’t make much out of
some of them. Ezra told me unless I read Browning’s “Sordello” I
couldn’t expect to understand The Cantos. So I waded through that.
Ever read it? Well, I don’t advise you to. I found it didn’t help me
much with Ezra’s Cantos anyway.’82
A house in the suburb of Jenkintown, then a move south-east
onto nearby Fernbrook Avenue, Wyncote, and a house of six bed-
rooms and three storeys that stands today, on a lot two hundred
feet by fifty, with a playroom for young Ezra on the very top floor.
This was the American suburb that in 1921 Pound told Thomas
Hardy he emerged from: a place of no roots, and no centre, where
his parents were foreigners merely by virtue of coming from out of
state.83
Homer Loomer Pound, ‘the naivest man who ever possessed
sound sense’,84 or ‘cents’ for that matter, in the words of the old joke
that had special family significance, with whom Ezra would con-
clude the twelfth and final instalment of his ‘Indiscretions’. As a
young boy he followed his father into work at the grand old Phila-
delphia Mint on the corner of Chestnut and Juniper, behind white
marble frontage – the impression of its ‘“Greek temple” façade’
not lost upon young Pound: a temple of money with a classical
V | 193
edifice.85 In The Cantos, he recalled as a child watching the men
of the smelting room, stripped bare to the waist, ‘as I have seen
them by shovels full / lit by gas flares’,86 working the old coins for
recast as if they were sweeping litter. ‘Things like that strike your
imagination,’ he recalled in 1962. ‘You can go on for a long time
on that.’87 He watched, too, his father, raised beside a high shelf
table, working under natural light like an alchemist in his cavern to
measure to one-thousandths the proportion of golds in his cylin-
drical bottles; hours seated at his father’s roller-top yellow desk
with its two dozen drawers and cubby holes, its assortments of
filament and ore, and government gold, and blank coin discs yet to
be pressed into value. It seemed a conjuror’s art. And with it came
a parlour trick: for a visitor, Homer would weigh a small blank card
on his measuring scales and ask his guest to sign it in pencil. Then
he would weigh the card once again: in the difference, he said, was
the weight of a man’s name.88
//
‘Hero, Prophet, Poet,’ wrote Thomas Carlyle, ‘many different

names, in different times and places, do we give to Great Men.’
Carlyle’s lecture of 1840 had stated that it was through the actions
of a few that the many advanced. Universal history was the history
of great men, he believed, and while some are trapped by their
time, ‘the Poet is a heroic figure belonging to all ages’: an endless
contemporary, the voice of an era.89
Such a man is what we call an original man; he comes to us at first

hand. A messenger he, sent from the Infinite Unknown with tidings
to us. We may call him Poet, Prophet, God; – in one way or other,
we all feel that the words he utters are as no other man’s words.90
To a younger Pound, this was heady stuff. He took to heart

Carlyle’s vision of the poet as the ‘Hero-soul’ living each day direct
from the inner facts of things.91 In 1911 he gave such a figure a name of
his own, and called him ‘over-man’ – brother most certainly to the
Übermensch, to the poet-hero, to Aristotle’s magnanimous man.92
When the strength of the body combines with the fortitude of will
then a new kind of person is born, one who can combine superior
strength with artistic endeavour to achieve greatness. This ‘perfect
creature’ was a force in which to believe, wrote Pound – ‘some-
thing beyond man, something important enough to be fed with
the blood of hecatombs’.93 It was an notion of a flawless organism
that would find its place in Nazi Germany, and as the New or
‘Super’ Man of Mussolini’s new Italy.
Boxer, fencer, master of the tennis court (Ford Madox Ford said
he returned serve ‘like a galvanised agile gibbon’),94 Pound believed
that the health as well as the fortune of a man lay in his own hands.
And E liot’s poor health worried him: for the prospective voice of a
generation, he spent an inordinate amount of time laid up, and was
an unwelcome reminder to Pound of the physical fragility of the
artist, a figure who can only respond with a forceful strength if art
is to survive. It was for this reason that he wrote with such despair
of the feebleness of H. S. Mauberley: ‘Him of all men, unfit.’ Eliot,
he knew, mustn’t be allowed unfitness. Following his new year 1920
visit to Crawford Mansions, Pound wrote of the ‘osmosis of body
and soul’, noting that ‘wisdom, if not of the senses, is at any rate via
the senses’.95 On introducing Eliot to John Quinn, Pound said of
him, ‘He has more entrails than might appear from his quiet exte-
rior,’ before adding, ‘I think.’96 Over many years, and throughout his
correspondence, Pound returns to the word ‘guts’. So-and-so is the
only person with guts enough; someone else has more invention, more
guts; someone else again suffers from an Anemia of guts; elsewhere
he writes of people who have some guts; elsewhere again, people not
having the guts.97 Poems and projects and people have them or don’t
have them, but either way they are frequently described by Pound
in relation to them. And Eliot surely needed them if he were to be
V | 195
a literary leader; if he were being robbed of them – either by his
wife or by the grind of his daily work at the bank – then Pound
was going to do something about that: Eliot had to be taken off the
wreckage,98 he told Quinn.
‘No use blinking the fact that it is a crime against literature to
let him waste eight hours vitality per diem in that bank.’99 After
that summer of 1919, and the critical prose of that autumn, E liot’s
poetry should have been coming to fruition, but where was it? He
had written nothing since finishing ‘Gerontion’ the previous Sep-
tember, and the incomplete ‘The Death of the Duchess’. Work and
home life seemed to be occupying the place of writing, and while
it wasn’t possible to buy him out of his marriage (‘His wife hasn’t
a cent and is always cracking up, & needing doctors, & incapable
of earning anything’), perhaps, with the right support, it might be
possible to lure him away from the bank.
Tested on the matter, Eliot would share with Pound his earn-
ings at the bank that summer – £500 ($2,000) including bonus
– indicating that he thought he would need to secure half as much
again if he were ever to risk leaving such steady employment.100
It would take Pound some time to solve the problem, and in 1922
immediately after Eliot had finished The Waste Land he published
his response – a circular seeking thirty subscribers, each to con-
tribute £10 a year, to guarantee Eliot support enough to allow him
to leave the bank and concentrate on literature. In the event, the
scheme, which Pound called his Bel Esprit, would pose chronic
and predictable embarrassment to Eliot: how could it not to such
a proud, independently financed man? Lloyds Bank would be pub-
licly named as the institution from which he was seeking release,
thereby threatening the security of that income; but more devas-
tating still, Eliot was portrayed as economically hapless, which was
a message that mustn’t be allowed to get as far as America in case
it appeared to suggest that he had a family there who should be
providing for his support. Pound might have known the anguish
he would cause; but then, for all his intended kindness, for him the
needs of literature would always triumph over the sensitivities of
the individual.
//
Interest in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley was thin on the ground that

summer, and Eliot was worried. He had asked Harold Monro to
cover it for the Chapbook, but had received a dispiriting response.
Monro said that he couldn’t begin to see how he might review such
a book for the ordinary public, and with no desire to condemn it
(but no wish to praise it), he felt he could not be of assistance. Eliot
suggested to Rodker The Athenaeum instead, but he knew that for
a challenging work to be critically well received it must first have
its path prepared by work that the critics will tolerate; ‘Mauberley’
wasn’t it, he admitted, and ‘the only hope of fame is posthumous’.
Anything stronger from The Times would only be worse, he said.
And indeed it was.
In July, the Literary Supplement conceded that the poems in this
finely printed book had structure, rhythm and sincerity, ‘but they
are needlessly obscure’, and ‘esoteric’, hellbent to appeal to only a
small circle.101 But then, what else was to be expected? There are
always other voices. Except that this time there weren’t. The round-
up in The Times was all the attention that Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
would get. The greatest original effort of Pound’s career: he had
aimed at a withering assault upon establishment Britain, its hyp-
ocritical war, the slaughter of its young men in a futile cause, the
failure of art to adequately respond to the trauma of the time, the
unwillingness of a society to listen, the widening chasm between
art and everyday life, the farewell to failure, to a bygone world:
for all that effort, the reward would be four brief sentences in The
Times that culminated in a hope that his poems would be sweeter.
No word from The Athenaeum or the Observer, nothing from the
V | 197
New Age or New Statesman; no interest from Poetry in Chicago,
or Smart Set and Others in New York and New Jersey; no place
in the Little Review and not in The Egoist and Art & Letters now
they were a thing of the past, while The Dial had tied its hands in
reprinting an extract as well as ‘The Fourth Canto’ that summer.102
It was almost as if the book had never existed.
Reviewers would touch upon it again in the volume Poems
1918–21 in which it was later reprinted, but the response would be
little better. John Peale Bishop wrote then that there was nothing
in ‘Mauberley’ that was as poignant as the poems of T. S. Eliot.
Edmund Wilson made the same comparison, describing the poems
as furious attempts to conceal simple reactions behind complicated
riddles (‘Pound merely paraphrases statements of obvious fact in a
tortured pedantic jargon’).103 Edwin Muir grieved in equal measure
for the ‘laziness’ of the readership and the wilfully ‘cryptic’ mode
of Pound’s writing that left ‘Mauberley’ destined to be ignored.104
Only one voice spoke to support the poem, and that was Maxwell
Bodenheim, who wrote in 1922 that no one had better captured the
redundant propaganda, realistic horrors, and emotional revolts of war
and its poetry.105 That was a comfort; but then Bodenheim’s review
was in the journal that employed Pound as its correspondent, The
Dial. By the 1930s, F. R. Leavis had written despairingly that the
poem had ‘almost wholly escaped recognition’, though undoubt-
edly it was, he believed, Pound’s major achievement.106 But by then
the moment of the poem was more than a decade past, for a work
that, as Pound said, had described the war-torn mood of the ter-
rible year 1917.
It had almost been possible to feel the critical silence wash over
him, as if the fortune that befell Mauberley, drifting and forgotten
at sea, had finally come to be conferred upon Pound.
For a brief moment in the summer of 1920, it was hard to keep

up with Pound’s output. Instigations had appeared in New York
in April, his ‘Fourth Canto’ was reprinted by The Dial in June at
the moment that Hugh Selwyn Mauberley appeared with the Ovid
Press in London. And there was yet another book: a retrospective
of his early poems with Elkin Mathew in London, called Umbra. If
‘Mauberley’ had been Pound’s farewell to London, then Umbra was
his retrospective, his backward glance, a selection of early poems.
It was the last of the eight collaborations with Elkin Mathews,
who had been the primary publisher for Pound since his arrival in
London in 1908. When Mathews died unexpectedly in 1921, the
last plank in Pound’s London publishing was washed away with
him. For the next decade, Pound would publish almost exclusively
in Paris, without a London partner. And things did not look very
much better for him in New York. He wrote soberly in 1924: ‘My
American publishers do not exist.’ He began to plan accordingly.
‘I shall never again take any steps whatever to arrange publication
of any of my work in either England or America,’ he said at that
time.107 It would not be until 1928 that Pound would once again
find a publisher in London, in a new venture that had recently
hired a debutant director: the house of Faber & Gwyer, edited by
T. S. Eliot.108
A small-press, limited printing like ‘Mauberley’ would never
have been expected to garner much in the way of critical atten-
tion, but a full retrospective by an established publisher like Elkin
Mathews could. So when Umbra, like ‘Mauberley’, went unnoted
in the London papers it felt like a final blow. The New Age alone
covered it, a journal friendly to Pound which might be counted
upon for a good review: individual and imaginative with distinc-
tion; fastidious vigour; a subtle form of strength.109 The review would
be the last word on Pound’s English residence: the next time he
received note of his work in Britain, he would have left the country
behind him.
//
V | 199
Despite his complaints and exhaustion, E liot’s writing for The
Athenaeum continued with two instalments of ‘The Perfect Critic’,
whom Eliot revealed to be Aristotle: a figure capable of turning
his mind to all matters, and thus a mind above the average man,
able to look, as Matthew Arnold had, ‘solely and steadfastly at the
object’.
The end of the enjoyment of poetry is a pure contemplation from

which all the accidents of personal emotion are removed; thus
we aim to see the object as it really is and find a meaning for the
words of Arnold. And without a labour which is largely a labour
of the intelligence, we are unable to attain that stage of vision amor
intellectualis Dei.110
//
James Joyce arrived in Paris with his family on 8 or 9 July 1920,
greeted by Pound, who directed him and his family to tempo-
rary lodgings he had found for them at a small hotel on 9 rue
de l’Université, near the Hôtel Elysée at which he and Dorothy
were staying. Pound would make introductions whose aim was to
find a translator for a French edition of A Portrait of the Artist,
and he settled on Madame Ludmila Bloch-Savitsky (soon to be
John R odker’s mother-in-law), who would make a contract for
the edition with Éditions de la Sirène. She would offer Joyce her
apartment in the Bois de Boulogne, which would give him and his
family a base in the city, rent free into the autumn.
The Pounds were back in London on 21 July after ten weeks
of travels. From there Ezra saw to it that royalties owed to Joyce
were paid, and no doubt was the force behind the generous sub-
sistence payments by John Quinn and Harriet Shaw Weaver that
would help Joyce to settle in Paris that summer. Pound attempt-
ed find a publishing home for Ulysses, but both G. W. Huebsch,
Joyce’s American publisher, and Boni & Liveright in New York
were apprehensive of a printing boycott. John R odker had the idea
for a workaround in which an edition would be printed in Paris
and imported, in order to avoid any prosecution that could affect
a book published in Britain. He duly went to Paris to meet with
Joyce, offering to print on behalf of the Egoist Press. The arrange-
ment wouldn’t be necessary by then; Pound had prepared for Joyce
the most important of all the introductions he would make in Paris.
In November 1919, at 8 rue Dupuytren in the Latin quarter, an
English-language bookshop had opened. It was called Shakespeare
and Company, and was no ordinary bookshop: it was also a curious
lending library, for which no catalogue or card index existed, and
from which loans were mostly recorded by memory. Lending was
much easier than selling, its proprietor, Sylvia Beach, discovered
– some authors borrowed more than others ( Joyce kept certain
books for years) – but somehow a business model emerged that
kept it trading to become a remarkable centre for ‘pilgrims from
America’,111 some of whom were escaping prohibition and liter-
ary censorship. Paris was booming, and soon Everyone was in the
city (Beach capitalised the ‘e’) – Joyce, Picasso, Stravinsky – well,
not quite Everyone, she admitted, as Eliot was regrettably still in
London – but certainly the literary cast of the time, gravitating to
her English – and to Adrienne Monnier’s French – bookshops of
Saint-Germain. Djuna Barnes, F. Scott Fitzgerald, André Gide,
Mina Loy, Ernest Hemingway, Paul Valéry, George Antheil,
Nancy Cunard, Robert McAlmon and Bryher – all were callers
and friends; Sherwood Anderson was found gazing fondly at his
own book in the window, while Ezra Pound, a passing guest, put
himself to good use by mending a cigarette case and a chair. Here
was the centre of a literary community, the venue for readings and
even a residence for guests.
It was at the house party of André Spire that Beach first shook
hands with James Joyce in July 1920 – ‘that is, he put his limp,
boneless hand in my tough little paw’, said Beach, ‘if you can call
V | 201
that a handshake’.112 What did she do? he asked her politely; she
ran a bookshop, she replied. He took out a notebook and, holding
it close to his eyes, recorded her address. The next day he came to
see her.
Sylvia Beach had followed the serialisation of Joyce’s Ulysses with
wonder, but she had no idea how much she would also enjoy his
company. She learned that languages were his ‘favourite sport’, and
that he spoke ‘at least nine’ (they counted between them that day:
English, Italian, French, German, Greek, Spanish, Dutch, Nor-
wegian, Swedish, Danish – he counted ‘the three Scandinavian
tongues’ as one – and Yiddish; he also knew some Hebrew.)113 She
learned, too, that he was frightened not only of thunderstorms but
of dogs, that he couldn’t afford clothes (‘Joyce was always a little bit
shabby’), and that he wondered how to keep his family of four in
food and shoes and shelter. She learned too that he was desperate
to finish Ulysses, and that she could provide an office that he would
christen ‘Stratford-on-Odéon’ when in 1921 the shop moved to new
premises on rue de l’Odéon. Though it was early days, Joyce and
Beach had founded an extraordinary partnership that would pro-
duce remarkable results: another in a long line of warming fires that
Ezra Pound – ‘that busy Manager’, as Lewis called him – had lit.114
//
The Eliots spent the August bank holiday weekend at Garsing-

ton Manor, Oxfordshire, where the Huxleys were also among the
guests of Ottoline Morrell, a hostess of such blue blood, Virginia
Woolf once commented, that she entered a room like the Cor-
nish sea.115 It was an occasion too far for Vivien: she collapsed on
her return to London, for which Eliot blamed himself, having
seen it coming and done nothing to prevent it. ‘Vivien has bro-
ken down rather badly,’ he explained to Sydney Schiff ahead of
the Eliots’ prospective visit to Eastbourne the following weekend,
which was now in doubt. In the event, they went anyway, Eliot
carrying the news from Leonard Woolf that the 250 or so copies
of his 1919 Hogarth Poems had now sold out.116 Wyndham Lewis
was also a guest that weekend, and the two men discovered that
their desire to visit France that month coincided, and could be
simultaneous, if Eliot didn’t mind staying on the coast with Lewis,
who had work there. Eliot didn’t mind a bit, and would bathe, he
said, while Lewis worked, and they would travel by bicycle. But
the news did not please the exhausted Vivien, weakened as she
was, looking ‘very tired and ill’ when Eliot departed from Waterloo
Station on Saturday 14 August, leaving her behind for a second
summer on her own. A rare surviving letter between the couple
– the earliest preserved – tells as much. Writing to him between
stations at Nantes and Vannes in Brittany, she implored him to
keep in touch.117 ‘Yesterday I felt so ill and despairing that I went to
my room and cried and called yr. name,’ she explained.118 And she
likened her numbered lives to those of a cat, though if she sensed
which life she was on then she kept that information to herself.
In the small Hôtel de l’Élysée, on the Left Bank of the Seine,

Lewis and Eliot waited patiently for their introduction to James
Joyce. Eliot carried with him a parcel for Joyce from Pound in
London; he was not permitted to know what it contained, but it
was too large for his suitcase and so was carried under his arm and
upon his lap on two trains and a ferry. Lewis later told the story of
the encounter.
Eliot had written to Joyce to invite him to receive the parcel
from Pound, and to dine immediately afterwards. At six o’clock,
Joyce arrived punctually at the hotel with his son Giorgio to collect
the package that Eliot had placed ceremoniously in the middle of
the room on a marble table footed by gilded eagle claws. Introduc-
tions were exchanged with bows and nods, before Joyce sat down
and dangled his straw boater to wait on whatever was to come
V | 203
next. At this moment, Eliot stood up ceremoniously, and, pointing
to the packet, announced that this was the package which he now
delivered, thereby discharging his duties. Joyce played along, oblig-
ingly: ‘Ah! Is this the parcel you mentioned in your note?’ It was
indeed, confirmed Eliot, resuming his seat. Now it was Joyce who
stood to take up the package, but found it so exacting in its knots
that he was unable to untie them. He asked if anyone present had
a knife – ‘You want a knife?’ said Eliot. ‘I have not got a knife, I
think!’ – and managed to locate instead a pair of nail scissors sharp
enough for the occasion. The ties undone at last, Pound’s gift was
revealed. An old and slightly beaten pair of brown shoes. ‘Oh!’ said
Joyce faintly, and sat down. ‘Oh!’ repeated Lewis. It was Eliot who
broke the silence. D
inner?119
The choice of restaurant that evening would be Joyce’s, who
took upon himself the duty of host. He surveyed the evening’s
specials, and ordered on behalf of the table to please his diners; he
chose a wine to complement the soup, and another for the subse-
quent courses, and despite his circumstances settled the bill before
anyone else had thought to ask for it. From time to time, Eliot or
Lewis would be permitted to buy a drink for themselves, but never
for Joyce, and never when dining. For the table was Joyce’s court,
and it was there, reported Lewis, sampling the Château Latour he
had selected, that he raised a toast to ‘the band’ – ‘the literary band’,
Lewis corrected – ‘a group, comprised within the critical folder of
Ezra Pound – the young, the “New”, group of writers assembled
in Miss Weaver’s Egoist just before and during the War’. It was
a tribute made with a certain wrinkling of the nose (four people
more dissimilar in every respect would be difficult to find, said
Lewis), but it was a tribute nonetheless to the four young men of
the moment, these contemporaries in arts, ‘these four Zeitgenossen!’
‘He does not take much notice of me!’ protested Eliot mildly to
Lewis one day in Paris, when they were contemplating how best to
buy Joyce a beer without his refusing. Eliot saw in Joyce’s generos-
ity a flamboyance, but Lewis sensed something different: that the
used shoes had been an embarrassment to the man’s self-respect.
The gift itself had been no more or less than the kind of con-
sideration shown by Pound in Sirmione, when Joyce had pleaded
to a lack of clothing; but the ceremony conducted by Eliot had
been a humiliation that triggered in Joyce a counter-display of
benevolence and wealth. However Joyce had taken the message, it
seemed he hadn’t taken kindly to its messenger. ‘To the last Eliot
was treated distantly,’ said Lewis.120
//
Eliot returned from France determined to renew his search for a

better place to live. More than ever, he wanted to be released from
what he unexpectedly told his m other was ‘the neighbourhood of
prostitution’. From now on, the hunt for a property would occupy
121
his evenings, placing so much pressure on his literary work that he

had to enlist the Pounds to help him to proofread Methuen’s pages
for The Sacred Wood, a task littered with time-consuming checks on
foreign-language sources. Proof work, house-hunting, holiday and
the bank – ‘I want to get settled quietly and write some p oetry,’
but it was no wonder that Eliot hadn’t. He supposed that he
122
wouldn’t be settled into writing before November, but at least the

urge was burning. ‘I have several things I want to do,’ he told his
mother on 20 September, ‘and I want a period of tranquility to do
a poem that I have in mind.’123
//
G. K. Chesterton was a man who had tried many hats: critic,
novelist, philosopher, theologian, even a poet of war (‘But they
that fought for England, / Following a falling star, / Alas, alas
V | 205
for England / They have their graves afar’).124 His was a liter-
ary style pinpointed by Eliot as ‘first-rate journalistic balladry’;125
‘slop’, in o ther words, said Pound.126 Eliot observed in 1918 that
although Chesterton’s head swarmed with ideas, he saw no evi-
dence that it contained any actual thought.127 To him and Pound
alike, Chesterton was a brute from a bygone age (and brute he
was, six foot four in his shoes and twenty stone), best remem-
bered for stating that ‘poets have been mysteriously silent on the
subject of cheese’.128 In mockery, Pound transformed him into a
cake of soap: ‘Lo, how it gleams and glistens in the sun / Like the
cheek of a Chesterton.’129
In September 1920, Chesterton was on the cusp of conver-
sion to Catholicism. In a serialisation that month of his book
The New Jerusalem, he finally responded to the articles in the
New Age of the previous summer in which Pound had taken a
half-hearted swipe at the Catholic Church. He called Pound
a vagabond pursuing a dim tribal tendency and blind aboriginal
impulse – a habitual language of ethnic offence that had already
marked Chesterton as an anti-Semite: ‘In plain words,’ he wrote
of Pound, ‘this sort of theory is a blasphemy against the intel-
lectual dignity of man.’130 Pound would bat the assault aside. It
was impossible to be annoyed by Mr Chesterton’s calling him ‘a
Boche, a bungler, and a blasphemer’, he wrote in reply, ‘since Mr
Chesterton has so long been engaged in trying to prove that no
word means anything in particular, and that precision of language
is undesirable.’131 It was a witty and well-judged put-down that
would have tickled Eliot at the time. But times would change,
and in the years after Eliot had joined the Church of England in
1927 he would write that Chesterton’s religious views (like Eliot,
he had been brought up a Unitarian) placed him ‘consistently on
the side of the angels’.132 Pound’s spat with Chesterton in 1920
would be merely a warm-up for the disagreement he would have
with Eliot in the 1930s. By then, Eliot and Pound had taken their
disagreement over religion into print in a public and, for Eliot at
least, distressing way.
In a lecture given in Virginia, in 1930, and later reprinted in After
Strange Gods in 1934, Eliot made an incendiary remark.
The population should be homogeneous; where two or more

cultures exist in the same place they are likely either to be fiercely
self-conscious or both to become adulterate. What is still more
important is unity of religious background; and reasons of race and
religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews
undesirable.133
Eliot would be asked to explain this remark for years to come.

He would tell a former Harvard student, V. F. Healy, in 1940 that
by ‘free-thinking’ he had not intended a racial slur, but despair
at the fading effects of a religion which its practitioners were
unwilling to practise.134 By the time Eliot clarified himself to
Isaiah Berlin in 1952, a complete picture of the horror of Nazi
concentration camps was before him: ‘The sentence of which you
complain (with justice) would never have appeared at all at that
time, if I had been aware of what was going to happen, indeed
had already begun, in Germany,’ he wrote. ‘I still do not under-
stand why the word “race” occurs in the sentence, because my
emphasis was on the adjective “freethinking”.’135 Another decade
and another explanation, to a journalist in 1964: ‘I did make the
statement which you quote, but I have ever since regretted mak-
ing it in that form, for it was not intended to be anti-semitic.
What I had in mind was that I hoped there would be more co-
operation between practising Christians and practising Jews,
but I agree that the statement as it stands is regrettable.’136 After
Strange Gods would be the only substantial work of Eliot’s that he
chose to keep out of print.
Not unreasonable that Pound might have a bone to pick with
Eliot, but this wasn’t the bone he chose to pick. Reviewing After
V | 207
Strange Gods, Pound took issue with E liot’s proposition that the
weakness of the condition of literature was an effect of the weak-
ness in the condition of religion. So began a correspondence in
print that would be sustained in the pages of the New English
Weekly for almost four months.
As Pound grew more waspish, Eliot grew more wounded. Eco-
nomic injustice is what ruins lives and isolates people (Pound). It
is a lack of religious engagement that prevents a cohesive socie-
ty (Eliot). A Christian faith will eradicate the need for inequality
(Eliot). A Christian Church enforces inequality (Pound).137
By the time the New English Weekly was moving into its fourth
month of coverage, Eliot was determined to sign off. Someone had
to sweep up after Ezra, and as it seemed he wouldn’t stop flinging
tomatoes Eliot was going to take his leave in the personal code of
Brer Rabbit that the two used in their private correspondence.
I am going to set round the chimbly and have a chaw terbacker with
Miss Meadows and the gals; and then I am going away for a 4tnight
where that ole Rabbot can’t reach me with his letters nor even with
his post cards.138
For all the outrage, what the two men expressed so publicly
in New English Weekly was no more than a magnification of the
differences already growing between them in 1920 that would
take such sharp relief in the p
oetry to come: the hope for eco-
nomic justice in The Cantos, the desire for spiritual direction in
The Waste Land.
//
The search for a new flat had dragged on into October. ‘We have
been worried out of our wits,’139 Eliot told his m
other. ‘I simply
cannot any longer work where we are, or even rest. I have of course
been unable to write, or even read and think, for some weeks.’ The
anticipated expense meant that the Eliots knew they might have
to consider living without Ellen Kellond, their maid of four years,
who accepted low wages and large responsibilities – including
nursing the both of them – that no one else would; they hoped she
would stay, but had to find a flat in which they could manage if she
were to leave. As it was, the Eliots’ immediate fears for Ellen were
unfounded: she stayed with them until she married in 1926. Vivien
described her then as her greatest and almost only friend of nine
years.140 Such was the intimacy with Ellen that, during a period in
the winter of 1925 of enforced isolation in a nursing home, Vivien
poured out her fears that her husband had abandoned her. ‘You see,
he no longer wants me and no longer cares for me,’ wrote Vivien at
the time. ‘O Ellen what shall I do what shall I do.’ Kept against her
will, Vivien said that she was being tortured with neglect, cruelty
and despair. ‘I mean to take my life. At the first opportunity I shall
do so. It is difficult here, but I shall find a way. This is the end.’141 It
may be that the distress of this episode hastened Ellen’s departure
from service three months later. Vivien said in 1928: ‘She can never
be replaced’;142 and she is forever etched into ‘A Game of Chess’ in
The Waste Land. It was from Ellen’s accounts that the Albert and
Lil sequence was created – ‘pure Ellen Kellond’, was the descrip-
tion Eliot gave later to the passage.143 When her husband William
Sollory lost his job as a foreman in a metalworks in 1932, Eliot sup-
ported him financially, and sought legal advice on his behalf that
led to the labour exchange making payments that it had previously
denied. ‘You have been a God send to me,’ Sollory told Eliot; ‘I
only wish I could be of some service to you in return.’144
//
Every day, without missing a day, William Carlos Williams had

written down something – anything – that came to mind, and that
wasn’t to be changed. For a year he did so, and then, after that
V | 209
year, he went back to the words he had written and went through
them once more, adding a commentary below them.145 They were
‘wild flights’, he said later, an embarrassment in retrospect, but in
October 1920 they were published by the Four Seasons Compa-
ny of Boston as Kora in Hell: Improvisations.146 On one level, he
said he had wanted merely to ‘sound off ’, to tell the world and
his friends what he thought of them, and most particularly those
in London, who were able to see ‘no alternative but their own
groove’.147 But there was also a more nationally minded aim, to
discover just what a modern American literature might look like,
one that didn’t adopt the style of the old masters but that might
instead find a language and form adequate to the experience of
a modernising America. Viewed that way, Eliot was easy pick-
ings, engaged in no more than a rehash of European literature.
Williams called him the ‘archbishop of procurers to a lecherous
antiquity’, someone who looked backward, someone who had
rejected America.148 That was no surprise; but what he said of his
old friend Ezra was certainly shocking. Williams published a per-
sonal letter he had received from Pound in 1917 (‘you’re such a
devil for printin’ one’s private affairs’ – Pound) which had chal-
lenged the grounds of Williams’s Americanism.149 Williams knew
nothing of the prairies of the Sierra Nevada, Pound had written:
WOT could he know of America? ‘But I (der grosse Ich) have the
virus, the bacillus of the land in my blood,’ Pound continued, ‘for
nearly three bleating centuries.’150 Williams did not like that, and
he wasn’t about to let anyone – friend or no friend – question his
credentials for forging a new literature. It was Pound who was a
rogue trader, misrepresenting American verse to Europe, passing
off as American what was really European. ‘E. P. is the best enemy
United States verse has.’151
‘You’re a liar,’ Pound snapped on 11 September 1920. His old
friend was dissembling, and this was ‘bilge, just sloppy inaccu-
rate bilge’.152 Williams had sat on his prescription backside (he
was by employment a physician), while Pound had been fighting
a troubadour’s fight ‘for honest clear statement in verse’. Pound
never claimed to be writing ‘US p oetry’, and didn’t give a curse for
international divisions. ‘I don’t care a fried – – – – about nation-
ality,’ he told Williams, who was nothing if not a hypocrite: a
second- generation émigré (‘Spanish, French, English, Danish’
wrote Pound, though his parents grew up in the Caribbean), and
Williams had all the benefit of ‘the fresh flood of Europe’ in his
veins.153 Pound and Eliot, by contrast, were old ‘Yankees’ despairing
at the generational decay of their culture: they simply couldn’t have
stayed. ‘There is a blood poison in America,’ said Pound, moving
the matter further onto troubled grounds. ‘You don’t need to fight
the disease day and night; you never have had to. Eliot has it per-
haps worse than I have – poor devil.’ The blood poison was not
named, but the inference was clear. It was immigration, and Pound
gave voice to resentment at the erosion of Anglo-Saxon Protestant
settler values, to which Pound might as well have added ‘White’.
‘The “race problem” begins where personal friendliness ceases,’154
Pound had written in the New Age that summer with a pose of
tolerance; but whatever his motivation then, his language was so
addled with tropes about ‘the old South’, generational stereotypes
and use of the n-word, that any effort to be progressive appeared
undermined by many of its own assumptions.
//
Eliot and Pound’s first articles for The Dial came at almost the
same moment. E liot’s was the lead contribution that November,155
and took for its theme poetic drama – one among several poetic
forms, Eliot acknowledged, but the one most capable of greater
variation and expressing more varied types of society. Its key lay not
simply in shape, rhyme and rhythm, but also in the half-formed
matter surrounding it – what he called the ‘temper of the age’ – the
V | 211
stimuli of the moment to which a public would respond. The task
at hand, he wrote, is to seize the permanence of thought and feel-
ing by simplifying it through actions and objects that an audience
can understand. This requires the artist to meld form and temper
into a ‘precise statement of life which is at the same time a point of
view, a world’. To be at once both a point of view and a world places
a supreme stress upon an art: depersonalisation, he had said before,
is the method of transfer from personal view to public world, but
what material could possibly lend itself to such variety in form and
temper? Entertainment could do that, he believed – entertainment
subjected to a process that would transmute it into art. Few at
the time agreed that popular culture could be the matter of art,
but Eliot was now imagining culture beyond what was considered
‘lower’ and ‘higher’, in a way that would energise the long poem he
was contemplating. ‘Perhaps the music-hall comedian is the best
material,’ he wrote.
//
‘The Sacred Wood is the most stimulating, the most intelligent, and
the most original contribution to our critical literature during
the last decade.’156 By the time Richard Aldington wrote these
words for the journal Today, in September 1921, the reception
of E liot’s critical essays had already been assured. Published in
November 1920, it carried eighteen pieces from 1919 and 1920:
half taken from The Athenaeum, three of them new, and included
among them his essays on Hamlet, Dante, ‘Tradition and the
Individual Talent’, opening with ‘The Perfect Critic’. The book’s
title, like the notes to The Waste Land, would draw from James
Frazer’s The Golden Bough – here, a competition among priests to
be King of the Wood157 in a seeming allusion to the competitive
flavour of professional literary London. But in its preliminary
material, the book would carry a more private reference besides.
An epigraph, taken from the Satyricon by Petronius, in a transla-
tion of the time, read, ‘I am a poet,’ he said, ‘and one, I hope, of
no mean imagination, if one can reckon at all by crowns of hon-
our, which gratitude can set even on unworthy heads.’158 If there
was any doubt to whom Eliot was addressing these proud words,
the mystery would be clarified five pages later: for / H. W. E.
/ ‘tacuit et fecit’.159 He was silent and acted: the Eliot family
motto, cast into the past tense.160 The next time Eliot would draw
on Petronius and Frazer it would be for an epigraph and a note
to The Waste Land.
Very quickly it was clear that The Sacred Wood was to serve
in exactly the way Eliot had hoped, as a concentration of his
theory of impersonality. For it was on this that the first reviews
would focus, often going out of their way to summarise E liot’s
argument. One, a literary work is an object that arouses emo-
tion; two, the poet manufactures an object that elicits feeling in
others rather than one that has given voice to his or her own
feelings; three, the success of that accomplishment is measured
in the reader’s engagement with the object; four, in any assess-
ment of that engagement, the critic must illuminate that emotion
without reliance upon emotions of their own. Some reviewers
produced allegories of their own. The New Statesman likened the
role of the poet to a dumb man expressing what he is feeling
by holding up objects one after another; it was not the object
itself that was the subject of his thoughts, but the emotions it
suggested to the reader. It was for criticism, wrote John Middle-
ton Murry in the New Republic, to assay the degree of perfection
with which this act is performed and to describe the quality of
art that it produced. In so doing, Eliot had elevated criticism to
its rightful realm, wrote Marianne Moore in The Dial: a genuine
achievement in criticism is an achievement in creation.161
Not everyone concurred that the author had achieved his effect.
The Times thought Eliot’s account was less disinterested than
V | 213
he admitted – perverted by malice, no less – betraying a personal
investment in a literature of detachment.162 The result was a crit-
ical failure, thought The Nation.163 More meticulous was his old
friend Conrad Aiken, who questioned the notion that art could be
impersonal or scientific, or even that Eliot himself was clear what
he meant when he wrote in such terms. To understand art we must
begin with its social function, and see it as a force in the commu-
nity of life itself. Eliot, thought Aiken, was looking in the wrong
place: ‘life’ should come first; Eliot’s ‘aesthetic’ or ‘science’ second.164
But even for the critics who disagreed with the answer, the ques-
tion asked of whether p oetry should be personal or impersonal was
now at the heart of discussion. From what material should the
poet write? In what form should experience be transmitted? The
answers were debatable, but as the New Statesman put it, whenever
the question of modern p oetry was raised, the name T. S. Eliot was
now certain to come up.165
Why did it matter so deeply to Eliot to consolidate the link
between p oetry and criticism? Because they were interlocutory.
Each engaged the o ther in a mutually supportive dialogue. Crit-
icism was capable of energising poetry with the rigour it needed
for deep development. Poetry, too, can do that for itself, but was
slower to act than journalism. As Pound had observed in an article
of that year,166 even the most modest volume of poetry takes infinite
time for its ideas to circulate. Criticism can simply get there faster,
making its case quickly through the broader readership of prose.
Later, Eliot would say that at the time of The Sacred Wood he still
hadn’t quite made up his mind what criticism was for; but he had:
it was to enable the conditions in which to animate creative writ-
ing. Criticism is the chamber of poetry; how the room is arranged
is the poem. Eliot had used his criticism of 1919 and 1920 to map
the prospectus for the p oetry he now wanted to write. One that
was learned from the p oetry of the past but written in a modern
cadence. One that privileged the sensory response of the reader
above the directive intent of the writer. One that altered the past
as it altered the present. A new poetry that flowers on the stem of the
oldest. An original cadence. An inventive form. A distanced intimacy.
A music hall in which all that was missing was the discovery of
cadence and tempo.
‘The only criticism of poetry worth noticing is that of poets,’
Eliot wrote in a letter of 1927. ‘Theoretically, it does not matter at
all whether the critic is a poet or not; it is merely true in experience
that most of the best critics of poetry have been poets themselves.’167
And why is the poet important to criticism? Because the poet is
the artisan with the skill to manipulate the object through its nec-
essary states of being. The poet is the smith at the poem’s forge;
the poem is the heated metal; criticism is the anvil over which the
object is shaped; when it is cooled, it is for the reader to determine
the sensory significance of the artefact.
It was perhaps this that Leonard Woolf meant, when he wrote
in The Athenaeum that Eliot had produced something that can
serve as a foundation for knowledge.168
//
John Quinn had offered financial assistance to aid Pound, but he

wouldn’t accept it, saying that given his plight it should be Eliot
who was the first to be saved. I want to get T. S. E. out of that bank.
And by that he meant to ‘release his fading energy for writing; not
increase his earnings while he is in the bank’. He didn’t give a damn
whether his friend made and spent three times what Pound did:
he had to get him writing. He didn’t underestimate the financial
commitments that Eliot faced at home: ‘If someone wd. murder
or elope with his wife it wd. have the same effect as finding a few
hundred £.’169 But Pound’s own finances were not all stable. So long
as America continued to exclude him then his ‘exile’ had some
reality to it. What work could he actually undertake there? He
V | 215
had no obvious base for lecturing in the universities, and editing
promised thin returns. His work with The Dial was going well (he
had just sent Thomas Hardy the invitation that would produce the
poem ‘Two Houses’), and two letters from ‘The Island of Paris’170
had been printed there; but surely he and Thayer had reached the
natural threshold of their mutual tolerance, and anyway, as Wil-
liam Carlos Williams had pointed out, there was no longer enough
of a contemporary American in Pound to think he could edit the
poetry of contemporary America. London, for all its attractions,
had become a place where he said he could hear only his own play-
ing, and that was not a good place from which to write. He came to
Europe to build a civilisation, but instead he felt as though he was
administering opiates to a dying patient. ‘There is a point at which
self-inflicted discomfort becomes mere sadism.’171 England, he said,
seemed unlikely to provide ‘the white hope’.172
//
In Shirehampton Public Hall, on the River Avon, beginning at

ten minutes to eight, the programme of the local choral society
promised a ‘Grand Concert’. What it premiered that evening was
a sonata for violin and piano by Ralph Vaughan Williams. It was
a piece written on the eve of the Great War that seemed to pass
elusively between the stations of pre-war peace and the horrors
that followed, what a review called ‘serene disregard of the fashions
of today or of yesterday’.173 The piece was called The Lark Ascending.
Marie Hall was the violinist that December night, and she would
reprise the part for the first orchestrated version in London’s
Queen’s Hall the following summer. It was not a performance that
would register in Pound’s column as a music critic for the New Age,
begun that autumn. His attentions had been captured by a differ-
ent concert and a different performer: a young violinist from Ohio,
who played from a haunting catalogue of her own at the Aeoli-
an Hall, in London’s New Bond Street on 10 November. It was a
programme to fall for: Handel’s Sonata in D, Lalo’s Symphonie
Espagnole, Boulanger’s Nocturne and Cortège, Pizzetti’s Sonata
in A.174 And fall Ezra Pound would, when, in 1923, he met the solo-
ist in person rehearsing in Paris. Her name was Olga Rudge, and
she would dedicate the next fifty years of her life to Pound; but
before then, on that November night in the Aeolian Hall, Pound
limited himself to saying simply, ‘Olga Rudge charmed one by the
delicate firmness of her fiddling.’175
If there were a redeeming grace at that moment for Ezra Pound,
then it had lain in his hearing. Just as Eliot was tuning up his ear
for the composition he was about to begin, so Pound had opened
his to an enlivening variety of forms. In the second of his Paris-
ian letters for The Dial that November, he had praised the verses
of Maurice Vlaminck for their ability to ‘make a music for sing-
ing’.176 And he had reminded Ford Madox Ford that summer of
his paraphrasing of Dante: ‘A poem is a composition of words set
to music.’177 Like Eliot, he was hearing in everything the intercon-
nectedness of poetry and music.
Roland Hayes was the first Black artist to sing spirituals in a
programme at Wigmore Hall in London. Pound had been in the
audience the night of 28 October for his English debut, and wrote
rapturously in the New Age of a recital in which, through the purity
and clarity of rhythm and expression, Hayes had become the very
embodiment of the lyric form: ‘The meaning of the poem is in
him.’178 It was the variety of his vocal performance that was most
arresting: from Southern spirituals to the Parisian opera of Mas-
senet, to the graveside elegies of Paul Laurence Dunbar, not an
ascending lark but the kept bird bruised and beating. I know what
the caged bird feels.179 Pound could think of no singer who employed
‘so many different qualities of voice, from operatic delivery to a
singing which is almost speech’. The tapestry of voice and genre
was a shared pursuit for Pound and Eliot in the winter of 1920–1.
V | 217
‘The art of fitting words to tunes’, wrote Pound in The Dial, ‘is not
to be confused with the art of making words which will be “musi-
cal” without tunes.’180
//
‘Note new address – !’ Vivien wrote on 17 November. ‘Telephone.

Pad[dington] 3331.’181 Four months of flat-hunting had culminated
in a long negotiation with an ‘insane she-hyaena’182 of a seller, who
had spitefully cut off all the amenities so that Eliot would have to
reconnect them. But at last, the Eliots were in.
An Edwardian mansion block inspired by art nouveau and
Arts and Crafts influences, Clarence Gate Gardens, Glentworth
Street was to be the Eliots’ home for the next six years. ‘It is a
very nice flat,’ a relieved Eliot wrote to his mother: only a lit-
tle more expensive to rent than Crawford Mansions and with
half as much floor space again. A corridor ran from the entrance
through the spine of the flat and provided a sense of spaciousness
that the Eliots had not previously known. Two bedrooms flanked
a reasonable sitting room on one side of the corridor, while a
box bedroom, bathroom and kitchen lay on the other, which led
out to a small balcony at the back. It came with electricity, gas
and anthracite stoves throughout, and a constant supply of hot
water ‘to all the building’, stressed Eliot to his m
other, as well as
an aspect, which, for her pleasure, he translated into American:
‘First floor (i.e. second floor, American style) and lift (elevator)
also.’183 They had moved less than half a mile north-west across
the busy Marylebone Road, and were now just yards from the
wrought iron gate that opened onto the boating lake and Clar-
ence Bridge of Regent’s Park. An extra room meant they were
able to consider both an additional bedroom and a work space
for Eliot, but the flat had one still more important advance on
Crawford Mansions: it was quiet. For the first time, Eliot was in
possession of two ingredients as valuable as any typewriter: he
had space and he had quiet.
//
The body of the Unknown Soldier had been carried through the
night to a makeshift chapel at St Pol, in Northern France, and
placed in a casket carved from an oak tree that had once grown in
Hampton Court Palace. It travelled with a military entourage to
Boulogne, from where it was conveyed across the Channel aboard
the HMS Verdun, flanked by an escort of six battleships. It docked
at the Dover Marine Railway Station on 10 November, the eve of
the second Remembrance Day, and was carefully transferred to the
meticulously prepared Passenger Luggage Van 132, for an evening
departure to Victoria Station. From there the Daily Mail recorded
its journey:
The train thundered through the dark, wet, moonless night. At

the platforms by which it rushed could be seen groups of women
watching and silent, many dressed in deep mourning. [. . .] In the
London suburbs there were scores of homes with back doors flung
wide, light flooding out, and in the garden, figures of men, women
and children gazing at the great lighted train rushing past.184
The Unknown Soldier was laid to rest in the Westminster Abbey

on 11 November 1920. The procession that had approached the
nave heard the cathedral choir sing ‘I am the Resurrection and the
Life’, the signal for the Dean to conduct the service for the Burial
of the Dead. The coffin was interred at twenty minutes past eleven
in earth carried from the battlefield, baring red roses and bay leaves
from the King.185
In Dublin, in the early morning of Sunday 21 November 1920,

Michael Collins sent execution squads across the city targeting
V | 219
British intelligence operatives: fifteen people were killed, some in
their beds, one or more in mistaken identity. The response of the
Royal Irish Constabulary that day was one of the most shock-
ing events of the War of Independence. Black and Tans drove a
truck into a Gaelic football match at Croke Park, between Dublin
and Tipperary, and began shooting into the crowd: fourteen were
killed, including Jane Boyle, in the week before her wedding, and
two boys, William Robinson and Jerome O’Leary, aged eleven and
ten. Three men were executed in Dublin Castle that evening, tak-
ing the loss of life to thirty-two that day, a Sabbath that became
known as Bloody Sunday. In the escalating violence that followed,
a patrol of eighteen British auxiliaries was ambushed in Co. Cork
a week later: all but one died. In reprisal, Black and Tans burned
the city centre of Cork to the ground, shooting at firefighters and
beating residents who were attempting to quell the blaze. Up to
350 properties were burned, and two thousand people left home-
less or without work.
//
For all the esteem that The Sacred Wood would bring, by December
Eliot said that he had grown tired of the book, and was anxious to
move on to new work. ‘I should more enjoy being praised if I were
engaged on something which I thought better or more important.’
He added, ‘I think I shall be able to do so, soon.’186 But first he would
seek to clear his head from the exhaustion of the move, and take a
week’s holiday from the bank. He would return to Paris, alone, to
the pension near the Panthéon, nestled between a poultry shop and
a restaurant, where he had stayed on his first visit to Paris in Octo-
ber 1910. It was the place that he shared with Jean Verdenal, when
Eliot once lobbed a sugar lump from his window into the garden
below in order to get his attention.187 Eliot and Verdenal had then
been taken by the homely charm of the elderly proprietors, Mon-
sieur Casaubon, who served afternoon tea in the garden from a
silver pot, and Madame Casaubon, who presided each evening over
dinner. Now, in 1920, he returned alone to find that the proprietors
had passed away and left the running of the pension in the hands
of their grandson.188 Eliot might have been living among ghosts, he
said. For Vivien he bought a drawing (‘very cheap’) by Raoul Dufy,
and saw his brother-in-law Maurice, coincidentally in town, and
he made new introductions besides. Without the kind of society
that introduced him to new painters and poets, the experience of
the city would have felt quite different. The memory of Verdenal
was still raw, he told his m
other. The word he chose to describe this
sense was not without significance for the poem to come. Desolate,
he wrote, the city would have felt desolate.189
//
As Eliot returned from Paris to the new flat in London, Pound

was making his final arrangements for the journey in reverse. He
was, he told his father vaguely just after Christmas, ‘in some sort
of trajectory toward Orange or Avignon’.190 The Kensington flat
at 5 Holland Park Chambers had been home to the Pounds since
before the war, but now it was sublet to Agnes Bedford, a vocal
coach and accompanist on Five Troubadour Songs, published that
month (‘full of misprints’) by Boosey & Co., with piano arrange-
ments by Bedford and texts in Provençal and Chaucerian English
adapted by Pound.191 Bedford had taken the apartment books and
all, allowing Pound to leave his precious clavichord, a gift from
Arnold Dolmetsch, in her safe hands. From now on, Bedford
would be called upon to send on to Pound whichever of his books
he felt he needed at the time. He was leaving London in unknown
circumstances, as A. R. Orage announced in the New Age, ‘perhaps
for one year, perhaps for two, perhaps for good’.192
The move had been long in coming, but even so the abruptness
V | 221
of the news took Eliot by surprise. ‘I infer that there is no prospect
of seeing you,’ Eliot wrote in a hurried note of 22 December. ‘Your
letter is extremely obscure, but it appears that you are going South.
This is a blow. Please write and explain lucidly what your plans are
and for how long.’193 It was a blow indeed.
It had been Pound who identified a publisher for ‘The Love
Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, who subsidised the printing of Prufrock
and Other Observations and found a home for its twelve poems in
the literary journals of the day.
It was Pound who pre-published in the Little Review each of
the seven pieces of the Hogarth Poems of 1919.
And it had been Pound who had taken his blue pencil to all
but two of the additional pieces that made up Ara Vos Prec and the
Poems of 1920.
Twenty-five poems had been published by Eliot since his arrival
in London in 1914: Pound had a traceable hand in twenty-three,
and may very well have contributed to them all.
It was Pound who had encouraged E liot’s commitment to Eng-
land, who had reflected and directed Eliot’s reading and thinking,
fuelled the modernising fire and taken up arms in the field of crit-
icism. Pound carried him over the threshold with ‘Gerontion’, and
had, for four years as a near neighbour in West London, been the
exclusive, unwavering champion of his art.
That man – editor, publisher, adviser, interlocutor, stimulator,
supporter, conspirator in his dirty doggerel, Appleplex, Brer Rab-
bit, cohort, friend – that man was now leaving London behind for
ever, and so ending his quotidian life with Eliot.
‘If no more,’ wrote Eliot, ‘Farewell and Pleasure.’194
‘We are in action of closing up,’ said Pound enigmatically two
days after Christmas.195
Soon after, he was gone.
II
‘Mr Eliot, may I ask a question?’

‘Certainly.’
‘Er – did you mean that poem seriously?’
Eliot looked non-plussed for a moment, and then said quietly,
‘Well, if you think I did not mean it seriously, I have failed
utterly.’
– Oxford Universit y, 19281

The Burial of the Dead.
‘Banker, Critic, Poet’: it was in that order that T. S. Eliot listed his
occupation for a college alumni report of 1921; in the year ahead,
his priorities would be reversed.1 That New Year’s Day, he wrote to
Scofield Thayer, explaining that, with Vivien’s father having been
at the point of death for ten weeks (the surgeon had been so hor-
rified by what he saw that, said Eliot, ‘he wanted simply to sew
him up and let him die in peace’) he had not been able to write
the ‘London Letter’ he had promised for The Dial; that, and the
move to the new apartment, and the unexpected length of time it
took to prepare The Sacred Wood, had created a block on his writ-
ing of a kind that he had not experienced in five years. He was at
the bank six days a week, 9.30 to 5.00, and dividing everything
else between evenings and Sundays, which meant that he couldn’t
possibly accept Thayer’s offer to join Pound as a foreign editor for
the journal. But he was able to offer some advice in business. He
pressed upon Thayer the need not to rely on a subscription (‘Eng-
lish people, with very few exceptions, are unused to subscribing to
anything’), but to secure for the journal instead a physical presence
on every bookstall and Underground station.2 And he imparted
advice of a more mercenary kind: on no account could Thayer hope
to share his writers and readers with the London Mercury; for The
Dial to succeed it would have to be prepared to ‘cut the throat’
of its rival by enticing away its writers, and that required more
than merely financing its contributors: it meant seducing them
with the promise of literary esteem. Thayer had already come to
the same conclusion himself, and the presence of four drawings by
225
E. E. Cummings (one, a fawn rising onto to its hind legs before a
nude woman) seemed to signal a clear divergence from the read-
ership of the Mercury. But more likely still to have caught Eliot’s
eye was surely a description of Paris given by Ezra Pound in that
issue. ‘In a city the visual impressions succeed each other, overlap,
overcross, they are cinematographic, but they are not a simple line-
ar sequence,’ he wrote. ‘They are often a flood of nouns with verbal
relations.’3
The Pounds had made the crossing to France early in the first
week of the new year. On 10 January 1921, the Paris Herald print-
ed a welcome to Ezra, ‘just arrived in Paris from London’, which
seemed just the new beginning needed after a loveless departure
from England. The Pounds spent ten days in the city before travel-
ling south to Saint-Raphaël on the Côte d’Azur, where they would
rest for the next three months. While Pound was only too pleased
to leave his typewriter behind, Eliot was frustrated over his inabili-
ty to settle at his. Vivien, too, was worried: Tom was so much better
than he was at Christmas, she reassured Mrs Eliot, but he lived in
constant distress that he could achieve so little writing. ‘He gets
tired with his long day at the Bank,’ she reported, ‘and feels more
inclined for a quiet evening of reading, and early to bed, than to
begin the real business of his life, and sit up late.’4 But on the very
week that Vivien would write those words to Charlotte, Eliot was
indeed up late – and was, in Vivien’s perceptive language, at last
about to immerse himself in the real business of his life.
On the weekend of 22 January, Eliot finished the first piece of writ-

ing of any kind that he had managed for six months.5 Prepared for
The Dial’s American readership, it was the inaugural one of eight
bimonthly reports from London, ‘dealing with the literary life of
the metropolis’.6 The writing had come hard, he admitted, and the
piece had been rewritten twice, but it was at least a breakthrough.7
In it, Eliot labelled provincialism and dullness as ‘the two stupidi-
ties’ of British and American literary culture, and made some fairly
provocative announcements besides. ‘Culture is traditional, and
loves novelty’; ‘the General Reading Public knows no tradition,
and loves staleness.’ It was a salvo unlikely to win admirers: general
readers were uncritical and therefore to be ignored, he had written,
while cultured readers were snobs to be ridiculed. And ridiculed
they most certainly would be, as Eliot focused his scorn upon what
he defined as the ‘Georgian’ public: ‘that offensive part of the mid-
dle class which believes itself superior to the rest of the middle
class; and superior for precisely this reason that it believes itself to
possess culture’.8 It wasn’t entirely apparent which readers might
remain available for E liot’s attention, but one of them could have
been Harold Monro, the man who had turned down Prufrock, and
whose Some Contemporary Poets: 1920, published two months ago,
Eliot now prepared to etherise under the critical knife.
Harold Monro had intended his book as a health check for
contemporary poetry by one well placed for the job: he owned
the Poetry Bookshop that had traded on Devonshire Street since
before the war, and had been the founding editor of London’s
Poetry Review as an all-comers’ showcase for p oetry. But Monro
wasn’t quite where he thought he was: recently discharged from
the army, he had fallen behind the curve, and didn’t apprehend the
fractious moment in poetry to which he had returned. He couldn’t
understand why the poets would no longer harmonise as once they
had when he launched his anthology Georgian Poets in 1912, and he
was in no mood to forgive petty squabbles. Old allies were brutally
discarded. Poets he once published were written off as turgid (Las-
celles Abercrombie), facile (Wilfrid Wilson Gibson), insufficiently
profound, specious and wearisome (Robert Graves, John Drinkwater
and D. H. Lawrence).9 And that was merely the ‘Georgians’: more
troublesome still were the modernisers. Neither E liot’s poetry nor
his name had been considered worthy of inclusion, but Pound’s
had. Despite more than a dozen p oetry collections to his name,
The B ur ial of t he D e ad | 227

Pound was relegated by Monro to ‘a mere experimenter in unu-
sual rhythms’ whose unfashionable obsession with archaic verse
left him isolated and irascible, pelting his peers with paper darts.10
It was, said Monro, simply bad manners for the poet content to
scorn a botched civilisation, as Mauberley had, to make himself so
comfortable as a permanent resident in its culture, which by now
Pound no longer was.
Eliot was unimpressed. Criticism must work harder than this,
he insisted, as readers were entitled to more insight than adjec-
tives alone could bring, and what Monro had served up was mere
middle-class smudge. There could be no literature without critical
sense; and good criticism is the parent of good p oetry.11 And for
once, Eliot did not stand alone in his critical opinion. Such was the
outpouring of ill temper towards the book that Monro decided he
had better lie low, and in January 1921 he left hurriedly for the Villa
des Oliviers in France, illness the given reason, a flight duly hon-
oured in the Saturday Westminster Gazette with ‘Obituary Verses’:
Harold Monro
Had got to go
And (considering the kind of book he’s been writing about his
friends lately)
’Tis better so.12
Monro, the last unifier in London’s polarised poetic scene, had

stepped out of the fray. The Dial had given up on its effort to be
non-denominational. No one and no journal would now attempt
to bring together the Georgian and the new poetries.
//
‘It will be several months before I have any verse ready for publi-
cation,’ Eliot told Scofield Thayer on 30 January, just after delivery
of his first ‘London Letter’.13 Thayer was disappointed: ‘Why no
verse?’ he responded, and served friendly notice that he felt this
was a question that he hoped should never again need asking.14
But Eliot hadn’t said that there was no verse, only that it would
take time in coming, and as January turned to February he did
have a draft underway. At last, conditions for writing had altered.
The noisy, overbearing surroundings of Crawford Mansions and
the hours of flat-hunting were now behind him; the vigils for
Vivien’s father were over after he ‘miraculously’ stabilised and
began a convalescence in Tunbridge Wells and Eastbourne. Vivien
had relapsed after months of stress, and had taken to bed with a
throat infection that had left her temporarily mute. Tired as he was
– and he was: when Virginia Woolf saw him for lunch on Fleet
Street she described him as ‘pale, marmoreal Eliot’ – he finally
had peace.15 And momentary as it would be, he had now found a
place: one that was quiet and temperamentally stable, if only for
a brief time, but long enough that he began to see the prospect
of that longed-for period of tranquillity. The publication of The
Sacred Wood had consolidated his critical reputation and removed
any need to prove himself. His ‘London Letter’ had reawakened
the ritual of writing. His visit to Paris had rekindled in him the
energy of that pre-war time with Jean Verdenal and thrilled his
sense of the nouveau; it had stimulated, as Pound had just written,
filmic impressions overlapping, overcrossing, the flood of nouns
and verbal relations.16 He had spoken of hoping at last to be able to
get some work done, 30 January, and before that of his wish to settle
down to work now, 22 January. He had been anxious to get on to new
work, December 1920; had wanted to get to work on a poem he had
in mind, October 1920; sought a period of tranquillity to do a poem
that he had in mind, September 1920; to get settled quietly and write
some poetry, September again.17 The straining verbs said it all: to get
on, to get to, to do – a pressure he had experienced since November
1919, when he had first said that he hoped to get started on a poem he
had in mind.18 He had a lot of things to write about if the time ever

came when people would attend to them: December 1917. He had
lived through material for a score of long poems: January 1916.19
//
The Phoenix Society might have failed in their 1919 revival of The
Duchess of Malfi, but the production of Ben Jonson’s Volpone brought
to the Hammersmith Lyric for two nights, 30 January and 1 Febru-
ary, played to a rapturous response. W. B. Yeats said he could think
of nothing else for hours after he left the theatre, Aldous Huxley
that he couldn’t remember a production of such unmixed pleas-
ure.20 It was, Eliot would reflect in an article that summer for The
Dial, ‘the most important theatrical event of the year in London’:
a superbly executed demonstration of Jonson’s unity of inspira-
tion, terrifying in its directness, as bold as it was shocking.21 But
the occasion was also significant for something that happened off
stage. Eliot had seen Wyndham Lewis at the theatre that evening,
and had hinted to him that something new was underway. ‘Eliot,
like myself, seems to have been engaged in some obscure and intri-
cate task of late,’ Lewis told Violet Schiff in puzzlement, ‘though
what his task has been I cannot say.’22 He hoped that it was writing,
and said he intended to encourage Eliot in ‘the writing of a poem
or two’; whatever it was, he sensed something unusual: ‘It will be
music for some time to come, I hope.’
The ‘music’ was to materialise a few days later, when on 5 Feb-
ruary, Lewis would meet again with Eliot, and this time he was
given sight of the ‘intricate task’ which had been occupying him.
‘He is doing his article,’ Lewis told Violet’s husband Sydney, for
the ‘paper in preparation’ that would become his new journal, The
Tyro, financed by Schiff, to which Eliot had agreed to contribute.
But that wasn’t the task in question. For Lewis had been permitted
to see something in draft that day that was far more significant
than the article. ‘He also showed me a new long poem (in 4 parts)
which I think will be not only very good, but a new departure for
him.’23 Lewis did not reveal the title of the new long poem in four
parts, but almost certainly it had one, and it is likely to have been
the title that forms part of the poem today.
Eliot had found his way to his title long ago, at Harvard in 1913,
where it had begun a five-line verse with its opening rite, ‘I am the
Resurrection and the Life’.24 There he had left it, unpublished but
stored, a lyric that would be preserved among the papers for The
Waste Land gifted to John Quinn in 1922, and for a reason: eight
years after its composition, in the wake of his father’s death, it would
seemingly provide the ‘new long poem (in 4 parts)’ with its first and
most elegiac title, a service of rites from The Book of Common Prayer.
I held my tongue, and ſpake nothing: I kept ſilence, yea, even from good
words; but it was pain and grief to me . . . My heart was hot within me;
and while I was thus muſing the fire kindled: . . . For I am a ſtranger
with thee: and a ſojourner, as all my fathers were . . . In the morning
it is green, and groweth up: but in the evening it is cut down, dried
up, and withered . . . he fleeth as it were a ſhadow, . . . In the midſt of
life we are in death: . . . duſt to duſt; . . . he is able to ſubdue all things
to himſelf . . . O Father, to raiſe us from the death of ſin unto the life of
righteouſneſs; . . . Come, ye bleſſed children of my father . . .25
liot’s typewriter had seen better days. It was a Corona, ‘my

E
wretched old one’, that he had carried over in his suitcase from Har-
vard in 1914.26 Since then seven years of essays and letters and poems
had worn thin the mechanism, landing his heavily used vowels une-
venly above the baseline. As he sat before it in the winter of 1921, he
centred the carriage, and depressed the shift lock. The strikers swung
up from the type basket, prompting the escapement forward, letter
by letter: a title, concluded as were all his titles, with a terminal point.
THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD.

He rolled the platen twice for a two-line drop, and began to type
the poem’s opening. But it was not ‘April is the cruellest month’,
the line that would become synonymous with the poem, but some-
thing altogether different.
In January 1921, Eliot had written to Maxwell Bodenheim to say

he found life in England more comfortable than in America: ‘I can
get a drink of very bad liquor of any sort when I want it; which is
important to me.’27 Prohibition had been in force for a year in the
United States, and was a subject on Eliot’s mind that winter. In
the essay he was writing for Lewis, ‘The Romantic Englishman’, he
made a coded comparison between lives of the seventeenth centu-
ry and those of the present day, speculating that our forebears were
‘surrounded, indeed, by fewer prohibitions’, or by ‘the petrified
product which the public school pours into our illimitable sub-
urbs’.28 It was a cause that was about to become the opening theme
of the poem that had been so long in the planning. He typed:
First we had a couple of feelers down at Tom’s place,

There was old Tom, boiled to the eyes, blind,29
The poem was to begin not with April or lilacs or with the spring
rain that we know today, but with night-time, booze and brothels.
Its voice was that of ‘a nice guy – but rough’, an unnamed guide
who would direct a small crowd of companions through the back
streets of an unnamed city (‘Boston’ was given by Valerie Eliot in
1971) in the draft’s opening scenes.30 Drinks were followed by din-
ner, then by a smoke and an adult ‘show’ at which the companions
overstepped the permissible boundaries and found themselves
ejected. More drink was taken, while one of the company tried for
a way in at a boudoir to be told by its proprietor that she’s not in
business for guys like him, and indeed barely in business at all now,
‘what with the damage done’ by the new licensing laws. When a
policeman interrupts the party in an alleyway for ‘committing a
nuisance’ (relieving themselves), arrest is avoided only by the
chance arrival of the influential Mr Donavan, who takes the revel-
lers onward in search of another club, running a hundred yards on
a bet, and home.
It was knockabout stuff – bawdy, risqué in its subject and vernac-
ular – fuelled by liquor and a slurring movement between popular
songs in a continuous stanza of fifty-four lines. Undoubtedly it

revved with energy and excitement, a soaked world of whirling
pleasures, but there was, too, something wayward about it, some-
thing offbeat. It seemed scrawny, somehow, dishevelled not only
in content but also in form. For one thing, he hadn’t found the
distinctive cadence that Pound had described as typical of Eliot’s
style, but instead hovered around a blank verse with just the kind
of conversational tone that Eliot had said in a 1919 essay that he
was set against. It had yet to think musically:
The next thing we were out in the street, Oh was it cold!
The vocalisation was rough, even ragged:
And now you go get a shave, she said; I had a good laugh,
It wouldn’t be the last time that Eliot would tune in to such

voices to dramatise the poem, but when next he did it would be in
a London pub, and with the benefit of Vivien’s ear to finesse his
own. But for the meantime, the opening lines remained uncom-
fortable and unworn, awkward at the ear:
What’s this, officer. You’re new on this beat, aint you?

I thought so. You know who I am? Yes, I do,
Saidd the fresh cop, very peevish.
It isn’t known exactly when Eliot produced the first page of

typescript, but it appears that he revisited the draft on separate
occasions, first in pen and then in pencil, and probably for a third
time following that. His first pass was slight: he struck a good
laugh for a couple of laughs and then reverted when he returned by
pencil, before cancelling the phrase altogether. He trialled similar
efforts in lines with the police officer: correcting first in ink and
then cancelling as an afterthought in pencil; it seems he tried to
break the single stanza into three at this time. The second edit,
by pencil, was more determined, tightening the phrasing, delet-
ing a line and several half-lines that seemed pernickety in their
steps. And he reworked a name for its entrance into the German
Club: Joe Leahy became Heinie Krutzsch became Gus Krutzsch.
But he continued to struggle with the musical tone, ringing lines
of song he’d taken from the 1908 musical Fifty Miles from Boston
(‘I’m proud of all the Irish blood that’s in me’), and replacing them
with two turn-of-the-century songs, each crossed out in favour
of something closer to ‘home’: a ragtime tune called ‘The Cuban-
ola Glide’, by Harry Von Tilzer of the Tin Pan Alley, who had in
his time written music for the St Louis brewers Anheuser-Busch.
Eliot struggled, too, with the speaking voices, and had repeated
attempts at a conversation held at the bordello door, and finally
struck out lines reprimanding the policeman. It seemed he knew
the tone that he was after, but he hadn’t teased out a memorable
expression for it.
A second page was spooled into the typewriter’s paper rest: four
spaced asterisks marked a sub-section, and above those a folio
number, ‘2’.31 And below, there it came: a line that was to become
among the most well known in literature, a frame so defining that
generations of readers would commit it to heart.
April is the cruellest month
Only that wasn’t the line, but part of it, for the full line would in
fact read,
April is the cruellest month, breeding
It was a verb to make the difference: not a month of grow-

ing or nourishing or nurturing as any other spring might expect,
but breeding, as animals and bacteria breed, and in a moment of
utmost cruelty. Its startling place at the line ending served as a
supercharger, and would fuel the early engine of the poem through
a chain of reacting echoes. Breeding, mixing, stirring, covering,

feeding: so ended five of the first six lines, propelling the poem for-
ward. It was a sequence of nouns with guardian adjectives: cruellest
month, dead land, dull roots, forgetful snow, little life, dried tubers;
only the spring rain countered the withered tone, like a memory
of the once sweet downpour of Chaucer’s ‘Whan that Aprill with
his shoures soote’.32
The ‘Boston’ lines had been plucky, if not wicked, but already
from this second page it was clear how artificial an opening at
‘Tom’s place’ would now be. For here, in this second section, lay the
heart-work of the subject, and the emotional hard-wiring of the
poem to come.
April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
A distinctive cadence. A personal modus of arrangement.

Remote origins of a personal quality. Each of Pound’s three tests
for a poem was met in these seven lines. In form it was quite unlike
anything else: neither Georgian (of course) nor Imagist either,
nor resembling anything else of E liot’s, besides perhaps a partial
likeness to the recent ‘Gerontion’. Even the number of lines them-
selves was unusual – seven – not quatrains or the more familiar
compliance of six or eight lines, but a tilt from the top that estab-
lished a new timing from the outset. And then, mid-stanza, having
anchored the septet, it tilted once more. Summer surprised us. The
breath lengthened, the pace slowed, and it swept into an allitera-
tive glide of swirling ‘s’s and whirling ‘w’s, in a carousel of sound
and childhood: summer, shower, stopped, sunlight; winter, warm,
when we were.
The first of a busy cast of characters would take to the poem’s
stage: enter a Lithuanian who feels not Russian but German, in
a symbol of warring Prussia; enter the reminiscence of Countess
Marie Larisch von Moennich, the disgraced go-between in the
doomed affair of the Archduke Rudolf, Crown Prince of Austria
and his lover. In these twin characters alone lay the fall of two great
empires, and, just as importantly, an accent for the poem. Like ‘a
set of snapshots’ or sepia postcards spilled out upon a table, here
were the first of the sensory signals that the Boston scene hadn’t
managed to convey – the ‘object correlatives’, as Eliot had come
to call them – the symbols that he believed might serve to stir
the emotive response of the reader: ‘the faded poor souvenirs of
passionate moments’.33 Here, too, was the tone for the cameo chat-
ter that would carry throughout the corridors of the poem: the
overheard voices and glimpsed faces that bring only a ‘partial real-
isation’, characters that were to be drawn from music hall, comedy
revue and cinema, who between them contained the possibility
of combining to ‘provide fragments of a possible English myth’.34
This was an ancient idea that he had already observed in the works
of Seneca: of members of a minstrel troupe ‘rising in turn each to
do his “number”, or varying their recitations by a song or a little
back-chat’.35 But in E
liot’s hands it had infused the technology of
its day. The flicker of a moving picture, the jump of a gramophone
needle, the rapid revolve akin to what Eliot always liked to call
‘the wireless’ (Stravinksy noted that Eliot had a fondness for such
‘horse-drawn phrases’ as ‘the wireless’).36 It is not without reason
that in 1945 the poem would be likened to the experience of listen-
ing to stations on a long-wave radio while tuning the dial between
them.37
Another row of asterisks and another section. Ezekiel in the
valley of dry bones, unable to decipher what stirs and what doesn’t.
A heap of broken images. (And your altars shall be desolate, and your
images shall be broken.)38 And for the first time, but not the last,

a plunder from Eliot’s earlier work: four lines chiselled from the
rock of a 1915 poem, ‘The Death of St Narcissus’: grey it was then,
now red, as the red-rock ochre of the caves of Font de Gaume,
Come in under the shadow of this red rock.
A final part, a further line of asterisks marking a gateway. Here,
a sailor’s song from the doomed love story of Tristan and Isolde,
Wagner (Fresh blows the wind for home, my Irish child, where do you
roam?) rolling right into the hyacinth girl who, after a decade’s
silence, Eliot would tell Emily Hale was for her – his last romantic
connection to America, a flower girl forgotten by the one who
loves her, one who was neither living nor dead, the love of a ghost
by a ghost. In 1930, Eliot would ask her to reread these lines as a
measure of his love for her. ‘I shall always write primarily for you.’39
Then Madame Sosostris and her wicked pack of cards foretast-
ing the rise and fall of waters that would bring fertility and demise:
‘Fear death by water,’ she says.40
Terrible city. No, that was not quite right, and returning the
typewriter carriage to the start of the line, he retyped, in so doing
finding in a flash what would be one of the poem’s defining p hrases.
Unreal City.
He had almost reached the conclusion of the draft when, just
four lines from the end, the typescript ribbon ran out of ink. Left
with two faint lines he could barely read, Eliot changed the spool
on his machine, and typed back over the top of the faded strokes,
and in so doing he added a line:
You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
Whether a spontaneous addition or a line left out at first by mis-

take, in its reference to the naval triumph of Rome over Carthage,
an allusion to John Maynard Keynes and the Great War had been
impressed into the poem.
Three pages of typescript, four parts, six stanzas, 130 lines. Too
long, perhaps, and did the Boston beginning at ‘Tom’s place’ read
too much like a prologue? He would very soon return to take a
look at that. But a draft – finally a draft – after all this time. ‘The
Burial of the Dead’ was underway.
//
When an interviewer said in 1959 that he’d heard that Eliot com-
posed on the typewriter, he received a qualified reply. ‘Partly on
the typewriter,’ Eliot responded, and offered an insight into his
recent play, The Elder Statesman, saying that it was initially pro-
duced in pencil on paper, before he transferred it to the machine.41
‘In typing myself I make alterations,’ he said, ‘very considerable
ones.’ The early poems of the Prufrock years were mostly begun
in manuscript and occasionally transferred to typescript (Conrad
Aiken possessed a sheet produced by Eliot in splendid purple ital-
ic on a Blickensderfer). But for the poems of the ‘French’ style
– the Hogarth, Ovid and Knopf editions – and for the period of
The Waste Land – a run of five years and perhaps sixteen poems
– Eliot appears to have altered his approach. In August 1916, he
told Aiken that he was composing on the typewriter and enjoying
lucidity and compression as a result.42 Most likely, he was thinking
of his prose when he wrote this, but it may not be a coincidence
that from that moment no draft manuscripts at all survive until
the pages of The Waste Land in 1921. Some papers may have been
written and destroyed in the act of transfer onto the machine, a
moment which, to Eliot, marked the end of their practical value;
but the condition of some initial typescripts – many in states of
reasonably heavy revision – suggests that at this time Eliot was
making his first drafts directly onto the typewriter. Or at least
that he was making his first full drafts on the typewriter, allowing
for the possibility that fragmentary scraps or ‘scattered lines’, as
he referred to them when writing to John Quinn, had provided
a source from which to draw – what in Margate later in 1921 he

gave another name to, when he called them ‘rough’ drafts. Two
years after the publication of The Waste Land, he said of ‘The Hol-
low Men’ in 1924 that ‘I compose on the typewriter,’ and repeated
the phrase word for word to a poet in 1927, adding: ‘The nearest
approach to a manuscript I ever have is the first draft with pencil
corrections.’43 That seemed an exact description for The Waste Land:
a first full draft in typescript, sometimes from scattered lines that
were destroyed once used, with corrections to the typescript made
by hand, in pencil and in ink. Two years later he told the Bodleian:
‘I work mostly on the typewriter from rough notes, which I usually
destroy.’44 His process was crystallised in the mid-1930s in a letter
to a younger author:
My practice is to start a passage with a few pencilled pages, and

then when I get going I usually continue it on the typewriter, so that
I should never have a complete pencilled manuscript of any poem
of any length, and I never have any ink manuscripts at all, unless I
prepare them especially.45
‘As for verse,’ he wrote to his brother at the same time, ‘I usually
make a few rough notes and then draft and redraft on the machine.
Sometimes I start with a pencil and then when I have got going
work straight on with the typewriter.’46 He went still further in
1940 with the mother of Hope Mirrlees, saying that he could only
think with a typewriter – so much so that there were occasions
where he typed first and copied out in longhand second, indicating
that ‘my typing is equivalent to o ther people’s handwriting, and my
handwriting to o ther people’s typing’.47 The mechanical process of
compilation aided the process of composition.
It was the typescripts, not the manuscript ‘roughs’, that were
the precious object for Eliot. A single page took ardent effort to
produce, as well as attention to preserve. Three sheets would be fed
into the machine: two leaves sandwiching a carbon sheet. The top
or ‘ribbon’ copy was always the most legible and would ideally be
the one submitted to printers and publishers, but sometimes it was
the clearer copy for annotating and would be the sheet that Eliot
would share with friends. In that case, he would keep back the
carbon copy for his records, and sometimes annotate that accord-
ingly. Whether ribbon or carbon, c opies were not for his friends to
keep: an author needed them back for correction or submission,
or else face the prospect of retyping from scratch. On occasion,
a new copy would be necessary for just that reason, or because a
redraft was sufficiently dramatic to require it. Friends may have
clung on to pages longer than they should, and printers often recy-
cled their setting c opies once their job was complete: gaps in the
record are the most likely explanations for ‘missing’ c opies of type-
script. Having both ribbon and carbon copies out with friends at
the same time could speed the return of criticism, but it was also a
risk, and may have caught Eliot out when he had no typescript of
‘Gerontion’ to take with him to France as both c opies were in cir-
culation. Where a typescript was annotated or revised for a second
time, a different medium might be adopted: pencil in one instance,
pen in another to distinguish a hierarchy of marking. But often a
typescript was only as clean or as ‘finished’ as it needed to be for a
reader or printer to follow, and was frequently a work in progress.
In 1968, when Eliot’s bibliographer Donald Gallup became the

first to document the rediscovered pages of The Waste Land in the
New York Public Library, he recorded that many of the typescript
pages were probably ‘first draft’.48 The bibliographer had been
given only limited time to make his assessment before the archive
was opened to the public, but nonetheless, his instinct had chimed
with a remark made by Eliot only months after finishing the poem.
In September 1922, he would tell John Quinn that ‘the large[r]
part is really typescript for which no manuscript except scattered
lines, ever existed’.49 Those that did exist were often destroyed by
Eliot himself, as he had told the Bodleian, for reasons that were

peculiar to Eliot’s unusual mind. For some poets, drafting is not
always progressive: some go back to go forward, preserving their
drafts in order to reconnect to elements that might have been
excised along the way. But E liot’s brain worked differently, and
when he destroyed a manuscript he did so for one of two reasons:
either because its content had been subsumed into a typescript, or
because he wished it to continue to stir chemically in his mind. ‘As
a rule,’ he told an interviewer of 1959, ‘with me an unfinished thing
is a thing that might as well be rubbed out.’ Erasure was part of the
process of making something new.
It’s better, if there’s something good in it that I might make use of

elsewhere, to leave it at the back of my mind than on paper in a
drawer. If I leave it in a drawer it remains the same thing but if it’s
in the memory it becomes transformed into something else.50
Where manuscript roughs for The Waste Land survive it would

be because their transformation had not been completed: they
were neither absorbed yet into typescript nor rubbed out to create
something new, but preserved on their way to a planned integra-
tion of the longer poem.
//
‘Like a chapped office boy on a high stool’: Eliot was tense at lunch
with Virginia Woolf at the Cock Tavern on Fleet Street in the
second week of February.51 ‘The critics say I am learned & cold,’
he confided as they walked back along the Strand together. ‘The
truth is I am neither.’ Coldness, she said, was a sore point with him.
Once again, his tension had been stoked by the state of Vivien’s
health. She was confined to her bed, Wyndham Lewis said, when
he and Eliot saw each o ther at Volpone. By 3 February, Eliot had
explained to Mary Hutchinson that Vivien had been out too soon
after experiencing an ‘attack’ and was now laid out, speechless with
bronchial trouble. Eliot always believed that a remedy for Vivien
lay in the countryside, and he expected her to repair there shortly;
but her condition instead worsened, and she couldn’t manage in
the country on her own. Eliot told his m other that what Vivien
was experiencing was a ‘severe attack’ of influenza: she was very
weak and he had been unable to get to his writing.52 By 13 Febru-
ary Vivien had left the flat, but not for the country: she had been
installed in a nursing home at the very moment that her father was
making a miraculous recovery and being discharged from his. For
the next fortnight, at least, Eliot would have the flat to himself. He
sent his mother a list. Would she let him know: 1. when she was
coming to England; 2. her budget for board and lodging; 3. pref-
erences for hotel; 4. preparations for food; 5. – and this would be
the most important – whether she would consider taking a small
furnished flat if the Eliots provided a cook. More than five years
had passed since he had seen his mother, more than two since
his father had died; it began to look as though the possibility of
reunion with the former might at last be on the horizon. Might his
mother finally be accepting of his marriage? Might his inheritance
be restored? With that prospect before him, and with Vivien in
care, Eliot would suspend his correspondence for the rest of the
month in order to use the newfound quiet to immerse himself in
writing of an altogether deeper significance.
//
The ruling by Justice McInerney on 21 February was swift and

decisive. ‘I think that this novel is unintelligible,’ he told the New
York Court of Special Sessions, ‘and it seems to me like the work
of a disordered mind.’53 Ulysses had been convicted of obscenity
after complaints about an episode of its ‘Nausicaa’ pages, in which
a young girl called Gerty MacDowell leans back to watch a fire-
work display, under the heated gaze of Leopold Bloom. (‘And

she was trembling in every limb from being bent so far back that
he could see high up above her knee where no-one ever and she
wasn’t ashamed and he wasn’t either.’)54 Or more accurately, it was
the Little Review that had been convicted: its editors, Margaret
Anderson and Jane Heap, were fined $50 each for violating sec-
tion 1141 of the Penal Code in publishing obscenity, and forced to
suspend serialisation. The next day, the New York Times reported
the judgement with the headline: ‘Improper novel costs woman
$50’, and the subhead ‘woman’s dress described’, in a censored allu-
sion to Gerty MacDowell’s raised garments. The Great Red Scare
was underway; Bolshevism was stirring the American workforce;
one thousand arrest warrants for members of the Union of Rus-
sian Workers had been issued by the attorney general. The court
held that sections of the story were ‘harmful to the morals of the
community’ and the defence counsel John Quinn had failed to
persuade it otherwise.55 Serialisation had made Joyce’s name better
known, Ezra Pound believed, but ‘the excuse for parts of Ulysses is
the WHOLE of Ulysses’.56 It was time to see the work published
in its entirety.
A Game of Chess.
For two weeks Eliot wrote no letters but concentrated exclus

ively on his writing. Through the middle of February to the end of
March, he produced articles for The Times and Chapbook, and two
for Lewis’s Tyro.1 By the time he returned to his new long poem
the ribbon on his ‘wretched old’ Corona had faded slightly under
the load. But he had now a working title for the poem’s second
section: it was to be called ‘In the Cage’, from the Sibyl of Cumae,
who had asked Apollo for immortality but not eternal youth.2
So withered by age had she become that her shrunken body was
trapped inside a two-handled ampulla, where she hung, wanting to
die. It was Eliot who had translated ampulla as ‘cage’, even though
he would have known that the Latin more closely translates to bot-
tle or flask or vessel, and even though his own edition of Petronius’
Satyricon, from where it came, rendered the word as ‘jar’.3 Perhaps
he feared that the ampulla might magnify the focus on drinking
that ‘Tom’s place’ had established; perhaps he was even beginning
to doubt the wisdom of that section as an opening passage for the
poem. Either way, the title of this second part of the poem was to
change – although when it did, the reference to the Sibyl would
not be lost forever, but in time restored, when the whole poem – by
then a poem of five sections – would adopt the passage as its final
epigraph.4
‘The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne’.5 When Eliot had
referenced in 1919 Enobarbus’ description of Cleopatra in ‘her
infinite variety’, he had trailed off the quotation with ellipsis as if
it were something he intended to return to. Now, it opened the
245
draft of the second part of his poem, where the barge had become
a chair, and Cleopatra a figure of variety – an Egyptian queen, a
Belladonna foreseen by Madame Sosostris, a woman framed
below a painting of the brutal rape of Philomela by Tereus – ter-
minating in Ophelia’s ‘Good night, ladies’ – a figure whose death,
like Cleopatra’s, is marked upon the cards. These were lines more
ornate and formal than anything that had gone before them in
‘The Burial of the Dead’ – griped by iambic pentameter, thick-
ened by allusion, ‘antique’, even, to use the poem’s own word, and
quite unlike the sharp modernity of the first part. How did they
belong, exactly, amid such contemporary lines? Littered as they
were with rare and decorative ornaments, it seemed unclear how
these lines could provide ‘correlative’ objects that were likely to be
understood by the reader. Eliot, of course, may have intended
exactly that: a disparate moment of a miscellaneous bill of the
kind found in the music hall or the box of postcards that he had
spilled out on the table of the first part. There is reason to think
so, in fact, as before Eliot got very much further – and certainly
before he reached a second page of the new typescript – he did
something unexpected. It was an action to do with the title – and
not the title for this part of the poem, ‘In the Cage’, which was
soon to be retitled ‘A Game of Chess’, but one that would govern
both parts of the poem written to date – a frame, as it were, for the
whole. While the first sheet of ‘In the Cage’ was still in the type-
writer, Eliot wound back the carriage wheel to the top of the
paper and typed into the header:
HE DO THE POLICE IN DIFFERENT VOICES: Part II.
His source was a line from Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, but to
the poem it promised what Eliot may always have intended – that
‘infinite variety’ of which Enobarbus had spoken: the vocal move-
ment of the poem, its polyphony of speakers and its assortment of
registers – a choir of ‘different voices’. With the new title in place,
Eliot wound down the sheet and continued with his draft of ‘In
the Cage’.
Vivien’s treatment in the nursing home for suspected influenza
had lasted no more than a fortnight; by the beginning of March
she was recuperating at home. But then her condition suddenly
worsened, until by mid-month she was in a dire state. As Eliot
attempted to manage the visits of friends, he told Brigit Patmore
A G a me of C he s s | 247
that the doctors had never seen such a case, and had done noth-
ing at all to help her. ‘Vivien has been lying in the most dreadful
agony with neuritis in every nerve, increasingly – arms, hands,
legs, feet, back.’6 Dreadful agony, screaming agony: he wasn’t sure
how much of it her body could take. ‘In the Cage’ records a sim-
ilar desperation.
‘My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
‘Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.
‘Have you ever been in such incessant and extreme pain that you
felt your sanity going, and that you no longer knew reality from
delusion?’ Eliot asked Patmore that March. ‘That’s the way she is.’
‘Nerves’ was the condition attributed to both Vivien and Eliot by
doctors and friends, and even to each o ther: in E
liot’s draft, ‘nerves’
seemed to express the fugue of a couple – or was it perhaps a single
speaker speaking to themselves? – as well as tugging at lines from
The Tempest: Thy nerves are in their infancy again.7 And it was these
same ‘nerves’ that carried the draft toward yet another tempest, the
trenches of the Great War:
I think we are in rats’ alley

Where the dead men lost their bones.
How subtly the fear and squalor of the conflict was admit-
ted by Eliot in the poem at that moment, without being named
directly. And it would surface still more clearly in a second page
that followed, in a scene from a London pub at closing time,
‘When Lil’s husband was coming back out of the Transport
Corps’.8 By then, Eliot had returned not once but twice to The
Tempest, first in a refrain of a line used already in ‘The Burial of
the Dead’, ‘Those are pearls that were his eyes, yes!’, and then to
beg the despairing question, ‘What shall I do now? What shall
I do?’9
Six times in the poem that followed Eliot would return to The
Tempest, six times to the same scene – Act One, Scene Two, in
which a young prince receives the devastating news that his father
has been drowned at sea:
Full fathom five thy father lies.

Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.10
In Shakespeare’s play, the young prince is tricked into grief:

although he does not know it, his father is in fact alive and well
and washed up on the same island; he will eventually find joy in
reconciliation. But Eliot’s poem will experience no such redemp-
tion, and will dwell instead on the image of a son tortured by the
image of his father’s body, dismantling and distributing, losing his
bones like the men of rats’ alley, collapsing and remaking under the
metamorphic forces of the changing sea.
‘Splendid last lines,’ Vivien would write on reading the poem in
May – and they were: the very last of them lifted from Hamlet
verbatim – Ophelia’s cry before her own drowning.11 It was then,
probably immediately upon completing his typed draft of ‘In the
Cage’, that Eliot went back to the typescript of ‘The Burial of the
Dead’ and wound its first page – the Boston scene – back into the
typewriter once more. From there, he typed the same Dickensi-
an title across its header, only this time slightly off-parallel to the
existing text and in the lighter colour of ribbon ink used on the
sheets of ‘In the Cage’ that he had just typed.
HE DO THE POLICE IN DIFFERENT VOICES: Part I.
The poem was now in two parts, with a governing title and two
part titles, some 228 lines in length. It was by far the longest poem
Eliot had written. And there was very much more to come.
//
It was Richard Aldington who had proposed a special issue of

Chapbook to Harold Monro as ‘an enquiry into the nature of prose
poetry’; it was he who suggested Eliot for what he knew to be his
‘respectable and subtle’ objections to prose poetry in order to make
for an engaging debate.12 Eliot accepted, saying that he thought
such an enquiry might help to stimulate the worn nerves and
arthritic limbs of our diction; it was probably at the compositional
moment of ‘In the Cage’ that he wrote these words, and said that
he proposed to respond in what he called disconnected paragraphs
for Chapbook that March.
Eliot was interested in intensity as a distinguishing marker
between poetry and prose, and he made a revealing statement.
‘No long work can maintain the same high tension throughout.’13
This was a distinguished thought, for it wasn’t the view of many
poets, Eliot admitted, and certainly not of Edgar Allan Poe, who
had written that undue brevity was one challenge to writing, but
‘undue length is yet more to be avoided’.14 Intensity was the unity
of feeling for Poe, and there could be no relaxation of tension at any
length in order to achieve it; long or short, the intensity of a poem
should be the same. Ezra Pound agreed in this with Poe: it was
only through the precision of concentration that an author could
energise their language. From the beginning Pound had stressed
the need for a concentrated register: direct treatment, no superfluity,
the musical phrase had been the three spears of the Imagist trident
in 1913, and he had told Harriet Monroe soon after: ‘The test of a
writer is his ability for such concentration AND for his power to
stay concentrated till he gets to the end of his poem, whether it is
two lines or two hundred.’15 But now Eliot was saying something
quite different – something fundamentally different – about the
working of a longer poem. In 1942, he would put the thought more
clearly still:
In a poem of any length, there must be transitions between passages
of greater and less intensity, to give a rhythm of fluctuating emotion
essential to the musical structure of the whole.16
After ‘modernising’ themselves in like-minded ways, after a

common valuation of tradition, after an interrogation of ‘vers libre’,
after their defiant course against Georgians, the Squiredom and
Mercurian poetry, after defending and promoting and expounding
one another’s art, after all of that: as each man cleared a way for his
longest work – The Waste Land and The Cantos – Eliot and Pound
were divided on a critical matter: the intensity with which a long
poem may run. And now Eliot would make his most incisive –
and, for the poem he was calling ‘He Do the Police in Different
Voices’, his most important – statement of all:
I see no reason why a considerable variety of verse forms may not be

employed within the limits of a single poem.17
There it was: the formal licence he had sought for poetry issued
to himself in a single sentence. And he went on in the next breath
to address the image and the textual eye, in what he called the
impression received into the mind of the author: ‘the rapid and
unexpected combination of images apparently unrelated’.18
Right there was a second critical statement. Variety of form,
combination of image: each licensed according to the requirement
of the poem. And what animated both – what distinguished prose
from p oetry, finally, said Eliot – was a definite concession to what
he called ‘the desire for “play”’.
//
Dinner with the Woolfs at Hogarth House had overrun. Arriving
late at Richmond Station afterwards, Eliot and Virginia discov-
ered they had missed the train to Hammersmith, where they had
tickets for the Phoenix Society production of Congreve’s Love
for Love at the Lyric Theatre. They shared a taxi instead, passing
through the darkened market gardens that still flanked the river
then. Virginia recorded the conversation in her diary.
‘Missing trains is awful’ I said. ‘Yes. But humiliation is the

worst thing in life’ he replied. ‘Are you as full of vices as I am?’ I
demanded. ‘Full. Riddled with them.’ ‘We’re not as good as Keats’ I
said. ‘Yes we are’ he replied. ‘No; we dont write classics straight off as
magnanimous people do.’ ‘We’re trying something harder’ he said.19
//
Conrad Aiken had reviewed The Sacred Wood – ‘rather grudging’,
thought Eliot.20 But then Aiken had just been very publicly hauled
over the coals in The Dial for using, in Eliot’s words to his mother,
passages ‘borrowed or stolen from me’. The work under scrutiny
was The House of Dust, newly published in March by the Four Seas
press of Boston, from which the critic Babette Deutsch had pulled
out four passages and laid them against original lines by Eliot,
concluding that they were ‘obviously indebted’.21 The review went
so far as to credit Eliot as ‘the “assisting artist”’, saying that the flaw
was not that Aiken had shared the same thoughts as Eliot, but that
when the thought came he had lifted his eyebrows in the same
way. Deutsch was just beginning her career as a young American
poet with one collection to her name, but already she had proved
herself an astute reader of E liot’s work. Her review of Prufrock and
Other Observations in 1918 had stood above the fray, noting precisely
that what gave E liot’s language its extraordinary charge was ‘com-
mon words uncommonly used’.22 Her response was more exacting
than the vague pronouncements on beauty and rebellion that had
emanated from the English journals, as was an observation that
what defined E liot’s vision was a weary mind ‘looking out upon a
crowded personal experience with impartial irony’. Although she
couldn’t have known it, that was an uncannily accurate observation
not only of a man but of a personal life. She could recognise Eliot
in any costume and was certain she’d seen it beneath Aiken’s.
The opportunity to review Aiken in The Dial had been offered
to Eliot, but he wisely turned it down. He had been sent The House
of Dust by Scofield Thayer in the autumn of 1920, and by the fol-
lowing day had ‘glanced through’ just enough to see an unwelcome
likeness of himself.23 He told Thayer that he, Eliot, was the work-
man called in to build the House, while Aiken had provided the
Dust, and he swiftly directed Thayer to an overlapping passage that
would serve to strain their personal friendship were he to review
it. The House of Dust was the fourth in a series of book-length
poems that Aiken called ‘symphonies’, in which the alienation of
the city was a running motif. He had said that he was striving for
an ‘absolute music’, not one based on a single dominant idea, but
a polyphony where ‘individual and crowd are used as contrasting
themes with which one might play a species of counterpoint’.24 If
that sounded a little like a statement of Eliot’s, then in a way it
was, for parts of Aiken’s work could read like a simulation of E liot’s
past and imagined future. But influence doesn’t always move in
one direction only, and while Aiken’s early debts to Eliot appeared
incontrovertible, The House of Dust may have made a deeper mark
on Eliot than he was willing to admit.
‘Am I cuckoo in fancying that it cancels the debt I owed him?’
Aiken asked an American editor after the publication of The Waste
Land.25 His own dues to Eliot had been acknowledged, but Aiken
was certain that he could now detect what he called ‘echoes or
parodies’ of his own work in his friend’s. The violet hour, Madame
Sosostris, the crowd of the unreal city, even the musical phrasing
was like his own, he said. Aiken had already written about a tarot
reading similar to one that Eliot had just drafted in ‘The Burial of
the Dead’, as well as an under-sea passage of picked bones quite
like the one that appeared ‘In the Cage’/‘A Game of Chess’.26 The
first of Aiken’s ‘symphonies’, The Jig of Forslin of 1916, had suffered
from an overexposure to ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’; but
there were moments in Aiken’s book – which appeared in its first
London edition in the winter of 1921/2 – that seemed to find an
echo in The Waste Land: Eliot’s (later) ‘voices singing out of empty
cisterns’ sounded surprisingly like Aiken’s (earlier) ‘voice crying
from the cistern’.27 Other allusions lay in o ther books: Eliot’s typ-
ist would smooth her hair with automatic hand, while her lover
descends the stair; in the second of Aiken’s ‘symphonies’ from 1918,
The Charnel Rose, ‘The eternal mistress lifts her hand, / To rear-
range her hair, / For the deathless lover who climbs and climbs the
stair.’28
In The House of Dust, further parallels seemed apparent. ‘We
crowd through the streets in a dazzle of pallid lamplight,’ wrote
Aiken, then:
Good-night! Good-night! Good-night! We go our ways,

The rain runs over the pavement before our feet,29
Good night, Bill. Good night, Lou. Good night, George. Good
night . . . Eliot . . . And each man kept his eyes before his feet . . .
In yet another passage, a clock: a ‘tower / Ticks with reverberant
coil and tolls the hour’ (Aiken); ‘towers / Tolling reminiscent bells,
that kept the hours’ (Eliot).30
In the great scene of ‘nerves’ that Eliot had just written: ‘What
are you thinking of ? What thinking? What?’ In The House of Dust:
‘What are you thinking of ?’ Eliot, 1921: ‘What shall we do tomor-
row? / What shall we ever do?’ Aiken, 1920: ‘To-morrow – what?
And what of yesterday?’ and ‘What shall we talk of ?’31
Not for the last time would Eliot find himself tangled in ques-
tions of originality or influence. But influence rarely travels in a
straight line and more often moves via a network, where there are
fields of common interest and nodes of mutual inspiration through
which writers and their poems pass. It’s no surprise that peers of
the same generation, similar in their concerns, overlapping in their
reading matter, reacting at the same time to their time, might
respond in similar terms. And for all his doubts about the deriva-
tion of parts of The Waste Land, Aiken would be one of the first to
acknowledge its importance on publication, saying it was the best
thing he had read in years.32 But as E
liot’s poem became a success,
a sense of grievance would grow between the old Harvard friends;
Aiken expressed it in a private letter of 1925:
eliot is the cruellest poet, breeding

lyrics under the driest dustpan, mixing
memory and desire, stirring
verb-roots with spring brain.
aiken kept him safe, covering
dearth with forgetful verbiage, needing
no notes, no elaborate allusions or explanations,
(for there was nothing to explain).33
//
At the end of March, Eliot completed the second of the two essays
for Wyndham Lewis’s Tyro. The first, ‘The Romantic Englishman’,
had seemingly run in parallel with ‘The Burial of the Dead’s’ brush
with prohibition, and now this second essay, on Baudelaire, made
reference to a firework display of ‘Bengal lights’, which had just
made an appearance as a brand of cigarettes in the opening lines
of ‘The Burial of the Dead’. That was not the only reference to
the draft on which he was working: the article ended, as had ‘The
Burial of the Dead’, quoting a phrase of Baudelaire’s: Vous, hypo-
crite lecteur . . . 34 There was in this moment a confluence in content
between the verse and the prose, and there was, in addition, one
further connecting spoke between the long poem and E liot’s writ-
ing for The Tyro.
It may have been in the week following his 5 February meeting
with Lewis that Eliot began his ‘Song for the Opherion’ for The
Tyro, and it may have been in the final week of March that he com-
pleted it. Somewhere in between, Eliot produced not only the two
articles, but this lyric of fifteen lines: two end-rhymed sextets and
two envois, with a curious peninsula-like half-line to complete it.
When, in April, the poem would be printed in the inaugural issue
of the journal, it carried a revised and probably erroneous title,
‘Song to the Opherian’. But about the pseudonym under which it
appeared there could be no doubt: ‘Gus Krutzsch’ – a name that
Eliot had pencilled into his typescript for the Boston scene in ‘The
Burial of the Dead’. Later, he would say that the poem had not
been good enough to acknowledge under his own name, but at the
time he may have had a more practical agreement with Lewis not
to overload the new edition with work by a single writer, but to
separate the authorship of the poem from prose published under
his own name.35
Pound’s assessment of the poem, when it came, was bleak.
The title, for one thing, simply wouldn’t do, he thought, and he
obliterated ‘for the Opherion’ in pencil on typescript, leaving visi-
ble only the word ‘Song’. The early running of the poem didn’t fare
much better either. He singled out the third line – ‘Perhaps it does
not come to very much’ – and scribbled beside it in jagged graphite,
bracketed it for deletion, and, in case that were not clear enough,
then took to ink and struck it out altogether, writing in the margin
perhaps the most damming word in Pound’s arsenal: ‘georgian’.36
It was an intervention of some radicalism: with it, the abab rhyme
scheme was stripped out and the two sextet stanzas became instant-
ly lopsided; in a stroke, Pound had run the poem formally aground.
Then there was the provocative charge of Georgianism. Pound had
once gone as far as challenging one proponent of Georgian poetry
to a duel, and here he was now taking up arms against Eliot. And
his intervention didn’t stop there. Next, he turned his attention to
two envois that Eliot had once hoped might clinch each stanza,
rewriting the first and striking heavily through the second, which
Eliot himself had already dispensed with in The Tyro. Even so,
what Eliot had once envisaged as a fourteen or fifteen-line poem
had become twelve, though Pound had doubts that even that much
was worth preserving. ‘The song, has only two lines which you can
use in the body of the poem,’ he told Eliot, and, later, ‘I dare say
the sweats with tears will wait.’37 Those lines – ‘When the surface
of the blackened river / Is a face that sweats with tears?’ – would
find a meandering entry into The Waste Land, as the oil and tar
with which the river sweats in ‘The Fire Sermon’; they would, too,
be among a number of lines to re-emerge in 1924 as ‘The Wind
Sprang Up at Four O’Clock’.38 Forensic as he was, Pound may have
overlooked for salvage lines that seemed exceptionally telling of
Eliot’s mental state that winter:
This thought this ghost this pendulum in the head

Swinging from life to death
Bleeding between two lives39
But in their print life with ‘Song’, they would have only a brief
time in The Tyro before being stripped for parts.
//
Wyndham Lewis had told John Quinn in 1920 that he felt he had
not lived up to his own promise of the war years: he called himself
‘a character of essay, and unfulfilment’.40 But a new response was
to begin now, he said, and his aim was nothing short of making
these post-war years the first of ‘complete work’. His exhibition that
opened at the Leicester Galleries in London in April was named
‘Tyros and Portraits’: he knew, as he told Agnes Bedford, Pound’s
musician-tenant in Kensington, that as a show it was not easy to
like; but it came with the launch of its literary wing, his journal
The Tyro.41
‘We are at the beginning of a new epoch,’ announced Lewis,
slipping seamlessly back into manifesto mode. And his target
was the ‘tyros’ of the journal’s title: grotesques, grinning por-
traits of novice ‘villainies’ and simpleton ‘interior broods’ in
which Lewis saw in humanity a regression to animalism of a
kind that he had witnessed first hand in the trenches, under
what he called the ‘immense meaningless shadow’ of the war.42
There was no passage back across the chasm of the conflict to
a time of innocence; equally, we had not yet reached a terrain
beyond the void of an artistic no man’s land. These were the in-
between times of the tyros: these mannequins of conceit, this
self-serving ‘prettiness and fervour’ and art-for-art’s-sake of a
kind to be found in Bloomsbury and Paris.43 But we were chil-
dren of change, Lewis believed, and we were not yet resigned:
‘Europe grows more, not less, of one mind.’44 Eliot did not agree
with such a hopeful vision of the continent, but he was now
happy to be conscripted into an avant-garde that turned its fire
on the French nineteenth-century arts that he had only just
stepped away from. Lewis was always at his best on the borders
of satire and caricature, he said, and the Tyros might still prove
to produce an energetic race.45
In 1914, Blast had called for ‘MACHINES OF LIFE, a sort of
LIVING plastic geometry’, and what it began The Tyro would try
to finish. Inevitably, for Lewis, that meant a continuing obsession
with ageing targets – Clive Bell, Duncan Grant and R oger Fry –
which even Pound thought was a waste of ammunition.46 ‘Cant
see that TYRO is of interest outside Bloomsbury,’ he told Lewis
bluntly.47 And in truth the journal felt narrow in its breadth, thin
in its contributors (nine), and cramped in its production, and for
all Lewis’s campaign, and all Sydney Schiff ’s money, it would run
for only one further issue.
//
The prospect of a general strike loomed that spring, as miners
walked out for a second time in six months; Eliot expected the
postal service to be stopped at any moment, and Lewis predicted
the distribution of his Tyro to be halted as a result.48 Two weeks
later, the rail unions unexpectedly voted not to come out in soli-
darity with the miners in a moment that became known as ‘Black
Friday’ for the bitter charge of disloyalty that went with it. Whatev-
er else, this disorganised chaos was another step in the destruction
of ‘Europe’, wrote Eliot. ‘The whole of contemporary politics etc.
oppresses me with a continuous physical horror like the feeling
of growing madness in one’s own brain,’ he wrote.49 The mind of
Europe now seemed a place of torture complimentary to his own,
his language so like that which he used to describe Vivien’s state
only a month before. ‘It is rather a horror to be sane in the midst
of this; it is too dreadful, too huge, for one to have the comforting
feeling of superiority. It goes too far for rage.’ In the autumn of
1919 he had described himself as a liberal, now he sounded bro-
ken by rancour.50 He had been observing the work of the French
poet and polemicist Charles Maurras, whose ‘three traditions’ –
‘classique, catholique, monarchique’ – had caught his attention back
in October 1920, when he had written an appreciative letter that
was published in The Times.51 Maurras directed Action Française, a
journal and political movement seeking restoration of a royal sov-
ereign, a state religion, and exclusion from office of les quatre États
confédérés – Jews, Protestants, freemasons and foreigners. Failure in
the French legislative elections of 1919 had pushed the movement
even further to the right, onto more anti-democratic grounds,
from where Eliot watched, defending Maurras in print at the
moment when he made his own conversion to Anglo-Catholicism
in 1927. In time, he would appeal to Maurras for contributions to
The Criterion. Now, in April 1921, he told Aldington, ‘Having only
contempt for every existing political party, and profound hatred for
democracy, I feel the blackest gloom.’52
*
‘It is true that I have started a poem,’ Eliot wrote to John Quinn
that spring.53 Throughout March he had continued working on it,
and early in April he explained to Schiff: ‘My poem has still so
much revision to undergo that I do not want to let anyone see it
yet, and also I want to get more of it done – it should be much the
longest I have ever written. I hope that by June it will be in some-
thing like final form. I have not had the freedom of mind.’54 June
was not an arbitrary date: Eliot had learned that it was the month
that his family were coming from St Louis to stay.
//
The typist was floundering. No sooner had the apartment door

opened then she had thrown her pages down on the floor, turned
on her heel and vanished into the streets of Paris. Nine typists
had failed in the attempt, Sylvia Beach reported; the eighth had
threatened in despair to throw herself out of the window.55 ‘Circe’,
the fifteenth of the eighteen episodes of Ulysses, and the end-mark
of section II, was finished at last, but it had almost not made it into
typescript. Nine typists with nine ribbons on nine papers had left
the draft in a shambles and Joyce at his apartment door in a state
of high anxiety.56 People were talking. He had overheard rumours
that he was a cocaine addict. That he had broken down and was
dying in New York. And most strangely of all, that he owned a
chain of cinemas across Switzerland.57 Where was Pound when
his readership was needed? Three months of travelling south and
still no sign, and it was too great a risk to post the pages while
his address was unconfirmed. Since the prosecution of the Little
Review, Ulysses no longer had a print outlet, and he feared that
Benjamin Huebsch, his publisher in New York, would not take
an interest, nor John Rodker, for that matter, in London. Paths to
publication seemed to be blocked, and he said that he was strug-
gling to keep his feet. He feared that the year spelled incessant
trouble, and wrote out its digits as a doom-laden sum: 1 + 9 + 2 +
1 = 13.58
The omens did not read quite as Joyce thought. A week would
pass and the Pounds would return to Paris, to a ‘comfortable’ two-
room studio in the Hôtel Pas-de-Calais, 59 rue des Saints-Pères
(‘Vivien’s old hotel,’ Eliot would remark with pleasure) with a view
of the Seine: ‘slightly too expensive’, but a home nonetheless for
Ezra and Dorothy that would suffice until their move into the
apartment at ‘70 bis’ in December.59 They had barely unpacked their
cases before Joyce had brought over the pages from ‘Circe’ and, for
good measure, a draft of what would become the sixteenth episode,
‘Eumaeus’. That was a Saturday, the middle of the month. By the
Wednesday, Pound had finished his reading.
‘Circe’ was ‘Magnificent, a new Inferno in full sail’, he told
his parents; and to Agnes Bedford he said: ‘enormous – megalo-
scrumptious – mastodonic’.60 Joyce had been told the same, and
could feel his spirits renewed. Pound ‘appears to be very excited’,
he told Harriet Shaw Weaver, and relayed the news that the type-
scripts were on their way to her from Pound, and asked her to pass
them on to Eliot when she had finished.61 It was a request that,
very soon, would change the direction of the long poem Eliot was
writing.
‘Circe’ was vast on every scale: it had taken eight drafts and six
months, and was about as long in typescript as the first eight epi-
sodes combined. It would not only provide the book’s memorable
midnight hour amid the Nighttown brothels but summon almost
every character in the novel into the service of the story. Each
would undergo transformation, just as Circe had cast her mutable
spells and turned Odysseus’ men to swine on Aeaea. But it was in
its style that the writing was so transformative: countless dream-
like spells conjured and broken, pages soaked in booze and ‘snakes
of river fog’, raising memory and stirring trauma.62 It was staged
in the form of a playscript, freed from the shackles of a second-
person speaker, disturbing the division between what can be said
to take place and what might be fantasised, between the overtly
expressed and the implicit. It was the whole novel and something
entirely new besides: the heart of the book and at the same time a
different rhythm beating against it. In these pages, Joyce had come
to understand the potential for the novel as ‘a kind of encyclopae-
dia’.63
But potential it would remain unless a publishing solution could
be found. With no English or American publisher willing or able
to take the legal risk, what options were left to him? Heubsch had
indeed backed away from publication after John Quinn refused
on Joyce’s behalf to make any alterations to the text, and Boni &
Liveright, next on Quinn’s list, were equally cautious. Sylvia Beach
witnessed the slump in Joyce’s demeanour as he explained the
position to her in the bookshop. It was a heavy blow, she wrote,
one that hurt his pride: after seven years of relentless work, ‘My
book will never come out now.’64
‘It occurred to me that something might be done,’ said Beach
decisively, ‘and I asked: “Would you let Shakespeare and Company
have the honor of bringing out your Ulysses?”’
Beach was a lender and a seller of books and a literary host par
excellence, but she was no publisher; she was preparing to move
premises to 12 rue de l’Odéon, ‘a few steps down from the Boule-
vard Saint-Germain’, near the church of Saint-Sulpice, and already
had her hands more than full. Yet she understood the opportunity
to bypass the censors by publishing from Paris, and she was deter-
mined to grasp it.
‘He accepted my offer immediately and joyfully. I thought it
rash of him to entrust his great Ulysses to such a funny little pub-
lisher. But he seemed delighted,’ she recorded. ‘And so was I.’
//
John Middleton Murry’s attempt with Eliot to rescue The Athe-
naeum had been a valiant one, but in February 1921 the journal had
finally conceded to a dwindling readership and merged with The
Nation. After The Egoist and the hamstringing of the Little Review,
the closure of The Athenaeum marked the third of Eliot’s publish-
ing outlets to effectively dematerialise in a year, leaving The Times
and the London Mercury as almost the sole literary forums in the
capital. But even the survivors faced troubles: The Times’s insist-
ence on the anonymity of its contributors left it unable to uphold
any definite standard of criticism, said Eliot, while the Mercury
suffered from the very reverse: the ‘solemn trifling’ of editor J. C.
Squire was too much apparent in the ‘mediocrity of the minds’
brought to bear upon it.65 Eliot now felt relief that he hadn’t left
the bank for the offer of the editorship that Murry had made him
two years before – where would he be now if he had? Admittedly,
the bank work was an encumbrance ‘which breaks the concentra-
tion required for turning out a poem of any length’.66 And that
was now the urgent concern. With The Sacred Wood behind him,
his commitments in prose were for the moment fulfilled: ‘I am
not anxious to produce another for a year or two,’ he told Quinn
in May, ‘and meanwhile have a long poem in mind and partly on
paper which I am wishful to finish.’
//
Dead to deadfish, that’s how Pound described London that April,

and while there were fools also to be found in Paris, he said, on
the whole they were considerably less likely to get in one’s way.67
Eliot didn’t agree. At the end of April he was finishing the second
of his London letters for The Dial, a miscellany in which he made
known his appreciation of the Phoenix Society’s ‘consummate’
Volpone that had taken place in January and February, as well as
Lewis’s exhibition at the Leicester Galleries in the city.68 But he
worried over the state of criticism, and described as ‘unanimous
rubbish’ the thought that a younger generation was taking up the
form – which anyway was not the point, only that creativity will
not flourish without criticism. Once again it was the music hall
and the comic revue that Eliot turned to, praising England for
having more of it than anywhere else, and at the same time ask-
ing that it should be treated with more seriousness. And he found
room, also, to highlight the ‘desuetude’ of some of the churches
inside the London Wall, which were due to be demolished in the
district where he was forced to spend his days, in the ‘dust and
tumult of Lombard Street’. Among them was St Mary Woolnoth,
on the corner of Lombard and King William streets, which would
be saved from demolition, and which Eliot had preserved in the
pages of ‘In the Cage’/‘A Game of Chess’, where a crowd flowed
from London Bridge, up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the time,

With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.69
//
On the north bank of the River Liffey in Dublin, the Custom
House was in flames. For more than a century, James Gandon’s ele-
gant building had survived, most recently as the offices of the Local
Government Board, and the repository for the country’s income
tax records. It had been on the target list of the Irish Republican
Army since 1918, but with the return of Éamon de Valera from a
winter tour of the U
nited States in 1920 it had become the symbol-
ic target that the independence effort needed. A successful attack
would cost the British government £2 million and more, it was cal-
culated, but more importantly it would make the administration of
Ireland from Whitehall all but impossible. Throughout the spring
of 1921, informants were tapped and blueprints were leaked, as
meticulous plans of the building were drawn up. An attack would
require a republican force of 120, but Michael Collins feared heavy
losses if more men and women weren’t drafted in. Shortly before
one o’clock in the afternoon, on 25 May, volunteers walked into the
building carrying cans of paraffin. The janitor who telephoned the
alarm was shot and killed. But word had reached the Royal Irish
Constabulary, who were swift to mobilise a force of paramilitary
auxiliaries, and with that the shooting began. The building blazed
for five days; it was believed that the spread of the flames was made
easier by sympathisers within the city’s fire brigade. As many as
seventy or eighty republican militants were arrested, but the profile
of the cause had been raised internationally by the nightly scenes
of this iconic British administrative centre in flames. Six weeks
later, an uneasy ceasefire between the Irish Republican Army and
the British government began.
//
‘Circe’ had reached London that spring, and not only ‘Circe’ but
the later sequence of ‘Oxen of the Sun’, and ‘Eumaeus’, the four-
teenth and sixteenth parts of Ulysses, had also found their way to
Eliot via Harriet Shaw Weaver. Eliot had read the serialisation of
Ulysses since it began in 1918, when he described it as ‘volatile and
heady’, and had praised the element of the horrific that he found
within it.70 ‘Both are terrifying,’ he remarked at the time, compar-
ing it to Wyndham Lewis’s Tarr. ‘That is the test of a new work of
art.’ When a work of art no longer terrifies us, he said, when what
he called its ‘attractive terror’ has been diminished, then either our
senses have been dulled or we were mistaken in our original read-
ing, and he would say something similar in 1923, writing that the
complete novel had given him ‘all the surprise, delight, and terror
that I can require’.71
On 9 May 1921, Eliot told John Quinn that he had liked Joyce
on meeting him the previous summer, though cautioning that he
was ‘a handful’, with a fanatic’s conviction that everyone present
should be in the service of his work. As it happened, in his case,
the conviction was well placed: Eliot had been reading the lat-
ter part of Ulysses in typescript, and could report that it was ‘truly
magnificent’.72 On 21 May, he returned the typescripts by registered
post to Joyce personally, saying, in a slightly curious turn, that he
was ‘obliged for a taste of them’. There were one or two phrases in
‘Circe’ that he didn’t get on with, and he listed them, but beyond
that his criticism of the three chapters was negligible. ‘I think they
are superb – especially the Descent into Hell, which is stupen-
dous.’73 Eliot didn’t offer any annotation, nor was he asked to; in
fact, it wasn’t quite clear why Joyce had wanted him to read it,
beyond the fact that he knew Eliot to be an influential reader. ‘But
otherwise, I have nothing but admiration; in fact, I wish, for my
own sake, that I had not read it.’
That statement has been given much attention ever since. I wish,
for my own sake, that I had not read it. Why, for Eliot’s sake, did he
wish he hadn’t read it? For some readers the plausible explanation
was that Eliot would now draft the opening scene of ‘The Burial
of the Dead’, as a prequel to April’s cruellest month, based upon
the nighttown pages of ‘Circe’ that he had just read, for which
supporting overlaps in the two texts exist. More likely is that in his
reading of ‘Circe’ Eliot had confirmed for himself what two passes
of fiddly revisions to his typescript had already caused him to sus-
pect: that his own scene in Boston was simply not good enough in
the final analysis – not good enough when set against writing as
‘stupendous’ as Joyce’s, not good enough to lead off his long poem,
if he had any aspirations at all to produce a work of equal standing
to Ulysses. Such a realisation would be a hard one for any writer of
any genre, but most especially for one working in so concentrated
a form as poetry, where every line is carefully weighted. To such a
writer, to lose just one line might be a grievance; to lose fifty-four
is a devastation. But it was probably at that moment that Eliot
made his third return to the ‘Tom’s place’ typescript and, having
already made more than two dozen revisions, decided to abandon
it and strike it out – all fifty-four lines, in broad pencil waves over
the whole page. Or not quite the whole page: for there was one
part of the typed leaf that he did not strike out, left, presumably,
to retain the structure of the subsequent typescript: and that was
the title, ‘He Do the Police in Different Voices: Part I’ and beneath
that, ‘The Burial of the Dead’. It seemed that, for now at least,
those two elements of the title of the poem were there to stay;
everything else was cancelled.
There may, in addition, have been a reason more personal than
his reading of ‘Circe’ for Eliot to remove the section, as the pun of
placing the opening drinks ‘at Tom’s place’ might imply. In a theatre
review written around this time Eliot had said that a man desires
to see himself on stage, but in a projection: to be more admirable
and forceful, to be more villainous and despicable.74 Certainly, there
may have been an element of self-reflection in the Tom’s place
sequence that appealed to Eliot, whose capacity to take a drink had
not gone unnoticed in Bloomsbury. In winter 1923, Virginia Woolf
would find him blurry-eyed and confused in the flat, before he left
the room to be sick. ‘After a long time, he came back, sank into the
corner, & I saw him, ghastly pale, with his eyes shut, apparently
in a stupor. When we left he was only just able to stand on his
legs.’75 But here, in the poem, the setting of the drinking may have
had more than a projection to it. Although Eliot never expressly
named the night out as taking place in Boston, it seems likely that
he portrayed a Harvard crowd from Cambridge, where prohibition
was particularly strict, and where his late father had hoped E liot’s
academic career might flourish. For all the projection, a private
message may have survived: one for Eliot’s late father, a man who
described syphilis as God’s punishment for indecency, an infection
for which he hoped there would be no cure.76 In an attempt to stem
the spread of venereal disease, the Missouri legislature had in 1872
introduced the regulation of prostitution, which to the Eliot family
amounted to legalisation. Greenleaf had led the charge to repeal
it: social evil should be treated like other crimes, he said, namely
punishable by law.77 An editorial in a St Louis newspaper once
proposed Greenleaf for police commissioner on the grounds that
‘forty-eight hours after Dr Eliot assumed the reins of the police
department there would be no gambling houses in St Louis’.78 It is
reasonable to suppose that the revels of the poem so long in Eliot’s
mind would have appalled his father and grandfather alike. But
upsetting his surviving mother would not have been something
Eliot wished to do. If Mrs Eliot would have been shocked by the
menstruation of ‘Ode’, then she would surely have been dismayed
by these opening antics: bars, a brothel, urination in public, arrest
– not what she would regard as suitable material for poetry. For
Eliot’s poem to begin with behaviour that was not only immoral
but possibly illegal – a poem that he had invited her to anticipate, a
poem he had told her was so long in mind – that could only come
as a tremendous affront to his family.
Reuse, reuse, reuse: Eliot was nothing if not pragmatic. Like
the discarded draft of ‘Song’, he would abandon but not forget the
lines, and would in time return to them as a source for ‘Sweeney
Agonistes’. In the words of that poem, ‘These fellows always get
pinched in the end.’79
//
Eliot knew that with his family’s imminent arrival in London, his
hopes of finishing the poem by June were a mirage. He told Dor-
othy Pound that instead he would be ready for some mountain air
by October, ‘after I have finished a little poem which I am at pres-
ent engaged upon’.80 For the first time since the Pounds had left
England in January, Eliot had secured a postal address for them,
and he caught them up on his reading of Ulysses, saying that ‘the
unpublished manuscript is even finer stuff than the printed’. He
said that he hoped Ezra had managed in the time away to produce
a notable work of his own.
Vivien had been in bed for more than two months, Eliot
explained to Dorothy, but he must have been counting only the
continuous run at Clarence Gate Gardens, as she had also spent
the month of February prostrate partly in a nursing home, part-
ly in the flat. Such as it was, her recent improvement had been
sufficient that by the second week of May she had left London
for recuperation at the coast: Eastbourne, most likely, where her
father was himself recovering from his operation. There she fell
into familiar patterns of caring for him at the expense of her own
recovery. Eliot described to Dorothy Pound how Vivien had finally
got up from her own bed only to collapse at her father’s: gastric
flu was the diagnosis, but standing upright in anxious vigil had
been the symptom, and had, he said improbably, without medi-
cal evidence, ‘precipitated internal displacements’.81 What he didn’t
mention to Dorothy, and therefore what Pound didn’t yet know,
was that Vivien had taken with her to the seaside, or received by
post, a typescript of a second part of the ‘little poem’ on which he
had been working, and upon which she would now report.
W O N D E R F U L, Vivien wrote in the margin beside ‘My

nerves are bad tonight’; wonderful, again beside the lines of know-
ing and seeing and remembering nothing; & wonderful, once more
beside those of the streetwalker who will wear her hair down.82 But
Vivien was no cheerleader, and she had pertinent textual sugges-
tions of her own to make. It was probably she r ather than he who
struck out the lethargic line about Lil’s husband ‘coming back out
of the Transport Corps’: Discharge out of the army?? Eliot pencilled,
in what was effectively an editorial query to his editor-of-the-
moment, Vivien; no, ‘demobbed’, seven words reduced to one, for
which the hand was Pound’s (plausibly pencilled over Vivien’s), but
the ear and the English idiom Vivien’s.83 And she commented on
the typescript elsewhere, too. ‘No, ma’am, you needn’t look so old
fashioned at me’: Eliot’s line in draft; If you don’t like it you can get
on with it, Vivien had replaced assertively. E liot’s stiffened ‘It’s that
medicine I took in order to bring it off ’ became Vivien’s flowing
‘It’s that [them] pills I took to bring it off ’.
Not that she judged everything so perfectly. ‘Something of that’,
Eliot’s ladies had said in the draft; Somethink, Vivien prompt-
ed, refining the ear; but Eliot explained in the margin I want to
avoid trying to show pronunciation by spelling; Eliot and Vivien were
speaking to one another through the draft. Beside the hot water
at ten she prompted the improbable hot water bottle!, which was
surely a picture of the Eliots’ evenings, though a misstep here; and
she had a thought that the publican’s great acoustic – HURRY UP
PLEASE IT’S TIME – was premature: Perhaps better not so soon,
wrote Vivien in the margin, Could you put this later; Eliot would
consider the comment, and transcribe it onto the carbon copy for
further reflection.84
Vertically, in pencil, beside the first twenty-seven lines, Vivien
wrote in the right-hand margin Don’t see what you had in mind
here. And she was right to do so: she had identified by far the most
ritualised of all the sections of the draft to date – passages that
possessed a formality of address beyond the iambic pentameter
they were cloaked in that were ornate in tone as well as form – and
distant too: remote origins without the necessary accompanying per-
sonal quality. Not only in the image of Philomel had the opening
passage brought with it a brutal sexual violation: the section had
carried the hint of frozen intimacy that culminated in four lines
imported by Eliot from ‘The Death of the Duchess’, the estranging
poem which he had shared with Pound in the autumn of 1919, and
possibly with Vivien too. Further lines introduced from the same
poem would conclude the scene of bad nerves, and beside those
Vivien marked the more ambiguous, Yes. Was this an appreciation
or an agreement? Or was it simply a recognition of having read the
lines in the ‘Duchess’ poem once before? There they had lowered
the temperature between the Malfi-like couple into an almost bar-
ren state. But it is terrible to be alone with another person, a ‘call’ line
in that poem had run; If it is terrible alone, it is sordid with one more:
the line with which it ‘answered’. And shortly after the call-and-
answer had come the intervention between the couple in the form
of a game of chess, now repeated in the new poem, in which ‘The
ivory men make company between us’.85
It wasn’t in this moment with ‘In the Cage’/‘A Game of Chess’
that Vivien objected to this line, but object she did, and it is pos-
sible to speculate as to why. Ivory is cool before it is warmed by
touch, and the chess pieces of the two poems stood in for absence:
not of the poem’s couple, who after all were present in the vers-
es, but for that element of a relationship that introduces company
of another kind. For it probably wasn’t the thought that the lines
might invite a portrayal of their marriage that troubled Vivien –
after all, which partnerships around them were not straining under
their own complications? – but the possibility that they hinted at
the absence of generational company, of life without children. It
was surely this that Vivien reflected upon most painfully when she
asked for the removal of the lines: an atmosphere that Eliot would
later describe for The Family Reunion in ‘A man and a woman
/ Married, alone in a country house together, / For three years
childless, learning the meaning / Of loneliness.’86 When Eliot first
wrote the line for ‘The Death of the Duchess’, the couple had been
three years childless, almost four.
The line of ‘ivory men’ was the one that Eliot restored to the
poem in Morocco in the winter of 1960. Asked why he had done so,
he answered evasively that the line was originally omitted from the
published poem ‘for some reason or o ther’ and left it at that.87 But
Valerie, Eliot’s second wife, knew exactly how the line had come to
be excised, and she knew this because her husband had written it
down.88 The fair copy of The Waste Land that Eliot produced in that
Moroccan winter had been the last occasion that he had written
out the poem, but it had not been the only occasion. Eliot also kept
a humble ruled notebook that he called ‘Valerie’s Own Book’, into
which he made fair copies of those poems of his that he thought
she particularly cared about following their marriage in 1957. Here
too, in 1958, he wrote out The Waste Land by hand, as he had for the
London Library; here too, he restored the omitted line, only this
time he inked it with a forceful asterisk, and in the footer wrote by
way of a legend: ‘* Line omitted from published text, at Vivien’s insist-
ence.’89 That was bold. Not in deference to or out of respect for, and
not at Vivien’s request either, but her insistence. Vivien had insisted
upon the removal of the line because she didn’t want her friends
looking in upon a childless marriage.
Children were a matter that Eliot had been sensitive to in the
past. A year after their wedding, he wrote defensively of a nine-
month run of nerves, ailments and neuralgia that Vivien was
experiencing: ‘I may say that this was not a case of maternity in
any degree,’ he told Conrad Aiken. ‘Most people imagine so unless
I explain.’90 And in a suppressed 1917 poem, it came in the form of
an accusatory question, ‘Est-ce qu’il n’a pas d’enfants?’, Has he no
children?, to which an answer followed: ‘Il est eunuque, a s’entend.’
He is a eunuch, of course.91
Children’s voices had touched Eliot’s premarital work but
lightly, as something heard in a distant strain or a whimpering
corner; but in the years that followed the honeymoon ‘Ode’ they
would be encountered again and again as a witnessing presence.92
Children would be at the gate in ‘Ash-Wednesday’ (1926–9), and
seek a home in ‘A Song for Simeon’ (1928); they would form the
whispers and small laughter of ‘Marina’ (1930) and would be the
bodies who quickly tire in The Rock (c.1933); their voices were in
the New Hampshire orchard between the time of blossom and
fruit (‘Landscapes’, c.1934); they were the hidden laughter, buried
beneath the leaves of ‘Burnt Norton’ (1935–6); and in their final
form, their last and most haunted outing of all, in ‘Little Gidding’
(1941–2), they would become the undetected presence in the apple
tree, half-heard but unknown because they were never looked for.93
Three times children would rise in The Waste Land, twice more they
would be cut from the drafts; but the most memorable of them
survived in Vivien’s correction of ‘In the Cage’/‘A Game of Chess’.
‘You want to keep him at home, I suppose,’ had been E liot’s falter-
ing first effort; Vivien crossed that out decisively with what would
become one of the poem’s better-known lines. What you get married
for if you dont want to have children.
‘I think it must be dreadful to have children to think that you
might pass on something of yourself,’ Vivien said once: she thanked
God that she hadn’t, and had never wished to, since she was a girl.94
She had grown up being told by her mother that mental instability
was an inheritable condition, and had, from her middle teens, been
medicated (bromide, probably) by the family doctors to suppress
her polarising moods. In fact what she may have been experiencing
as a teenager were hormonal fluctuations in the form of heavy and
irregular menstrual cycles that still afflicted her in the early days
of marriage, as E liot’s ‘Hysteria’ and ‘Ode’ appear to record. As
an adult, she marked her periods in her diaries; some months she
marked nothing else. By 1919, her cycle had become regular, though
frequently accompanied by migraine.95 That children remained a
biological possibility, and even a desire, is traced in a remark that
she posed to a friend and m other: ‘What would you feel like if you
were told you must not have children?’96 A writer had once told her
as much, insisting that the financial burden would be too great a
burden for her husband: his writing came first, she was told, and
motherhood must wait.97
There are clues that Eliot was good with children, and cer-
tainly that he could be charmed by them. In Paris in 1911, before
he met Vivien, Eliot watched children playing with boats in the
ponds of the Luxembourg Gardens, and marvelled at how in their
hands the toy craft sailed right across the surface and through the
fountain without upset.98 In 1915, after Pound introduced him to
the Dolmetsch family, he reported that he found their children
extraordinary and said that he was wild to see them again.99 There
are even hints that this was a life that Eliot may have wanted for
himself. His letters to Emily Hale are populated by an affection-
ate engagement with his friends’ children. To her, he advertised
frequently – perhaps even leadingly – their presence ‘under my
direction’: at tea parties, birthday parties and at weekend stays,
‘capering’ around him and ‘grumbusking’ (‘in the children’s lan-
guage grumbusking means “moving rapidly from place to place,
like Genghis Khan” – thus I teach history’).100 He told her once,
‘I confess that I very much enjoy the flattery of being liked by
children and animals, and rather go out of my way to gain their
approval.’101 And after a visit from his nieces in 1931, he wrote most
tellingly of all that he wished that he could see more of them, but
felt a little baffled in their particular company: ‘I feel towards them
something of the affection I should like to have given to children
of my own, but am too shy to express it very well.’102
The painful truth of the Eliots’ marriage and their ‘ivory men’
may have been that Eliot after all might have wanted children; he
simply hadn’t wanted to have them with Vivien.103
We are tired children, he would draft for The Rock in 1934, and can
endure only a little light.104 In the typescript that had surely just been
through Vivien’s hands:
I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.105
From the seaside, in May 1921, Vivien folded the draft ready for
the envelope. ‘Make any of these alterations – or none if you prefer,’
she scribbled on the back of the final page. ‘Send me back this copy
& let me have it.’106 And there’s every reason to think that this is
exactly what Eliot did, for he had ‘answered’ her textual queries
with marginal comments of his own, and had copied a selection of
Vivien’s annotations onto the carbon typescript that he retained,
before folding up the ribbon copy once more, and – judging by the
additional fold of the paper – posting it back to Vivien to help in
her recuperation.
The Fire Sermon.
Seven decks, 700 feet in length, 25,000 gross tons, one Turkish bath, a
surgeon, a postal service, a gymnasium and a library:1 the SS Adriatic
was among the largest and most luxurious liners ever to set out on
the Atlantic. Since its maiden voyage in 1907, it had taken just over
a week to make the crossing between New York and Southampton
via Cherbourg, and it was on just such a journey that on 10 June 1921
Eliot’s mother Charlotte, sister Marion and brother Henry arrived
in England.2 Their visit would be a turning point in the poet’s life.
For the next ten weeks Eliot’s m other and sister occupied the flat
at Clarence Gate Gardens; brother Henry took a room two stops
along the Metropolitan line at 41 Gordon Square – the flat of James
and Alix Strachey (who were in Vienna with Sigmund Freud), two
doors up from Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. Vivien and Tom
moved into the glass-roofed attic of 12 Wigmore Street, a mile to
the south-east, a small flat rented by Lucy Thayer, sister of Scofield.
It was, from the beginning, a tiring series of arrangements, and by
early July, with Vivien’s health having deteriorated once more, Eliot
‘got her away’3 to Itchenor, Sussex, allowing Henry to move into
Wigmore Street with Tom. Barely had that happened than Vivien
was summoned back in order to discuss an urgent offer that Eliot
had received from Lady Rothermere to launch a new literary peri-
odical that would in time become The Criterion. She returned to the
cramped glass roof in Wigmore Street, which now included Henry
– ‘very confined and uncomfortable quarters for three people’, said
Eliot.4 Tensions with Mrs Eliot were apparent from the beginning,
and it hadn’t helped that Vivien had to be presented, ‘for their ben-
276
efit’, when medical advice sought to usher her away to the country.
‘These new and yet old relationships involve immense tact and innu-
merable adjustments,’ Eliot told Richard Aldington. ‘One sees lots
of things that one never saw before’.5
//
When Igor Stravinksy’s ballet Le Sacre du printemps had first

opened in Paris in 1913 the audience was so rebellious that police
were called to restore order. The revival that opened in the Parisi-
an winter of 1920–1 was choreographed by Léonide Massine and
made its London appearance at the Princes Theatre as The Rite of
Spring on 27 June 1921. It would provide Eliot with the outstand-
ing element in the long-prepared tapestry of his poem. On the
face of it, the production was a failure, he said, because it hadn’t
been able to unite the music with the dance. ‘In art there should
be interpenetration and metamorphosis,’6 and the production had
achieved neither, leaving the music and ballet as two divisible arts.
For the fusion of ancient and modern something particular need-
ed to take place: ‘a revelation of that vanished mind of which our
mind is a continuation’. This was his experience with the Magda-
lenian cave art at the Font de Gaume: the memory of the tribe,
our modern roots from origin, tradition and the individual talent.
But the ballet wasn’t that, and seemed so locked in its own ritual
that it was simply unable to break into the present. The music, in
contrast, had achieved a modern art of its own. From the moment
the opening bassoon began to climb through its Lithuanian folk
melody like ivy it pulled achingly upon the root of the past; from
the moment it found its percussive explosion it ignited into the
modern. Stravinsky had found in the great Russian plains of his
imagination a soundtrack for modernity. He had metamorphosed
the rhythm of the Great Steppes into ‘the scream of the motor
horn, the rattle of machinery, the grind of wheels, the beating of
The F ir e S e r mon | 277

iron and steel, the roar of the underground railway, and the other
barbaric cries of modern life’. It was too new and strange to please
many listeners, Eliot understood, but to him it was thrilling: the
sound of horns and motors, he was about to write in the long poem.
And he called Stravinksy ‘our two months’ lion’ for the impact
the run had in London. Stravinsky had succeeded in isolating the
cries of modern life ‘and to transform these despairing noises into
music’. And there – right there in that moment for Eliot – was the
final piece of the jigsaw puzzle that would become The Waste Land.
His long poem had identified its subject matter; it had found its
motivations in Eliot’s daily life; it had grasped the multiplicity of
voices, the variety of the music hall, the moving images of the cin-
ema; and now it had the ‘auditory imagination’ within its hearing
– not only the lyric melody of ragtime and dance, but the music of
the primitive imagination played on modern instruments.
//
Marianne Moore had written in The Dial that March that Eliot’s
poems were ‘troutlike’7 (praise, in her language), which in turn had
drawn an appreciative letter from Eliot, who said that he would
like to try to get her poems published in England if at all possible.
It wasn’t possible, she said, she wasn’t ready, and felt she had fur-
ther to go before a collection of poems could make its appearance.8
So Eliot was delighted but surprised when he learned that Harriet
Shaw Weaver was bringing out Moore’s English debut at the Ego-
ist Press that summer. String-tied, print-decorated covers, it was
an elegant piece of printing and typographic work. There was only
one problem: Moore didn’t know about it, and it most certainly
did not have her permission. The Egoist volume had been assem-
bled in the hope of advancing her reputation by her admirers in
London, H. D. and Bryher, but Moore didn’t want her reputation
advanced, at least not until she had material sufficient to back such
a claim, and she had told them as much; she was furious that this
had been ‘put over’ her head.9 She appreciated the unstinting care
taken with the production, and didn’t mind the simple title, Poems
(although Observations would have been her choice), but she sim-
ply didn’t want these poems appearing now, and some of them not
ever, and as a publication it couldn’t possibly be to her advantage.
She told Eliot that although she understood it to be the tribute
of a friend’s affection, to her it was little more than a testimony to
how little she had accomplished as a poet.10 And in one sense, she
never really changed her attitude towards the release of her work.
In 1934, she found herself rekindling the conversation with Eliot,
this time for a prospective edition at Faber & Faber with him as
publisher. At that moment she was moved to decline, as she had
been before, telling him that ‘I have not yet quite enough for a
book’.11 Her ferocious standards and personal modesty engendered
an unusually illuminating exchange between a poet and their pro-
spective publisher over a matter of unceasing importance to poets:
the question of just exactly when it is that a collection of poems is
‘enough’. ‘The point at which one has “enough” for a book (of verse)
is not a quantitative matter alone,’ replied Eliot; ‘it’s a question of
form.’
One only has not enough, when one feels that the poems written
require the cooperation of certain poems not yet written, in order to
be themselves quite.12
It was a brilliant materialisation of the immaterial: to anticipate

how what is present might depend for its completion upon some-
thing not yet in existence. With that answer, Eliot laid a standard
which many deliberating poets have followed. And as for Moore’s
particular case, while he didn’t wish to badger her, he believed that
she most certainly had ‘enough’. From that moment, and for the
rest of their working lives, Moore and Eliot would publish together
in London at Faber & Faber.

//
liot’s lens on London continued from what he called the ‘fine hot
E
rainless spring’ into the early summer. Albert Einstein had arrived
from America on 8 June, and laid a wreath on Isaac Newton’s grave
in Westminster Abbey on 13 June. In between, the scientist had
attended a reception in his honour at the Royal Astronomical
Society, Eliot recorded in the third of his letters for The Dial.13 That
Bernard Shaw had been invited to meet Einstein did not escape
Eliot’s attention, and he recorded with just a hint of mischief that
Einstein had made no comment on that subject. J. C. Squire had
also been in the news, as had the discovery of a new strand of influ-
enza that left a bitter taste and dryness in the mouth.
The Dial seemed to be flourishing in New York now, and while the
Little Review limped on from its defeat in court, in London the con-
dition was one of literary drought. Art & Letters and The Athenaeum
had gone, and The Egoist was now exclusively a publisher of books
alone. Squires’s London Mercury was in serious danger of becoming
the centre of activity. Eliot knew that the capital needed a literary
journal of its own, and had come to feel that he must be the one
now to drive it forward. He sounded Scofield Thayer on a prospec-
tive partnership. Together, they wondered if they could interest Lady
Rothermere in establishing a journal with an international platform,
comprising The Dial in America and a new magazine edited by Eliot
in London. It was a bold idea, but one she would not take up, and
by the beginning of August she had decided to restrict her contribu-
tion to an English review: the London Quarterly it might have been
called, until the suggestion of The Criterion.14
Eliot was meanwhile reading John Dryden for the third of his
articles for The Times. Annus Mirabilis, Dryden’s long poem on the
renewal of London, had used the elegiac quatrains that Eliot was
about to adopt for himself; he praised too the ‘genius’ of Pope’s
heroic couplets that Eliot was similarly about to take up in his own
poem. Shakespeare, Jonson, the music hall, the demolition of city
churches, Baudelaire, Dryden: every matter that Eliot looked to
came from the poetry of cities and, in particular, from London. Sure
enough, the opening setting of his long poem had been elsewhere,
but already that sequence had lost its place in the poem, while the
chambers and churches and bridges and boozers had all moved in
upon the unreal city on which he was about to expand. ‘What is
needed of art is a simplification of current life into something rich
and strange,’ he wrote in ‘London Letter’, in doing so returning
once again to Ariel’s song from The Tempest.15 He had sketched five
lines of manuscript, as either a rough for the present typescript or
a memo to be incorporated in what that autumn would become
‘Dirge’ and ‘Death by Water’. In other news, he wrote, octopus and
poisonous jellyfish had been found at Margate.16
//
Ezra Pound peeled himself from the pillar he was leaning on and
bowed: ‘Sooner than might have been expected.’ The young man
before him in the Parisian street was E. E. Cummings, an intro-
duction that Scofield Thayer had been attempting to effect without
success, but which had happened in the event quite naturally. He
was a gymnastic personality, said Cummings of Pound afterwards,
but timorous and subtle with it – ‘or in other words somebody,
and intricate’.17 Less elusive had been an introduction by Thayer
to the literary court of Gertrude Stein. On Saturday evenings her
salon would gather in her Left Bank studio apartment at 27 rue de
Fleurus: Picasso and Braque and Matisse were among the regulars,
Apollinaire and Picabia too; and then there was the raft of resident
Americans, to which she gave Pound a wary welcome, but they
hadn’t taken well to each o ther. He was ‘a village explainer’, she
explained, ‘excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not’.18

He couldn’t forgive her for putting it ‘all over’ him in conversa-
tion, said Thayer;19 she couldn’t forgive him for breaking her chair.
Hemingway suspected that Stein had given him the seat knowing
that it would break.20
Pound took to life on the Left Bank. He liked to dine at an
Alsatian restaurant called Emile, beside the famous Bal Bulli-
er dance hall. There he would relax and hold court with all who
would listen. He was ‘the merriest spirit of the party’, said one reg-
ular. A ‘supreme’ dancer, Sisley Huddleston wrote in 1920s Paris:
‘Whoever has not seen Ezra Pound, ignoring all the rules of tango
and of fox-trot, kicking up fantastic heels in a highly personal
Charleston, closing his eyes as his toes nimbly scattered right and
left, has missed one of the spectacles which reconcile us to life.’21
The Australian artist Stella Bowen remembered his style from
wartime London as ‘highly personal and very violent’ – springing
up and down, swaying from side to side.22 Caresse Crosby took
him to hear a band of Martinique players at the Boule Blanche
in 1930. He eyed the dancefloor scornfully, saying, ‘These people
don’t know a thing about rhythm,’ and began tapping out one of
his own:
Suddenly unable to sit still a minute longer he leapt to the floor

and seized the tiny Martiniquaise vendor of cigarettes in his arms,
packets flying, then head back, eyes closed, chin out, he began a sort
of voodoo prance, his tiny partner held glued against his piston-
pumping knees.23
As the tempo grew, a crowd swelled around the two dancers to

crescendo, remembered Crosby. ‘Ezra opened his eyes, flicked the
cigarette girl aside like an extinguished match and collapsed into
the chair beside me.’
Pound was flourishing, though some of his encounters were not
without risk. Jean Cocteau had genius, Pound would say, but their
friendship was nearly his undoing after a dinner in Pound’s honour
almost turned into his last.24 Robert Desnos had sworn death to
Cocteau, and joined the occasion believing the Frenchman would
be an invited guest. When Cocteau didn’t appear, Desnos lunged
with a knife at Pound instead and had to be wrestled out of the
restaurant into the Place de l’Odéon outside.25
These were new and daring days, and just as Pound needed. Paris
was vibrant, pioneering and modern, and everything that London
was once but had failed to sustain, and brought Pound an assured
new lease of life. ‘I actually believe he cooked better in Paris,’ said
Lewis.26
//
Eliot told Richard Aldington that he found his m other ‘terrifying-

ly energetic for seventy-seven’. He travelled with her to Warwick
for the weekend of 9 July, from where she headed onward to Strat-
ford with Marion while he returned to London. But it was the
variety of energy r ather than the level that Eliot had begun to find
terrifying that summer. ‘Anxieties of several kinds’ had overtaken
him, he told Aldington: one undoubtedly had been the prospectus
for the new journal with Lady Rothermere, but by far the deeper
and more serious anguish was a familial one: ‘the strain of accom-
modating myself to people who in many ways are now strangers to
me’.27 He admitted that he had not expected to do any work while
his family stayed, but by mid-July he was falling behind on even
basic correspondence.28
Vivien, however, on 20 July, said something rather different: she
noted that, despite his fatigue, Eliot had been busily finishing off
‘various things’ ahead of joining her on a much-needed retreat to
Itchenor.29 Almost certainly he was writing the first half of the
fourth of his ‘London Letters’, in which he reported on Stravin-
sky’s June appearance; he probably covered the second half of the
letter on his return: George Bernard Shaw’s The Shewing-Up of

Blanco Posnet which would run through July and August at the
Queen’s Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue. So anxious was he to be
away from the strain of family that it seemed even to filter into the
‘London Letter’ he was drafting: ‘One knows, oneself, that there
are times when it is desirable to be seen and times when it is felic-
itous to vanish.’30
It was a sudden and great release that Eliot and Vivien expe-
rienced when they broke free from the family on 22 July for
Chichester Harbour. ‘My mind has left me,’ Vivien told Scofield
Thayer, ‘and I am becoming gradually insane.’31 Once, when the
two had been on the verge of courtship, Thayer had invited her to
drown her sorrows with him; now she reminded him of his offer. ‘I
am ready at any moment,’ she said.
The Hutchinsons were away from Eleanor House, at nearby
West Wittering, and so Eliot had no visitors to receive, wrote no
letters that survive, had no immediate dealings with Lady Rother-
mere, and had seemingly left in London his ‘wretched old’ Corona
typewriter, suspending any work on the ‘London Letter’. It was,
just at that moment, only Vivien and himself, and ten days with-
out interruption or distraction. It was surely in these moments,
with the tides making north along the estuary to Bosham Hards,
or in walking south to the shingle spits of Ella Nore and East
Head, that Eliot began to turn his mind to the next instalment of
the long poem. Perhaps he even produced some scattered lines or
rough manuscript in Itchenor; perhaps it was there that he found a
title for the lines to come, in the flaming eye of Mahā Vagga, from
which was pronounced ‘The Fire Sermon’.
//
If ‘In the Cage’/’A Game of Chess’ had seemed ceremonial in its

opening lines, the draft of ‘The Fire Sermon’ would raise the for-
mal register higher still. For seventy lines, it gathered itself in
iambic pentameter, this time finished off with lines in couplets
echoing the mock-heroic majesty of Alexander Pope’s The Rape of
the Lock. The white-armed Fresca of ‘Gerontion’ had returned as
the wanton and obsessive subject of this sequence. From her wak-
ing to her morning toilet, every action of her day is described and
ridiculed: her literary aspiration (‘She may as well write poetry, as
count sheep’). Her social pretension (‘Not quite an adult, and still

less a child’). Her diminution to a vessel of sexual and scatological
function (a ‘strolling slattern in a tawdry gown, / A doorstep
dunged by every dog in town’).32 No doubt Eliot’s aim was one of
period style: a satire in an eighteenth-century mode, where scurril-
ous form was understood – such popular entertainments as he had
been praising in his criticism. No doubt his aim was also to achieve
a kind of humour, on which he had just written in praise of the
English comedic style and the valuable place of the comedy revue.
And he had also just written of poetic drama as the form that best
expressed the varied types of society. In his critical prose, Eliot had
foreshadowed the intention to bring both humour and drama into
his p
oetry, but now that it had arrived it simply didn’t fit the man-
ner of the poem. These were prurient, damning and lustful
reductions without clear motivation. Intolerance had dragged
‘Bleistein’ and ‘Gerontion’ into a mire, and it threatened to do the
same here. As a literary trope it didn’t work; as an evocation of
personality it was repellent. As Gertrude Stein had told Ernest
Hemingway of one of his short stories at almost that moment: it
was inaccrochable – a work that could not be exhibited because the
indecency of content prevented it.33 There was no point in an inac-
crochable art, she told him: it was non-transmissible, and therefore
a non-starter.
It was a relief when the draft broke in with a new metre and a
new moment, casting back for tone and rhythms already moulded
in the first two parts of the poem. A rat returning through the veg-
etation; The Tempest returning for a fifth and sixth time, ‘Musing
upon the king my brother’s wreck / And on the king my father’s
death before him’ – and ‘This music crept by me upon the waters’;
Philomela and Tereus, returning, twit twit twit So rudely forc’d; the
Unreal City returning.34 And then the promised elegiac quatrains
of John Dryden: seventeen of them, narrating the typist and her
‘young man carbuncular’, as told by Tiresias.
Tiresias, seer of Thebes, lived seven generations with prophecy
granted by Zeus, could understand the language of birds, could
divine the future from fire or smoke.
Tiresias, changed into female form for seven years, after beat-
ing with his stick two mating snakes to the displeasure of Hera;
restored to male form encountering the same and this time letting
them lie.
Tiresias, blinded by Athena (Callimachus) after he stumbled
upon her bathing naked, or by Hera (Hesiod) for impiety after
stumbling into her dispute with Zeus as to whether woman or
man best understood sexual pleasure.
Tiresias, death by water poisoned in the tainted spring of Til-
phussa.
Tiresias, ‘the most important personage in the poem’, said Eliot,
in a somewhat wilful misdirection for his notes of the summer of
1922; never the most important, but a person of importance none-
theless through which are funnelled some of the multiple voices
of the poem; said Eliot: ‘uniting all the rest’.35 This would matter
more to the poem once the descriptive working title ‘He Do the
Police in Different Voices’ had been abandoned, and it would offer
a key indicator for it: for the poem was not to be a collage of var-
ious voices spliced together, but a single voice speaking variously,
to create, as Pound said of the poem in 1924, ‘an emotional unit’.36
In reading Seneca, Eliot would imagine something similar, saying
that ‘the plays were written to be declaimed, probably by a single
speaker’.37 And in 1939, responding to a radio reading of The Waste
Land which had been cast for four voices, Eliot said that he had a
strong dislike of dividing ‘poems which were conceived in terms of
one voice’. He said that it was a pity that poets hadn’t learned more
from choral work: ‘And by choral work I do not mean simply verse
to be spoken by a number of people in unison, but by an orches-
tration of a number of different voices speaking singly in turn.’38
Not a Greek chorus, then, but a harmony found in consecutive and
sometimes discordant parts. And not a series of unrelated images,

either, but a coordinated catalogue of visions that had given a title
to the section: the blazing eye of prophecy, the seer, the prophet
and the Buddha.
//
The rehabilitation of Ezra Pound in The Dial continued throughout

the summer when in August Scofield Thayer gave a first outing in
print to the fifth, sixth and seventh Cantos.39 Meanwhile, the Pounds
had at last found a studio apartment to rent in Montparnasse, across
the Luxembourg Gardens; they would wait for four months for the
tenants to vacate. Agnes Bedford was in town to work with Pound
on his proposed opera, Le Testament de Villon, and he had taken up
the bassoon – ‘good for the lungs’, he told his mother, and Dorothy
agreed, admiring the finer noises amid the ‘queer’ ones. ‘He will be a
soloist always,’ she told Mrs Pound ruefully.40
//
When Eliot returned with Vivien from Itchenor at the beginning

of August it was to consecutive weekend visits to Ottoline Mor-
rell’s manor house at Garsington: first with his mother, and then
the following weekend with his brother. His visits to Garsington
were never so regular (he hadn’t been for a year), but impressing
upon his family the kind of circles in which he moved must have
been of some importance. The performance was exhausting, but
it would at least be the last of the common activities as the Eliot
family began to prepare for their return to America.
On Saturday 20 August, ten weeks after their arrival, Char-
lotte, Marion and Henry sailed from the port of Liverpool aboard
the RMS Cedric for New York.41 Tom and Vivien were not only
exhausted but depressed. It had been six years since Eliot had
seen his mother: his father had died and had his ashes scattered
at Bellefontaine Cemetery in that time, and neither his decision
to marry Vivien nor her place by his side had been accepted by
the family. The visit of Mrs Eliot had been the hope to change all
that; but it simply hadn’t transpired. More had been riding on his
mother’s visit than perhaps even he knew. In the shadow of his
father’s death, he had yearned for her, longed for reconciliation, for
a reunion with his childhood days, for an endorsement of his lit-
erary and married life; but he was granted none of these things. In
seeing her off on Saturday 20 August, there had been no bonding,
no forgiveness, no promise of a new start. Reunion never seemed
further away, and Eliot may have experienced a return of the sense
of abandonment he knew as a child. He said that he felt engrossed
by her departure, and told Sydney Schiff that ‘the reaction from
the strain of it has been paralysing’.42
For the first time, Mrs Eliot had observed first hand the rela-
tionship between Vivien and her son. There was love between
them evidently, she said, even devotion, but it came at a cost to
her Tom. Vivien expected so much of him, demanded so much of
him: ‘I think he is afraid of her,’43 she told Henry. She had tried to
remain above the fray of the comings and goings of Vivien’s health,
but had been drawn in nonetheless to something that she probably
didn’t understand – who among them could say that they did? ‘She
likes the role of invalid,’ Henry interpreted her as saying, and that,
together with a desire to be petted and fussed over, she uncon-
sciously encouraged her own breakdowns. It was hard to tell what
was physical and what mental, but Henry was in little doubt that
her predicament was essentially pathological, and said that had she
a will to be well then she could be well. ‘She needs something to
take her mind off herself,’ he said, ‘something to absorb her entire
attention’.44 Bootstraps, was what she should reach for.
To Vivien and Tom, Mrs Eliot had not done enough to show
concern, and when two days had passed between Vivien’s return
from Itchenor and Charlotte’s bedside visit to her at Wigmore

Street, she felt Tom’s ‘beautiful attitude of affection’ towards her
slip.45 Vivien had found the atmosphere around Mrs Eliot an
‘emotionless condition’, a cause of great strain from which she said
she wanted to break out to scream and dance.46 Immediately, a
migraine overcame her (‘Vivien always recites some account of her
migraines’: Henry to his mother) that lasted until the following
Tuesday.47 She worried that in Charlotte’s eyes her behaviour had
been demonstrative, expressive, too wild, like that of an animal and
‘no lady’; but she had felt stunned, perfectly stunned throughout
the visit, and simply couldn’t manage to rein herself in any longer,
ending in what she described as a fit. ‘Good-bye Henry,’ she had
said. ‘And be personal, you must be personal, or else it’s no good.
Nothing’s any good.’48
For ten weeks, Eliot had found himself in the eye of the storm
between Charlotte’s reserve and Vivien’s extraversion; to each
he had preserved his beautiful attitude of affection. It had taken
every ounce of his ‘prepared faces’, as he once called them to Igor
Stravinsky, and the effort had simply overwhelmed him.
No sooner had his family departed than Eliot attempted to renew

his literary friendships, but his strength was barely up to it. On the
Monday, he met Richard Aldington for lunch at the Cock Tavern in
Fleet Street, and on the Tuesday, Dorothy Pound, newly arrived from
Paris, for dinner at the Kensington Palace Hotel.49 He was desperate
to revive his fading effort on the poem if only he could summon
the energy. He had told Mary Hutchinson that he wouldn’t be able
to return to Itchenor any time soon: he must stay in London part-
ly to save expense, but also ‘to tackle a special piece of work’.50 By
this he may have meant the preparations for the new journal with
Lady Rothermere that he was keeping secret from friends until the
arrangements had been finalised; but he may also have meant by this
‘The Fire Sermon’, which he wasn’t far from typing out.
The Eliots couldn’t bring themselves even to look in on Clarence
Gate Gardens until three days after the family’s departure. It was
then that Vivien had discovered an envelope that Henry had left
behind, containing a cheque. She was quite overcome: ‘It is terrible
that you should be so generous,’ she wrote at once. But there was a
further surprise. ‘And the typewriter? What does that mean please?
You can hardly have mistaken them in (as Tom insists) the circum-
stances. But whatever it means, you are shown up as an angel. A
bloody angel, as they say over here.’51 Henry had exchanged his
typewriter with Eliot’s: one Corona for another, only Henry’s was
newer and in better working order, and would carry Eliot through
the next two years.52 Eliot was most painfully touched: he was glad
to see the back of the machine he called ‘my wretched old one’,
which had been in use since at least 1913 and had long since need-
ed to be retired. He told Henry that he hoped this old machine
wouldn’t fall to pieces: ‘I have the same feeling whenever I look at
it or use it.’53
It took a further week for the Eliots to find the motivation to
move back into their flat from Wigmore Street. Clarence Gate
Gardens seemed desolate without his mother, he told her, but it
wasn’t true; both flats now seemed equally unbearable, and wishing
to be in neither, they lingered on at Wigmore Street ‘morosely’.54
They couldn’t even bring themselves to go out for the alcohol they
needed and then bickered in the evening for going without. Final-
ly, on the last weekend of August, they packed their suitcases and
made the journey a mile north-east across the Marylebone Road
to reclaim their home.
//
‘I am feeling completely exhausted,’ wrote Eliot to Mary Hutchin-

son on 1 September 1921. ‘The departure of my family laid us both
out – and have had some splitting headaches.’55 To Richard Ald-
ington he addressed the first letter on the typewriter that Henry

had left him, but a new machine couldn’t bring change to the old
themes as he wrote of the Eliots’ continuing illness.56 Workloads
pressed in on him. In addition to his daily routine at the bank, he
wrote a ‘London Letter’ for The Dial and for the Times Literary
Supplement struggled with a review ‘unsatisfactory to myself ’57 of
metaphysical poetry in which he described the decline of literature
after Alexander Pope, a moment when English verse had ‘gone to
pieces’.58 Gone to pieces was the very thing that Pound would soon
tell Scofield Thayer that Eliot had done.59
By the end of September, E liot’s health had broken down com-
pletely. He told his brother that he had been feeling nervous and
shaky and had very little self-control, and that he had overdrawn
his nervous energy.60 He could no longer manage his work at the
bank, but they had been ‘very kind’, he said, and granted him a
leave of absence, which was to take place under a medical regimen
of rest, diet and repair. It was not an insignificant grant of leave:
not a week or two, but three complete months.
For the first time since January, Ezra Pound was in London (‘the
bassoon slumbers’) for a week’s stay with his mother-in-law, Olivia
Shakespear, in Kensington. He was meeting with Arthur Griffith,
founder of Sinn Féin, who was also in town with an Irish dele-
gation discussing terms with the British government that would
lead to the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in December: for an
‘illuminating’ hour Griffith listened to Pound advancing a case for
Social C redit before telling him that it wasn’t possible to move
people with ‘a cold thing, like economics’.61 Paris had made Pound
no less forgiving toward the English, who continued in his opinion
to terminate ‘below the cervical ganglion’, but he saw Ford (‘about
as usual’), Yeats (‘somnolent’) and Lewis (‘painting better than I
had expected’), and on 12 October he called on Eliot at Clarence
Gate Gardens to find him in an enfeebled state.62 ‘Eliot has been
ordered away for 3 months rest,’ he reported to his parents. ‘It is
high time.’
liot’s psychological stability had been more dependent upon
E
his parents than he cared to admit. The loss of his father had
intensified a need for reconciliation with his mother that had,
after two years of planning for her visit, simply failed to mate-
rialise, bringing no closeness or forgiveness. Her departure had
left his crisis unresolved; worse, he now felt estranged, also, for he
had no choice but to resign himself to the idea that there would
be no compensation, no redemption in his familial purgatory, no
amends for his father through his mother. ‘It did not seem right
or inevitable,’ he said of his family’s departure. ‘We cannot rec-
oncile ourselves to it.’63 Neither right nor inevitable, but there it
was, plainly before him. ‘The rule of conduct was simply pleasing
mother,’ Eliot would write in time in The Family Reunion. She
hadn’t been pleased by Eliot’s life on seeing it close up, any more
than his father had approved from a distance. Like the lost prince
Hamlet, fatherless, appeasing a m other with whom he could not
connect, Eliot felt undermined and undone. ‘And now,’ wrote
Mrs Eliot to Henry, ‘as I always expected, he is the one to break
down.’64
‘I have seen the specialist (said to be the best in London) who
made his tests and said that I must go away at once for three months,
<quite> alone and away from anyone, not exert my mind at all, and
follow his strict rules for every hour of the day,’ Eliot informed
Richard Aldington at the beginning of October.65 A diagnosis of
any kind must have seemed like progress of sorts, but it brought
with it accompanying worries for Eliot. He said that he dreaded
the solitude of being among strangers, and anticipated a period ‘of
great depression’, particularly at first, which he had heard would be
the hardest phase of all. But he would try.66
On 13 October, the day after meeting Pound, Eliot had decided
on a destination.
‘I am going to Margate tomorrow, and expect to stay at least a
month,’ he told Aldington.67 Vivien would come too, at least until

he was settled in; she wasn’t supposed to but he couldn’t bear to
face this entirely alone.
‘It is very terrifying to stop after having gone on for so long,’ he
told Henry.68
//
A hunter’s moon hung low over Margate for the Eliots’ arrival. The
fine, rainless spring recorded in the ‘London Letter’ had turned
to heatwave that summer. In London, Kew Gardens baked under
the hottest October ever known, while in Kent, the thermometers
held at a steady seventy-five through the first week of the month.69
Margate had long boasted ‘even more temperature’ than any o ther
seaside resort, and was soaking in ten hours of sunshine daily.70 But
now drought had struck the county of Kent: the grasses of Thanet
were parched and scorched, its countryside a patchwork of yellow
and brown, dried tubers. Autumn continued as if summer would
never end: the desert year, it would come to be known.71
The holiday trade had long ended, and in the quiet left behind
the local newspaper reported day-to-day business. A former ser-
geant, crippled in combat, had been found guilty of the petty theft
of a rolled gold watch.72 A Ramsgate trawler had landed an anchor
and chain ‘of ancient pattern’. On Marine Parade, the star turn in
the boxing bout had seen better days. Curley Walker had been
bantamweight champion during the war, but his reputation hadn’t
recovered since he headbutted an opponent in London’s New
Cross. More and more, Curley Walker’s rivals seemed to escape
his swing; his loss in twenty rounds at Margate was the midpoint
in a run of eleven straight defeats.
Eliot told Richard Aldington that from 14 October he could be
found at the Albemarle Hotel, Cliftonville, above Margate, and
that he expected to stay for at least a month.73 No one besides the
bank had that address, and Aldington himself wasn’t to give it up
under any circumstances. Would he be good enough to take in
their cat (a good mouser), acquired to replace dear Dinah Brooks?
And would St John Hutchinson take over his column in The Dial?
Eliot tied up as many loose ends as he could. The summer had been
an exceptional struggle, but for the first time since the armistice,
Eliot had largely spent it with Vivien. There had been no French
trips with Lewis or Pound, as there had in 1919 and 1920, and for all
the tension and strain with Vivien, Eliot could not bear the pros-
pect of beginning his recovery alone. He thought that he might
even ask her to join him on the continent, should he find the treat-
ment there that he had heard about from Ottoline Morrell. More
than at any moment in their troubled marriage, Eliot was reliant
upon his wife for his stability and security. The family visit had
failed to repair the years of damage; Pound was once again abroad
and to all intents out of reach; the gratitude lavished upon Richard
Aldington for ‘an immense support’ was out of proportion to the
two men’s connection, and underlined quite how vulnerable Eliot
now seemed. Vivien had never been so needed; but at that moment
she appeared intent on a flirtatious correspondence with Scofield
Thayer, who had moved on from a summer in Paris, to the Frisian
island of Sylt, in northern Germany, and was now in Vienna, a
patient of Sigmund Freud. ‘Tom has had rather a serious break-
down,’ Vivien reported, adding, ‘I have not nearly finished my own
nervous breakdown yet.’ He had stopped all work for three months
to go away, she reported: she rather wanted to go somewhere too,
just like Tom, she told Thayer; it didn’t much matter where, ‘but I
must escape from England or it will smother me. Have been trying
to escape for five–six years!’ Six years had been the length of the
Eliots’ marriage. ‘I may appear in Vienna,’ she trailed.74
The Albemarle was, by Cliftonville standards, a modest hotel: a step

above bed and breakfast, but well below the large, exclusive accom-
modation that had developed there in the late nineteenth century.

The grand 1868 Cliftonville Hotel offered three hundred rooms for
well-to-do families and attic space for their entourage of nannies
and personal servants; it had its own orchestra, and so noteworthy
were its guests that a list of resident ‘fashionables’ would be printed
each week in the local newspaper. Beside it stood the magnificent
Queen’s Highcliffe, second only to the Cliftonville in splendour,
with its eight-course dinner for those wearing evening dress and
a ballroom for four hundred dancers; it was from the windows
of this hotel that John Betjeman watched the ‘fairy-lit sights’ of
the terrace promenade as Britain braced for German invasion in
1940 (‘It is those we are fighting for, foremost of all’).75 A narrow
fissure descended to the beach, known to the fishermen who cut
it as Devil’s Gap, and across it, nestled into the south-east corner
of the green at 41–3 Eastern Esplanade, was the Grand, opened
in 1904 as the Hydro for its luxurious Turkish and Russian baths
offering electric, thermal, seaweed and brine treatments. Of all the
Cliftonville establishments that surrounded the green, the Grand
felt itself the most exclusive, and advertised unblushingly for ‘vis-
itors of a class who have hitherto been inclined to look askance at
the town’.76 And next door but one to the Grand, on the broadest
thoroughfare of Cliftonville, stood the Albemarle Hotel, ‘newly
furnished in the modern style’ under the proprietorship of Walter
Beazley, a four-storey double-fronted terrace before which, every
evening, a lamplighter wicked the lanterns of the promenade.77
J. M. W. Turner sought out the unrestricted light and skies that
were ‘the loveliest in all Europe’, but the early Victorians came
‘escaping from a chrysalis state in London to flutter as a butter-
fly at Margate’, and whether for holiday or convalescence they
made the most of the town’s entertainment.78 The Winter Gar-
dens opened on Fort Green in 1911, close by the five-storey Hotel
Metropole: it carried a municipal orchestra that treated audiences
of up to 4,500 to famous arias and classical favourites, and was
close enough to London to entice Covent Garden’s visiting stars
of the moment – Anna Pavlova and Nellie Melba among them.
On the day the Eliots arrived, the Gardens was preparing for the
Christmas season with what the local paper described as ‘first-class
concert parties, a course of lectures, bands at the weekends, and
dance’.79 The Parade Cinema opposite the pier proudly advertised
itself as ‘the only place of entertainment in Thanet fitted with a
“SLIDING ROOF ”’ – a retractable covering kept open when
the films were not running, allowing fresh air and sunlight, ‘the
best of all disinfectants’, to flood the auditorium: tip-stalls at 6d, a
back row of doubles for couples at 1s.80 On Monday 24 October, for
six days only, Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid, the ‘Great Million Dollar
Six Reel Production he took a year to make’, screened daily at 2.45,
6.30 and 8.35. (‘The egregious merit of Chaplin’, Eliot would write
in 1923, ‘is that he has escaped in his own way from the realism of
the cinema and invented a rhythm.’)81
By the time of the armistice, variety and vaudeville shows were
replacing classical concerts, and down on Marine Terrace in the
south bay a more profound metamorphosis was taking place. The
Hall-by-the-Sea had opened there in 1865 in a space vacated by a
railway terminal. It was then a roofed corridor within which a music
hall and ballroom were housed, to which were added a skating rink
and a Ferris wheel, and then a circus arena in which the proprietor
kept his faded lions. By 1919 it had found a new owner in John
Henry Iles, and a new model in the amusement parks that he built
in Pittsburgh and elsewhere in North America. The relaunched
attraction housed a menagerie and a zoo, and a miniature rail-
way puttering through ornamental gardens, and state-of-the-art
mechanical rides: the Joy Wheel, the Whip and the boating River
Caves. But its main attraction was the rollercoaster known as the
Scenic Railway, whose mile-long wooden boards rose high into the
Margate skyline, and whose thrill-screams would become almost
as much a part of the local soundscape as the cry of the gulls. The
ride drew half a million visitors in its first three months. It had

opened in 1921, and carried a name that surely had been noted by
Eliot: Dreamland. For years to come, it would be known as the
Heartbeat of Margate.
Times were changing on Margate Sands. Bathing had been
segregated until the decade before the war: men and women sep-
arated by a fifty-yard division, and by a policeman who patrolled
an exclusion zone. Only in 1919 had bathing machines begun to
give way to cabins and tents, but even so some bathers still insisted
upon the machines – a wheeled, horse-drawn hut driven into three
feet of sea water so that its inhabitant could bathe with discretion.
Modesty was respectability, and so men sported jackets and a col-
lar and tie and wilted under heat; women wore their beach dresses
full length. The donkeys, it was said, carried angels by day and spir-
its by night: holiday makers in the sunshine, smugglers’ contraband
in the dark.
Seven, eight, nine hours a day, the Eliots soaked in sunshine; by
Tuesday of their first week Margate was basking under clear blue
skies and seventy-three degrees. Eliot spent most of his days in
the open air, some of the time resting in the hotel, trying to rid his
mind of the swarming life of London that had left him feeling so
rushed and tired.82 He would tell Sydney Schiff, towards the end of
his stay, that he r ather dreaded returning to the city: it was possible
to become dependent on sea or mountains to provide a sense of
security.
The Eliots had taken well to the White Room of the Albemarle:
such a nice, comfortable and inexpensive little hotel, said Vivien.
They took their meals in, ‘en pension’, for which they paid £1 1s
daily, with an extra shilling for breakfast and an extra shilling again
for the bath. By the second week, Vivien was able to discern quite
a change in her husband. ‘Tom is getting on amazingly,’ she told
Violet Schiff. ‘It is not quite a fortnight yet, but he looks already
younger, and fatter and nicer.’83 Walking west from the hotel would
take Eliot down the Fort Lower Promenade into the town, across
the crescent, jettied bay to Nayland Rock shelter where he could
sit and watch the movement of the tide, and the locals working
the beach for whelks or fishing off the pier with a simple line and
hook. Tram cars clattered noisily between the station behind the
shelter and the hotels on Cliftonville’s heights. Walking east, he
could clear the town entirely for the scotched brown cliffs over-
looking Foreness Point while the long late summer lasted. But
conditions had begun to turn. Sunshine warmed the cooling air,
but when a depression blew in on strong winds from Ireland, the
temperatures dropped so much that for the first time in a week the
Eliots warmed up in a hot bath.
Eliot had been reflecting on a conversation with Ottoline Mor-
rell. Exactly a decade had passed since her first visit to see specialist
doctors in Lausanne, on the shores of Lac Léman, Switzerland.
She had returned again in 1912 and 1913, by which time she was
under the care of a young Swiss doctor called Roger Vittoz. Julian
Huxley had been a patient of the same doctor, Eliot learned from
Ottoline, and might also be able to provide a reference. Eliot had
been instructed by his London doctors not to tax himself with writ-
ing, but now took up his pen: Ottoline had strongly advised him
to go, he explained to Huxley on 26 October, but he knew nothing
of Vittoz, and Switzerland was expensive and he must be sure of
the benefit of treatment: could Huxley provide an evaluation of
the doctor’s worth? And even suggest a moderately inexpensive
pension in which he might stay?84
Vivien continued to witness an improvement in Eliot’s demean-
er. ‘I have started Tom well,’ she told Mary Hutchinson after a
fortnight, ‘and he shows great improvement already. He looks
younger and better looking.’85 He even seemed well enough to be
left to his recuperation, and on Friday 28 October, Vivien returned
to London. Eliot moved into sole occupancy of Room 6, at half the
daily price (10s 6d) of their previous accommodation. The Albe-
marle had served them well, Vivien wrote to Mary as she departed:

‘marvellously comfortable and inexpensive’, and something of the
flavour of the town had entered pleasantly into the Eliots’ con-
sciousness: ‘Margate is rather queer, and we don’t dislike it.’
For two weeks, Eliot had honoured the terms of his reclusion.
He had broken the embargo on correspondence only once, and
then to make the necessary enquiry with Julian Huxley about
Dr Vittoz. But that Saturday, 29 October, in Vivien’s absence, he
sent off a postcard to Richard Aldington deploring the state of
reviewing in The Times, and in particular remembering the maul-
ing of Pound’s Mauberley in the Supplement the previous summer
(‘needlessly obscure . . . an esoteric volume’), an event from fifteen
months before, and yet still he told Aldington, ‘I am quite dis-
tressed about E. P.’86 He wrote two open letters to the newspaper,
only one of which was published, to his annoyance; but the letters
alone signalled a critical re-engagement that now typically preced-
ed his verse. It may have been that day that Eliot received a ‘very
full and satisfactory’ reply from Huxley, and for the first time in
his stay, his hotel bill recorded that he made a telephone call, most
likely to Vivien, now back at Clarence Gate Gardens, in order to
share the contents of the letter he had received. Huxley had com-
mended Vittoz unreservedly, leaving Eliot to conclude, ‘He sounds
just the man I want.’ The search for a solution had seemed endless,
but at last he may have found a therapeutic response he had been
looking for.
‘I shall go to Vittoz.’87
//
The thirtieth of October was Pound’s thirty-sixth birthday, but

in his mind it was a date of mightier significance, for it was also
the day that James Joyce completed Ulysses. Pound declared the
moment Year 1 p.s.U’, postscriptum Ulysses: ‘Here was the job
done and finished, the diagnosis and cure was here.’88 He would
say that it marked the end of the Christian Era, and the beginning
of another: not The Cantos, as it would turn out, but quite a dif-
ferent poem altogether, whose opening drafts were now just days
away from being placed in Pound’s hands.89
//
For an evening, a day and a morning, Atlantic rain swept into Mar-
gate, soaking the dry soil. The weather had cooled dramatically, and
struggled now to climb above ten degrees centigrade (fifty degrees
Fahrenheit); Eliot took baths almost daily to warm up from the
long, cold hours he now spent sitting in the shelter at Nayland
Rock, on the far western cove of the town beach.90 His decision
to go to Switzerland was now made, but he waited for the clinic
to confirm arrangements, and told his brother that he thought he
might have to remain in Kent for several weeks longer (‘Very good
sea air, and quiet’).91 That Friday, 4 November, he made a telephone
call so expensive at 4 s 6 d (almost half the rental of his room) that
it could only have been a long-distance connection, to the clinic of
Dr Vittoz or to the pension at which he would stay, the Hôtel Ste
Luce, recommended by Ottoline Morrell, just north of the Gare de
Lausanne. By Sunday, he was still awaiting a reply from the clinic
to his telegram about his treatment, but if all seemed acceptable
he would leave for Switzerland the following week. Only a few
days before, Dr Vittoz was merely a recommendation; now Eliot
was staking his recovery on him. He wrote to Richard Aldington,
Sunday 6 November, to offer him the Eliots’ flat, rent free, for a
period of six weeks.
My idea is to consult, and perhaps stay some time under, Vittoz,

who is said to be the best mental specialist in Europe – now that I
have a unique opportunity for doing so. I am satisfied, since being
here, that my ‘nerves’ are a very mild affair, due, not to overwork, but

to an aboulie and emotional derangement which has been a lifelong
affliction. Nothing wrong with my mind.92
Aboulie was the hallmark phrase of Dr Vittoz. His Traitement

des Psychonévroses par la Rééducation du Controle Cérébral had been
a publishing event when it was first issued in Paris in 1911, and in
an English translation in London the same year. It had gone into a
third edition by the time Eliot acquired his French-language copy
in 1921. That he used the specific term with Aldington suggests
that he may already have had his copy in his hands in Margate
when he wrote his letter of 6 November. Eliot didn’t possess the
English edition, but if he had he would have seen the word trans-
lated as ‘lack of will’; it was one of many sections marked by Eliot,
and it contained a touchstone sentence: ‘Que l’absence de volonté
est plus apparente que réelle.’ The want of will is more apparent than
real.93
Eliot may have returned to ‘The Fire Sermon’ early on in his stay,
but most likely he waited for Vivien’s departure on Friday 28 Octo-
ber, explaining, as she did that week, that ‘it is so difficult to write
with people about’.94 Possibly, he carried on in Margate where he
had left off in Itchenor and London, continuing in blank verse
but with a loosened rhyme scheme. He had been practising scales
on the mandolin that Vivien had given him in Margate, he’d told
Sydney Schiff.
O City, City, I have heard + hear

The pleasant whining of the [no, a] mandoline
Outside [no, Beside] a public bar in lower Thames Street
And a clatter + a chatter in the bar from within95
He decided to reverse the order of the second and third lines,

perhaps seeking a departure from the end rhyme that he had estab-
lished thus far. Then,
Where fishmen lounge + loafe + spit at noon
He partly struck that out and had another go.
Where fishmen lounge at noon, where the walls

at noon time, where the walls
at noon time, out where the walls
– not out:
Where fishmen lounge at noon time, there the walls

Of Magnus Martyr stood, + stand, + hold
Their joyful splendour of Corinthian white + gold
And not Their joyful splendour either: Inviolable splendour?

No, he had that already in ‘A Game of Chess’. Inexplicable? Yes.
And splendour? music? Splendour was right. Inexplicable splendour
of Corinthian white + gold. Nor were these lines quite in the right
order. The fishmen should come before the clatter; no, the clatter
should come before the public bar. Round and round went the car-
ousel of the draft, but at least he was back in the activity of the
poem.
Beneath the lines ‘O City, City’, he ruled off the page in a clean
stroke, and began another sketch of the city, this time in twelve
lines of terza rima. ‘London, the swarming creatures [no, life] that
you breed.’96
A second line required a jumpstart: ‘Among half stunned’ (no) –
‘Striving half stunned’ (no) – ‘Scampering half stunned’, ‘Huddled,
dazed ’ (no, no) – ‘Huddled, stunned’ . . .
Bollocks97
. . . Pound would write in shorthand in blunt black ink when he

was given the chance. It was a dense and tortuous rough draft that
would not survive its brief life in typescript once Pound had struck

through the entire passage of terza rima. But that exchange was
still to come, and in Margate Eliot continued onto a second leaf,
with some further London lines in pencil, this time with eyes on
the lower Thames of Greenwich Reach and the Isle of Dogs. ‘The
river sweats / Oil + tar’ . . .
O O hin hein heinh98
– he drew a wavy pencil line through this and found instead a

consonantal phrasing that would come to capture the section:
Weialala leia
Wallala leialala
Götterdämmerung. Once again, Eliot was returning to the sourc-

es: Wagner, reprised from ‘The Burial of the Dead’, only this time
his song of the Rhine daughters, a river no longer under German
control, that Eliot in a mental leap had transferred to the Thames.
It was a complete section of some twenty-six lines that with only
minor amendment would survive into the finished poem as an
interval between the elegiac stanzas.
A third leaf of manuscript. And still London, still the song of
the Thames daughters:
“Highbury bore me. Highbury’s children

Played under green trees and in the dusty Park.
We/Mine were humble people + conservative
As neither the rich nor the working class know.99
These and six further lines were struck by Eliot. ‘Type out this
anyhow,’ commanded Pound that winter, but Eliot had already
found the form of these lines, returning to the elegiac quatrains of
the typist sequence:
“Trams and dusty trees.

Highbury bore me. Richmond + Kew
Undid me. Beyond By Richmond I raised my knees
Stretched on the floor of a perilous canoe”.
The draft continued to the foot of the page: My feet were at

Moorgate, My feet are at Moorgate, and my heart / Under my feet.
Eliot turned over the same leaf and continued drafting on the
back. Not the humble people of Highbury, he reflected, but those
before his eyes at that moment. In summer, the jetty creaked under
a tide of holidaymakers, but in autumn it returned to the locals,
where the hard up fished with a simple line for a catch to put on
the family plate, or scoured the surf for lugworms and crabs to sell
for bait. I sketch the people, after a fashion, he told Sydney Schiff.100
“I was to be grateful. On Margate sands

There were many others. I can connect
Nothing with nothing. He had
I still feel the pressure of dirty hand101
Then a second pass at the lines that have become so famous:
“On Margate Sands.

I can connect
Nothing with nothing.
The broken finger nails of dirty hands.
My people are plain humble people, who expect
n/Nothing”.
And there it was. The connection of nothing with nothing that

would for so many come to define a recognisable spirit of The Waste
Land, the elegiac quatrains loosened in their grip, abcabc. Nothing
would come of nothing, Cordelia had been told by her father, as
perhaps Eliot felt he’d been told by his, as he brought the draft to
its climax. He may have been yet to grasp the opening to ‘The Fire
Sermon’ – that was still to undergo Pound’s intervention – but he
most surely had its ending:

To Carthage then I came.102
First the Rhine, now Roman Carthage – once again, a Keynesian

warning:
Burning burning burning burning
O Lord thou pluckest me out
O Lord thou pluckest
burning
//
liot’s month in Margate didn’t produce only rough drafts for
E
the long poem. There were two single – and apparently discrete –
poems that he also drafted on that second fortnight in the town.
For all the literary distance that he had travelled since the Hogarth
Poems of 1919, it was in some ways a surprise to find him return
to something like the ‘French’ form of the late war years, but so
he did, in both pieces. ‘Dirge’, a song, was the flightier of the two
poems, in two variable tetrametric stanzas, six lines by ten; ‘Elegy’,
the second, was the more formal, locked stiffly into abcb quatrains.
There was a proximity to them that was more than metric: they
were written on backing pages of the same leaf, for which there
should have been no need: new poems take new leaves, unless no
leaves are to be had, which is perhaps the situation that Eliot found
himself that day in the Nayland Rock shelter.
‘Dirge’ was seemingly the first to be written. Once again Eliot
had returned to the same song in the same scene of the same play,
Ariel’s dirge in The Tempest: Full fathom five thy father lies.103 But
here, in Eliot’s hands, it was given a horrific twist:
Full fathom five your Bleistein lies

Under the flatfish and the squids.
{man’s
Graves’ Disease in a dead {jew’s eyes!
Where the crabs have nibb eat the lids.104
Again he was reaching towards anti-Jewish tropes. A Jew’s-eye

was proverbially an object of prized value, but for all the wrong
reasons: it could be a medieval torture to extract monies from
defaulting Jews. Such an annihilation would be systematic to the
poem: a drowned body, picked at and lidless, gold teeth, lower once
again than the rats, low where the lobsters scratch scratch scratch. But
Eliot now had deliberated on a variant: which was it to be, a dead
jew (again the lower case) or a dead man (the universal case)? Per-
haps this time he would move beyond the trappings of ‘Bleistein’
and ‘Gerontion’ and universalise the experience: this time he surely
meant ‘man’ – a man, any man and therefore all men. Or perhaps he
meant a quite specific man: after all, as it was, the line read like the
thinnest of exchanged veils: Shakespeare’s word ‘father’ had become
Eliot’s word ‘Bleistein’, and Eliot may very well have had in mind
a symbol of the same, a projection of his father as the figure dead
to him, as the ‘other’, as the one outside of him – in Eliot’s Unitar-
ian upbringing, everything represented by the ‘Jew’. After all, the
original sequence in Shakespeare leads to a personal bereavement:
a bereft and grieving son, imagining the death of a father, imaging
as does ‘Dirge’ the sea-change, rich and strange into new atomic
matter. Such an amalgam reading of the Jew-father wouldn’t lessen
anti-Semitic offence, but it might inform our understanding of his
motivation. So which was it to be, a Jew or a man? It would take a
month or two for Eliot to resolve, but when, in Lausanne that win-
ter, he made a fair copy of the poem in manuscript, he would choose
which. Jew. Shamefully he picked Jew.
That Eliot may have had his father in mind may also be inferred
from the lines marked ‘Elegy’ on the verso leaf of ‘Dirge’. Here,
Eliot’s revival of the ‘French’ form was more arch, more traditional,
but then he was dressing for elegiac attire:

How steadfastly I should have mourned
The sinking of so dear a head!
But/Were’t not for dreams the/a dream restores
The very always inconvenient dead.105
Again the drowning, again the dead, and once again the purga-
torial shade:
God, in a rolling of fire

Pursues by day my errant feet.
The His flames of pity horror passion anger and of ire desire
a/Approach me with consuming heat.
This sounded not unlike the surrender of the perfecti, recalling

Eliot’s encounter at Périgeuex in 1919, as if he now adopted a
sustained effort to find the indirect address to his father that he
had sought for so long. Yet here the effort seemed forced, too
rigid in its armour to let the emotion out: as if the lines were
serving duty rather than the poet’s heart. But then it may not
have been complete: the manuscript, little more than a fragment,
with its pencilled title squeezed into the corner, kept perhaps
more as a piece of mental filing than as a crowning of a final
draft.
There’s reason to think that both poems might have been
imagined as part of a trilogy from that time. Another piece may
have been produced in typescript before he wrote either, and
before he left for Margate. Called ‘Exequy’, a funeral rite, it was
a highly ritualised memorial ode. Seven lines, a heptastich, again
tetrameter, this time an inventive abbcaca pattern. Here, too, it was
as if Eliot could not break through the distance between the per-
sonal experience locked within him and his desire for an objective,
public expression of it. This time, the poem carried lines from the
Purgatorio, from which Eliot had typed one and then replaced it by
hand with another: be mindful in due time of my pain, and, in thought
I see my past madness.106 The first came from the same sequence as
Ara vos prec, and would be quoted by Eliot in his 1922 Notes to The
Waste Land; the second from four lines before, Arnaut Daniel’s
famed introduction: I am Arnaut that weep and go a-singing. These
lines were ingrained upon Eliot in 1919, that winter of his father’s
death, and that summer of dispossession. It was as though Eliot
was now connecting all l evels of his recent experience but failing to
find a form to record them in verse memorable enough to sustain
the longer poem.
When the pages of The Waste Land that Eliot sent John Quinn
in gratitude for his help with publication were lost – or at least
thought lost by Eliot – he said he couldn’t remember much about
the incidental pieces that he excluded from the body of the final
poem, but he had a name for them: he called them ‘short poems’
and ‘Waste Land lyrics’, and used a yet more telling word besides,
‘interludes’. His specific reference when he said this was to the
‘Song’ that had appeared in Tyro, but most likely he may also have
included any or all of ‘Dirge’, ‘Elegy’ and ‘Exequy’ when in 1946
he wrote: ‘It may or may not have been one of those included as
interludes in the first draft of The Waste Land. It is impossible to
settle this point now. I preserved no copies of those Waste Land
lyrics.’107 Extraordinary as it seemed, at least some of these poems
may have been intended as accompanying texts to the poem, even
as interludes between the major parts of the long poem: a testi-
mony to how focused Eliot was at that moment on his notion of
the music hall, the comic revue and the popular variety show. Their
introduction would have been a disaster, tangling the ground of
the final poem with literary weeds, but for a moment at least in the
winter of 1921–2, it appears that this was the course of action that
Eliot was considering. It would take the wisdom of Ezra Pound to
prevent it.
//
The eleventh of November was the first time that poppies served to
commemorate Remembrance Day. In Margate, red paper flowers
were sold along the pier; some blew in cartwheels across the sands.
I have done a rough draft of part of part III, but do not know
whether it will do, and must wait for Vivien’s opinion as to whether
it is printable. I have done this while sitting in a shelter on the front
– as I am out all day except when taking rest. But I have written
only some fifty lines, and have read nothing, literally – I sketch the
people, after a fashion, and practise scales on the mandoline.108
It was most likely this day, Friday 11 November – though possi-

bly the Friday before – that Eliot had written to Sydney Schiff. In
his letter he had written something else of tantalising relevance to
the long poem in progress. ‘I should have liked to hear from you,
but of course did not expect to, knowing that you had much to do
and bad health and worries.’ This remark deserves a little reflec-
tion, and might have appeared little more than a courtesy were it
not for is placement immediately before the sentence outlining the
‘part of part III’. That Eliot could mention a ‘part III’ at all with-
out reference to a larger work suggests that he expected Schiff to
understand exactly what it was a part in relation to – information
that Schiff could have gathered in the course of a conversation, but
more likely from being in temporary possession of the typescripts
of parts I or II – or conceivably of an early typescript of part III.
There is no evidence to corroborate that such an early third-part
typescript was ever created; conversely, it would be entirely possi-
ble that Eliot had left drafts of the first two parts with his friend
before he went to Margate. ‘I enjoyed Sunday very much and am
very grateful to you for encouragement,’ Eliot wrote to Schiff in his
week in London following his return from Margate.109 The Sun-
day in question was 13 November, the day he travelled back from
Kent, and the encouragement is not clarified: an encouragement
towards Lausanne, perhaps, but more probably an encouragement
in discussion of the long poem. Specifically, it may be that Eliot
had lent Schiff the (now missing) carbon of ‘The Burial of the
Dead’ and it was this that he took back that Sunday, and this that,
on the Tuesday of that week, 15 November, he may subsequently
have lent to Wyndham Lewis for comment.
In London, Vivien learned from Bertrand Russell of the immi-
nent arrival of his first son (he would be named after Joseph
Conrad). The mother was not Constance Malleson, but Dora
Black, whom Russell had married in September while she was
seven months pregnant with their child. Vivien must have relayed
the news to Eliot during their phone call on Saturday 29 October,
for he offered a Mr Apollinaxian blessing of sorts: he was quite
sure that the baby would have pointed ears that would sharpen in
time. Vivien shared with Russell Eliot’s own predicament just as
she had with Thayer. ‘Tom is having a bad nervous – or so called
– breakdown,’ she confided. ‘In a short time I hope he will go to
Switzerland, to see Dr Vittoz.’110 Vivien had vowed to be done with
Russell, but it seemed she wanted the moment of her husband’s
collapse to be shared with both Thayer and Russell, the two men
who, in her mind, had been – or were still – rivals for her affection.
//
Eliot was convinced that in aboulie he had identified the source of

his disturbance. He had heavily marked his copy of Vittoz’s book
accordingly, including what may have stood in Eliot’s understand-
ing as a description of his own condition:
Toute idée, tout acte de volonté éveille dans l’esprit du malade une
sensation de crainte; il prévoit la stérilité de l’effort, le doute l’étreint
et le paralyse. C’est la peur du vouloir qui le rend aboulique, car
tout effort est douloureux, tout acte angoissant. (Every idea, every
act of will causes a sensation of fear in the mind of the sufferer, he

foresees that all effort is in vain, and he is paralyzed and fettered by
doubt. It is the fear of using his will that deprives him of the power
of doing so, for every effort is painful, and every action causes great
distress.)111
He marked special attention to ‘Ouïe’ (‘Hearing’):
On constate en effet une hyperexcitabilité qui rend le malade

sensible au plus léger bruit, cause très fréquente de l’insomnie.
(There is, in fact, often an excessive excitability which makes the
sufferer aware of the slightest noise, and is very frequently a cause of
insomnia.)112
Throughout his copy, Eliot marked phrases in French that

seemingly create an insight into the conditions that concerned
him – in English translation: Half-awake – the physiological life of
man – insanity and purely mental illnesses – hysteria – a case of arrest-
ed development – complete submission to treatment – apathy, fatigue,
want of interest in life – chronic symptoms as a result of even very slight
mental shock – greater fatigue in the morning than in the evening –
undue excitement – a fit subject for rest cures – the slightest change in
habits or the smallest task may bring on an attack of great distress –
want of will is more apparent than real . . . it is more a question of
want of its use.
And then there were the descriptions of physical pain that Eliot
marked: digestion, genital-urinary, noise, insomnia, a feeling that
the head will burst, a feeling that an iron band is gradually tighten-
ing round the head, a painful contracting of muscles (beside which
he annotated ‘handwriting’), and a contracting of the oesophagus,
stomach and intestines (besides which, ‘constipation’).
Finally, he marked Vittoz’s recommended responses: passages
demanding a concentration on something definite, another on
the resisting of self-examination. And beside ‘La volonté’, a pas-
sage which says that the will is a component force of every human
being’s life, he wrote a tentative question in the margin: ‘Each per-
son has a definite “quantity”?’
Someone, surely Eliot, bookmarked his copy at three sections of
special interest. The first marked ‘Symptômes de la periode d’état’
(‘Symptoms of the chronic state’), a section that records a neuro-
logical deterioration from instability to a loss of control in which
sufferers grow ever more conscious of the state of their brain, and
ever more anxious and fearful in response. The second, ‘Effet psy-
chique du controle des actes’ (‘Psychic effect of control over the
actions’), describes how mastery over daily activity restores a calm-
ness of being. Each of these two sections would have caught E liot’s
attention, but of most concern of all would be the third and last
bookmark, ‘Concentration sur l’idée’ (‘Concentration on an idea’),
in which the patient must learn to focus without distraction upon
the object of attention, learning to dispel any thought that are
irrelevant. It would be hard to overstate the coincidence of this
thought as Eliot tackled the completion of his long poem in Lau-
sanne that winter: Vittoz would encourage the concentration; the
poem would be the idea.113
//
It was bitterly cold in Margate as Eliot at last prepared to depart:

days of low forties, nights of frost and freeze. Snow swept over the
south coast, dragging a squall of hail and thunder over Kent. On
Sunday 13 November, he settled his final bill with the Albemarle
Hotel, and caught the train to London. It was probably then that
he saw Sydney Schiff en route back to Clarence Gate Gardens,
and following a month away and a fortnight of solitude, he was
glad of the company.114 On Tuesday that week, he saw Wyndham
Lewis, and probably passed him the same typescript that he had
just taken back from Schiff: Lewis had been the first to set eyes on
‘The Burial of the Dead’ in February, but he hadn’t yet been asked

for a critical reading (Eliot would shortly send him a chasing post-
card from Switzerland). Now back in the flat, and without Lloyds
work to distract him, Eliot had time to type out ‘The Fire Sermon’,
or at least partly: 193 lines across five leaves were produced – by far
the longest of the parts to date – into which he inserted a dozen
lines from ‘London, the swarming life’ that he had drafted in pencil
in Margate. But he had not the time to – or had not yet accepted
the inclusion of – the remaining pages of Margate manuscript that
would conclude that section of the poem; instead, he packed them
– three leaves, four pages – together with ‘Dirge’ and ‘Elegy’ – with
the assortment of typescript pages for the poem that he intended
to return to. On Wednesday, he saw Mary Hutchinson, and passed
her what he called ‘a farewell note’115 (‘Au bonheur!’) and told Har-
old Monro that he was on the eve of leaving for Lausanne; he said
the same to Glenway Wescott, whom he didn’t know personally,
but in whom, in an act of uncharacteristic disclosure, he confided
that he’d had ‘a nervous breakdown’.116 And he even found time to
tease Richard Aldington on his dislike of E liot’s poetry, saying that
he expected him ‘to abhor the poem on which I have been work-
ing and which I am taking away with me!’117 Suddenly, in this last
moment before departure, Eliot seemed determined to open him-
self to a new level of scrutiny, both of his wellbeing and of his verse.
‘We leave London tomorrow morning.’
Death by Water.
At the Hôtel Pas-de Calais, 59 rue des Saints-Pères, the Eliots

checked into the pension that the Pounds had made their home
until only a few weeks before. It would be just the second time that
the two men had seen one another that year, but there would be
an unexpected edge to the reunion. Pound had published an article
in the New York Little Review in July in which he had referred
sneeringly to Eliot as the ‘Dean of English criticism’; it had taken
until now for E liot’s subscription copy to reach England. Pound
had told the journal editors that his contribution was ‘my own dec-
laration of independence’ – but an independence from what exactly
– from London, or from Eliot and his friends?1 He ridiculed his
old Imagist comrade Richard Aldington, whose serious-minded
review of James Joyce in the English Review he called ‘the funni-
est thing that has appeared in England for some time’.2 But more
particularly he appeared to signal an independence from Eliot, and
feelings may have been hurt. ‘Have they sent you the Little Review
(quarterly) in which Ezra (in an otherwise irritating attempted-
funny article) speaks of me as the “Dean of English Letters”?’ Eliot
asked Aldington on the eve of departure for Paris. ‘He refers to you
also in a common condemnation.’3
In The Tyro that April, Eliot had written in his essay on Baude-
oetry is occupied with morality’.4 Pound
laire that ‘All first-rate p
didn’t care for that statement one bit, and found it aloof: he
sensed that Eliot was now more concerned with appealing to the
academy – or, worse, to God – than to p oetry. He attributed to
Eliot a remark that ‘the greatest poets have been concerned with
315
moral values’, but that wasn’t exactly what had been said: Eliot
had written of poetry, not poets, and of morality, not moral val-
ues. Nevertheless, E liot’s article had prised open a discursive door
that Pound would kick wide. ‘This red-herring is justifiable on the
grounds of extreme mental or physical exhaustion,’ he announced
in the Little Review, but justifiable on no other.5 The greatest poets
have equally been concerned with eating breakfast and taking a
walk and . . . E liot’s statement, in o ther words, described nothing
of significance. When Pound drafted his article in May, he hadn’t
seen Eliot for five months, but he was aware of the mental and
physical distress that his friend was in, and his remarks cut close
to the bone. He had encouraged Eliot never to be the battering
ram (that was Pound’s job), nor the explosives expert (that was
Lewis’s), but to try for a more subversive method in ‘sapping the
foundations’ instead: as a literary heist, Pound was to go through
the front door and Eliot was to go around the back. His task was to
be produce a criticism that was revolutionary, but instead all Eliot
seemed to be serving up was parsimony. That E liot’s was a style of
good manners was partly the result of Pound’s direction, and those
manners had won him acclaim: ‘He is now respected by the Times
Lit. Sup.,’ Pound would say wearily. ‘But his criticisms no longer
arouse my interest.’6 It was buncomb that p oetry needed a moral
code: that was the kind of dutiful fluff a writer said because he
believed he ought to (and Eliot was nothing if not dutiful); when
duty enters, pleasure departs: a truth in art as in love. A writer had
to please himself alone if an artwork were to live, and not cower to
the political or moral fashions of the day.7
Eliot, as it happened, would have agreed, and indeed had
anticipated Pound on the point when in 1919 he had written that
‘the best work, the only work that in the end counts, is written
for oneself ’.8 In 1957 he would put the idea this way: ‘The first
voice is the voice of the poet talking to himself – or to nobody.’9
But objectivity wasn’t exactly in Pound’s mind at that moment.
Primness needed puncture, and Pound was the man with the
sharpest pin.
The work of art is not a means.

The work of art is an end.10
The review left Eliot in such a waspish mood that, for all the
amicability of their Margate correspondence, he turned upon Ald-
ington. H. D. had christened her new collection Hymen (a title
that wasn’t at all pleasing to Eliot), and he told Aldington that
he found his wife’s book riven with ‘a neurotic carnality which I
dislike’.11 But he didn’t say only that, he said ‘morally’: morally, he
found a neurotic carnality which he disliked, as though a dislike
of carnality was itself a moral position. It was Pound who had lev-
elled the charge of morality at Eliot, and now it was Eliot who in
turn sent it ricocheting onto Aldington. Aldington was a proud
husband and had described H. D. as the greatest living exponent
of vers libre.12 Eliot was sorry but he couldn’t agree: the new book
was below par, lacking in vitality and sorely in need of an editor:
‘fatiguingly monotonous and lacking in the element of surprise’
was the ribbon he wrapped it in.13 Eliot’s personal reliance upon
Aldington that autumn had not been inconsiderable, and his
remarks on H. D. would not be forgiven. In the time to come
Aldington would produce some of the most vociferous and most
personal assaults on Eliot that anyone would make.
Walking back one afternoon in 1925 to his cottage in Padworth,
Berkshire, Aldington collapsed by the roadside, believing his heart
was giving out; in fact, it was a nervous exhaustion that left him
prostrate for weeks. For some years, ‘moods of depression’ had
swept over him unchecked, and the breakdown he experienced
seemed to alter not only his outlook but his personality. In his
criticism of others, Aldington had become unforgiving, to say the
least. Robert Graves went as far as to call him the ‘hangman of let-
ters’, bent on the gloomy destruction of his literary peers.14 It was
De at h b y W at e r | 317
a damaging energy that Eliot would feel the weight of, charged by
Aldington with not returning to others the support and help that
he had himself received from the likes of Pound and Aldington.15
Jibes escalated, and in 1930 resentment boiled over when Alding-
ton wrote what Eliot described as a ‘cruel and unkind lampoon’ of
his marriage with Vivien, in which her mental deterioration was
met only by a coldness and sense of legal obligation.16 ‘I’m going
mad, I’m going mad, I’m going mad,’ Aldington would report her
saying to a chilly and impassive Eliot.17 He spoofed Eliot with
Pound as ‘Cibber’ and ‘Cholmp’ perambulating the streets of Lon-
don together, deliberating over the fate of the marriage to Vivien.
‘You ought to do something about it,’ Cholmp urged. ‘What I mean

is, haven’t eether of you got any sense?’
‘A situation so complicated . . .’ Cibber murmured.
‘But you can’t go on like this. You’re driving each o ther crazy.’
‘Ye-es,’ said Cibber.
‘Well, can’t you do something?’
‘What is there to be said, what is there to be done?’ Cibber
retorted languidly.
‘Well, you can’t go on like this, can you?’
‘No-o, no-o, probably not.’
‘Then you’ll have to do something.’
‘Ye-es, ye-es, no doubt.’
‘Well, what are you going to do?’
Cibber raised his arms slightly, and let them fall limp against his
sides with the mute eloquence of despair. Cholmp restrained his
impatience.18
Geoffrey Faber would call it ‘a bitter and indeed a malevolent

attack on Eliot’, and it grew only worse.19 Aldington would say
in an essay of the 1930s that Eliot was deficient of all emotions
except ‘disgust, despair and suicidal impulse’.20 And Eliot would
accurately anticipate his response to The Waste Land when he said
that Aldington would not be in favour of it. ‘After that the only
thing for us all to do now is to go Home and commit suicide as
painfully as possible,’ Aldington would write.21
Eliot would cut contact with Aldington after the attack on his
marriage. But he knew, too, that he hadn’t taken care with the man
equivalent to the care he had received from him. He had been, he
admitted, the first to give offence, and on more than one occasion
had been clumsy and tactless. ‘I hurt his feelings once or twice very
deeply indeed.’22 Aldington, like Pound, couldn’t understand why
Eliot did not look after his friends better than he did.
All things considered, Pound thought that Eliot seemed well when
he saw him – or at least fairly well, as he qualified to Scofield Thayer.23
Not bad for a man in the middle of a breakdown, travelling for ther-
apy with a wife who seemed to be as busy engaging the attentions of
her husband’s peers as her husband himself, and whose friend and
ally had just accused him of literary ‘buncomb’ in print.
Eliot emptied his briefcase before Pound.
For the first time, he gave Pound sight of ‘The Burial of the
Dead’, leaving him the ribbon copy for his attention while Eliot
was in Lausanne. (The carbon – if ever there was one – may still
have been in London with Wyndham Lewis.)
He also left Pound ‘A Game of Chess’ in the ribbon copy that
was Vivien’s, and that still carried her markings wonderful & won-
derful; the carbon copy he kept with him for carrying to Lausanne,
with Vivien’s remarks transcribed.
And he left with Pound the new, unblemished copy of ‘The
Fire Sermon’ in typescript: this time the carbon copy, retaining
the ribbon to take with him to Lausanne; he may also have left
the Margate manuscript pages then, although it’s more likely that
he gave these to Pound on his return from Switzerland when he
assembled the poem in full for the first time. With that done, he
left Pound to his studio renovations.
The few days in Paris together were very perfect, said Vivien. But
her husband’s departure for Lausanne, probably on 21 November,
would leave her disorientated. ‘It was only after I saw him climb
into that dreadful Swiss train, and me left on the platform, at 9.20
in the evening, that I felt someone had taken a broomstick and
knocked me on the head.’24 She found no company to replace her
husband. The Pounds were busy with their studio, and in Decem-
ber, they became further occupied with Dorothy’s hospitalisation
for an abscess on her left forefinger. At the same moment, Vivien
had a chance encounter in a Parisian post office with Roger Fry,
who appeared alarmed to see her and anxious to escape her compa-
ny. No one, it seemed, had time for her or wished for her presence.
She said she felt thrown, pained and ‘absolutely alone’. No one and
nowhere seemed real to her, not even Eliot. Everything and every-
one was forgotten. She began to make arrangements to visit an
unidentified person to whom she obliquely referred as ‘the man
from Cologne’; but when the Deutschmark briefly stabilised in
December Vivien’s prospective costs doubled suddenly: he would
come to visit her in Paris instead. ‘The man from Cologne arrives
tomorrow – will stay with me,’ she told Mary Hutchinson. ‘After
that I don’t know.’ What was she thinking, exactly, and who was
this mysterious man from Cologne? She wouldn’t reveal, though
it’s possible that Cologne was little more than a cover for Vienna
to prevent the name of Scofield Thayer finding its way back to
Eliot. ‘About Tom –’ she told Mary, ‘I don’t know I don’t know.’
After ‘9 months of restaurants’, Dorothy and Ezra Pound were

now decorating and making furniture for their new apartment, a
mile to the south of Vivien, down the busy boulevard Raspail.25
‘The Pounds have a most exquisite Studio (with two rooms) not
far from here!’ Vivien noted with envy. ‘Only £75 a year.’26 (She
didn’t care at all for her own compact upper room, by compar-
ison, nor the meals taken en pension to save money.) 70 bis rue
Notre-Dame-des-Champs, close to the south-west corner of the
Luxembourg Gardens, was insulated from the street noise by ‘two
rows of building’ via an alley that opened onto a pavilion courtyard
of small trees and a crumbling statue of Diana and the hound.27
Curtains hung over an entrance to the glass-fronted studio itself:
a small single room, as described by Dorothy, which ‘has a little
room off it, a littler one up a staircase (the latter in the studio) and
then a cupboardy kind of place across the hall where we shall have
some kind of cooking apparatus.’28 The little room was a former
kitchenette that they decided to use as a box room; the littler room
up the curling staircase became the bedroom, and the cupboardy
kind of place a dressing room. They cooked on a gas stove in the
main space – what Pound sketched in a letter to his parents as
the ‘conservatory kitchen’.29 All around was decorated with evi-
dence of Pound’s physical prowess: his fencing foils hung above
the bookcases, his tennis racket beside them, and near them a pair
of boxing gloves with which he liked to pummel any guests who
were willing to spar. From the untreated wood of packing cases,
Pound made a low tea table, crimson painted, that he called his
Chinese dining table. ( Joyce said on inspection: a cobbler should
stick to his last.)30 From London, he shipped his triangular typing
table. He crammed the few free spaces with artworks by Dorothy
and Gaudier-Brzeska, and, given pride of place, the suitcase-sized
clavichord that Pound had commissioned from Arnold Dolmetsch
in London with money that Yeats had given him on his wedding.
A subsequent resident would describe the place as ‘a little country
cottage set down in the middle of Paris’, but to Pound it was ‘mag-
nificently large’.31 There was even room for a cat.
With the street came history. Victor Hugo had lived at num-
ber twenty-seven, Pierre-Auguste Renoir once had a workshop at
thirty-four, John Singer Sargent at neighbouring seventy-three,
James McNeill Whistler at eighty-six. As many as half a dozen
painters of note had lived in the apartment itself before Pound,
and directly above him lived the poet Ralph Cheever Dunning
of Detroit, an opium addict, said to have been christened by Ford
Madox Ford for his reclusive lifestyle as ‘the living Buddha of
Montparnasse’. Dunning very rarely spoke and was never, ever
seen to eat, and his spartan apartment had just a single chair, a
stove, a bookcase and a cot. Back in 1910 he had published a slim
collection of poems with Bodley Head in London, and had spent
the next decade trying to perfect a second book, under the encour-
agement and championing of his new neighbour, Pound. Briefly
and unexpectedly, and with Pound’s help, he would be the toast of
Parisian conversation when in 1925 he was awarded Poetry mag-
azine’s Helen Haire Nevinson Prize; but by 1930 Dunning was
dead from tuberculosis, brought on by malnutrition, and the small
gathering of work he left behind ignored thereafter.32
Most important of all the neighbours and visitors to 70 bis
would be a young writer without a book to his name, who moved
in at number 113 and who was filing columns for the Toronto Star
when he met Pound at Shakespeare and Company, early in 1922.
When Wyndham Lewis visited from London for the first time,
the two men were producing such a noise from within the studio
that no one answered the bell; he pushed open the door and found
them in mid boxing bout. ‘A splendidly built young man, stripped
to the waist, and with a torso of dazzling white, was standing not
far from me,’ Lewis recalled. ‘He was tall, handsome, and serene,
and was repelling with his boxing gloves a hectic assault of Ezra’s.
After a final swing at the dazzling solar plexus Pound fell back
upon his settee.’33 The young man was Ernest Hemingway, and
with Pound he would get on like a house on fire: he had ‘a terrific
wallop’, Hemingway would acknowledge, ‘and when he gets too
tough I dump him on the floor’.34 He became a regular caller, and
said of the studio that it was as poor as Gertrude Stein’s studio was
rich.35 And he became protective of Pound, who helped him into
the world of print just as Eliot had once been helped in London.
Indeed, the tribute he gave Pound in 1925 would sound remarkably
like Eliot’s.
So then, so far, we have Pound the major poet devoting, say,
one-fifth of his time to poetry. With the rest of his time he tries
to advance the fortunes, both material and artistic, of his friends.
He defends them when they are attacked, he gets them into maga-
zines and out of jail. He loans them money. He sells their pictures.
He arranges concerts for them. He writes articles about them. He
introduces them to wealthy women. He gets publishers to take
their books. He sits up all night with them when they claim to
be dying and he witnesses their wills. He advances them hospital
expenses and dissuades them from suicide. And in the end a few of
them refrain from knifing him at the first opportunity.36
//
To most visitors the vast Alpine lake on the shore of Ouchy car-
ried the name Lake Geneva, or Genfersee in German, but to the
French speakers in Lausanne and the Vaud it was Lac Léman: a
stretch of water so vast that it takes a decade for the Rhone waters
that enter near Villeneuve in the east to empty in the south-west
through the city of Geneva. The wind that whipped out of the
north-east brought such a chill that it had been given a name: la
Bise, ‘the kiss’ from out of the Alps. Lausanne and Ouchy, on the
north bank of the lake, were spared the worst by the shelter of the
Jura mountains, but once the cold air found open water it would
accelerate to whip up the surface of Léman and scour the southern
windward shores with frozen spray that transformed trees to ice
sculpture. La Bise was known to freeze tears. And when it grew
colder still it became la Bise noire, so terrible to one clergyman
traveller in 1870 that he saw in it ‘the likeness of evil spirits’.37 On
some days, a seiche, or standing wave, would swing rhythmically
from shore to shore, and when backed by la Bise, a surge five or
six feet in height could roll eerily across the surface. On rarer days,
when la Bise was all but stilled and its frigid air was colder than the
water below, the lake would smoke with a phantom fog.
It was still dark when Eliot’s early-morning train from Paris pulled
into the Gare de Lausanne.38 A pall of fog hung over the town
and the thermometer had only just begun to climb above freezing,
but to reach his hotel Eliot had only to cross the Place de la Gare,
and climb the one-hundred-and-some yards up the curling rue du
Petit-Chêne that rose towards the banks and post office at Église
Sainte-François. His hotel, on the corner of avenue Ste-Luce,
faced the old town uphill to the north, but the southern aspect,
elevated in generous grounds, looked back across the station from
which Eliot had arrived. From his hotel room on the second storey
he could see, through the lifting fog, the mile down to the waters
of Lac Léman at neighbouring Ouchy; a clear day brought sight
of the French Alps, although Eliot would be blessed with only a
few of those. Hôtel Pension Ste-Luce was an early nineteenth-
century villa built on an old vineyard. It cost half the daily rate of
the upmarket Hôtel Continental just below it, although to take
meals en pension, as Eliot did (‘the food is excellent’), was to double
the room rate.39 Of the pension’s thirty rooms one was special, and
Eliot had it: it was the room in which Ottoline Morrell had stayed,
as he reported to her contentedly: ‘I am here, in your room (so they
tell me) and under Vittoz.’40
The walk to the clinic took ten minutes: across the place de la Gare,
300 metres along the broad avenue d’Ouchy, until he reached the
Villa Cimerose, a turn-of-the-century villa on the corner at ave-
nue des Tilleuls 2.41 Here lived R oger and Jeanne Vittoz, married
in Paris in 1905, no children, surrounded by lime trees, dappled by
a copper beech in the garden. This wasn’t a sanitorium in recu-
perative grounds – no long lawns for patients to perambulate, no
verandas with an aspect – but a small practice run from the fam-
ily home, on the corner of the main road where the trams rattled
down to the lake.
Here, Eliot knew, was the place of Ottoline Morrell and Julian
Huxley’s recovery from symptoms that he recognised in him-
self; Huxley had described a ‘calamitous state when any mental
effort, and any attempt to reach a decision, even in trivial matters,
becomes a source of anguish’; Morrell had said simply that, at the
time, she felt as though ‘all my emotions are dead’.42
Ottoline Morrell was making a fifth visit to Lausanne when
she met Vittoz in 1913.43 She had suffered from two years of doubt
and trial and worry, and had said her time with the doctor had
been infinitely precious; she described his extraordinary poise,
and goodness, and how he had enabled her to be calm but actif
in mind. ‘He taught his patients a system of mental control and
concentration, and a kind of organisation of the mind, which had
a great effect on steadying and developing me,’ she recorded in
her memoirs. ‘I found it an enormous help then and always.’ Part
of the treatment was in teaching patients how to remove destruc-
tive thoughts by eliminating letters from words and numbers from
sequences; her daughter would tease her as she stared into space:
‘There is Mummy eliminating,’ she would say.44
When Julian Huxley suffered a breakdown in 1919, his wife was
bewildered and frightened by his condition: it was she who took
him to Vittoz, in sessions recalled by her husband.
His method was to propose some simple subject on which to

concentrate, such as visualising a circle or a square, or solving an
easy mathematical problem, and to test the validity of my efforts
with the side of his hand on my forehead, whereby he claimed that
he could feel and estimate the special brain-pulse accompanying
genuine concentration. Gradually more complex subjects for
concentration were propounded and the exercises became easier to
carry out. I thus got a little more control over my depression, but it
was a dreary summer for us all.45
Eliot desperately wanted to attain just such control over his

condition, and he had travelled a long way to take it. As he climbed
the stairs to the doctor’s front door, he must have wondered if his
journey would be worthwhile.
Patients came to Vittoz with a spectrum of conditions. Some dis-

played milder behaviour, feeling that simple life events were beyond
their control; in more profound cases, others had withdrawn
entirely from social engagement, feeling their own personality to
be detestable.46
Sessions were short: thirty minutes of contact daily, with the rest
of the time given over to prescribed physical and mental exercise
that included concentration upon specific parts of the anatomy,
such as hands or feet or keeping an arm aloft, in order to per-
fect a mental control over it. Conscious thought was to master
the unconscious, and Vittoz had, like Carl Jung in Zurich, dis-
pensed with the hypnosis practised by Freud in Vienna because
he believed it disabled the mental and physical activism that he
saw as a necessary part of any recovery. This Vittoz called ‘brain
control’, for which he believed he was able to detect vibrations in
the head – pulses or waves emitted from the brain – by placing his
hands on the patient’s cranium. Such tremors marked a process of
recovery in which the patient regained control over the immediate
environment, which in turn aided memory, the loss of which was
frequently a symptom in his patients. Reception of stimuli, con-
centration upon them, conscious action upon them: these were the
tenets of Roger Vittoz. To be in touch with all that was around
us; to pursue an idea without distraction. Vittoz’s practice shared
some elements with Taoism: to admit stimulation and not combat
it, to accept an impulse and not react to it, to intercept thought
and create a quarantine for emotion. He likened the process to
the tuning of a mental piano, or of being conductor of the mind’s
orchestra, bringing each of its parts into harmony.
Vittoz encouraged self-examination. He spoke of gnothi seauton
(know thyself ), but with a Christian tint, and Eliot would not have
missed the allegorical allusion to healing and self-reliance in the sto-
ries of the New Testament. He may have detected that Vittoz was a
religious man, and in their praise for self-discipline, individual cour-
age and regard for others, the doctor’s nostrums may have echoed his
grandfather’s Unitarian church. The emphasis on willpower sounded
much like Christian teachings: resistance to temptation, control over
the body and mind, righteous behaviour, the discipline of a code.
Temperatures lowered to freezing that first week in Lausanne.
Rain fell, turning to snow at night, and by the middle of the second
week the thermometer struggled to rise above zero at all. Only a few
days47 into his treatment and the change in Eliot was pronounced.
On 30 November, he told Ottoline Morrell that he had been put
rapidly through the primary exercises by Vittoz and felt a confidence
in him that he had not encountered before. Diagnosis had been swift:
it was not a case of nerves – Eliot had never believed in nerves, or nor
did Vittoz, he now reported – but a failure to fully master brain con-
trol. He understood that such a swift effect might prove to be illusory,
but he felt committed to the routine. The transformation was already
remarkable. ‘At moments,’ he wrote, ‘I feel more calm than I have for
many many years’ – and then he added, ‘since childhood’.48
//
Only once did Eliot leave Lausanne that month, as far as we know:
on a visit to Berne, where he purchased a copy of Hermann Hesse’s
1920 Blick ins Chaos in German, which he signed and dated, ‘T. S.
Eliot Berne Dec. 1921’.49 He saw in the essays a seriousness which,
he told the author, had simply not yet become apparent in English
literature;50 and he saw also a prophecy in what Hesse had called
‘the Downfall of Europe’:
Es zeigt sich, daß Europa müde ist, es zeigt sich, daß es heimkehren,
daß es ausruhen, daß es umgeschaffen, umgeboren werden will.
(Europe is tired, it shows itself in that Europe wants to turn
homeward, in that Europe wants rest, in that Europe wants to be
recreated, reborn.)51
But Europe was struggling in its rebirth.

In Athens, it was clear now that the war with Turkey in Anatolia
was heading for disaster.
In Vienna, Scofield Thayer had been caught up in riots, and
almost stripped of his fur coat and gold watch.52
In London, David Lloyd George signed the Anglo-Irish Treaty
with Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins. Crown troops were to
leave Ireland, which would become a self-governing dominion of
the British Empire, an Irish Free State with a British monarch at
its head; Northern Ireland could withdraw from the Free State
should it choose. Griffith and Collins were plenipotentiaries, but
not everything they negotiated found support at home, especially
the oath of allegiance to the British king. Splits widened; civil war
ensued in June; within weeks, Collins had been shot and killed by
anti-Treaty forces.
And the hand of London could be felt further afield.
In Jerusalem, Mandatory Palestine, unrest had marked the
fourth anniversary of the Balfour Declaration of a Jewish home-
land in Palestine. Blame for the Jaffa Riots that had left almost one
hundred dead in May had been laid at the door of Arabs by the
Haycraft Commission. Zionism pressed for advantage, a Supreme
Muslim Council was established: ‘the Conflict’, as it was becoming
known, was gaining momentum.
In Alexandria, scarred by race riots, martial law was imposed by
the British administration in May.
Downfall would be seen in the wearing out of symbols, warned
Hesse, in the devaluation of the spirit, in the internal despair of an
inward generation. Europe was on the road to chaos, am Abgrund
entlang, reeling on the edge of abyss.53
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria Vienna London.
Falling towers. Unreal.
In Paris, Ezra Pound called at Vivien’s hotel. He hadn’t neglected

her, at least not entirely, though he continued to be busy with the
refurbishing of the studio at 70 bis, and by now had constructed
what he called two armchairs (rigid, uncomfortable, block-panelled
thrones), a kitchen table, a Chinese dining table, a wash stand and
shelving, and could finally dine at home. ‘See end approaching,’54 he
told his parents, although to Scofield Thayer he conceded that for
the time being he remained in the middle of a chain of ‘plumbers,
gasistes, fumistes, stovistes’.55
The pension was comfortable and the town very quiet, Eliot told
Mary Hutchinson, except when children descended from the Cité
or the Bourg on scooters over the cobbles.56 It was mostly banks
and chocolates shops, he said, but there was also a very good book-
shop, Librairie Payot & Cie, on the rue de Bourg, which had traded
on the same spot for almost half a century57 and which still trades
today; there he purchased a French-language copy of Baedeker’s
1911 Switzerland.58
That the treatment of the first week had allowed little time for
anything else suggests the poem was almost certainly set aside
by Eliot for a period. But by the second weekend he was, if not
writing, at least preparing the ground to do so, as he scribbled an
abrupt postcard to Wyndham Lewis from the pension Ste-Luce:
‘I wish you wd. send me the criticism you said you would write,
please. I shall be here till Christmas. Good doctor.’59 The criticism
sought was most likely comments on ‘The Burial of the Dead’ now
that Eliot was once again ready to review the poem in draft.
‘Je n’ai rien écris depuis longtemps,’ Eliot wrote to Jacques Rivière
in Paris on 5 December: I have written nothing for a long time.60 Only
a month had passed since the fifty lines in Margate and the pair
of poems that accompanied them; it must have seemed longer to
Eliot, or it could be that he was thinking in prose, remembering his
promise to Rivière of a contribution to his journal La Nouvelle Revue
Française. No article, not even a short one, would be possible for the
next two months, and Eliot explained why: he shared the news that
he was under the direction of a renowned doctor (un célèbre médecin)
until Christmas at least: un traitement de psychasthénie. Psychasthenia
wasn’t a term much used by Vittoz himself (he deployed it only twice
in his Traitement), but was associated instead with Pierre Janet to
describe an obsessive-compulsive condition of anxious self-scrutiny,
resulting in an inability to direct thought and speech: not neuras-
thenia, therefore, not a mechanical weakness of the nerves, and not a
failure of the body’s electrical impulses either, but a disorder of the
mind. The neurasthenic had no feeling except for their personali-
ty, Vittoz had written, a personality from which they are desperate
to escape but cannot.61 Poetry, Eliot had written, is an escape from
personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions
know what it means to want to escape from these things.
‘It is a commonplace that some forms of illness are extremely
favourable, not only to religious illumination, but to artistic and
literary composition,’ Eliot would write in 1931. ‘A piece of writ-
ing, meditated apparently without progress for months or years,
may suddenly take shape and word; and in this state long pas-
sages may be produced which require little or no retouch.’ At this
moment, the writer – like the patient of aboulie – has the sense of
being a receptor, not a maker. ‘You may call it communication with
the Divine, or you may call it a temporary crystallisation of the
mind.’62 Whatever name it goes under, in Lausanne that month
Eliot would have the most profound experience in working on the
closing sections of the long poem. And when, later in the month,
he would set down the last part of all, ‘What the Thunder Said’, he
would complete it almost whole, with barely any correction.
More than likely, when Eliot returned to the poem in Lausanne he

began by reviewing what he had most recently written: ‘The Fire
Sermon’, for which he carried the ribbon copy, and for which he
now drafted an ‘apostrophe’ for the Fresca sequence.63 On distinctive
quad-ruled paper that he had borrowed from Pound, Eliot produced
a heavily worked pencil manuscript of seventeen lines in couplets, a
portrait of a patron of the arts, Lady Katzegg, beginning with Venus
Anadyomene. Pound had included a poem of that title by Arthur
Rimbaud in his Instigations (1920), reprinted from the Little Review,
whether or not the two men mentioned the poem while Eliot was in
Paris.64 That Eliot was still at this moment expanding upon a section
that he soon excised said much about how he was struggling with
‘The Fire Sermon’, which now existed in five leaves of typescript, and
four leaves of subsequent manuscript, and was still growing. The word
‘breeding’ appeared in the ‘apostrophe’, as it had in opening the ‘Burial
of the Dead’: ‘Thus art ennobles even wealth and birth, / And breed-
ing raises prostrate art from earth.’ 65 None of this felt quite right for
the moment, and some kind of editorial or creative intervention was
badly needed. The section seemed distended and disjointed, which
wasn’t helped by its various states of draft work. What the section
required was to be brought fully into typescript now, but Eliot had
no typewriter with him in Lausanne, and that would therefore have
to wait. Pound would be able to offer a steer from the pages left with
him when Eliot returned to Paris, surely he would.
//
‘Death by Water’ would be the title of the fourth section. Like the
lines of the Venus Anadyomene, when Eliot came to begin the
fourth section in Lausanne, he must surely have done so in part
in a pencil rough that he later discarded; certainly the fair copy
he would return with to Paris could not have been a first draft, so
fluent – almost flawless – was it in its penmanship of the ninety-
three lines and four leaves.
Most determinedly it had a sense of place and title: ‘Part IV’,
wrote Eliot, ‘Death by Water’; but part IV of what, exactly? Of ‘He
Do the Police in Different Voices’, as ‘The Burial of the Dead’ and
‘A Game of Chess’ had been its first two parts? If so, then why
hadn’t ‘The Fire Sermon’ been associated with either the police title
or a part number? It appeared that the poem was now moving
clearly away from the anchor of the Dickensian title, and this was
to be a fourth, free-standing part in a larger poem.
Again, as had the second and third sections, the draft began in
formality: again quatrains, again abab rhymed, again the tempes-
tuous seas that, symbolically, had swallowed his father whole; only
this time they brought with them what seemed a personal reflec-
tion on his treatment with Vittoz to overcome aboulie:
The sailor, attentive to the chart and to the sheets.

A concentrated will against the tempest and the tide,66
Quickly the mode dispersed into the travels of a schooner

moving out beyond the eastern banks of the Cape and the Dry
Salvages to open sea and danger. ‘Thereafter everything went
wrong.’ Drinking water was contaminated, the gaff jaws jammed,
the garboard-strake leaking, the crew gonorrhoeal. At last they
caught up with the running codfish, and it was there that the trou-
ble deepened. The vessel was blown scudding before a gale, into the
roar of a running sea, into a deafening wind:
and no one dared

To look into anothers face, or speak
In the horror of the illimitable scream
Of a whole world about us.67
No longer in control of their destiny, the crew were subjected to

the tempest around them, ‘Frightened beyond fear, horrified past
horror’, facing into annihilation –
– Something which we knew must be a dawn –

A different darkness, flowed above the clouds,
And dead ahead we saw, where sky and sea should meet,
A line, a white line, a long white line,
Toward which we A wall, a barrier, towards which we drove.68
– into the void of common silence:
And if Another knows, I know I know not,

Who only know that there is no more noise now.
It was a masterful draft: ninety-three lines, uneven perhaps, but

sturdy in storyline and broad in its horizon. It drew so assuredly
upon Eliot’s childhood experience from the seas before the house
that his father built in Gloucester, and did so with elemental force
in a gripping passage, concluding with ten lines that Eliot had
translated from the French of his own poem: the ending of ‘Dans
le Restaurant’, from the 1919 Hogarth Poems: ‘Le repassant aux
étapes de sa vie antérieure’ – which might then have translated into
something like Returning through the stages of his life before, but to
which Eliot now gave a subtle slant: ‘He passed the stages of his
age and youth’. The restoration of a life with his father was sof-
tened in the new line, but it was still detectable; and no longer was
he repassant, pulled back through, but instead he now passed the
stages in a movement away, forgetting both the profit and the loss.
Eliot had returned the poem to the drowned father and the
grieving prince. It was the same drive that had introduced the
refrain ‘Those are pearls’; it had produced ‘Dirge’, which he like-
wise brought into an inked fair copy in Lausanne; it had provided
the moment for Madame Sosostris to turn the tarot card and fore-
warn ‘fear death by water’, and so assign the fate of Phlebas, ‘the
drowned Phoenician Sailor’, with whom finally Eliot now con-
cluded his draft.69 There is no such card as the drowned sailor in
any tarot pack: this was a fortune told in particular to the poem.
//
In Paris, Pound had received advance c opies from Boni and Liv-
eright of the retrospective of his London work: Poems 1918–21,
Including Three Portraits and Four Cantos. The portraits were the
homages to Propertius, the Langue d’Oc and Mauberley, the
cantos four to seven; it was to serve the audience in New York a
little like the way the Ovid Press had in London with Quia Pau-
per Amavi. It was an erratic setting, cramped in places, without
adhering to any typographic consistency, but it was eye-catching
too, which had become a mark of all of Horace Liveright’s work
as a publisher, and it pleased Pound: ‘Liveright has printed them
with all the pomps.’70 It seemed inevitable at this stage that Pound
would get poor reviews, and so he did, with even his allies strug-
gling to support him. Maxwell Bodenheim couldn’t help but draw
attention in The Dial to ‘the massive isolation’ between Pound and
his peers: contemporaries who felt insulted by him, younger writ-
ers who lacked the sophistication to appreciate him.71 John Peale
Bishop wrote in Vanity Fair that Pound had never stayed in one
place long enough to build a constituency for his talents.72 It took
Harriet Monroe (who else?) to summarise the sense of disappoint-
ment in Poetry. Imprisoned in a library of ‘mental easy-shares’, year
on year Pound’s work had become increasingly narrow and reduc-
tive. ‘It has lost its freshness and become secondary, deriving from
books of the past instead of life of the present, and refining often
to trivial excess.’73 It was a damning epitaph on the post-war years.
‘A youthful fire r ather than an enduring light . . .’
Horace Liveright would stand by Pound where o thers hadn’t.
Their partnership still had another three books to run, culminating
in the magisterial 1926 volume, Personae, that remains in print to
this day. It was, at that moment in the winter of 1921–2, a bold new
beginning between Horace Liveright and Ezra Pound. ‘Liveright
has sailed for YURUP,’ Pound told his father with enthusiasm
on Christmas Day.74 It would be a visit that would have dramatic
consequences not only for Pound, and for his Parisian neighbour,
James Joyce, but also for Eliot, who returned from Lausanne to a
dinner that would change the course of both his poem and his life.
//
Eliot had been a month in Lausanne with such remarkable effect

that by the middle of December he had begun to make arrange-
ments for his departure. He expected to leave Switzerland at
Christmas and rejoin Vivien at the Hôtel Pas-de-Calais, Paris,
where they would stay until the middle of January.75 ‘The great
thing I am trying to learn is how to use all my energy without
waste,’ he told Henry in the middle of the month, ‘to be calm
when there is nothing to be gained by worry, and to concentrate
without effort.’ Efficiency, perspective, control: the treatment
with Vittoz was working dramatically. He had never been taught
mental hygiene, he told his brother, and nor had the family (‘so we
are a seedy lot’). In that letter Eliot had underlined four words:
shameful, calm, thinking, talk.76 Henry had just written sympa-
thetically to his mother about his brother’s breakdown. Tom had
been going on his nerves during their stay in London that sum-
mer, he wrote: overworked and almost permanently separated
from his craving – ‘poetical composition’ – which had induced
‘a frantic state of mind’. Vivien had drained off the last of it,
said Henry, and Eliot had been left as an empty man behind his
masks. ‘To me he seemed like a man playing a part.’77 Now, Eliot
was able to report a change to Henry. ‘I am very much better, and
not miserable here,’ he summarised. ‘I am certainly well enough
to be working on a poem!’
Unlike the draft labelled ‘Part IV. Death by Water’, this new,
fifth part had no title, and no clear sense of numbered sequence in
the poem, only folio numbers to show the order of the pages. It
began simply, without fanfare, below the header in hurried pencil,
with little by the way of hesitation or correction. In fact, ‘The whole
section was written at one sitting,’ Eliot said later, ‘and never
altered.’78
The draft began by returning to an earlier work, an untitled poem
from Eliot’s Harvard time or just after, beginning ‘After the turn-
ing of the inspired days’, from which he would draw his opening:
‘After the torchlight red on sweaty faces’.79 After, After, After: three
times came the elegiac refrain, to be followed with a mesmerising
couplet, He who was living is now dead and We who were living are
now dying, so reversing the Order for the Burial of the Dead.80
Eliot told Ford Madox Ford that there were about thirty good
lines in the whole of the long poem (‘The rest is ephemeral’), and
these were lines evoking rock and water with which he continued
onto a second leaf from his pension below the Alpine mountains –
in the dead mountains, in this decayed hole among the mountains,
under the sterile thunder, where there is neither silence nor soli-
tude, but the continual spiritual presence of another, of ‘one more
member’ than could be counted:81
Who is the third who walks âlways^ beside you?

When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another ône^ walking ^there^ beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or â^ woman
– But who is that on the other side of you?82
London had been at the heart of ‘The Fire Sermon’, but now
it was just one of the five unreal cities and their tumbling, falling
towers that carried fluently onto a third leaf, with their tolling
reminiscent bells.83 The poem seemed to pour out, unhesitant. A
child on a bridge above a dried-up river, suffering from water on
the brain, was the only stanza in the entire part that Eliot struck
out.
Everything now – the sum of all that Eliot had gathered towards
him – seemed to reach an elevated level in this draft. The arid plac-
es of April had become the stony place of imminent thunder, the
drowned father with pearls for eyes was now dead as the living are
now dying, the deep elemental images of water and rock had fused
in the prison and palace and silence and solitude of the mountains
under which he wrote, the primitive in the rock, the faces in the
rock; the eerie company of the o ther beside you, always another
walking beside you, friend or father or spiritual ghost, the dissolv-
ing cities and the memory of bells.
Co co rico the cockerel crows, in a flash of lightning that wakes
into the thunderous Sanskrit of the Upanishads – in a summary by
Pound in 1924:
Datta – Give.
Dayadhvam – Sympathise.
Damyata – Control.
and Shantih – Peace.
‘I don’t care a damn where which influence crossed what other,’

Pound wrote then of the referential trails that criss-crossed the
final poem, but these four words of Sanskrit alone were worthy
of cross-examination.84 Give, sympathise, control: the first three,
taken from Brahma’s Da, Da, Da in the Hindu Brihadaranyaka
scripture, were also healing of a kind administered by Dr Vittoz,
whose expert hands were those to which the ‘boat’ of those lines
responded.
Datta, give alms and relief, be charitable, do not keep for your-
self more than you need, do not appropriate or confiscate.
Dayadhvam, sympathise with others and yourself, be compas-
sionate, shun cruelty, seek mercy.
Damyata, control the self, restrain oneself, subdue the senses.
These three could be understood without translation from the
emotive tone of the surrounding passages, said Pound; they were
the booming voice of God. But of the fourth: ‘Let it go that shantih
means Peace; I think one does need to be told that.’ A prayer for
peace to mark the beginning or the end of ritual, the Peace which
passeth understanding, as Eliot would notate, a formal ending, he
said; but it surely was not a prayer to mark redemption.85 Instead, at
the very end of the poem, the poet lingers, fishing while the world
about disassembles, wondering whether to set their lands in order.
And into that void poured the poem’s great and final collapse of
cascading imagery and fleeting p hrases, like a cine-reel of a disap-
pearing Europe: London Bridge collapsing into the tradition of
Arnaut Daniel’s ‘Ara vos prec’, collapsing into Dante’s Purgatorio,
collapsing into the Vigil of Venus in Latin Rome, collapsing into
the Aquitaine prince and his ruined tower, collapsing into Eliza-
bethan drama – that great driver of the poem – ‘mad againe’. These
fragments I have spelt into – no, he would quickly alter that – These
fragments I have shored against my ruins.
Peace in ruin, peace in horror, peace in madness.
Datta. Dayadhvam, damyata.

Shantih shantih shantih.86
//
By the time that another week had passed, Eliot was becom-
ing sufficiently strong to express a growing boredom. He began
to think that Lausanne was a dull place now that he was ‘feel-
ing much better’, and he wouldn’t stay longer than he had to: its
chief recommendation, he told Sydney Waterlow, was its cast of
international characters, which he listed like the entourage of his
long poem: ‘American countesses, Russian princesses, Rumanians,
Greeks and Scandinavians, Czecho counts, Belgian punks etc.’ But
as a haven in which to master his cognitive direction, Lausanne
had passed every test. ‘I have been losing power of concentration
and attention, as well as becoming a prey to habitual worry and
dread of the future,’ he explained: the net result had been wasting
more energy than he used, and wearing himself out. ‘And I think
I am getting over that.’ For the first time that week temperatures
climbed above freezing, and under blue skies would rise to a balmy
thirteen degrees centigrade, but Eliot had little time left to enjoy
the new weather, for he would soon be leaving: south, perhaps, or
back to Vivien in Paris, to be decided. ‘I am trying to finish a poem
– about 800 or 1000 lines. Je ne sais pas si ça tient,’87 he wrote. I do
not know if it holds.
Eliot spent Christmas Day alone. He wrote to Alfred Knopf
about his contract, and sent a letter and Christmas cable to his
mother in which he mentioned again the improvement in his
levels of concentration and energy: ‘I am working at a poem too,’88
he told her. He had finished his treatment with Dr Roger Vittoz
clear minded and in control of events, and had written in excess
of two hundred lines of the poem in less than a month. For once
the bitter Bise was chased off the lake waters at Ouchy as the Föhn
blew strongly from the south-west. Warm wet weather soaked the
town. On New Year’s Eve, as Eliot prepared to return to Paris, for
the first time in his stay a rainbow arced over Lac Léman.
What the Thunder Said.
‘I have a hunch that I’ll like the five days in Paris with Ezra Pound,’
Horace Liveright told Lucille, his wife, as he sailed for France.1
Two years had passed since he had published Pound’s essays,
Instigations; Poems 1918–21, his selection of verse, was just out. In a
short time, the two men had fostered a witty and frank publishing
relationship (Liveright: ‘Do you suppose I like to go along losing
money on you miserable highbrows?’; Pound: ‘Horace . . . is a pearl
among publishers’), but they had not yet met.2 Pound admired
the gung-ho style of publishing (‘LIVERIGHT HAS BEEN
KNOWN to send cheques abroad’), and sensed a commitment
to real literary development: his was a list like no one else’s in
New York or London, there was no doubt about it: Liveright was
‘going toward the light not from it’.3 For each of Liveright’s days in
Paris (he would eventually spend six there), Pound offered to be his
personal guide to the artistic and musical figures of the city, intro-
ducing him to Picasso, Morand and Brâncuși, to Igor Stravinsky
and Eric Satie, although the publisher’s inability to speak French
left him unable to exchange a word with any of them. But he was
reunited with Djuna Barnes, who had arrived from New York in
1921 on a commission with McCall’s fashion journal, and whom he
would soon publish.4 He had, Pound said with assurance, seen the
right people, and in case of any doubt clarified precisely who he
meant by that: ‘He saw Joyce and Eliot with me.’5
Liveright’s approach to publishing was one of ‘reckless splen-
dour’, author Sherwood Anderson remembered: a man who, if
he believed in you, would gamble on you, a chancer at a time of
342
gentlemen publishers from the established families.6 Bennett Cerf,
vice-president at Boni & Liveright, recalled an era of middle-aged
men with gold watch chains straining across their portly bellies,
who thought it vulgar to chase after a book, let alone to advertise
one; to them Liveright was an upstart, who seduced authors and
pioneered a grubby style of eye-catching marketing with heavy
display type and ornamental borders that shocked polite publish-
ing.7 Liveright was simply not one of them: he was not one of the
old families, he was not a conservative and, more troublesome still,
he was not a Christian but a Jew.
Horace Liveright and Albert Boni founded their press in 1917
in three small rooms on West 40th Street, New York City. ‘Albert,
with all your socialist connections, why can’t you get Lenin to do a
book for us?’ Liveright had nagged his partner at the time. ‘Sure,’
Boni had quipped, ‘he’ll stop the Revolution to write a book for
Boni & Liveright.’8 While he didn’t quite do that, Vladmir Lenin
did provide Liveright with an introduction to John Reed’s Ten
Days that Shook the World (‘Unreservedly I recommend it to the
workers of the world’), published in the spring of 1919.9 The book
became a national bestseller, moving nine thousand copies in
three months, and underwriting the company for the next two
years.10 It became a handbook for revolutionaries in the United
States, and, following the shipyard strike in Seattle in 1919, the
focus for the ‘red scare’ that gripped the U nited States. By then,
Boni & Liveright had already fallen under the watchful eye of
the Military Intelligence Branch: the company’s publishing of
Leon Trotsky was by March 1918 technically considered aiding
an enemy of the Allies, and strictly against the war effort.11 To the
authorities, Horace Liveright was not only a Jew but a socialist
Jew; to Pound, he was the man to open doors that had slammed
shut on him. The Cantos would recall with affection a night in a
bar in Paris together in that new year of 1922, when they were
warmly bid welcome: ‘Entrez donc, mais entrez, / c’est la maison de
W hat t he Th un de r S ai d | 343
tout le monde.’ Come in then, come on in, this is everyone’s house.
This is the house of the world.12
Eliot arrived in Paris from Lausanne around 2 January.13 It was

probably the day after arrival that he showed Pound his new pages
of manuscript. And it was probably that same evening that the
two men went on to what would emerge as a historic dinner with
Horace Liveright and James Joyce. Liveright had earned himself a
name for hard drinking and harder hangovers in New York, which
was a reputation that would have put Eliot at his ease (Eliot once
warned Pound that he could drink him ‘under the table before
breakfast’), and no doubt with James Joyce as well, whose ‘unaf-
fected love of alcohol’ (Lewis’s description) had been noted in
Parisian circles since his arrival in July 1920.14 Alone among them,
Pound was the one who moderated his intake, believing drinking
to be an unnecessary pause in his conversation.
By the end of the dinner, Liveright had made an arrangement
with each of the three writers.
To Ezra Pound, Liveright would give employment as a Euro-
pean scout at an annual salary of $500, which he called ‘a little
arrangement’ to take care of Pound’s rent for two years.15 In return,
Pound would translate whatever French-language books he dis-
covered, in a contract, drawn up the next day by Pound, which
included a clause that Liveright would not demand of him ‘the
translation of any work that Mr Pound considers a disgrace to
humanity or too imbecile to be borne’.16
To James Joyce, Liveright would offer US publication of Ulysses,
for an advance of $1,000, to happen as swiftly as was practicable.
It was a bold offer given the outcome of the trial in New York less
than a year ago, and that Sylvia Beach’s edition in Paris was all
but printed. It may have been an offer too bold for both parties on
reflection, for Liveright quickly sought counsel from John Quinn
on the matter, while Joyce considered his own position. Pound
couldn’t understand the hiatus that followed: Liveright had offered
‘1000 bones’ but Joyce had hesitated. ‘Why the hell he didn’t nail it
AT once I don’t know’17 – the terms were reasonable, the risk was
all the publisher’s. Pound shrugged; at least it was no longer his
problem: ‘Joyce is off my hands.’
To T. S. Eliot, just as remarkably, Liveright offered a publica-
tion deal for the long poem ‘sight unseen’: $150 (£35) and a royalty
of 15 per cent against the unfinished draft. Indeed, such was the
impression that Pound – and perhaps Eliot, too – had made upon
Liveright that he left Paris for London not even knowing the
title of the poem he was offering to buy (it still didn’t have one),
but having made his commitment nonetheless. For Eliot, it was a
moment like none he had experienced. After the subsidised edition
of Prufrock by the Egoist, after the limited print runs of Hogarth
and Ovid, after the trials and rejections of Alfred Knopf, here was
a publisher in New York – Pound’s publisher in New York, no less –
trusting sufficiently in his work to invest in a poem that he had not
seen, nor Eliot completed, but to which Eliot had already given
everything. For the first time, Eliot’s poetry was wanted by a trade
house, without hesitation or question. Pound detected the relief
in Eliot: he seemed ‘so mountany gay’, quipped Pound. ‘May your
erection never grow less.’18 All that there was left to do now was to
finish the poem.
//
Whether it was the day of the dinner or the one either side of it,
Pound would have begun by returning the drafts given to him by
Eliot as he passed through Paris in November: the ribbon copies
of ‘The Burial of the Dead’ and ‘A Game of Chess’, and the carbon
copy of ‘The Fire Sermon’. Eliot would have given him in return
the new Lausanne manuscripts of ‘Death by Water’ and ‘What
the Thunder Said’, as well as the manuscript fair copy of ‘Dirge’;
W hat t he Th unde r S ai d | 345

he seems also to have given Pound the ribbon copy of ‘The Fire
Sermon’ for a second look.
Pound didn’t mark the first page of ‘The Burial of the Dead’ –
the fifty-four lines cancelled by Eliot from the Boston night out
– but he probably saw it, as without that page neither the ‘Burial’
title nor two-part ‘Police’ title would have been present, and it’s
likely that Eliot would have left the page temporarily in situ as a
placeholder to guide his friend’s reading. It’s possible, too, that he
would have taken the opportunity to seek a first and last opinion
on whether to salvage the section that he had already cancelled:
if so, the answer would be no. Upon the new beginning, ‘April is
the cruellest month’, Pound’s touch was light. Here and there he
ringed lines that may have seemed too Romantic to him – forget-
ful snow, and there you feel free and I look in vain (Eliot changed
the latter) – and he bracketed the Unreal city on the next page
as a line of its own, which Eliot duly followed. More controver-
sial were four lines he marked for removal: the first was the line
most emblematic of the loss of E liot’s father, Those are pearls that
were his eyes. Look!, which he may have preferred for its subsequent
appearance in ‘A Game of Chess’, not yet appreciating the central
motif that it would become. He also struck out a line referring to
John the Divine (Eliot concurred) and the couplet on St Mary
Woolnoth, writing in the margin that the lines were reminiscent
of William Blake’s, and ‘too often used’ (Eliot retained the passage
but in a revised form). And beside the line with which Eliot had
simply been unable to make up his mind –
Sighs, short and infrequent, were expired, exhaled expired

exhaled.19
Pound would simply annotate that this was J. J. – James Joyce.

Joyce aside, this was a respectful edit by Ezra Pound. ‘The Burial
of the Dead’ would have been returned to Eliot with a clear sense
that, once the opening lines from Tom’s place were removed, the
remaining seventy-six lines were in a sturdy enough condition to
open the poem.
‘A Game of Chess’ was a different matter. From the beginning,
Pound railed against its traditional form.
The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne

Glowed on the marble, where the swinging glass
Held up by standards wrought with golden vines20
‘Too tum-pum’, Pound wrote of the opening lines, and, later,

‘too penty’, meaning pentameter – too rigid. Eliot duly removed
the twin syllables of ‘swinging’ in line two, thereby reeling in the
line from five to four feet, which was not a revolution, but just
enough to jolt the logjam of the regular iambic pentameter. And
he showed the revised second and third line to his friend, with
‘golden’ subdued to ‘fruited’:
The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,

Glowed on the marble, where the glass
Sustained by standards wrought with fruited vines21
OK, Pound would ink heavily in reply to E liot’s revision, but

even so, he would take apart the stanza of the Belladonna’s dress-
ing room that Vivien had said she couldn’t understand.22 He wrote
that parts were dogmatic in deduction and wobbly as well, and
Eliot would remove altogether the line that Pound said contained
the weakest point. Pound didn’t want to see Romanticism, and
he didn’t want realism either, marking ‘photography’ and ‘photo’
against the nerves passages as if they were somehow too realistic
to be art. And he most certainly did not want anachronism. He
ringed ‘the closed carriage’ at four as a ‘Blot’ between ‘1922 & Lil’
of the pub scene, and just to clear up any doubt, dated the lines he
thought dated: ‘(1880)’. It was no good clothing a modern poem in
nineteenth-century attire, he told Eliot, who suggested ‘a closed
car’ in replacement, explaining ‘I cant use taxi more than once’:

OK, Pound inked heavily once more.
Pound’s comments to date had been isolated and incisive: single
words and on occasion full lines pulled out for revision or removal
where he felt they lacked fusion or modernity. But for the blue-ink
carbon pages of ‘The Fire Sermon’ he took a more intervention-
ist stance. He disliked the Fresca couplets that provided the first
seventy-two lines. He challenged the inclusion of the woman’s toi-
let habits, and the need to degrade her, but he appealed also at
a macro level to the tone – ‘Too loose’, he marked; ‘rhyme drags
it out to diffuseness’ – the trick of Pope had been not to let his
couplets become diffuse, he told his friend, and here was Eliot
squandering the precious store of energy that his first two parts
had generated.23 It was a relief to Pound when he encountered the
lines of the rat creeping softly through the vegetation – Echt, he
wrote in the margin, at last, something real and genuine to work
with. But he thought the Twit twit twit returned the poem too
soon to Philomela and Tereus and he was in no doubt whatsoever
that the dozen lines of London, the swarming life, written in Mar-
gate, should be expelled altogether. But it was the long sequence of
the typist’s seventeen quatrains to which Pound most busily took
his pencil, querying and circling and bracketing and cancelling
as he went. Verse not interesting enough as verse to warrant so much
of it. That told Eliot. Not good. So did that. Inversions not war-
ranted. And Too easy. And too Personal and too tentative in mealy
words of Eliot’s such as ‘perhaps’. As he had with Fresca’s morning
toilet – and as he had in places with Joyce’s Ulysses – Pound tem-
pered Eliot’s more scatological instincts, and firmed up any hint of
indecisiveness – ridiculing ‘perhaps’ (Perhaps be damned) and ‘may’
(make up yr. mind) – either we know our mind or don’t, there’s no
may or perhaps about it.24
//
As Eliot took back the pages of the first three parts of the long
poem, it seems that he replaced the marked carbon copy of ‘The
Fire Sermon’ with the black ribbon copy he had taken to Lausanne,
on which he had made half a dozen and more revisions, including
cuts to the lines of ‘London, the swarming life’ and, most notably,
the insertion of the new ‘apostrophe’ lines of manuscript of Venus
Anadyomene. It may have been then, or the previous November,
that he left Pound with the rough pages from Margate in order to
guide his reading of the section. Pound didn’t like to work from
manuscript: Type out this anyhow, he commanded beside a can-
celled passage, before conceding OK and echt in a thick green pencil
beside the lines on Highbury, Richmond and Kew. But Eliot also
gave Pound first sight of the manuscripts of ‘Death by Water’ and
‘What the Thunder Said’: ninety-three lines in fair copy, 117 in first
draft, as well as the fair copy of ‘Dirge’. And that wasn’t all: ‘Elegy’
went through Pound’s hands in typescript at some moment that
winter, as did ‘Song for the Opherion’ and ‘Exequy’. All in all, in
excess of three hundred lines.
Pound was busy with Horace Liveright on 4 January, typing up
his own contract of employment and seeing Liveright off to Lon-
don for the next leg of his European tour. It may have been on 5
January that he inked Eliot’s Lausanne manuscript of ‘Death by
Water’ dismissively, Bad – but cant attack until I get typescript, mak-
ing no other marks on this, nor upon ‘What the Thunder Said’,
except to ink in its header OK from here on I think. Upon ‘Dirge’,
he inked a single word only, doubtful. It was clear that Eliot was
not going to receive anything of interest from Pound until he had
turned his Lausanne manuscript into typescript.
The typescripts of ‘Song for the Opherion’ and ‘Exequy’ had
already received pencil comments by Pound when he added inked
marking that January (it may have been then that he wrote ‘geor-
gian’ so damningly in the margin of ‘Song’); but it was Pound’s
second reading of the ‘The Fire Sermon’ – this time from the black
ribbon copy – that would have held the greatest importance to
Eliot. That it was the second reading was made clear by Pound
himself, who wrote on it vide o ther copy in reference to markings
made previously on the blue carbon.25 And now, in reading the
draft once again, he was confirmed in his doubt about those first
seventy-two lines that he’d previously marked as ‘too loose’. This
time he struck them through, all of them, from line two to seventy-
two, and reaffirmed the conclusion he had already made that it was
with the lines of the rat creeping through the vegetation that the
section became OK, and was to be STET. On seeing once again
Eliot’s effort to rescue the lines on the swarming life of London,
Pound’s patience (but not his humour) may have left him, as he
reached for the expletive:
B––ll––s.26
Between his two edits, Pound had let only four of the eighteen
stanzas on the typescript pass as acceptable; coupled with his sug-
gestion to keep only one of the first seventy-two lines, it wasn’t
apparent to Eliot quite how much of the ‘The Fire Sermon’ was
to be left standing. The Margate roughs were still to be typed and
might offer an answer, but even so it was clear that there was work
still for Eliot to do on the opening and the closing sections.
Eliot had more than two hundred lines of manuscript to type up

before Pound would review them, and that meant making use of
Pound’s typewriter, as the most convenient machine to hand. Like
Eliot, Pound used a Corona typewriter, only his was r ather differ-
ent: it was a Corona 3 portable model on which the platen carriage
folded neatly over the keyboard after locking the escapement
throwout; from there it fitted into a compact handled case, which
made it the choice of travelling writers. Hemingway so loved the
model gifted to him for his birthday in 1921 that he wrote an ode
to it.27 It was manufactured at pica pitch, meaning that it pro-
duced ten characters per inch, making its running text noticeably
wider than the condensed elite twelve pitch of Eliot’s own Corona
model in London. Some machines boasted an ‘automatic reverse’,
ensuring that it was, in the words of the manual, ‘unnecessary for
the operator to pay any attention to the ribbon save to replace it
when it has been in use so long that its ink is exhausted’.28 Even so,
Pound may have done well to pay just a little more attention than
he had of late, as by the time Eliot came to type his drafts, Pound’s
purple ribbon was badly faded. Conceivably, Eliot sat at the typing
table at 70 bis while Pound was out on errands; more likely he took
advantage of its portability and removed it to his hotel a few streets
away. Either way, it was certainly the machine that he used to bring
‘Death by Water’ and ‘What the Thunder Said’ into typescript that
month on his friend’s grainy foolscap paper, gathering the poem
now into nineteen pages of loose typescript, including the can-
celled leaf of the Boston episode that may have been preserved for
working titles alone, with some rough manuscript pages still to be
typed.
It isn’t known exactly on what date Eliot produced those typescript

pages on Pound’s machine or when exactly Pound read them.29
Probably it was 9 January, after he had made a visit to Jacques Riv-
ière on the sixth and an unsuccessful attempt to call upon André
Gide on the seventh in Auteuil (he had left for Brussels), and after
Pound had used the typewriter himself for correspondence on 8
January, when he told his parents ‘Eliot here, with a new poem in
semi-existence.’30
The marked typescript of the new ‘Death by Water’ that Pound
returned to Eliot after that read less like an edit than a redacted
document. The opening lines and much of the first page were can-
celled almost wholesale.
‘The sailor, attentive to the chart and to the sheets / A con-
centrated will against the tempest and the tide’ was reduced by
Pound simply to ‘The sailor’, in a stroke removing from the section
the overcoming of aboulie set against the tempestuous tide of the
father.31 The first dozen lines of the page were bracketed – presum-
ably for removal or repositioning – and then the next twelve or
more fared even worse under a relentless pattern of cancellation.
Full lines became half-lines or no lines at all under Pound’s blunt
graphite; by the time he reached the third page of four he had left
only one line uncancelled, intentionally or not: In the horror of the
illimitable scream – which, at that moment, may have been some-
thing Eliot felt moved towards. Only the final twelve lines of the
typescript were left standing, ten of those being Eliot’s reworking
into English of the French lines of ‘Dans le Restaurant’, Phlebas
the Phoenician. As much as 90 per cent of the draft had been
marked for discarding: ‘Death by Water’ lay in ruins.
‘What the Thunder Said’ was a different story altogether. These
four pages of typescript Pound touched very lightly, marking up
almost nothing beyond typing errors he’d spotted from the manu-
script. He didn’t care for Eliot’s resolution of a single phrase – there
is (are) only you and I (he thought it should be it is only you and
I) – but that was just about his only reconstruction on a four-page
typescript of which he left the final page unmarked.32 It was not
only the best part of the poem, but the part that justified the whole,
Eliot would tell Bertrand Russell in 1923, and Pound agreed.33 Give,
sympathise, control, peace: instinctively, Pound understood the moti-
vation of the section, its focusing of the whole of the other four
parts, and its consummation of them all. Eliot was so close now
to completion of the entire work: it needed simply restraint and
constraint. Its antique and extended features had to be cut away
or cut back to allow the more dynamic modern poem to appear;
its formal grip needed to be loosened to speak more clearly from
its own time. Eliot could reach that point soon, very soon, and
Pound encouraged his friend to finish the poem there and then in
Paris, and get it published (he suggested The Dial) without further
delay.34 But by then E
liot’s commitments may have begun to move
against him: he was due back at Lloyds in the middle of January,
and the moment of return to London was approaching.
In practical terms, ‘The Burial of the Dead’ was all but finished:
the opening Boston lines were categorically not to be restored,
but instead Eliot would allow the section to begin with ‘April’. In
doing this, he knew that the poem was guaranteed a dynamic start:
he had sensed that for himself, but Pound had now confirmed it.
‘A Game of Chess’ would need some minor correction: a break-
ing out of its formal harness, wherever it could, to keep the kinetic
energy of the poem live.
But it wasn’t clear what Eliot should do with ‘The Fire Sermon’
now that Pound had effectively dismantled it. Neither the opening
nor the ending was fit for purpose, and although the Margate frag-
ments were still to be added, Eliot hadn’t had an opportunity to type
those on Pound’s machine and it seemed now that their production
would have to wait for his return to London. But he had an idea
for a new opening to the section: just nine lines, in fact, to replace
Fresca’s seventy. He turned over the first of the typescript pages that
Pound had struck out, and then he turned it upside down as well:
The rivers tent is broken, he wrote in pencil; (Sweet Thames etc.). The et
cetera was from the ‘Prothalamion’, a refrain of Edmund Spenser’s
that had celebrated the betrothal of Thames daughters, but it had
also carried what Spenser had called the ‘vndersong’35 of a disen-
chanted poet. Eliot wrote this with Vivien, once ‘the river girl’, about
to leave for Lyons; in E liot’s new lines, the nymphs are departed. And
then, in addition to the nine roughed out in pencil, he began a tenth
line, a fragment, for which he wrote just three words:
By the waters36
Perhaps, when Eliot wrote this, he was hurried, and the com-
pression was nothing more than a shorthand, like the et cetera
of Sweet Thames, like the exiled rivers of Babylon, to be expand-
ed in typescript: By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept . . .
Léman, to which he had arrived in pieces and left with some
semblance of unity. Léman, beside which he had unburdened
himself. Léman, where he had discovered the hand expert with
sail and oar. Léman, where he had learned to quarantine the feel-
ing of rejection by a father and mother, and the state of mind
of a disintegrating marriage. Léman, the mistress waters, beside
which he had concluded his longest poem, a work that had been
a year in the writing and nurtured even longer in the mind. They
have forgotten thee, O Sion, he had written that past summer in
The Dial, as if anticipating this very moment. He knew, all right,
the line to come but just may not have wanted to write it in that
moment, like a line that he could not cross, a sign that he had
come as far now as he could.
By the waters
The last new words of the poem that Eliot would write.
//
‘I have so much to tell you and complain,’ Vivien wrote to Mary

Hutchinson as Eliot packed his bags for London, but she would
return in a fortnight and convey it personally: ‘I would rather talk
it than write it.’37 Had Eliot been uncaring on his return, or was
there a new security about his state of mind that appeared to leave
him less in need of her? Perhaps he seemed lost to the poem and
to Pound in those two weeks in Paris; even so, he made a small
shopping list of skin ointments to purchase for Vivien on the back
of the typescript of ‘Death by Water’; few o ther details of their
time there survive.38 Why, after six weeks apart, would the Eliots
not wish to travel home together? Why, after all the loneliness of
Paris, would Vivien seek out that moment to travel in the opposite
direction, not to London but to Lyons? But that was what would
now happen, in the middle of January: Eliot to the north-west,
Vivien to the south-east.
In the days that followed his return to London on 14 January,
Eliot received news from Mary Hutchinson that was seemingly
not easy for him to digest. ‘I am very much disturbed by your note.
I had wondered – you must tell me all about it, because we can’t
leave things like this.’39 Mary may have intended only to com-
plain at the mistreatment by Scofield Thayer of her husband, St
John, whose ‘London Letter’, deputising for Eliot, had with some
embarrassment been rejected by The Dial. Equally, time enough
had passed that she could have seen Vivien on her return to Lon-
don: was it news of this kind that she wished to impart? Had
Vivien told Mary something different about Thayer? Whether it
was Thayer or someone else, just what had transpired with the man
from Cologne, if anything at all? It would be at this moment, in
London, late January, that Eliot, who had been ‘so mountany gay’
in Paris, would tell Pound that he was now ‘excessively depressed’,
and, in the very next sentence, ‘V. sends you her love and says that
if she had realised how bloody England is she would not have
returned.’40
//
‘Eliot’s poem is very important,’ Ezra Pound told Scofield Thayer

early in February, ‘almost enough to make everyone else shut up
shop’ – before adding characteristically, ‘I haven’t done so.’41 And he
hadn’t, for Pound had completed his Eighth Canto, and, as Eliot
departed Paris, had sent a draft of it not to the man he’d worked
with so closely that fortnight, but to Ford Madox Ford in Sussex,
asking him to go through it ‘with a red, blood-red, green, blue, or
other pencil and scratch what is too awful’.42 It seemed telling that,
at the moment of his great collaboration on Eliot’s poem, Pound

would not seek Eliot’s opinion in return. Perhaps it was Pound’s
sense of selflessness that left him unwilling to disturb Eliot, but
whatever the reason, Pound confided in Ford that it was so difficult
to find good criticism, ‘and one goes blind, deaf after a time’. The
Cantos and The Waste Land could have been in mutual co-operative
partnership that month, but Pound hadn’t let it happen. He had
prepared fifteen or more versions of ‘Canto VIII’ without E liot’s
attention, ‘all worse or less or more’. In its theme, it was the most
oceanic canto, funnelling throughout ‘the long course of the seas’,
a voyage he had permitted himself in his poem but had not per-
mitted Eliot in ‘Death by Water’, but instead had so stringently
cut back.
Water cutting under the keel,

Sea-break from stern forrards,
wake running off from the bow,43
A curve of common names and images appeared in the canto

as in E
liot’s poem – Tiresias, Triton, a tower, one-eyed, a porpoise.
When they brought the boy I said:

‘He has a god in him,
though I do not know which god,’
And they kicked me into the fore-stays,
And I was frightened,44
And I was frightened, used twice by Eliot, in the drafts Pound

had just read.
If you will lean over the rock,

the coral face under wave-tinge,
The rock, the coral, the tempest, the wave pattern: Eliot could
be seen in it all, despite Pound’s peculiar insistence to John
Quinn that his canto was ‘not in the least à la Eliot’.45 Then quiet
water, Pound would conclude, ‘splashing in rock-hollows and
sand-hollows / In the wave-runs by the half-dune.’46
The Cantos had never read so fluently, bringing to Pound, in
Paris then, a moment of reckoning. ‘Some one has got to make
the plunge, decide whether the Epic, or wottell of cosmograph-
ic volcano is extinct or not,’ he told Ford. ‘Mauberley’ had failed,
‘Propertius’ had failed, the early lyrics and the ‘French’ form were
distinctively modes of the past to him now. Surely this was the
moment for him to make a commitment. ‘It will take me another
thirty years at least.’47 But now, without exception, the epic of The
Cantos would become the form of Pound’s creative composition
for the remainder of his life.
//
‘Eliot as you perhaps know is back from Switzerland,’ Wyndham

Lewis reported to Ottoline Morrell on 22 January. ‘I saw him the
other day.’48 Back in London and back in bed, Eliot had influenza
again, this time for ten days, which no doubt was not what Lloyds
had hoped for after their three-month grant of leave. As it would
turn out, the recouperation gave Eliot the time to make the final
creative decisions he needed. Said Lewis: ‘He has written a par-
ticularly fine poem.’
‘He Do the Police in Different Voices’ had been a title in inter-
im service the poem. It had signalled the dramatic cast that Eliot
had conceived in the first two parts: old Tom, Mr Donavan, the
hyacinth girl, Madame Sosostris, the Belladonna, Albert and Lil;
but it had made decreasing sense for the fire sermon that Tiresias
directed, or the sequence at sea, or the thunderous tones of the
prophetic lines that closed the poem. Most likely it had had ceased
as a possibility soon after those later sections were written. What
title could possibly serve for the vast tract of territory over which
Eliot’s poem now stretched? It couldn’t be one taken from the
constituent parts, as that would be to privilege one section above

another and so unbalance the work. It had to be something new.
But what? And then, around the middle of January, only a few days
after returning from Paris, Eliot believed that he had found it. He
wound a sheet of paper into his Corona typewriter and tried it out
on a title page.
THE WASTE LAND.
By
T. S. Eliot.
Three words, not two, as he would find himself pointing out with
frequency, beginning with Ezra Pound himself. ‘Not “Waste Land”,
please, but “The Waste Land”,’ he would tell his friend that summer;
and ‘not “The Wasteland” but “The Waste Land”,’ he would subse-
quently correct a translator; and ‘not Waste Lands’ either, come to that
(to Lady Rothermere).49 Three words, one definite article.
The title, said Eliot, had been drawn from a recently published
book by Jessie L. Weston, From Ritual to Romance, where among the
many quests for the Grail had been ‘the restoration to fruitfulness
of a Waste Land’.50 It may not have been the first time that he had
encountered the aridity and the Grail. Eliot may also have remem-
bered Tennyson’s ‘Morte D’Arthur’ (‘an agony / Of lamentation, like
a wind, that shrills / All night in a waste land, where no one comes, /
Or hath come, since the making of the world’)51 or Thomas Malory’s
description of a barren place without corn or grass or fruit, of water
without fish, scarred by pestilence and harm: ‘the waste land, for that
dolorous stroke’.52 An issue of Poetry magazine from 1913 had con-
ceivably, though doubtfully, lodged in his recall: it contained a poem
called ‘Waste Land’ by Madison Cawein (which may have been a
misprint for ‘Wasteland’), the pool-hall poet of Louisville known as
‘the Kentucky Keats’.53 In truth, the derivation didn’t matter as much
as the application, for it was most certainly well applied to Eliot’s
poem. Waste tapped the grief within – what Pound had written of
despairingly in ‘Mauberley’ as ‘wastage as never before’ – the lives of
countless millions lost to war.54 It said all that Eliot needed to say
about the falling towers of Europe, of desolate terrain uncultivated,
of loss without profit, of excess and refuse, the ravage of the body

by disease or decay, the mind in drink or immorality. It also marked
a more personal place in the relationship between father and son,
husband and wife. It spoke to Eliot’s sense of the submarine sec-
tions of the poem more than might first be apparent: the expanse
of ocean that Edmund Waller had called the ‘Worlds great Waste’,
and Dryden the ‘wat’ry Waste’, the mundus mare (‘so the world is a
sea’) for which land is not only a terrestrial noun but also a nautical
verb – to surface, to disembark, go ashore, take bearings and survey.55
Most certainly, Eliot had found his title.
An epigraph was taken from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,
a work beginning, ‘The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before
us like the beginning of an interminable waterway,’ and which
might have lent so much to the poem had Eliot allowed it: its
mysterious life of the wilderness, its streams of death in life, cut off from
the comprehension of our surroundings, from the heart of an impene-
trable darkness.56 Eliot hadn’t alighted on any of these passages, but
on one that sees in the dying face of ‘Mistah’ Kurtz his pride and
power, but also the expression ‘of craven terror – of an intense and
hopeless despair’.
Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and
surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge?
He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision, – he cried out
twice, a cry that was no more than a breath –
‘The horror! The horror!’57
Desire. Temptation. Surrender. Complete knowledge. Each of

these concepts had occupied Eliot’s criticism as he prepared him-
self for the poem, into the heart of light. The passage was, Eliot
told Pound, ‘somewhat elucidative’, and in no place more so than
its final cry, The horror! The horror!, which was a condition that had
stalked Eliot perennially. Twice already he had written it into the
poem only for Pound to expunge it: In the horror of the illimitable
scream and horrified past horror.58 It was present in the intimacy of
‘The Death of St Narcissus’, and was a subject on which Eliot had
praised John Webster for his capacity with a network of tentacular
roots reaching down to the deepest terrors and desires.59 Contemporary
politics, he had written in 1921, oppressed him with a continuous
physical horror.60 Perhaps no word better stood for the disposses-
sion, the aboulie, the anomie, the intimacy that Eliot struggled with
in his marriage and himself: ‘a horror of sensuality’ that Henry
Eliot had read across the work and no doubt into his brother’s
life.61 Perhaps few words spoke so deeply to Eliot, because the hor-
ror was the route to redemption. He wrote in 1930:
So far as we are human, what we do must be either evil or good;

so far as we do evil or good, we are human; and it is better, in a
paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing: at least, we exist. It
is true to say that the glory of man is his capacity for salvation; it is
equally true to say that his glory is his capacity for damnation.62
Eliot had found the most appropriate epigraph he could – one

that was somewhat elucidative – the perfect balance in what an
epigraph should be. But Pound didn’t agree. ‘I doubt if Conrad is
weighty enough to stand the citation,’63 he told Eliot. Did Pound
mean Conrad’s name or the passage itself was lacking weight, Eliot
attempted to clarify. Pound conceded: who was he to begrudge
Conrad his laurel crown? Eliot could keep it. But the doubt had
been sown, and Eliot began the search that would lead him full
circle: back to the presence of the Satyricon of Petronius that had
been lost when the draft of ‘In the Cage’ had been retitled ‘A Game
of Chess’. In the event, the Satyricon would bring less to the poem
than would Heart of Darkness, but then Pound’s hesitation was
explicable: why give away the laurel of a contemporary poem to
another contemporary writer? Why not draw upon the tradition
or on nothing at all?
Behind the new title page was a new typescript, produced in
London on Eliot’s new Corona around 20 January, and posted

shortly after to Pound in Paris for final review. ‘The Burial of the
Dead’ and ‘A Game of Chess’ were now as trim as they would
be. ‘The Fire Sermon’ was much improved with its new open-
ing replacing the Fresca couplets; its over-extended sequence
of seventeen quatrains with Tiresias and the typist had been
reduced to ten, without any loss to impact and with plenty of
gain. ‘What the Thunder Said’ was left respectfully untouched,
being the remarkable and momentary performance that it was.
Only ‘Death by Water’ was now in doubt, a sequence which had
arrived with Pound at ninety-three lines in length and left his
hands at ten lines – or twelve, depending on his marking – but
which Eliot was now planning to cut in its entirety. He told
Scofield Thayer on 20 January that he presently had ‘a poem of
about 450 lines, in four parts’, suggesting that he had already let
go mentally of that section from the poem, and asked Pound
that same week whether he agreed that he had better omit Phle-
bas also??? 64 ‘I DO advise keeping Phlebas,’ Pound replied. ‘In
fact I more’n advise. Phlebas is an integral part of the poem; the
card pack introduces him, the drowned phoen. sailor. and he is
needed ABSoloootly where he is.’65 That was clear, but in case
it wasn’t Pound inked in the margin of his letter must stay in.
And stay it would, providing in its short ten lines something of
the kind of interlude between sections that Eliot was about to
discuss with Pound. And that brought with it exactly the kind of
transition that Eliot had been striving for when he had written
that spring that no long work could maintain the same high ten-
sion throughout66 – there simply had to be variation, he believed,
and this was the route to it. In fact, so much did he like the var-
iation of the short fourth part in a five-part poem that he would
reuse the model again when he came to write the poems that
made up Four Quartets.
//
Eliot and Pound’s work to complete the poem was almost done,
but at the last moment their efforts ran into a problem. Horace
Liveright, who had been charming literary circles in London ever
since he left Paris, had received from Pound an assessment of the
poem’s length, and had written in response, ‘I’m disappointed that
Eliot’s material is so short. Can’t he add anything?’67 It was an
enquiry that would at the eleventh hour send Eliot into a spin,
fearing that he might be about to default on the conditions of
the offer of publication. Rapidly, even desperately, he calculated
the permutations for a published book, and he came up with an
unlikely solution. Quite against the tide of the edit that he and
Pound had been making, Eliot now began adding to the typescript.
He looked again at the satellite poems that had surrounded the
drafting of The Waste Land: these could be interleaved as what he
would later call ‘interludes’68 between the four sections (‘Death by
Water’ had momentarily been dropped). Looked at as Eliot did,
three ‘interludes’ promised everything of the long poem that he had
asked of it: a variety bill like a music hall programme with interim
relief between acts. Seemingly, from clues in Pound’s responses,
the interleaving trio that Eliot had intended was ‘Song’, ‘Exequy’
and ‘Dirge’, but those same responses tell us something different
from Eliot’s recollection: that the three ‘remaining superfluities’ as
Pound called them were, at that point, placed ‘at the end’ of the
typescript – ‘the last three’. Asking whether anything would be
lacking if they were removed, Pound answered his own question:
‘I dont think it wd.’ Better to leave ’em, abolish ’em altogether, he
told Eliot: the ‘Song’ had only two lines worth preserving, ‘Exequy’
didn’t hold with the rest, and ‘Dirge’ made no advance on earlier
‘stuff ’.
The thing now runs from April . . . to shantih without break. That is
19 pages, and let us say the longest poem in the Englisch langwidge.
Dont try to bust all records by prolonging it three pages further.69
With this, Pound had given the first confirmation that the Boston
scene in ‘The Burial of the Dead’ had definitely been removed from
consideration, but its absence only increased the pressure to bulk up
the typescript still further. Pound continued: if ‘the remaining super-
fluities’ must be retained, Eliot should run them at the beginning, and
not the end. But therein lay yet another challenge, for Eliot, in a des-
perate bid to expand, was about to make an improbable suggestion.
‘Do you advise printing Gerontion as prelude in book or pam-
phlet form?’ he asked.70
Pound was shocked. ‘Gerontion’ had an existing print life of two
years’ standing in Ara Vos Prec and Knopf ’s Poems, and it was not a
credible idea to introduce The Waste Land with a move of this kind.
‘I do not advise printing Gerontion as preface. One dont miss it
AT all as the thing now stands. To be more lucid still, let me say
that I advise you NOT to print Gerontion as prelude.’71 The mes-
sage was clear – but a yet stranger request was to come.
Quite separately, as an aside in Paris, in order to commemorate
the editorial partnership on the poem, Pound had composed what
he called three ‘squibs’ – skits he referred to as ‘an bloody imperti-
nence’ – among them one he had called ‘Sage Homme’, referring
to himself as the wise man of the title:
These are the Poems of Eliot

By the Uranian Muse begot;
A Man their Mother was,
A Muse their Sire.
How did the printed Infancies result

From Nuptuals thus doubly difficult?
If you must needs enquire

Know diligent Reader
That on each Occasion
Ezra performed the caesarean Operation.72
Dont use ’em with Waste Land, he instructed Eliot, at least half-
seriously, perhaps sensing the magpie-like way in which E liot’s
mind was moving. But Eliot was grasping for anything now that
would bulk the load, and he went right ahead and asked Pound
if he might use these ten lines nonetheless in italics in the front
matter. Surely Pound would stand by his first insistence and once
again say no; but he didn’t, he acquiesced. Do as you like, came the
alarming response from Paris.
The poem that Eliot had worked on for a year, and carried in
his mind for much longer, stood on the brink of a disastrous turn,
almost wrecked at the very last moment by an act of literary fili-
bustering. It had found a title (and, briefly, an epigraph) and at the
same moment that it was progressing towards its trimmest shape,
it was being distorted by the prospect of publication, and for a
moment the poem that Eliot was about to call The Waste Land
looked in his imagination suddenly like this:
(1) Sage Home by E. P. – (2) Gerontion – (3) The Burial of the

Dead – (4) A Game of Chess – (5) The Fire Sermon – (6) What the
Thunder Said – (7–9, in order unknown) Song – Exequy – Dirge.
Don’t print the first two, urged Pound at this eleventh hour;
don’t print the last three either. And DO restore ‘Death by Water’,
ABSoloootly. Hold the line, Pound urged in the face of this last-
minute wobble, hold the line.
And that’s exactly what Eliot did.
//
‘MUCH improved,’ Pound wrote with thoughtful affirmation on

24 January.73
‘Criticisms accepted so far as understood,’ Eliot saluted by return.74
‘Three times through the sieve by Pound as well as myself ’: that’s
what Eliot told Scofield Thayer that the poem had experienced.75

The process had begun in November 1921, when Eliot first left his
pages with Pound in Paris – that was the first sift. It blossomed
in the fortnight there together in early January, when the men
worked face to face – that was the second. But it had also contin-
ued in correspondence later that same month when Eliot returned
to London. It had been an act of perceptive and selfless direction
on Pound’s part, but it had also been a studious and modest hear-
ing on Eliot’s. It is doubtful if anyone else could have inhabited
Eliot’s imaginative space as well as Pound did then, to accept the
precepts of his approach, to know the possibilities of his talent, and
to judge exactly how far to stretch him to his limits without snap-
ping confidence or belief. In return, it is doubtful if anyone o ther
than Eliot could have listened with such dedicated disinterest or
act without ego in such service to the poem as to accept the scale
of revision that was proposed to him.
Something truly exceptional had taken place between Eliot,
Pound and The Waste Land, something truly rare. It wasn’t that
a good poem had been made a better poem through being well
edited: that isn’t what happened in Paris and London that winter.
Instead, the common focus of Eliot and Pound transformed those
pages into a poem for the first time. For what Eliot came back with
from Lausanne wasn’t yet a poem, or if it was to be called that then
it needed to be qualified, as Eliot later did when he said it was ‘a
sprawling chaotic poem’.76 Admittedly, it contained everything at
that moment that the poem needed to exist (everything but its
title and a beginning to ‘The Fire Sermon’), but its pieces were still
provisional, and had yet to be assembled in such a way as to make
the most distinctive object from it. Like a sculpture half-emerging
from its marble, the ‘poem’ that Eliot brought back from Switzer-
land was neither defined nor discrete – it was still a miscellany of
parts, still a hinterland r ather than the island it was forming. It had
yet to become what Pound would say of it in 1924 when he called it
‘an emotional unit’.77 What Pound and Eliot achieved together in
Paris and London didn’t make it a better poem; it made The Waste
Land a poem for the first time.
Like Eliot’s example of the catalysing platinum, a transforma-
tion had taken place, a metamorphosis that was particular to the
chemical minds of the two men. They had found a way for the
poem to exist within them both at the same moment, possessed
by neither but possessing of both. In that instant the poem was
neither ‘Eliot’s’ composition nor ‘Pound’s’ editorial, but a common
project, equally imagined, inhabiting each man simultaneously and
fully.78 The poem had become an event occurring in both men in
unison, in creator and critic, in poet and reader, in two halves of
a combining mind. Pound did not of course share the same life
experience as Eliot – not with his father or with Vivien, not with
Bertrand Russell, not with dispossession or the bank or any o ther
of the influences on Eliot’s life; but he understood how to expe-
rience the force of those feelings in the poem in which they were
converging, and, crucially, he understood how to transmute them
into an experience that o thers might comprehend.
Ezra Pound had, in E liot’s judgement of 1938, ‘done so much
to turn The Waste Land from a jumble of good and bad passages
into a poem’.79 But that’s not to say that without Pound the pages
would not have become The Waste Land. And nor is it to suppose
that the drafts that Eliot left behind are the only alternative to
what that final poem might have been. Such are the materials that
Eliot would certainly have achieved something spectacular on his
own, but probably not here, and not this spectacle. More likely he
would have reached a different poem: one that was longer, more
various in its voices, more formal and pernickety, more unkind in
its consideration for o thers. One that was more obviously attuned
to the experiences of Eliot’s own life; one that was less mysterious
in its transposition.
Pound’s work on the poem that winter had been inspiration-
al. He had dramatically stripped back the draft, clearing out all
that he considered to be excess, explication or autobiography,
leaving behind a shorter, sturdier and altogether stranger poem.
His encouragement to strip out the Fresca lines, to pare back the
typist’s quatrains, and to shrewdly unstitch the piece from E liot’s
surrounding work were instrumental decisions in the success of a
final draft in which he had persuaded his friend not to clutter his
typescript but entrust the work to stand confidently on its own.
He may have misjudged the epigraph, and the decision to reduce
‘Death by Water’ so dramatically was more open to debate: pow-
erful passages had been sacrificed, but ‘the emotional unit’ of the
poem had been strengthened.80
In the event, Pound had been an editor to the poem in three
ways. He had helped it at the level of the line, guiding it through
intricate decisions about phonemes, words, phrases and whole pas-
sages – a mechanic in its engine room fine-tuning its performance.
He had also aided it from above, defining its limits, melding the
shape that it makes today – the poem of five parts that it is, and
not the poem of eight or nine that it might have been. But beyond
his micro and macro work on the text, he had achieved something
more fundamental still. Pound had enabled Eliot in life – he had
stood behind him from arrival in London 1914, and encouraged in
Eliot the belief that he was a poet capable of a work as significant
as the poem he had now produced. Pound had encouraged the
conditions in Eliot for that most intangible but essential of edito-
rial arts: confidence.
‘I think it is the best I have ever done, and Pound thinks so too.’81
So said Eliot that summer.
Pound, of course, would be typically blunter. ‘Complimenti, you
bitch,’ he wrote in January. ‘I am wracked by the seven jealousies.’82
And for a moment, for a brief moment, it seemed almost possi-
ble to imagine Eliot beaming.
London 1960.
I should have listened to the Possum.1
– Ezr a Pound, c.1959
Eliot couldn’t accept the despair in which Pound held his own
work and life. On the eve for his departure to Morocco, in January
1960, he wrote in an effort to comfort his friend that there was so
much in his own life that he could not bear to think about: The
Waste Land was an exception, he said. The advice from his doctor
‘to get out of Europe’ had been a disaster: his evacuation follow-
ing the earthquake of Agadir had left him bed bound in London,
receiving treatment for a fortnight.2 As he began to make a recov-
ery in the summer of 1960, he turned back to Pound’s plight, and
urged him to remember that he retained the genius he’d always
had, only now he could count something additional: he could count
knowledge and the practice of a lifetime’s campaign.3 It might be
forgivable in older age to believe that one has nothing more to
say and that there’s nobody who would want to hear it if one did,
but that was an impulse to which neither of them should submit.
‘There’s always something that one can do, and do better than any-
one else,’ he told his friend in 1961, and then he cut to the chase.4
‘Damn it, you’re still the biggest man in the p oetry world, and have
had the greatest influence on p oetry of anyone in this century.’
Assuredly, Pound had proved the greatest influence on E liot’s
poetry, and on The Waste Land most of all; but that influence
hadn’t stopped with the completion of the poem: it had continued
in an effort to find it publication.
In 1922, Pound had secured from Horace Liveright an offer to
publish The Waste Land in New York, but an American edition
369
was just the first of four pieces that Eliot wished to put in place.
He also wanted to see the poem with a book publisher in Britain
and, if possible, to appear in journal publication on both sides of
the Atlantic in order to reach the widest audience and serve as an
advertisement for the poem. The Dial was the natural place with
which to begin, and on 20 January Eliot told Scofield Thayer that
he would shortly have ready ‘a poem of about 450 lines, in four
parts’ that could be divided between four issues, now that ‘Death
by Water’ had for the moment been dropped.5 He would like to
know what The Dial could offer for such a poem. A fixed rate,
would be the answer – $10 a page for a cast-off eleven pages, plus
a little bit extra for Eliot thrown in: $150 (£35), sight unseen.6 But
it wasn’t enough. It was rumoured that Thayer had paid George
Moore three times that sum for a short story, and Eliot wasn’t
about to let his poem go for ‘only £30–£35’ – ‘It is out of the ques-
tion.’7 On 8 March 1922, Eliot cabled a reply:
cannot accept under !8!56 pounds = eliot +8
The telegram had been mangled in transmission, and Thayer

didn’t interpret it kindly. ‘I have received from you a wire as fol-
lows, “Cannot accept under 856 pounds – Eliot”. I presume there is
some error upon the part of the telegraphic service.’9 Thayer prided
himself on paying all contributors – known and unknown – ‘at
the same rates’, and he wasn’t about to tear that up for a work he
hadn’t even read. But Eliot had intended £50, not £856, telling Ezra
Pound: ‘I would take £50 and no less.’10 Pound understood this was
a moment to step in. ‘I am afraid Eliot has merely gone to piec-
es again,’11 he told Thayer: abuleia, he explained, a physical inertia
had left his friend paralysed in his literary progress, and Thayer
should take the opportunity to get behind him. The poem was in
its way every bit as good as Ulysses, Pound assured him, and not
only ought the journal to snap it up but it should confer upon Eliot
the lucrative new Dial Award – $2,000 (£475) – created in 1921 to
370 | the waste land

honour annually a ‘service to letters’, and serve God or the Devil in
any measure that suited the artist, the journal had announced the
previous summer.12 ‘Three months off and he got that poem done,’
Pound boasted. ‘I think he is being in that bank is the greatest
waste now going on in letters, ANYWHERE.’13
Flu had laid out Eliot and Vivien simultaneously and successive-
ly since they returned to London.14 Once again Vivien’s condition
deteriorated, once again she entered a nursing home: ‘She must
be made to sleep.’15 Eliot anticipated that he would be alone in the
flat for weeks that winter of 1922: precisely the space he needed to
manage the poem. On 26 February he wrote to Maurice Firuski,
proprietor of the small Massachusetts press Dunster House on the
advice of Conrad Aiken. ‘I have now ready a poem,’ he wrote: 435
lines which, with spacing essential to the sense, would require 475
book lines, spanning twenty-eight to thirty-two pages. The poem
was once again in five parts with ‘Death by Water’ restored, and
Eliot had now replaced the Conrad epigraph with the Sibyl of
Cumae.16 ‘It is, I think, much the best poem I have ever written,
and I think it would make a much more distinct impression and
attract much more attention if published as a book.’17 What Firuski
would be prepared to offer? One hundred dollars would be the
response; once again, it was not enough.18
While negotiations for journal publication with The Dial stalled,
Eliot was making preparations of his own for English publication.
‘I have undertaken the task of finding and selecting the contrib-
utors for a modest quarterly review,’ he told T. Sturge Moore that
spring. ‘I shall make its aim the maintenance of critical standards
and the concentration of intelligent critical opinion.’19 The name of
that journal was suggested by Vivien in June – The Criterion (Eliot
would tell Pound teasingly that he was thinking of calling it The
Possum) and by midsummer he had decided that its inaugural issue
would carry the first two sections of The Waste Land, ‘and the rest
in the second number’.20
London 1960 | 371
Imperfect as they were, Eliot was in possession of offers for
book and journal publication in New York, and now he also had
a London venue in The Criterion. His negotiations had become
sophisticated, and Virginia Woolf said of him that spring that he
had ‘grown supple as an eel’.21 Three pieces of his publishing puzzle
were now in place, or, if not in place then at least in his own hands,
but he lacked the last of those pieces: an English book publisher,
and in March 1922, he offered the poem to the Hogarth Press.
‘He has written a poem of 40 pages, which we are to print in the
autumn,’ Virginia recorded in her diary. ‘This is his best work, he
says. He is pleased with it; takes heart, I think, from the thought
of that safe in his desk.’22 But the strain of his situation must have
been showing, for there was something off in his demeanour,
she recorded. She reported a rumour circulating in Bloomsbury
that Eliot was now applying violet powder to his face in order
to make him look ‘cadaverous’; she described his mood as ‘slight-
ly malevolent’, and said that she wasn’t sure that he did not also
paint his lips.23 By then she and Leonard had at last been given an
encounter with the poem. Eliot had come to dinner at Hogarth
House in June 1922, and read it aloud – or not so much read but
‘sang it & chanted it rhythmed it’, she recorded. It had tensity,
symmetry, a great beauty and force of phrase, she said, adding in
caution: ‘What connects it together, I’m not so sure.’24 When Eliot
rushed away after dinner he didn’t leave time for answers; but an
impression had been made and the Woolfs would go ahead with
publication. ‘The Waste Land, it is called; & Mary Hutch, who has
heard it more quietly, interprets it to be Tom’s autobiography – a
melancholy one.’25 Production would take longer than Virginia and
Leonard anticipated: the British book edition of The Waste Land
did not appear until the autumn of 1923.
Eliot was not alone in his strained behaviour that spring of 1922.
Margaret Anderson at the ailing Little Review had received a note
purportedly from Dorothy Pound, informing her of the distressing

news of her husband’s unexpected death, and including photo-
graphs of a death mask that had been cast from the late poet’s face
by the sculptor Nancy Cox-McCormack.26 The editors suspected
a ‘hoax’, and told their readers so, refusing to publish the pho-
tographs they had been sent.27 Pound was indeed alive and well
and holidaying in Siena, and was furious that his ruse had been
rumbled: he had been seeking ‘a little repose’, and considered his
demise an effective way to go about it; but in refusing to play along
the journal had ‘bungled’ it.28 It seemed as though nothing, not
even his literary death, lay any longer in Pound’s own hands.
Death masks aside, Pound’s efforts to rescue Eliot quickened.
He repeated for readers of the New Age that March what he had
told Thayer privately, that Eliot’s employment in the bank was the
greatest waste in contemporary literature; and he was more candid
still: Eliot had experienced ‘complete physical breakdown’, Pound
unblushingly told his readers, and during leave from the bank had
produced what he called ‘a very important sequence of poems’.29
But Eliot was not grateful for the attention: he told Richard Ald-
ington that although he appreciated the motives, the situation
was a tiring embarrassment.30 He was concerned that such public
pronouncements by Pound might make him the subject of gossip;
they might damage his position at Lloyds, and leave him with nei-
ther the bank nor the maintenance subscription that Pound was
calling Bel Esprit.
In Paris, Sylvia Beach had finished printing Ulysses. She sent
one copy, bound, to Eliot in London, that April, who had already
acquired uncut sheets and was delighted to be spared making up
the edition himself.31 He would call the book ‘the most impor-
tant expression which the present age has found’.32 Meanwhile,
efforts to publish his own work were barely advancing. Still Eliot
didn’t feel in a position to commit to the offer from Liveright,
even without an improvement from Dunster. Now it was Alfred
Knopf ’s turn. He learned from Eliot that he had a poem of 450
London 1960 | 373
lines primed for a small book of thirty pages: ‘It is, I think, a good
one.’33 A neglected clause in his contract for the 1920 Poems gave
Knopf first refusal on the next two books, and Eliot now enacted
it. He hoped that Knopf might improve upon Liveright’s offer of
$150 at 15 per cent and an autumn publication. ‘I am anxious to get
the poem published as soon as possible,’ he said in April, adding in
May, ‘on account of copyright’.34 But Eliot was not leaving Knopf
with enough time: he wished to see his four streams of book and
journal publications converge at the same moment in the autumn,
and Knopf ’s list for the fall was already confirmed; Knopf was left
with no option but to pass.35
Meanwhile, negotiations with Scofield Thayer had completely
broken down. Pound began enquiries with The Dial’s cross-town
neighbour, Vanity Fair, to find out what they might pay for Eliot’s
poem; the enquiry would ultimately lead nowhere, but then Pound
was using news of an editorial meeting in London that summer
with John Peale Bishop, its recently departed editor, to pressure
The Dial into action.36 It had not gone unnoted that in the New Age
that spring Pound had conferred upon The Waste Land the status
of ‘permanent value’ – not bad for an unpublished poem; and he
had also been working his private channels of influence among
writers, telling William Carlos Williams that the poem was ‘a
masterpiece; one of the most important 19 pages in English’.37 Nei-
ther the editors of The Dial nor Vanity Fair, nor any of the four
publishers engaged in discussion that spring had actually read the
poem, but they were being played off against one another skilfully
by Eliot and Pound in an effort to stimulate interest. The poem had
achieved a reputation even before it was read, and word of it was
travelling. Aldous Huxley had also alerted Bishop to the existence
of Eliot’s poem, warning that it was promised to The Dial; so Bish-
op telephoned a contact there, Gilbert Seldes, and asked about his
intentions. The enquiry came as something of a surprise to Seldes,
who knew nothing of the poem, and who cabled Scofield Thayer

in Vienna to clarify the picture, receiving in return his colleague’s
enigmatic response: ‘eliot refusa thayer’.38 Seldes, sensing
that something of value was slipping away, was not prepared to
concede just yet: publication in The Dial, he told Bishop, was ‘prob-
lematical but probable’.39 But to Thayer it was not probable; he
remained entrenched in his position that the journal had capped
fees and could not make exceptions.
The strain of uncertainty was telling upon Eliot. His brain had
run down, he told Richard Aldington, and he wrote to Ottoline
Morrell that he felt another breakdown was impending.40 With
negotiations on the poem unresolved, and with his prepara-
tions for The Criterion adding to his stresses, Eliot felt like a man
exposed and misunderstood that summer. He was upset not only
that the proposed advance didn’t recognise the work put into the
poem, but also, as he revealed to Aldington that summer, it failed
to acknowledge something stranger: ‘the vast amount of verse,
which in comparison with most writers, I refrained from writing’.41
That was a new kind of thought for any publisher to be expected
to absorb: that they might reward a writer for a discernment that
made their work valuable in its rarity: that in effect they might
reward a writer not to write. Eliot said that he was aware that the
larger part of literary London stood against him, and that there
were, in his words, ‘a great many jackals swarming about waiting
for my bones’.42 It was time to find some security and complete
arrangements with Horace Liveright.
When Boni & Liveright’s contract arrived in June it was not at
all what Eliot was expecting. With four publishers in the fray, Eliot
was only in a position to grant Liveright North American volume
rights – in o ther words, permission to make a book (alone) in the
US (alone) – but the contract that Eliot was asked to sign was,
he said, tantamount to conceding world rights, thereby preventing
the possibility of any deals with The Dial, The Criterion or the Hog-
arth Press.43 Liveright had been the only publisher involved when
London 1960 | 375
he made his offer over dinner in Paris that January, and a request
for world rights was not an unreasonable one to make, even if it
was a little slow to be formalised in a contract five months later.
But Eliot had since complicated the picture through his wish for
multiple printings, and now he cabled John Quinn to ask for his
support in ironing out the growing tangle. Quinn was happy to
help: he too had heard about the poem from Pound, and was only
too pleased to remind Eliot that he was under no obligation to
Horace Liveright.
Vivien’s health continued to worsen. Her temperature had fre-
quently risen above 100ºF that spring, and by the summer she was
diagnosed with colitis.44 She wrote to Pound with an exhaustive list
of symptoms and of ‘increasing mental incapacity’.45 The pressure
on Eliot to provide for her grew and grew. Richard Aldington told
him that he had become ‘bitter and hypercritical’.46 Eliot plead-
ed with Pound that he didn’t want personal favours of the kind
that Bel Esprit was projecting. ‘Sometimes I simply want to escape
from the whole thing and run away,’ he told Ottoline Morrell.47
When the Liverpool Daily Post and Echo reported falsely that Eliot
was benefitting from the scheme to the tune of £800, Eliot sued
for a correction and apology.48 He received both. But he wanted
more. He wanted to know the source of the allegation, and he
believed it was Richard Aldington, to whom he wrote leadingly in
a typed letter peppered with capitals and underlinings: both men
knew ‘FROM what source it is likely TO have emanated’.49 Ald-
ington was not involved, but the friendship was at breaking point:
he told Eliot that indiscreet friends were far more dangerous than
open enemies.50
Ezra Pound pressed Eliot for a typescript of the poem that he
could sell to The Dial, but Eliot said that couldn’t give up those
pages just yet: he had just sent a copy to John Quinn for delivery to
Boni & Liveright, and he needed to retain the other one himself.51
When John Quinn finally received a typescript of The Waste Land

in July, he told Eliot what he hadn’t wanted to hear: that it would
benefit from adding ‘four or five more poems to it’.52 As Pound put
it, ‘Liveright wanted a longer volume and the notes were the only
available unpublished matter.’53
It could have been at his reading of the poem at Hogarth House
on 18 June that the idea of notes to The Waste Land first arose as
a way of elucidating the poem. Clive Bell attributed the prompt
to Roger Fry (‘It may be,’ Eliot agreed in 1963).54 Eliot himself
would suggest in the 1950s that the annotations began as a form
of citation – preventative references for ‘spiking the guns of critics’
that were expanded upon when it seemed that, in book form, the
poem was to be ‘inconveniently short’.55 But there is no evidence
of such a tiered expansion, and it seems more likely that they were
written in a concentrated effort that summer for the sole purpose
of fulfilling Liveright’s demand for a longer extent. On 19 July,
Eliot told John Quinn that he would ‘rush forward’ with his work
on them, but it wasn’t until 31 August that anyone acknowledged
having seen them.56 Then, Gilbert Seldes told his colleagues at The
Dial they were ‘exceedingly interesting and add much to the poem’,
continuing, ‘but don’t become interested in them because we sim-
ply cannot have them’.57
Pound didn’t agree about the value of the new notes, and encour-
aged readers to do as he did – namely, to read without them. ‘The
poem is there for the reader,’ he wrote. ‘The notes are for some
other species of fauna.’58 He was characteristically precise in his
evaluation: the notes relied upon the poem, but not the poem
upon the notes. They were not a sixth section to the poem but
something more like a satellite, launched from it, but moving in a
quasi-independent orbit. Eliot was probably keeping a card or two
up his sleeve when he said with mischievous solemnity, in 1937,
‘The notes to the Waste Land should be taken at their face value,’
and yet his own patience with their value would run out in time.59
He would call them a ‘remarkable exposition of bogus scholarship’
London 1960 | 377
and would make a confession in 1956: ‘I have sometimes thought
of getting rid of these notes; but now they can never be unstuck.’60
And they can’t. For all E liot’s ambivalence, the notes are now for-
ever fused with the poem.
It was Scofield Thayer’s business partner, James Sibley Watson,
who revived Pound’s thought about the Dial Award. ‘Eliot seems
in a conciliatory mood,’ he told Thayer on 12 August, having at last
received a typescript of The Waste Land from Pound that month.61
‘The poem is <better than> not so bad. Shall I try to persuade him
to sell us the poem at our regular rate with the award in view?’62
The pieces were falling into place. The Dial could protect their pay-
ment system by giving the award to Eliot, and in so doing allow all
parties to maintain their dignity. The Dial would cover Liveright’s
advance of $150 in return for first publication of the poem, and
there would be a considerable sweetener: Eliot would be given the
Dial Award, the announcement of which might serve to generate
publicity for Liveright’s book, which was to follow the journal’s
first publication. Everybody would be a winner, or so it seemed.
But only a few days passed before Eliot had a change of heart. The
prize hadn’t actually been offered, but merely floated: a float was
not a certainty, he told Watson, and he couldn’t possibly trouble
John Quinn or Horace Liveright to alter the contract, not unless
the award of the prize was to form the basis of the agreement,
an entanglement that he anticipated the journal might find awk-
ward. Eliot’s action was either one of selfless respect to Quinn and
Liveright, or it was calculated brinkmanship; he wrote to Watson:
‘Let us hope that on a future occasion, if I survive to write another
poem, no such difficulty will arise.’63 But just so that no one was
in any doubt where they stood, Eliot let John Quinn know that
he had turned down ‘an attractive proposal’64 from The Dial that
he had not wanted to trouble him or Liveright with (‘particularly
yourself ’): he could not go into details, he said, but nonetheless
shared with Quinn three paragraphs on the matter.

On 7 September, Quinn wrote to say that, despite Eliot’s appar-
ent protest, he, Liveright and Seldes had met in his New York
office that morning, and drafted an agreement. This was everything
Eliot had hoped for; so overwhelmed by Quinn’s assistance65 was
he that he would gift him the typescripts and manuscripts of the
poem and its accompanying pages that he and Pound and Vivien
had worked upon so carefully together. But it was Gilbert Seldes at
The Dial who had found a scheme to suit all parties. The Dial would
publish first, ‘about October 20th’, in a text without the notes, and
would give Eliot both the Dial Award and a standard fee; it would
purchase the first 350 copies of Liveright’s numbered print run
to give away to subscribers of their journal.66 Neither it nor Boni
& Liveright would seek international rights, leaving Eliot free to
publish in The Criterion and with the Hogarth Press in England.
For Liveright, the deal was a stroke of genius: he had a firm sale for
one-third of the first printing, allowing the book to wash its face
commercially whatever happened; he would have to go second in
the publishing queue that December or January, but when he did
so he would have the added value of presenting the unpublished
notes, advertised for him with a banner in The Dial, and the award
to generate publicity.67 For The Dial, conversely, this had become
an expensive proposition: $150 paid to Eliot, a purchase order of
perhaps $350 to Liveright, and then the small matter of the $2,000
award. But in return, they had confirmed their part in the publish-
ing story of The Waste Land, and what price would history put upon
that? They would be the first publisher of the poem anywhere in
the world. Or almost anywhere: Eliot had retained rights in Great
Britain and, in London, his journal, The Criterion, would, as it hap-
pened, pip The Dial to the post by just a few days. ‘So everything is
all right,’ said Quinn, reflecting Eliot’s own feeling.68
‘Perhaps not even you can imagine with what emotions I saw
The Waste Land go out into the world,’ Vivien told Sydney Schiff
the week that The Criterion was published, mid-October, 1922. ‘It
London 1960 | 379
has become a part of me (or I of it) this last year. It was a terrible
thing, somehow, when the time came at last for it to be published.’69
A month later, with The Dial in print and the Boni & Liveright
edition imminent, Eliot told Richard Aldington that the poem
was a thing of the past, as far as he was concerned, and that he was
now looking forward to a new form and style.70 It was a remark-
able resignation – or perhaps separation – from the poem in the
moment of publication.
When an early notice praised the poem at the expense of Pound,
Eliot felt overcome with despair. He was grateful for good notices,
of course, but no praise was worth the humiliation of Pound. ‘I am
infinitely in his debt as a poet, as well as a personal friend,’ he told
Gilbert Seldes. ‘I sincerely consider Ezra Pound the most impor-
tant living poet in the English language.’71 It isn’t known how many
of his personal copies from Boni & Liveright Eliot inscribed as
gifts. But one – numbered 458 of 1000 – carries a neat inscription
in ink that would go on to have a permanent association with the
poem:
for E. P.
miglior fabbro
from T. S. E.
Jan 192372
Today, the page on which Eliot wrote those words bears a lit-
tle foxing where mildew has ingressed into the upper and outer
edge of the paper. It is said that in Italy, during the Second World
War, knowing his capture from an invading German army might
be imminent, and believing that his last possessions were to be
stripped from him, Ezra Pound asked Dorothy to bury this copy
in the earth where he stood, that no one – no army and no govern-
ment – could ever take it from him.73
//
In the years that followed publication of The Waste Land, Eliot and
Pound’s worlds began to move apart. Eliot finally left the bank
and joined Faber and Gwyer as editor of The Criterion, the journal
it had acquired from Lady Rothermere. From there, he began to
build one of the most respected literary lists in the English lan-
guage; his and Pound’s were the first books he brought to it. He
adopted British citizenship, and joined the Church of England. As
his standing grew, so did his fame: ‘The Hollow Men’, ‘The Journey
of the Magi’ and ‘Ash-Wednesday’ followed The Waste Land and
achieved for him a literary celebrity that would be his throughout
the remainder of his life.
Pound’s world began to unravel. He outgrew Paris and left for
Italy with Dorothy, and with Olga Rudge, now his mistress, in
tow; he fathered children with both women. His advocacy for
Social Credit dragged him deeper and deeper into a hatred for
usury. He became manic and unpredictable; his daughter, Maria,
spoke of him ‘visibly fighting a wasp nest in his brain’.74 He began
to date his letters by the fascist calendar, and would have an admir-
ing audience with Benito Mussolini.
Vivien’s health only deteriorated. In the spring of 1923, she and
Eliot alike were convinced that she was on the point of death.75
She was diagnosed with Streptococcus fecalis, and even contemplat-
ed suicide. ‘Hell’, Eliot told Pound at the time, it was hell.76 The
burden of unhappiness became more than Eliot could bear. His
mother died in 1929, and he renewed a friendship with Emily Hale
soon after. The lecture series he undertook three years later marked
his first visit to the US since his humiliating pilgrimage to his
family as a newly-wed in 1915. When he sailed from Southampton
in the autumn of 1932 he parted from Vivien for ever: his absence
would last nine months, and during his time in the US he would
serve upon her a deed of separation. The life in England to which
he returned would become ever more covert. As Vivien sought a
reunion, he began to keep his whereabouts secret; but at public
London 1960 | 381
events he was vulnerable, and when in 1935 she cornered him at
a book exhibition, he offered a formal handshake as if meeting
her for the first time: ‘How do you do,’ he said, and signed the
print editions she was carrying. 77 In the years that followed, Vivien
would be found by the police wandering confused through the
streets of Paddington in the small hours of the morning. Togeth-
er with her brother Maurice, Eliot signed a reception order for
her committal. She became a resident patient at Northumberland
House psychiatric hospital in Finsbury Park in 1938, and died there
eight years later.
‘I was never quite a whole man,’ Eliot told Emily Hale. ‘The
agony forced some genuine p oetry out of me, certainly, which
would never have been written if I had been happy: in that respect
perhaps I may be said to have had the life I needed.’78 Soon after
his marriage to Vivien the harm of it was clear to him, but he
came to see that it was a commitment he must ‘expiate’ for the
rest of his life.79 His feelings for Emily were not responsible for
that, he assured her: even had she not existed, the marriage would
have been the painful failure that it was.80 He had felt ‘unfitted’ to
the life of American academia, and found in Vivien someone who
could not or would not emigrate, allowing him to cut all ties to
home.81 But their seventeen years together had been bitter.82 In the
time that followed Vivien’s death, he had tried to steel himself to
the thought that feeling was dead, that his heart was dead, that his
life would be one of celibacy through to old age: ‘I had done The
Waste Land, and I thought my life was done.’83 But Emily, ‘friend,
blood shaking my heart’ had stirred in him ‘the awful daring of a
moment’s surrender’. These lines from the poem were for her, he
said, as he embarked on a romantic correspondence with her that
he would sustain until his wife’s death in 1947.
Eliot had longed for Vivien to die, he confessed, although he
knew such a longing was sinful.84 When the moment of her death
came, he realised that he had lost not only Vivien but Emily too,

for he discovered that he was not in fact in love with her at all, but
with the apparitional life that he hadn’t lived, or as he put it more
callously in directions to his executors, with ‘the love of a ghost for
a ghost’.85 He told Emily:
That, in fact, was the real shock. That I am my past, and the whole
of it, whether I like it or not; and that I meet myself face to face
as a stranger whom I have got to live with, and make the best of,
whether I like him or not; and while I still love you, and all those
whom I love in various relations and degrees, as much as ever, it is
this previously unknown man whom I, and they, will have to get to
know.86
In 1930, Eliot made a startling confession. He told Emily that in

the time before they renewed their friendship he had tried to have
a love affair with a young and wealthy society woman, who was
living apart from her husband, and who had made for herself a
notorious reputation. Nancy Cunard had travelled to England
in the early summer of 1922 from Fontainebleau, France; by the
beginning of September she was back in Paris. But for June and
July, she was staying at Eddington Mill, near Hungerford. In her
scrapbook from that time, she placed a carte du jour from the Res-
taurant de la Tour Eiffel, on Percy Street, Soho: a printed menu
with a Wyndham Lewis drawing on the front of what appears to
be Ezra Pound and James Joyce dining with an unidentified wom-
an.87 There is no date beside it, though it comes between clippings
dated 13 June (a Times review of Eliot) and holiday photographs
from September.88 It may have been a souvenir of an evening that
Nancy would describe in a poem of 1965 on hearing on the radio
of Eliot’s death. In it, she said that they had coincided at a ball on
a summer night of 1922, and had for perhaps two hours on end and
maybe more been lost in conversation. When she proposed ‘a tryst’
for the following night, he accepted. They took a private room at
London 1960 | 383
Restaurant Eiffel Tower, in what was known as the Wyndham
Lewis Room, and had excused themselves from a dinner engage-
ment with the Hutchinsons to be alone; they drank gin in the
upstairs room, served by the restaurant’s veteran Viennese waiter,
Joe. The summer of 1922 would be one of the coldest on record,89
and Cunard described them huddling together:
So, by the little gas fire, on the floor, we lengthily sat.

Our talk, it seemed to be going on so long,
That Joe, the Tower’s Austrian waiter, came up to see,
Found us by that heat (cold evening) as close as could be:
‘Want anything?’ said Joe, smiling at me.
‘More gin, Joe, please, make it doubles same as before.’90
Of dinner, Nancy said that she remembered little, only that the
two of them were together. And then? she asked in her poem; the
answer was discreet.
Not every life-moment’s recalled, though all of that night certainly

is . . .
‘It was over almost before it begun,’ Eliot told Emily Hale, ‘and
it left a taste of ashes which I can never forget.’91 It was the first
occasion of adultery in his life, and it would be the last. ‘I learned
something, about the world and about myself,’ he told Emily, ‘and
then I escaped finally from the influence of Bertie Russell.’ Nancy
returned to France that summer, and then to Venice. There, ‘drunk
a little’, on vermouth bianco, surrounded by evening crowds and
bells and traghetti, she said of Eliot, ‘I loved him so, but . . .’ her
boozy letter trailed off; it was to Ezra Pound, who may have coded
the encounter into The Cantos in a moment forever linked to the
timeless wave-stone and to Eliot:92
Nancy where art thou?

Whither go all the vair and the cisclatons

and the wave pattern runs in the stone
on the high parapet (Excideuil)93
Pound may not have been the only one to know: Vivien, too,
may have learned of it. In 1926, she would complain that Eliot
had banished her to a care home and locked her out of London.
‘Would this kind of thing happen to Nancy?’ she asked bitterly.
‘Why can’t I even have the freedom & respect which is accorded
to Nancy the real tart?’94
Never again would Eliot and Pound work together in the way they
had on The Waste Land. Eliot would seek Pound’s critical advice
only once more and only briefly, asking of ‘The Hollow Men’ in 1925,
‘Is it too bad to print?’95 For the next four decades, their established
roles would be reversed. Eliot would try to bring Pound within
his sphere of influence, and keep him from his worst instincts. He
would offer him a publishing home at Faber & Faber and a life-
long editorial relationship – one that Pound would accept, but one
throughout which he would squall and scratch at Eliot, like an
animal unable to overcome ill-treatment.
‘There did come a point, of course,’ Eliot wrote, ‘at which dif-
ference of outlook and belief became too wide.’96 Pound’s wartime
broadcasts on Radio Rome formed the breaking point. He would
say that Hitler was a martyr, comparable to Joan of Arc; he would
later be hunted down and arrested by the Allies. Detained in a
military camp in Pisa, he spent three weeks in a steel cage, six
feet by six, exposed to blazing heat, which may have triggered his
mental collapse – in words from the Cantos, ‘when the raft broke
and the waters went over me’.97 It would take a presidential pardon
to secure his release in 1958 from St Elizabeths Hospital for the
criminally insane. Eliot was among those who campaigned to set
him free.
Pound attempted a redemptive path back to Eliot, but he could
London 1960 | 385
barely lift his fingers to the typewriter. ‘Now that I am wrecked,
and have struggled three days to write a page to you,’ he told Eliot.
‘I am trying to repudiate 30 years of injustice to you’ – saying, ‘you
doing real criticism and me playing a tin penny whistle.’98 He
turned once more to The Waste Land:
From time’s wreckage shored,

these fragments shorted against ruin,99
Eliot was having none of it. ‘What the hell is your offence and
whom, if anybody, have you offended? If so be that there are any
ruins I should like you to be as comfortable as possible.’100 But
Pound knew the ruins to be real, and his writing to be over, even if
the spirit remained:
A blown husk that is finished

but the light sings eternal
a pale flare over marshes
where the salt hay whispers to the tide’s change101
In 1922, Pound had vowed that he had ‘the crust’ to achieve a

poem in 100 or 120 cantos; when he died half a century later, the
poem he had written comprised 120 numbered and fragmented
cantos.102 And yet they were a ‘botch’, he said with a world-weary
dismay: he knew too little about too many things.103 Worse had
been his folly in life. He sought what he called a ‘verbal formula’
to combat the ‘rise of brutality’ around him, he said – ‘To be men
not destroyers’.104 This was to be the last word from The Cantos.
He would find no such formula. Any good he had done had been
spoiled by bad intentions, he said – ‘And of man seeking good, /
doing evil’.105 ‘But the worst mistake I made was that stupid, sub-
urban prejudice of anti-Semitism’ – ‘idiocies’, he called them.106 If
that was a turn – a sincere and repentant turn – then for many it
came too little and too late.
‘My old head just won’t do any more work.’107

His final fragment from the sequence, written in August 1959,
stops achingly:
I cannot make it flow thru.

A little light, like a rushlight
to lead back to splendour.108
There would be no more splendour, only silence. A pall descend-

ed upon him in which he stopped speaking; it lasted until the end
of his life. ‘I did not enter silence,’ he remarked in a rare interview.
‘Silence captured me.’109 He was emptied now, gone somehow, a
shell surrounded by people he could no longer hear. In notes made
for a final, 117th canto, he wrote:
That I lost my center

fighting the world.110
Eliot sent a cable that became mangled in transmission:
YOUR CRITICISM HAS ALWAYS BEEN IMMENSELY HELPFUL STOP

YOUR OWN ACHIEVEMENT EPOCH MACHINGEN [MAKING] STOP111
He wrote by letter the same day. The cable’s sentiment was all right
as it goes, but its brevity simplified complex feelings, and Eliot had
known well enough states of mind similar to Pound’s.
To tell a man what he has achieved in the world, how big his own
work is, all he has done for other people and for the world at large,
civilisation, society etc etc. doesn’t reach to the heart of the doubt,
disgust, despair etc. from which the victim is suffereing [sic]. He
knows all that and yet feels himself an utter failure. I got <have
been> that way too.112
‘I should have listened to the Possum,’ Pound confided to his

daughter towards the end of his life.113
In one moment, at least, he had. He had listened for the poem
that Eliot heard within himself in 1921, and he tuned it to the
London 1960 | 387
poem he thought ought to be heard in public. The risk of ruin
was high, but Pound had succeeded in steering the poem to the
better version of itself, and Eliot never forgot it. In Paris, he had
placed before Pound a sprawling chaotic poem, he said, that left
Pound’s hands reduced to half its size in the form which now sur-
vives today. It had, Eliot believed, been an intervention that stood
as irrefutable evidence of his friend’s critical genius.114
In the years ahead, The Waste Land would be called many things
by many people. None would put it more clearly than Ezra Pound,
who said all that should be said before the work is left with the
reader’s own judgement. And he said it in just four words.
‘A damn good poem.’115

Reviews
‘a complete expression of this poet’s vision of modern life . . . We

know of no o ther modern poet who can more adequately and
movingly reveal to us the inextricable tangle of the sordid and the
beautiful that make up life.’
Times Literary Supplement (26 October 1922)1
‘the finest poem of this generation’

New York Tribune (5 November 1922)2
‘[The Waste Land] maybe nonsense as a whole, but is certainly a

sporting attempt to turn accident into substance.’
New York Evening Post (11 November 1922)3
‘Mr Eliot’s work is marked by an intense cerebral quality and a

compact music that has practically established a movement among
the younger men.’
New York Times Book Review (26 November 1922)4
‘The poem is – in spite of its lack of structural unity – simply one

triumph after another.’
Dial (December 1922)5
‘remarkably disconnected, confused’

Nation (6 December 1922)6
389
‘a pompous parade of erudition’
Freeman (17 January 1923)7
‘Mr Eliot has failed to convince many readers that he has a soul’
New York Evening Post Literary Review (20 January 1923)8
‘“The Waste Land” seems to me as near to Poetry as our generation

is at present capable of reaching.’
Chapbook (February 1923)9
‘one of the most moving and original poems of our time’

New Republic (7 February 1923)10
‘the greatest poem so far written in contemporary literature’

Chicago Daily News (14 February 1923)11
‘There is a new kind of literature abroad in the land, whose only

obvious fault is that no one can understand it . . . It is rumoured
that The Waste Land was written as a hoax.’
Time (23 March 1923)12
‘A grunt would serve equally well’

London Mercury (October 1923)13
‘The thing is a mad medley . . . so much waste paper.’

Manchester Guardian (31 October 1923)14
Acknowledgements
I am deeply indebted to Clare Reihill, trustee the Estate of T. S. Eliot, and to
archivist Nancy Fulford and trustee Judith Hooper for their exceptional sup-
port and assistance throughout the preparation of this book, and for permission
to quote published and unpublished archive materials: © Set Copyrights Lim-
ited [TK]. I am also grateful to Christopher Wait and New Directions for
permission to quote from the work of Ezra Pound and for access to restricted
archives: © the Trustees of the Ezra Pound Literary Property Trust [TK].
My special gratitude to John Haffenden for his generous insight and
advice, to Anthony Cuda, similarly, for his, and to the Eliot scholars from
whom I have benefitted in working with at Fabers: Archie Burnett, Jim
McCue, Christopher Ricks, Ronald Schuchard and Valerie Eliot herself. For
their help with queries during my research I am grateful to John Kelly and
Hannah Sullivan.
I am grateful to the following institutions and individuals for their tire-
less assistance: British Library, London and Boston Spa (Trudy Southern);
Cornell University, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Ithaca,
New York (Caitlin Holton, Natalie Kelsey); Emory University, Stuart A.
Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Robert A. Woodruff
Library, Atlanta, Georgia (Kathy Shoemaker); Faber & Faber, London (Rob-
ert Brown, Jane Kirby); Harvard University, Houghton Library, Cambridge,
Massachusetts ( James Capobianco, Mary Haegert, Sara Powell); Indiana
University, Lilly Library, Bloomington ( Joe McManis, Kristen S. Wilkins);
McMaster University Library, Hamilton, Ontario (Bev Bayzat, Christopher
Long, Rick Stapleton, Sheila Turcan, Bridget Whittle); New York Public
Library, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American
Literature (Emma Davidson, Andrea Felder, Thomas Lisanti, Carolyn Vega);
W. W. Norton, New York [TK]; Princeton University Library, Department
of Special Collections, New Jersey (Emma Sarconi); University at Buffalo,
the Poetry Collection, New York (Alison Fraser, James Maynard); Univer-
sity of California Berkeley, Bancroft Library, (Dean Smith); University of
California Santa Cruz, Special Collections and Archives, McHenry Library
391
(Luisa Haddad); University of Chicago Library, Hanna Holborn Gray Spe-
cial Collections Research Center at the (Catherine Uecker); University of
Oxford, Bodleian Special Collections, Weston Library (Angie Goodgame,
Oliver House); University of Pennsylvania, Kislak Center for Special Col-
lections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, Philadelphia (David McKnight);
University of Texas, Harry Ransom Center, Austin (Steve Ennis, Elizabeth
Garver, Rick Watson, Kristen Wilson); University of Toledo Libraries, Ward
M. Canaday Center for Special Collections, Toledo, Ohio (Tamara Jones,
Sara Mouch); University of Tulsa, Department of Special Collections and
University Archives McFarlin Library, Tulsa, Oklahoma (Kelsey Hildeb-
rand); University of Virginia, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections
Library, Charlottesville (Rebecca Bultman); Washington University in St
Louis, Department of Special Collections, John M. Olin Library, Washing-
ton University Libraries, St Louis, Missouri ( Joel Minor, Sonya Rooney);
Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven,
Connecticut (Mary Ellen Budney, Nancy Kuhl, Sara Powell, Yasmin Rama-
dan).
I am also grateful to Dorking Museum and Heritage Centre, Surrey (Erica
Chambers, Sue Tombs); Friends of Guildford Museum, Surrey (Matthew
Alexander, Nicholas Bale); Surrey History Centre, Woking (Rose Anker);
and Tanhurst Estate, Surrey (Colin Grimes). My thanks to Margate Muse-
um (Ian Dickie), and to English Heritage (Rachel Morrison), and to Betty
Miller, at Marble Hill Park, Armistice Day, 2021.
Merci aux Archives de la Ville de Lausanne ( Jean-Jacques Eggler);
Archives Hotelières Suisses (Rudolf Christa); Hôtel Élite Lausanne ( Joel
Iunius, Marcel Zufferey); Institut des Humanités en Médecine (Centre
Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois avec Université de Lausanne) (Magdalena
Czartoryjska Meier); Musée Historique Lausanne (Mélina Ith, Sarah Liman
Moeri).
//
My heartfelt thanks to Neil Belton for commissioning this work in 2012, and
for his selfless editing and support beyond the page; likewise to Alex Bowler
for his insightful and directive reading, and his indefatigable patience.
Many people have given this book their time at Faber & Faber: Rachael
Alexander, Mitzi Angel, Lizzie Bishop, Aisling Brennan, Kate Burton, Mary
Cannam, Rali Chorbadzhiyska, Jane Feaver, Katie Hall, Paul Keegan, Jamie
Keenan, Julian Loose, Hannah Marshall, Anne Owen, Stephen Page, Lavinia
392 | Acknowledgements
Singer, Hannah Styles, Sara Talbot and Kate Ward, as well as each of the
beloved reps in Sam Brown’s team. Robert Davies was sensitive in his copy
edit and [proofreading credit TK].
Similarly, my thanks at W. W. Norton to Jill Bialosky for her support over
many years, and to her colleagues Steve Colca, Elizabeth Riley and Drew
Weitman [and Rebecca [TK]].
To Sarah Chalfant at the Wylie Agency, with Jessica Bullock and Alba
Ziegler-Bailey.
To Rosie Alison and Susanna White at Oxford Films.
To Juliet Nicolson for her help with Elinor House.
Hurry up please, John Clegg, it’s time.
//
My loving thanks to Claire, James, Rose, Simon and Beowulf.[TK]
Acknowledgements | 393
Notes on Sources
Return to the sources, Eliot instructed. I have attempted to follow that direc-
tive in my original research for this book, while acknowledging that I do so in
the debt of a great many researchers who have come before me, many of whom
have given a lifetime’s dedication to their study, and on whose shoulders my
own work undoubtedly stands. Although I quote only from primary sources
in this book, I have attempted to acknowledge those works that have directly
or indirectly informed my thinking in the pages that follow, and hope that any
accidental omissions or oversights do not cause unintended offence.
Archives
Draft works of manuscript and typescript are drawn from the archives listed
below, although one source in particular requires special mention: the pages of
The Waste Land, kindly rephotographed in colour for me by the Berg Collection
of the New York Public Library, and first published in Valerie Eliot’s edition of
1971, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Includ-
ing the Annotations of Ezra Pound, reissued in colour for the poem’s centenary
in 2022. Also of critical importance to my work have been the notebook and
loose leaves of Eliot’s early poems, again in the Berg Collection, published in
an annotated edition by Christopher Ricks as Inventions of the March Hare
(1996). Manuscript fair copies of The Waste Land held by the Eliot Estate and
the Harry Ransom Center have proved an invaluable resource, as have the
latter archive’s copy of the Boni & Liveright edition of The Waste Land, gifted
by Eliot to Pound, as well as Pound’s draft typescripts and proofs held there
for his ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’.
Poetry and Prose

Texts of the published poetry and prose are taken from those journals con-
temporary to the authors in which they first appeared. Where relevant, I have
included in the citation the first reprinting of the work in a collected edition.
These sources are given in full below and in shortened form in the notes.
Readers seeking current editions of the poetry might begin with Eliot’s The
395
Waste Land and Other Poems (first published in 1940), Selected Poems (1948) or
Collected Poems 1909–1962 (1963); Eliot’s prose is available as Selected Essays
(1932).
Readers of Pound’s early verse should seek out Personae: Collected Shorter
Poems (1926), while Selected Poems 1908–1969 (1975/7) covers the arc of his
career, as does his mighty The Cantos (Fourth Edition, 1987); his prose is
available as Literary Essays (1954).
Annotated and compendium editions of the works of both writers provide
an invaluable resource for readers and scholarship. Eliot readers are bless-
ed with The Poems of T. S. Eliot (ed. Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue, 2
vols, 2015), and The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition (ed. Ron
Schuchard et al., 8 vols, 2014–19); The Collected Prose of T. S. Eliot (ed. Archie
Burnett) will be issued by Faber & Faber in 2023.
Pound’s writings are gathered as Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose: Contribu-
tions to Periodicals (ed. Lea Baechler, Walton A. Litz and James Logenbach,
11 vols, 1991), and is accessible digitally via the Ezra Pound Society, which
also hosts the Cantos Project online.
Letters
Many of the letters consulted for this study are to be found in the archives
cited, but a great number were drawn from published editions, and it is to the
work of these editors that my own work must pay its greatest debt.
Eliot’s letters written before 1941 are mostly drawn from the volumes of
edited correspondence begun with Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton’s edi-
tion of 1988 and scrupulously advanced since 2009 by general editor John
Haffenden. Letters later than 1941, as well as some before, including those to
Emily Hale, were consulted from archive sources given below.
Pound’s letters are similarly taken from published and archive sources also
given below.
Biography
Although I have not drawn upon existing biographical studies in my research,
I would like to acknowledge the enormous contribution to both scholarship
and readership made by many biographers before me. For more on Eliot’s life I
would encourage readers to consult works by Peter Ackroyd, Robert Crawford
and Lyndall Gordon, and for Pound, those by Humphrey Carpenter, David
Moody and Charles Norman. Peter Ackroyd and David Moody have written
on both poets. Ann Pasternak Slater has deepened our understanding of Vivi-
en Eliot, as Carole Seymour-Jones did before her.
396 | Notes on Sources

The Waste Land
Eliot didn’t date his draft pages of The Waste Land, and so following the pub-
lication of Valerie Eliot’s facsimile of 1971 there began guided attempts by
scholars to do precisely that.
Evidencing the dates commenced with the realisation that the poem had
been prepared on more than one typewriter. Grover Smith (1972) and Hugh
Kenner (1973) correctly identified the presence of three machines involved
in the production of the typescripts, assigning certain sections of the poem to
certain machines, as did Lyndall Gordon (1974), who was the first to com-
pare the watermarked paper stocks against the machines used. Each scholar
arrived independently at the conclusion that the earliest passage of the poem
to be composed was its third part, ‘The Fire Sermon’. Later examinations cor-
rected those hypotheses: Peter Barry (1979) thought that ‘The Fire Sermon’
was the second piece composed, after the Boston night out in ‘The Burial of
the Dead’ but before ‘April is the cruellest month’; David A. Moody (1979)
postulated a chronology much closer to the order of the finished poem, while
S. Krishnamoorthy Aithal (1980) and Ronald Bush (1983) contributed alter-
native readings of their own. There matters rested until a comprehensive
investigation by Lawrence Rainey (2005) deepened our understanding of
events. Rainey compared the paper of Eliot’s undated drafts with the vari-
ous stocks of his letters, most of which were dated. On the supposition that
Eliot worked systematically through reams of paper (exhausting one entirely
before beginning other), he was able to surmise a timeline that brought the
undated draft poems into the frame of dated letters of matching stock. He
offered a revised and convincing account of the three typewriters: that the
first machine was brought to England by Eliot from Harvard in 1914; that
the second was the machine gifted by his brother Henry, left behind after the
family’s visit in 1921; and that the third was probably not Eliot’s machine
at all, but Ezra Pound’s, from Paris in 1922. With that proposition in place,
Rainey was able to demonstrate with reasonable certainty that each machine
related to specific periods of use, and that the five parts of the poem were
composed in the order in which they appeared in the first publication of the
poem in 1922. While I have sometimes drawn differing conclusions in my
research as to the exact order of composition of the poem (not least that Eliot
didn’t always draw down on his paper stocks systematically), it is nonetheless
the case that Lawrence Rainey’s invaluable work – as well as that of his pre-
decessors’ – has provided a foundation for my book.
Notes on Sources | 397

I – Archive Sources
Diaries, letters, manuscripts, notebooks and typescripts
Beinecke Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New
Haven, CT:
DCGP: Donald Clifford Gallup Papers, YCAL MSS 838
DSTP: Dial/Scofield Thayer Papers, YCAL MSS 34
EPP: Ezra Pound Papers, YCAL MSS 43
ORP: Olga Rudge Papers, YCAL MSS 54
WBEPP: William Bird Ezra Pound Papers, YCAL MSS 178
Berg Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American
Literature, New York Public Library
BDP: Babette Deutsch Papers, Mss Col 778
JQP: John Quinn Papers, Mss Col 2513
TSECP: T. S. Eliot Collection of Papers:
[Notebook]: ‘Complete poems of T. S. Eliot’. Holograph with the
author’s MS corrections. Final 2 pp are holograph copies of poems
by Tristan Corbiere. Bound, n.d.
[Poems]: ‘[Poems]’. Holograph, typescript, and typescript (carbon),
incomplete, with the author’s MS corrections, n.d. (34 pp, 28 pp)
[Waste Land]: ‘Waste land, The’. Typescript with the author’s MS
corrections. 18 pp include author’s drafts and revisions, n.d.
Berkeley Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
BL British Library, London
SP: Schiff Papers, Add. MS 52919
TH: Edward (Ted) James Hughes Papers: ‘Introduction to a
Reading of The Waste Land, Palace Theatre, Sept 25 88’, Speeches,
Eulogies and biographical pieces, Add. MS 88918/6/11, fos 44–8
Bodleian Bodleian Special Collections, Weston Library, University of Oxford:
AVHE/D1–4: Archive of Vivienne Haigh Eliot/Diaries, 4 vols: 1.
1914, MS.Eng.Misc.e.876; 2. 1919, MS.Eng.Misc.f.532; 3. 1934,
MS.Eng.Misc.e.877; 4. 1935, MS.Eng.Misc.e.878
MT: Mary Trevelyan, ‘The Pope of Russell Square’, unpublished TS,
Dep. c. 969
PTEL: Papers of T. E. Lawrence and A. W. Lawrence, MS. Eng. d.
3341
WTSE: Works of T. S. Eliot, ‘Manuscript and typescript drafts of
“The rock”, with related correspondence, 1933–1934’ MS. Don. d. 44
Buffalo Poetry Collection, University at Buffalo, NY
Cambridge EPHB: Eliot, Papers of the Hayward Bequest of T. S. Eliot
Material, GBR/0272/HB/B/16, Archive Centre, King’s College,
University of Cambridge
Chicago HMP: Harrier Monroe Papers, Hanna Holborn Gray Special
Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library

Cornell Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University,
Ithaca, NY
Dorking Dorking Museum, Surrey.
Eliot Estate Estate of T. S. Eliot, London:
EVE: Valerie Eliot, ‘The Waste Land: Broadcast Script’, 2 Nov.
1971, BBC Radio 3 (7 Nov. 1971)
HWE: Henry Ware Eliot, ‘Excerpts from Manuscripts of various
lectures given by T. S. Eliot in America, 1932–1933, which T. S. E.
allowed me to read while we were at Randolph, N. H. in June, 1933’
VOB1–2: ‘Valerie’s Own Book of Poems by T. S. Eliot’, manuscript
notebook, 2 vols
Emory Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library,
Robert A. Woodruff Library, Emory University, Atlanta, GA
Faber Faber & Faber, London
Hamilton SpArc Special Collections and Archives, Hamilton College,
Clinton, NY
Houghton Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA:
JRF: Jeanne Robert Foster letters from Ezra Pound and other
papers, MS Am 1635
TSEMP: T. S. Eliot Miscellaneous Papers, MS Am. 1691.3
TSEP: T. S. Eliot Papers, MS Am. 1691
Kislak Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts,
University of Pennsylvania:
CGC: Carl Gatter Collection on Ezra Pound, Ms. Coll. 182
EPRC: Ezra Pound Research Collection, Ms. Coll. 183
Lausanne MH Musée Historique Lausanne, Vaud
Lausanne Vd Ville de Lausanne, Vaud
Lilly Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington
McHenry Special Collections and Archives, McHenry Library University of
California, Santa Cruz
McMaster McMaster University Library, Hamilton, Ontario:
BRA: Bertrand Russell Archives
LCM: Lady Constance Malleson fonds
Margate Margate Museum, Kent
NA National Archives, Kew, Surrey
Norton W. W. Norton, New York
Princeton Manuscripts Division, Department of Special Collections, Princeton
University Library, Princeton, NJ:
EHL: Emily Hale Letters from T. S. Eliot, C0686
TSEC: T. S. Eliot Collection, C0896
RAA Royal Academy of Arts, London
Texas Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas:
EPC: Ezra Pound Collection, MS-03308
EPL: Ezra Pound Library, LI-10962, PS 3509 L43 W3 1922 PND
FSFC: F. S. Flint Collection, MS-1423

JRP: John Rodker Papers
MHP: Mary Hutchinson Papers
NCC: Nancy Cunard Collection; NCC/D1–3: Diaries 1919, 3
vols: 1. Apr.–June 1919, b. 22, f. 8; 2. June–Aug. 1919, b. 23, f. 1; 3,
Aug.–Dec. 1919, b. 23, f. 2; NCC/S1–3: Nancy Cunard Collection /
Scrapbooks 1913–29, 3 vols: 1. 1913–1921, b. 26, f. 1; 2. 1919–1929,
b. 26, f. 2; 3. 1921–27, b. 26, f. 3
OMC: Ottoline Morrell Collection
OSC: Osbert Sitwell Collection
TSEC: T. S. Eliot Collection, ‘The Waste Land’, handwritten copy,
signed, made for an auction benefitting the London Library, 1960,
T. S. Eliot Collection, Series I, b. 3, f. 15
Toledo EPP: Ward M. Ezra Pound Papers, The Cantos (MSS-057), b. 1, f. 1,
Center for Special Collections, University of Toledo Libraries, OH
Tulsa JHEC: John Hamilton Edwards Collection of Ezra Pound,
‘Criticism of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’, author typescript, 1951,
Department of Special Collections and University Archives
McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa, OK
Virginia DSC: David Schwab Collection of T. S. Eliot Manuscripts 1918–
1933, MSS 7556, Special Collections, Albert and Shirley Small
Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville
Washington WGEPP: William Greenleaf Eliot Personal Papers, 1829–1937
(WUA00068), Series 6, b. 1, f. 5, Department of Special Collections,
John M. Olin Library, Washington University Libraries,
Washington University in St Louis, MO

II – Published Works
Books by T. S. Eliot
ALAL American Literature and the American Language, St Louis, MO: Washing-
ton University, 1953
Animula Animula, The Ariel Poems, No. 23, London: Faber & Faber, 1929
ASG After Strange Gods, London: Faber & Faber, 1934
AVP Ara Vos Prec, London: Ovid Press, 1920
CC To Criticise the Critic, London: Faber & Faber, 1965
CP1936 Collected Poems 1909–1935, London: Faber & Faber, 1936
Dante Dante, London: Faber & Faber, 1929
DS The Dry Salvages, London: Faber & Faber, 1941
EE Elizabethan Essays, London: Faber & Faber, 1934
EED Essays on Elizabethan Drama, New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1932
EPMP Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry, New York: Knopf, 1917 [1918]
FLA For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order, London: Faber &
Gwyer, 1928
FPV From Poe to Valéry, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1948
FU The Family Reunion, London: Faber & Faber/New York: Harcourt, Brace
and Co., 1939
HJD Homage to John Dryden: Three Essays on Poetry of the Seventeenth Century,
London: Hogarth Press, 1924
ICS The Idea of a Christian Society, London: Faber & Faber, 1939
KEPB Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley, London: Faber
& Faber, 1964/New York: Farrar, Straus & Company, 1964
LG Little Gidding, London: Faber & Faber, 1942
Marina Marina, London: Faber & Faber, 1930
MP The Music of Poetry, Glasgow: Jackson, Son & Co., 1942
OPP On Poetry and Poets, London: Faber & Faber, 1957
P1919 Poems, London: Hogarth Press, 1919
P1920 Poems, New York: Knopf, 1920
P1925 Poems 1909–1925, London: Faber & Gwyer, 1925
POO Prufrock and Other Observations, London: Egoist, 1917
Rock The Rock: A Pageant Play, London: Faber & Faber, 1934
SA Sweeney Agonistes: Fragments of an Aristophanic Melodrama, London:
Faber & Faber, 1932
SE Selected Essays: 1917–1932, London: Faber & Faber, 1932; 3rd English
edition, London and Boston: Faber & Faber, 1951
SS A Song for Simeon, London: Faber & Faber, 1928
SW The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, London: Methuen & Co.,
1920
TWL1922 The Waste Land, New York: Boni & Liveright, 1922
TWL1923 The Waste Land, London: Hogarth, 1923
TWLF The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts

(ed. Valerie Eliot), London: Faber & Faber/New York: Harcourt, Brace,
Jovanovich, 1971 (see Annotated editions, below)
UPUC The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the Relation of Criticism
to Poetry in England, London: Faber & Faber, 1933
WM Words for Music, Bryn Mawr, PA: [Bryn Mawr], 1934
Articles by T. S. Eliot
Eliot, T. S., ‘Address’ (at the Centennial Celebration of the Mary Institute),
From Mary to You: Centennial, 1859–1959, St Louis, MO: Mary Institute,
1959, 133–6
——, ‘American Literature’, Athenaeum, 4643 (25 Apr. 1919), 236–7
——, ‘Andrew Marvell’, Times Literary Supplement, 1002 (31 Mar. 1921),
201–2
——, ‘Ben Jonson’, Times Literary Supplement, 930 (13 Nov. 1919), 637–8
——, ‘A Commentary’, Criterion, XIII. 52 (Apr. 1934), 451–4
——, ‘A Commentary’, Criterion, XIV. 57 ( July 1935), 610–13
——, ‘Contemporanea. A review, in part, of Tarr, by P. Lewis, Wyndham,
and The People’s Palace, by Sacheverell Sitwell’, Egoist, 5 ( June–July 1918),
84
——, ‘Criticism in England’, Athenaeum, 4650 (13 June 1919), 456–7
——, ‘Dante as a “Spiritual Leader”’, Athenaeum, 4692 (2 Apr. 1920), 441–2
——, ‘Dramatis Personae’, Criterion, I. 3 (Apr 1923), 303–6
——, ‘“The Duchess of Malfi” at the Lyric: and Poetic Drama’, Art & Letters,
III. 1 (Winter 1920), 36–9
——, ‘The Education of Taste’, Athenaeum, 4652 (27 June 1919), 61
——, ‘Eeldrop and Appleplex – I’, Little Review, IV. 1 (May 1917), 7–11
——, ‘Ezra Pound’, Poetry (Chicago), LXVIII. 6 (Sept. 1946), 326–38
——, ‘A Foreign Mind’, Athenaeum, 4653 (4 July 1919), 552–3
——, ‘A French Romantic’, Times Literary Supplement, 980 (28 Oct. 1920),
703
——, ‘G. K. Chesterton’, Tablet, 167 (20 June 1936), 785
——, ‘Hamlet and His Problems’, Athenaeum, 4665 (26 Sept. 1919), 940–1
——, ‘In Memory of Henry James’, Egoist, 5 ( Jan. 1918), 1–2
——, ‘The Influence of Landscape upon the Poet’, Dædalus, 89 (Spring
1960), 420– 2
——, ‘Introduction’, in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain),
London: Cresset Press/New York: Chanticleer, 1950, vii–xvi
——, ‘Introduction’, in Charles Baudelaire: Intimate Journals (tr. Christopher
Isherwood), London: Blackamore Press, 1930, 7–26

——, ‘Introduction’, in The Pensées of Pascal (tr. W. F. Trotter), London: Dent/
New York: Dutton, 1931, vii–xix
——, ‘Introduction’, in Seneca his Tenne Tragedies Translated into English,
Edited by Thomas Newton Anno 1581, vol. 1, London: Constable/New
York: Knopf, 1927
——, ‘John Maynard Keynes’, New English Weekly, 29 (16 May 1946), 47–8
——, ‘Kipling Redivivus’, Athenaeum, 4645 (9 May 1919), 297–8
——, ‘Leadership and Letters’, Milton Bulletin, XII. 1 (Feb. 1949), 3–16.
——, ‘Lecture Notes for English 26: English Literature from 1890 to the
Present Day’, in Complete Prose 4, 774
——, ‘The Lesson of Baudelaire’, Tyro, 1 ([Spring 1921]), [4]
——, ‘Literature and the Modern World’, The Teaching Church Review: A
Journal for Students of Religion, 5 (Feb. 1935), 11–15; rep. American Prefac-
es, Iowa City, IA: I. 2 (Nov. 1935), 19–22
——, ‘London Letter: March, 1921’, Dial, LXX. 4 (Apr. 1921), 448–53
——, ‘London Letter: May, 1921’, Dial, LXX. 6 ( June 1921), 686–91
——, ‘London Letter: July, 1921’, Dial, LXXI. 2 (Aug. 1921), 213–17
——, ‘London Letter: September, 1921’, Dial, LXXI. 4 (Oct. 1921), 452–5
——, ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, Times Literary Supplement, 1031 (20 Oct.
1921), 669–70
——, ‘The Method of Mr Pound’, Athenaeum, 4669 (24 Oct. 1919), 1065–6
——, ‘Mr Pound and his Poetry’, Athenaeum, XCIII, 4671 (7 Nov. 1919),
1163
——, ‘Mr T. S. Eliot’s Quandaries’, New English Weekly, IV (12 Apr. 1934),
662–3
——, ‘Modern Tendencies in Poetry’, Shama’a, 1 (Apr. 1920), 9–18
——, ‘The New Elizabethans and the Old’, Athenaeum, 4640 (4 Apr. 1919),
134–6
——, ‘A Note on Ezra Pound’, To-Day, 4 (Sept. 1918), 3–9
——, ‘Observations’, Egoist, 5 (May 1918), 69–70
——, ‘On a Recent Piece of Criticism’, Purpose, X. 2 (Apr./June 1938), 90–4
——, ‘The Perfect Critic [I]’, Athenaeum, 4706 (9 July 1920), 40–1
——, ‘The Perfect Critic, II’, Athenaeum, 4708 (23 July 1920), 102–4
——, ‘Philip Massinger’, Times Literary Supplement, 958 (27 May 1920),
325–6
——, ‘The Poetic Drama’, Athenaeum, 4698 (14 May 1920), 635–6
——, ‘The Poetry of W. B. Yeats’, Purpose, 12 ( July/Dec. 1940), 115–27
——, ‘The Possibility of a Poetic Drama’, Dial, LXIX. 5 (Nov. 1920), 441–7
——, ‘The Post Georgians’, Athenaeum, 4641 (11 Apr. 1919), 171–2
——, ‘The Preacher as Artist’, Athenaeum, 4674 (28 Nov. 1919), 1252–3

——, ‘Prose and Verse’, The Chapbook, 22 (Apr. 1921), 3–10
——, [unsigned], ‘Publisher’s Preface’, in James B. Connolly, Fisherman of the
Banks, London: Faber & Gwyer, 1928, vii–viii
——, ‘Reflections on Contemporary Poetry [IV]’, Egoist, 6 ( July 1919),
39–40
——, [‘Richard Aldington’], Alister Kershaw and Frédéric-Jacques Temple
(eds), Richard Aldington: An Intimate Portrait, Carbondale and Edwards-
ville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965, 24–5
——, ‘The Romantic Englishman, the Comic Spirit, and the Function of
Criticism’, Tyro, 1 ([Spring 1921]), [4]
——, ‘A Romantic Patrician’, Athenaeum, 4644 (2 May 1919), 265–7
——, ‘A Sceptical Patrician’, Athenaeum, 4647 (23 May 1919), 361–2
——, ‘Syllabus for a Tutorial Class in Modern English Literature’, London:
University of London Press, 1918
——, ‘Tarr’, Egoist, 5 (Sept. 1918), 105–6
——, ‘The Three Voices of Poetry’, Annual Lecture of the National Book
League, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953
——, ‘Thomas Stearns Eliot’, Harvard College Class of 1910, Secretary’s Fourth
Report, Cambridge, MA: Crimson Printing Co., 1921, 107–8
——, ‘Thomas Stearns Eliot’, Harvard College Class of 1910, Twenty-Fifth
Anniversary Report, Cambridge, MA: Crimson Printing Co., 1935,
219–21
——, ‘To the Editor of the Transatlantic Review’, Transatlantic Review, 1
( Jan. 1924), 95–6
——, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent [I]’, Egoist, VI. 4 (Sept. 1919),
54–5
——, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent – II’, Egoist, VI. 5 ([Nov./] Dec.
1919), 72–3
——, ‘Ulysses, Order, and Myth’, Dial, LXXV. 5 (Nov. 1923), 480–3
——, ‘The Use of Poetry’, New English Weekly, V (14 Jun. 1934), 215
——, ‘Verse Pleasant and Unpleasant’, Egoist, 5 (Mar. 1918), 43–4
——, ‘War-paint and Feathers’, Athenaeum, 4668 (17 Oct. 1919), 1036
——, ‘Whether Rostand Had Something about Him’, Athenaeum, 4656 (25
July 1919), 665–6
——, ‘Why Mr Russell Is a Christian’, Criterion, VI. 2 (Aug. 1927), 177–9
Annotated editions
Collected Prose The Collected Prose of T. S. Eliot (ed. Archie Burnett), London: Faber
& Faber, 2023

Complete Prose 1–8 The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition (general
ed. Ronald Schuchard), 8 vols, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press/London: Faber & Faber, 2014–19
IMH Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909–1917 (ed. Christopher
Ricks), London: Faber & Faber, 1996
PTSE1–2 The Poems of T. S. Eliot (eds Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue), 2
vols, London: Faber & Faber, 2015
TWLF The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts
(ed. Valerie Eliot), London: Faber & Faber/New York: Harcourt,
Brace, Jovanovich, 1971 (as TWLF1971 where pagination is to be
distinguished from TWLF2022, centenary edition in full colour,
London: Faber & Faber/New York: W. W. Norton, 2022)
Books by Ezra Pound

ABC ABC of Reading, London: George Routledge, 1934; new edition, London
Faber & Faber, 1951, 1960
Cathay Cathay: Translations for the Most Part from the Chinese of Rihaku, from
the Notes of the Late Ernest Fenollosa, and the Decipherings of the Professors
Mori and Ariga, London: Elkin Mathews, 1915
Canzoni Canzoni, London: Elkin Mathews, 1911
Cantos Cantos, fourth collected edition, London: Faber & Faber, 1987 (thir-
teenth printing, including Pound’s English translation of ‘Canto LXXII’,
repaginated after p. 441, New York: New Directions, 1995 [1996])
CNPJ Certain Noble Plays of Japan, Churchtown, Dundrum: 1916
DFC Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX to CXVII, New York: New Directions,
1969/London: Faber & Faber, 1970
DRL Diptych Rome–London, New York: New Directions, 1958
DTC A Draft of XXX Cantos, Paris: Hours, 1930; revised edition, London:
Faber & Faber, 1933
Exultations Exultations, London: Elkin Mathews, 1909
FC The Fourth Canto, London: Ovid, 1919
FTS Five Troubadour Songs: With the Original Provençal words and English
Words Adapted from Chaucer, Arranged by Agnes Bedford, London: Boosey
& Co., 1920
GB Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir, London: John Lane, Bodley Head, 1916
GK Guide to Kulchur, London: Faber & Faber/New York: New Directions,
1938
HSM Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, London: Ovid, 1920
Instigations Instigations, New York: Boni & Liveright, 1920
L1916 Lustra, London: Elkin Mathews, 1916
L1917 Lustra, with Earlier Poems, New York: Alfred Knopf, 1917
LE Literary Essays (ed. T. S. Eliot), London: Faber & Faber, 1954
NA ‘Noh’ or Accomplishment: A Study of the Classical Stage of Japan by Ernest
Fenollosa and Ezra Pound, London: Macmillan & Co., 1916 [1917]

P1921 Poems 1918–1921, New York: Boni & Liveright, 1921
PC1948 The Pisan Cantos, New York: New Directions, 1948/London: Faber &
Faber, 1949
PC2015 Posthumous Cantos (ed. Massimo Bacigalupo), Manchester: Carcanet,
2015
PD1918 Pavannes and Divisions, New York: Knopf, 1918
PD1958 Pavannes and Divagations, New York: New Directions, 1958
P1909 Personae, London: Elkin Mathews, 1909
P1926 Personae, New York: Boni & Liveright, 1926
QPA Quia Pauper Amavi, London: The Egoist, 1919
Ripostes Ripostes, London: Stephen Swift & Co., 1912
SC Social Credit: An Impact, London: Stanley Nott, 1935
SP1928 Selected Poems (ed. T. S. Eliot), London: Faber & Gwyer, 1928
SP1949 Selected Poems (ed. T. S. Eliot), London: Faber & Faber, 1949
SP1975 Selected Poems 1908–1959, London: Faber & Faber, 1975; revised edition,
London: Faber & Faber, 1977
SR The Spirit of Romance, London: Dent, 1910
Umbra Umbra: Early Poems, London: Elkin Mathews, 1920
VC A Visiting Card, London: Peter Russell, 1952 (trans. John Drummond
from Cara da Vista, Rome: Edizioni di Lettere d’Oggi, 1942)
WMF What is Money For? London: Great Britain Publications, 1939; rep. Lon-
don: Peter Russell, 1952
WTSF A Walking Tour in Southern France: Ezra Pound among the Troubadours (ed.
Richard Sieburth), New York: New Directions, 1992
Articles by Ezra Pound

Pound, Ezra, ‘Arnaut Daniel (Razo)’, Art & Letters, III. 2 (Spring 1920),
44–9
——, ‘Books Current – Joyce’, Future, II. 6 (May 1918), 161–3
——, ‘Briefer Mention’, Dial, LXX. 1. ( Jan. 1921), 110
——, ‘C. H. Douglas, Etc.’, Little Magazine, I. 2 (Feb./Mar. 1934), 16
——, ‘A Canticle . . . (Special to H. T. of St Louis)’, Much Ado, X. 3 (1 Jan.
1920), 1
——, ‘A Communication’, 1924: A Magazine of the Arts, 3 (Sept./Nov.) 1924,
97–8
——, ‘Credit and the Fine Arts . . . A Practical Application’, New Age, XXX.
22 (30 Mar. 1922), 284–5
——, ‘The Crusades: A Reply to Mr Chesterton’, Daily Telegraph (17 Sept.
1920), 12
——, ‘De Gourmont: A Distinction (Followed by Notes)’, Little Review, 5,
10–11 (Feb./Mar. 1919), 1–19.
——, ‘The Death of Vorticism’, Little Review, 10/11 (Feb./Mar. 1919), 45, 48

——, ‘Dramedy’, Athenaeum, 4688 (5 Mar. 1920), 315
——, ‘Drunken Helots and Mr Eliot’, Egoist, IV ( June 1917), 72–4
——, ‘For T. S. E.’, Sewanee Review, LXXIV. 1 (Winter [1965/]1966), 109
——, ‘Harold Monro’, Criterion, XI. XLV ( July 1932), 581–92
——, ‘Historical Survey’, Little Review (‘Brancusi Number’), VIII. 1
(Autumn 1921), 39–42
——, ‘How I Began’, T. P.’s Weekly, XXI. 552 (6 June 1913), 707
——, ‘Imaginary Letters – IV (Walter Villerant to Mrs Bland Burn)’, Little
Review, IV. 5 (Sept. 1917), 21
——, ‘In Explication’, Little Review, V. 4 (Aug. 1918), 5–9
——, ‘Indiscretions; or, Une revue de deux Mondes – I’, New Age, 1446,
XXVII. 4 (27 May 1920), 56–7
——, ‘Indiscretions; or, Une Revue de Deux Mondes – II’, New Age, 1447,
XXVII. 5 (3 June 1920), 76–7
——, ‘Indiscretions; or, Une Revue de Deux Mondes – III’, New Age, 1448,
XXVII. 6 (10 June 1920), 91–2
——, ‘Indiscretions; or, Une Revue de Deux Mondes – VII’, New Age, 1452,
XXVII. 10 (8 July 1920), 156–7
——, ‘Indiscretions; or, Une Revue de Deux Mondes – IX’, New Age, 1454,
XXVII. 12 (22 July 1920), 187–8
——, ‘Indiscretions; or, Une Revue de Deux Mondes – X’, New Age, 1455,
XXVII. 13 (29 July 1920), 204
——, ‘Indiscretions; or, Une Revue de Deux Mondes – XII’, New Age, 1457,
XXVII. 15 (12 Aug. 1920), 236–7
——, ‘The Island of Paris: A Letter, October 1920’, Dial, LXIX. 5 (Nov.
1920), 515–18
——, ‘The Island of Paris: A Letter, November 1920’, Dial, LXIX. 6 (Dec
1920), 635–9
——, ‘A Letter from London’, Much Ado, X. 5 (2 Feb 1920), 1
——, ‘The Little Review Calendar’, Little Review, VII. 2 (Spring 1922), 2
——, ‘List of Books: Comment by Ezra Pound’, Little Review, IV. 4 (Aug.
1917), 11
——, ‘Londres et ses environs: Un petit guide pour l’étranger bien intention-
né’, L’Art libre, II. 1 (1 Jan. 1920), 2–3; ‘London and its Environs. A Short
Guide for the Well-Meaning Foreigner’, tr. Archie Henderson, ‘Pound’s
Contributions to L’Art Libre (1920)’, Paideuma: Modern and Contemporary
Poetry and Poetics, 13. 2 (Fall 1984), 271–83
——, ‘Mr Eliot’s Looseness’, New English Weekly, V. 4 (10 May 1934), 95–6
——, ‘Mr Eliot’s Quandaries’, New English Weekly, IV (29 Mar. 1934), 558–9
——, ‘Mr Pound and his Poetry’, Athenaeum, XCIII, 4670 (31 Oct. 1919),

1132
—— (‘William Atheling’), ‘Music’, New Age, XVIII. 4 (25 Nov. 1920), 44
—— (‘William Atheling’), ‘Music’, New Age, XVIII. 8 (23 Dec. 1920), 92–3
——, ‘The New Sculpture’, Egoist, I. 4 (16 Feb. 1914), 67–8
——, ‘Pastiche. The Regional. I’, New Age, XXV. 7 (12 June 1919), 124
——, ‘Pastiche. The Regional. II’, New Age, XXV. 9 (26 June 1919), 156
——, ‘Pastiche. The Regional. VIII[–IX] [i.e. VII]’, New Age, XXV. 17 (21
Aug. 1919), 284
——, ‘Pastiche. The Regional. XVIII’, New Age, XXVI. 3 (20 Nov. 1919), 48
——, ‘Prologomena’ [sic], Poetry Review, I. 2 (Feb. 1912), 72–6
——, ‘Propertius and Mr Pound’, Observer (25 Jan. 1920), 5
——, ‘Small Magazines’, English Journal, XIX. 9 (Nov. 1930), 689–704
——, ‘T. S. Eliot’, Poetry (Chicago), X. 5 (Aug. 1917), 264–71
——, ‘T. S. Eliot’, We Moderns: Gotham Book Mart 1920–1940 (eds Frances
Stelo and Kay Steele), New York: Gotham Book Mart, 1939, 24–5
——, ‘“Tarr”, by Wyndham Lewis’, Little Review, IV. 11 (Mar. 1918), 35
——, ‘The Revolt of Intelligence – V’, New Age, XXVI. 10 (8 Jan. 1920),
153–4
——, ‘The Revolt of Intelligence – VI’, New Age, XXV. 11 (15 Jan. 1920),
176–7
——, ‘The Revolt of Intelligence – VIII’, New Age, XXVI. 18 (4 Mar. 1920),
287–8
——, ‘Through Alien Eyes, I’, New Age, XII. 11 (16 Jan. 1913), 252
——, ‘Troubadours: Their Sorts and Conditions’, Quarterly Review, CCXIX.
437 (Oct. 1913), 426–40
——, ‘Vers Libre and Arnold Dolmetsch’, Egoist, IV. 6 ( July 1917), 90–1
——, ‘Vorticism’, Fortnightly Review, XCVI. 573 (1 Sept. 1914), 461–71
Annotated editions
DFFN Drafts and Fragments: Facsimile Notebooks 1958–1959, New York:
Glenn Horowitz, Bookseller, 2010
EPPP1–11 Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose: Contributions to Periodicals
(eds Lea Baechler, Walton A. Litz and James Logenbach), 11 vols, New
York: Garland, 1991
PT Poems and Translations (ed. Richard Sieburth), New York: Library of
America, 2003
SPT Selected Poems and Translations (ed. Richard Sieburth), New York:
New Directions, 2010/London: Faber & Faber, 2011
VETC Variorum Edition of ‘Three Cantos’: A Prototype (ed. Richard Taylor),
Bayreuth: Boomerang – Norbert Aas, 1991

III – Correspondence
List of correspondents
AAK Alfred A. Knopf FSF F. S. Flint
AB Agnes Bedford GB George Boyle
ACH Alice Corbin Henderson GF Geoffrey Faber
AF Angel Flores GC Godfrey Childe
AFD Albert Frank-Duquesne GS Gilbert Seldes
AG Alyse Gregory GZ Gregor Ziemer
AH Aldous Huxley HAM H. A. Moe
AL Amy Lowell HC Harry Crosby
APGG André (Paul Guillaume) Gide HEM Harold Edward Monro
ARO A. R. Orage HG Horace Gregory
BB Basil Bunting HGJ Howell G. Jenkins
BGB B. G. Brooks HH Hermann Hesse
BP Brigit Patmore HHS H. H. Shakespeare (DS’s
BR Bertrand Russell father)
CA Conrad Aiken HL Horace Liveright
CB Clive Bell HLM H. L. Mencken
CCA Claude Colleer Abbott HLP Homer Loomis Pound (EP’s
CG Charles Guenther father)
CL Carlo Linati HM Harriet Monroe
CM Constance Malleson HR Herbert Read
CN Charles Norman HRC Harry Ransom Center
CWE Charlotte Ware Eliot, TSE’s HRCW Harold Raymond (Chatto &
mother Windus)
DC Dora Carrington HSW Harriet Shaw Weaver
DG Donald Gallup HW Hugh Walpole
DHW Daniel H. Woodward HWE Henry Ware Eliot (TSE’s
DI David Ignatow brother)
DJCG Duncan ( James Corrowr) HWES Henry (‘Hal’) Ware Eliot Snr
Grant (TSE’s father)
DP Dorothy Pound IB Isaiah Berlin
EEC E. E. Cummings ISC Iris Sylvia Crump (Iris Barry)
EH Emily Hale JCS J. C. Squire
EHH Eleanor Holmes Hinkley JE Jonathan Edwards
EK Ellen Kellond JF John Freeman
ELM Emily Lina Mirrlees JG Joy Grant
EMH Ernest (Miller) Hemingway JH Julian Huxley
E/RCC Edward/Rebecca Clarke Cum- JHW J. H. Woods
mings JJ James Joyce
EP Ezra Pound JK John Keats
FB Frank Budgen JMM John Middleton Murry
FES Felix E. Schelling JQ John Quinn

JR John Rodker RF Roger Fry
JRF Jean Robert Foster RL Robert Lowell
JSW James Sibley Watson RNL Robert N. Linscott
JV Jean Verdenal RS Robert Sencourt
KA Kenneth Allott RW Richard Woodhouse
LL Lucille Liveright SB Sylvia Beach
LS Lytton Strachey SHS Stephen Harold Spender
LW Leonard Woolf SN Stanley Nott
MA Margaret Anderson SOF Seán O’Faoláin
MB Maxwell Bodenheim SS Sydney Schiff (Stephen Hud-
MEB Mary (Ethel) Barnard son)
MC Marguerite Caetani ST Scofield Thayer
MdR Mary de Rachewiltz SW Sydney Waterlow
MF Maurice Firuski TEC Thomas E. Connolly
MG Michael Goldman TEL T. E. Lawrence
MH Mary Hutchinson TES Theodora Eliot Smith (TSE’s
MHW Maurice Haigh-Wood niece)
MLD Margaret Llewelyn Davies TH Thomas Hardy
MLH Mary Lilian Harmsworth THB Thomas H. Benton
(Lady Rothermere) TLE Thomas Lamb Eliot (TSE’s
MM Marianne Moore uncle)
MMC Mary Moore Cross TSE T. S. Eliot
MS May Sinclair TSM T. Sturge Moore
MsF Miss Fredman VB Vanessa Bell
MUC Master, University College, VD Violet Dickinson
Oxford VHE Vivien Haigh Eliot
MWC Marquis W. Childs VHH V. H. Healey
NRF La Nouvelle Revue Française VS Violet Schiff
( Jacques Rivière) VW Virginia Woolf
OM Ottoline Morrell WBY W. B. Yeats
OS Olivia Shakespeare (DM’s WCW William Carlos Williams
mother) WFS William Force Stead
PG Patricia Gruber WGH W. G. Hale
PMJ P. M. Jack WHDR W. H. D. Rouse
PWR P. W. Robertson WL Wyndham Lewis
RA Richard Aldington WS William Sollory
RCS Richard Cobden-Sanderson WWH W. Wilbur Hatfield
Letters from T. S. Eliot

TSEL1–9 The Letters of T. S. Eliot (eds Valerie Eliot, Hugh Haughton and John
Haffenden), 9 vols (incl. revised edition of vol. 1), London: Faber &
Faber, 2009–21; especially vol. 1, 1898–1922 (eds Valerie Eliot and Hugh
Haughton), revised edition, London: Faber & Faber, 2009

Letters from Ezra Pound
EPSL Letters of Ezra Pound 1907–1941 (ed. D. D. Paige), New York: Har-
court Brace, 1950; rep. as Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, New York: New
Directions/London: Faber & Faber, 1971; references to the original and
repaginated British edition of 1951 – Letters of Ezra Pound 1907–1941 (ed.
D. D. Paige), London: Faber & Faber, 1951 – are given in brackets at the
end of the citation
EPLC Pound/Cummings: The Correspondence of Ezra Pound and E. E. Cummings (ed.
Barry Ahearn), Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1996
EPLD Pound, Thayer, Watson, and The Dial: A Story in Letters (ed. Walter Sutton),
Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1994
EPLF Pound/Ford: The Story of a Literary Friendship: The Correspondence between
Ezra Pound and Ford Madox Ford and Their Writings about Each Other (ed.
Brita Linberg-Seyersted), London: Faber & Faber, 1982
EPLH The Letters of Ezra Pound to Alice Corbin Henderson (ed. Ira B. Nadel), Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1993
EPLJ Pound/Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce with Pound’s Essay on
Joyce (ed. Forrest Read), London: Faber & Faber, 1967
EPLJL Ezra Pound and James Laughlin: Selected Letters (ed. David M. Gordon), New
York: W. W. Norton, 1994
EPLWL Pound/Lewis: The Letters of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis (ed. Timothy
Materer), London: Faber & Faber, 1985
EPLLR Pound/The Little Review: The Letters of Ezra Pound to Margaret Anderson (eds
Thomas L. Scott and Melvin J. Friedman with Jackson R. Bryer), London:
Faber & Faber, 1988
EPLN One Must Not Go Altogether with the Tide: The Letters of Ezra Pound and
Stanley Nott (ed. Miranda B. Hickman), Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Univer-
sity Press, 2011
EPLP Ezra Pound to His Parents: Letters 1895–1929 (eds Mary de Rachewiltz, A.
David Moody and Joanna Moody), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010
EPLQ The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound to John Quinn, 1915–1924 (ed. Timothy
Materer), Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991
EPLS Ezra Pound and Dorothy Shakespeare: Their Letters 1909–1914 (eds Omar
Pound and A. Walton Litz), London: Faber & Faber, 1984, 1985
EPLW Pound/Williams: Selected Letters of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams
(ed. Hugh Witemeyer), New York: New Directions, 1996
EPLZ Pound/Zukofsky: Selected Letters of Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky (ed. Barry
Ahearn), London: Faber & Faber, 1987
Other correspondence
AHL Aldous Huxley, Letters of Aldous Huxley (ed. Grover Smith), London:
Chatto & Windus, 1969
BRSL1–2 Bertrand Russell, Selected Letters, 2 vols (ed. Nicholas Griffin), Boston:

Houghton Mifflin, 1992
CASL Conrad Aiken, Selected Letters of Conrad Aiken (ed. Joseph Killorin), New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978
EECSL E. E. Cummings, Selected Letters (eds F. W. Dupee and George Stade),
London: André Deutsch, 1972
EMHL1–5 Ernest (Miller) Hemingway, The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, 5 vols
(general ed. Sandra Spanier), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2011–20
ESSL Edith Sitwell, Selected Letters 1919–1964 (eds John Lehmann and Derek
Parker), New York: Vanguard, 1970
HCL Hart Crane, The Letters of Hart Crane 1916–1932 (ed. Brom Weber), New
York: Heritage House, 1952
JJL James Joyce, Letters of James Joyce (ed. Stuart Gilbert), London: Faber &
Faber/New York: Viking, 1957
JJL1–3 James Joyce, Letters of James Joyce (eds Stuart Gilbert and Richard Ell-
mann), new edition, 3 vols, London: Faber & Faber/New York: Viking,
1966–7
JKL Letters of John Keats (ed. Robert Gittings), Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1970
JMMLM John Middleton Murry, Letters of John Middleton Murry to Katherine
Mansfield (ed. C. A. Hankin), London: Constable, 1983
KMCL1–5 Katherine Mansfield, Collected Letters, 5 vols (eds Vincent O’Sullivan and
Margaret Scott), Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984–2008
LSL Lytton Strachey, The Letters of Lytton Strachey (ed. Paul Levy), New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005
LWL Leonard Woolf, Letters of Leonard Woolf (ed. Frederic Spotts), New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989
MM[S]L Marianne Moore, Selected Letters of Marianne Moore (eds Bonnie Costel-
lo, Celeste Goodridge and Christanne Miller), New York: Knopf, 1997
RAAL Richard Aldington, An Autobiography in Letters (ed. Norman T. Gates),
University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1992
RLL Robert Lowell, The Letters of Robert Lowell (ed. Saskia Hamilton), Lon-
don: Faber & Faber, 2005
VBSL Venessa Bell, The Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell (ed. Regina Marler), New
York: Pantheon, 1993
VWD1–5 Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf (eds Anne Olivier Bell and
Andrew McNeillie), 5 vols, London: Hogarth Press, 1977–84
VWL1–6 Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf (ed. Nigel Nicolson, asst.
Joanne Trautmann), 6 vols, London: Hogarth Press, 1975–80
WBYL W. B. Yeats, The Letters of W. B. Yeats (ed. Allan Wade), London: Rupert
Hart-Davis, 1954
WCWSL William Carlos Williams, The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams
(ed. John C. Thirlwall), New York: New Directions, 1957
WLL Wyndham Lewis, The Letters of Wyndham Lewis (ed. W. K. Rose), New
York: New Directions, 1963

IV – Additional Works and Further Reading
Bibliographies
Bonnell, F. W. and F. C. Bonnell, Conrad Aiken: A Bibliography (1902–1978),
San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1982
Cloud, Gerald W., John Rodker’s Ovid Press: A Bibliographical History, New
Castle, DE: Oak Knoll, 2010
Edwards, John, A Preliminary Checklist of the Writings of Ezra Pound, New
Haven, CT: Kirgo, 1953
Gallup, Donald, Ezra Pound: A Bibliography, Charlottesville, VA: University
Press of Virginia, 1983
——, T. S. Eliot: A Bibliography, London: Faber & Faber, 1969
Morrow, Bradford and Bernard Lafourcade, A Bibliography of the Writings of
Wyndham Lewis, Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow, 1978
Pound, Omar S. and Philip Grover, Wyndham Lewis: A Descriptive Bibliogra-
phy, Folkestone: Dawson Archon, 1978
Sackton, Alexander, The T. S. Eliot Collection of the University of Texas at Aus-
tin, Austin: University of Texas at Austin, 1975
Slocum, John J. and Herbert Cahoon, A Bibliography of James Joyce, London:
Rupert Hart-Davis, 1957
Turcon, Sheila, ‘A Bibliography of Constance Malleson’, Russell: The Journal of
Bertrand Russell Studies n.s. 32 (Winter 2012–13), 175–90
Wade, Allan, A Bibliography of the Writings of W. B. Yeats, third edition (ed.
Russell K. Alspach), London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1968
Woolmer, J. Howard, A Checklist of the Hogarth Press 1917–1946, Revere, PA:
Woolmer/Brotherson, 1986
———, The Poetry Bookshop 1912–1935: A Bibliography, Revere, PA: Wool-
mer/Brotherson, 1988
Other works
Ackroyd, Peter, Ezra Pound and His World, London: Scribner, 1980
——, T. S. Eliot, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1984
Aiken, Conrad, ‘The Anatomy of Melancholy’, New Republic (7 Feb. 1923),
294–5
——, The Charnel Rose; Senlin: A Biography; and Other Poems, Boston: Four
Seas Co., 1918
——, The House of Dust: A Symphony, Boston: Four Seas Co., 1920
——, The Jig of Forslin: A Symphony, Boston: Four Seas Co., 1916/London:
Martin Secker, 1921 [1922]
——, ‘“Our Age Has Been and Will Continue to Be His Age”: T. S. Eliot’,

Life (15 Jan. 1965), 92–3
——, ‘A Pointless Pointillist’, Dial, LXV. 775 (19 Oct. 1918), 306–7
——, Scepticisms: Notes on Contemporary Poetry, New York: Alfred Knopf,
1919
——, ‘The Scientific Critic’, Freeman, 2 (2 Mar. 1921), 593–4
——, Ushant: An Essay, New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1952
Aithal, S. Krishnamoorthy, ‘The Typewriters in the Making of “The Waste
Land”’, Studies in Bibliography, 33 (1980), 191–3
Aldington, Richard, ‘A Book for Literary Philosophers’, Poetry (Chicago),
XVI. 4 ( July 1920), 213–16
——, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot: A Lecture, London: Peacock Press, 1954
——, Images, London: Egoist, 1919
——, Life for Life’s Sake, New York: Viking, 1941/London: Cassell, 1968
——, ‘The Sacred Wood’, Today, 8. 4 (Sept. 1921), 191–3
Alexander, Michael, The Poetic Achievement of Ezra Pound, London: Faber &
Faber, 1979
Anderson, Galusha, The Story of a Border City During the Civil War, Boston:
Little, Brown, 1908
Anderson, Margaret, ‘Announcement’, Little Review, I. 1 (Mar. 1914), 5.
——, ‘Judicial Opinion (Our Suppressed October Issue)’, Little Review, IV. 8
(Dec. 1917), 46–9
——, My Thirty Years’ War: An Autobiography, New York: Covici, Friede, 1930
——, ‘“Ulysses” in Court’, Little Review, VII. 4 ( Jan.–Mar. 1921), 22–5
Anderson, Sherwood, Sherwood Anderson’s Memoirs: A Critical Edition (ed.
Ray Lewis White), Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press,
1969
Angelou, Maya, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, New York: Random
House, 1969/London: Virago, 1984
Arbuthnot, Malcolm, ‘Masters of English Prose Style’, Vanity Fair, 13. 5
(Feb. 1920), 38
Archer, William, ‘John Webster’, Nineteenth Century, LXXXVII ( Jan. 1920),
126
Bachelier, Samanthé, ‘Hidden History: The Whitewashing of the 1917 East

St Louis Riot’, Confluence, IX. 1 (Fall/Winter 2018), 16–25
Baedeker, Karl, Northern France from Belgium and the English Channel to the
Loire Excluding Paris and its Environs: Handbook for Travellers, fifth edi-
tion, Leipzig: Baedeker, 1909
——, Southern France including Corsica: Handbook for Travellers, sixth revised
edition, Leipzig: Baedeker, 1914

——, Switzerland and the Adjacent Portions of Italy, Savoy, and Tyrol: Hand-
book for Travellers, twenty-fourth edition, Leipzig: Baedeker, 1911
——, Switzerland Together with Chamonix and the Italian Lakes: Handbook for
Travellers, twenty-sixth edition, Leipzig: Baedeker, 1922
Barnes, David, ‘Fascist Aesthetics: Ezra Pound’s Cultural Negotiations in
1930s Italy’, Journal of Modern Literature, XXXIV. 1 (Fall 2010), 19–35
Barnes, Djuna, A Book, New York: Boni & Liveright, 1923
Barnes, James Strachey, Half a Life, London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1933
——, Half a Life Left, New York: Coward McCann, 1937
Barry, Iris, ‘The Ezra Pound Period’, Bookman (Oct. 1931), 159–71
Barry, Peter, ‘The Waste Land Manuscript: Picking Up the Pieces – In Order’,
Forum for Modern Language Studies, XV. 3 ( July 1979), 237–48
Beach, Joseph Warren, ‘Conrad Aiken and T. S. Eliot: Echoes and Over-
tones’, PMLA, LXIX. 4 (Sept. 1954), 753–62
Beach, Sylvia, Shakespeare and Company, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1959/
Beare, Robert L, ‘Notes on the Text of T. S. Eliot: Variants from Russell
Square’, Studies in Bibliography, IX (1957), 21–49
Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People (tr. Leo Sherley-Price, rev. R.
E. Latham, 1955, 1968), London: Penguin, 1990
Behr, Caroline, T. S. Eliot: A Chronology of His Life and Works, London: Mac-
millan, 1983
Bell, Clive, Old Friends, New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1957
——, ‘Plus de Jazz’, New Republic (21 Sept. 1921), 92–6
Bell, Robert, ‘Bertrand Russell and the Eliots’, American Scholar, 52. 3 (Sum-
mer 1983), 309–25
Benson, A. C., Edward Fitzgerald, London: Macmillan, 1905
Berryman, Jo Brantley, Circe’s Craft: Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Ann Arbor, MI:
UMI Research Press, 1983
Betjeman, John, New Bats in Old Belfries, London: John Murray, 1945
Binyon, Laurence (tr.), The Divine Comedy, 1947, rep. London: Agenda, 1979
Bishop, John Peale, ‘The Intelligence of Poets’, Vanity Fair, XVII ( Jan. 1922),
13–14
Blum, W. C., see Watson, James Sibley
Boaz, Mildred Meyer, ‘Musical and Poetic Analogues in T. S. Eliot’s The
Waste Land and Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring’, Centennial Review,
24. 2 (Spring 1980), 218–31
Bodenheim, Maxwell, ‘The Isolation of Carved Metal’, Dial, LXXII. 1 ( Jan.
1922), 87–91
Bogan, Louise, Achievement in American Poetry 1900–1950, Chicago: Henry

Regnery, 1951
Bolgan, Anne C., What the Thunder Really Said: A Retrospective Essay on the
Making of The Waste Land, Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press,
1973
Bollier, E. P., ‘T. S. Eliot’s “Lost” Ode of Dejection’, Bucknell Review, XVI. 1
(Mar. 1968), 1–17
Booth, Allyson, Reading The Waste Land from the Bottom Up, New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2015
Bowen, Stella, Drawn from Life, 1941, rep. London: Virago 1984
Boyle, George (ed.), Twixt Lombard Street and Cornhill: Designed, Written and
Illustrated by the Staff of Lloyds Bank Limited, London: privately printed,
1930
Bradbrook, M. C., T. S. Eliot: The Making of ‘The Waste Land’ (ed. Ian
Scott-Kilvert), Harlow: Longman, 1972
Bradford, Sarah, Splendours and Miseries: A Life of Sacheverell Sitwell, New
York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1993
Braithwaite, William Stanley (‘W. S. B.’), ‘A Scorner of the Ordinary Sub-
stance of Human Nature’, Boston Evening Transcript (14 Apr. 1920), II, 6
Bressan, Eloisa, ‘Reading A Walking Tour in Southern France: A Geographical
Approach’, Make It New, II. 1 ( June 2015), 77–86
——, ‘Regionalism and Mythmaking: A Map for Ezra Pound’s Walking
Tour in Southern France of 1919’, Make It New, II. 4 (Mar. 2016), 44–55
Brooker, Jewel Spears, ‘Dialectical Collaboration: Editing The Waste Land’,
in The Cambridge Companion to The Waste Land (ed. Gabrielle McIntire),
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015
—— (ed.), T. S. Eliot: The Contemporary Reviews, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004
Brooks, Cleanth, ‘The Waste Land: An Analysis’, in T. S. Eliot: A Study of His
Writings by Several Hands (ed. B. Rajan), London: Dennis Dobson, 1947,
7–36
Bryer, The Heart of Artemis: A Writer’s Memoirs, New York: Harcourt Brace,
1962
Bush, Ronald, The Genesis of Ezra Pound’s Cantos, Princeton, NJ: Princeton
——, T. S. Eliot: A Study in Character and Style, New York: Oxford University
Press, 1983
C.P., see Powell, Charles.

Carlyle, Thomas, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, New
York: Wiley & Halstead, 1840

Carpenter, Humphrey, A Serious Character: A Life of Ezra Pound, London:
Faber & Faber, 1988
Carpenter, Margaret Haley, Sara Teasdale: A Biography, second edition, New
York: Schulte, 1960
Carpenter, Martha C., ‘Oedipal Conflict through Mythical Allusion in T. S.
Eliot’s “Sweeney Erect”, Yeats–Eliot Review, 14. 3 (Winter 1997), 26–33
Carson, Anne Conover, Olga Rudge and Ezra Pound: ‘What Thou Lovest Well .
. .’, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001
Casillo, Robert, ‘Anti-Semitism, Castration, and Usury in Ezra Pound’, Crit-
icism, 25. 3 (Summer 1983), 239–65
——, ‘Damage Control in the Pound Industry: Response to Dasenbrock’,
American Literary History, 1. 1 (Spring 1989), 240–3
——, The Genealogy of Demons: Anti-Semitism, Fascism, and the Myths of Ezra
Pound, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988
Cawein, Madison, Minions of the Moon: A Little Book of Song and Story, Cin-
cinnati, OH: Stewart & Kidd, 1913
Cerf, Bennett, At Random: The Reminiscences of Bennett Cerf, New York: Ran-
dom House, 1977
Chesterton, G. K., Alarms and Discursions, London: Methuen, 1910
——, The Ballad of St Barbara and Other Verses, London: Cecil Palmer, 1922
——, The New Jerusalem, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1920
Chiari, Joesph, T. S. Eliot: A Memoir, London: Enitharmon, 1982
Childs, Donald J., Modernism and Eugenics: Woolf, Eliot, Yeats and the Culture
of Degeneration, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001
Chinitz, David, ‘T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide’, PMLA, 110. 2 (Mar.
1995), 236–47
——, T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2003
Clark, Ronald W., The Life of Bertrand Russell, London: Jonathan Cape/
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1975
Clegg, John, ‘Some Investigation and Digression into Lines 139–167 of The
Waste Land’, PN Review 242, 44. 6 ( July/August 2018)
Clutton-Brock, Arthur [unsigned], ‘Not Here, O Apollo’, Times Literary
Supplement, 908 (12 June 1919), 322
Cocteau, Jean, Le Cap de Bonne-Espérance, Paris: Editions de la Sirène, 1919;
‘The Cape of Good Hope’ (tr. Jean Hugo), Little Review, VIII. 1 (Autumn
1921), 43–96
Colin, Paul, ‘Fin d’année’, L’Art libre, 19 (1919), 211
Connolly, Cyril, ‘Major Poet: The Influence of Mr Eliot’, Sunday Times (3
May 1936), 8

Connolly, James B., Fisherman of the Banks, London: Faber & Gwyer, 1928
Connolly, Thomas E., ‘Further Notes on Mauberley’, Accent, 16 (Winter
1956), 59
Conrad, Joseph, ‘The Heart of Darkness’, Blackwood’s Magazine, CLXV
(Feb. 1899), 193–220; CLXV (Mar. 1899), 479–502; CLXV (Apr. 1899),
634–57, rep. in Youth: A Narrative and Two Other Stories, Edinburgh:
Blackwood, 1902, 49–182
Cook, Eleanor, ‘T. S. Eliot and the Carthaginian Peace’, ELH, 46. 2 (Summer
1979), 341–55
Cookson, William, A Guide to the Cantos of Ezra Pound, 1985, revised edition,
London: Anvil, 1985, 2001
Corona Typewriter Company, How to Use Corona, the Personal Writing
Machine, Groton, NY: Corona Typewriter Co., n.d. [c.1920]
Cory, Daniel, ‘Ezra Pound: A Memoir’, Encounter, 30. 5 (May 1968), 30–9
Cox-McCormack, Nancy, ‘Ezra Pound in the Paris Years’ (ed. Lawrence S.
Rainey), Sewanee Review, 102. 1 (Winter 1994), 93–112
Crawford, Fred D., ‘Conrad Aiken’s Cancelled Debt to T. S. Eliot’, Journal of
Modern Literature, 7. 3 (Sept. 1979), 416–32
Crawford, Robert, Young Eliot: From St Louis to The Waste Land, London:
Jonathan Cape, 2015
Crosby, Caresse, The Passionate Years, New York: Dial, 1953
Cuda, Anthony, ‘Coda: The Waste Land’s Afterlife: The Poem’s Reception in
the Twentieth Century and Beyond’, in The Cambridge Companion to The
Waste Land (ed. Gabrielle McIntire), New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2015, 194–210
——, ‘Evenings at the Phoenix Society: Eliot and the Independent London
Theater’, in The Edinburgh Companion to T. S. Eliot and the Arts (eds Fran-
ces Dickey and John D. Morgenstern), Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2016, 202–24
——, ‘The Poet and the Pressure Chamber: Eliot’s Life’, in A Companion
to T. S. Eliot (ed. David E. Chinitz), Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009,
3–14
——, ‘T. S. Eliot’, in A Companion to Modernist Poetry (eds David E. Chinitz
and Gail McDonald), Chichester: Wiley, 2014, 450–63
——, ‘Who Stood over Eliot’s Shoulder?’, Modern Language Quarterly, 66. 3
(Sept. 2005), 329–64
Cunard, Nancy, Selected Poems (ed. Sandeep Parmar), Manchester: Carcanet,
2016
Cummings, E. E., ‘T. S. Eliot’, Dial, LVIII. 6 ( June 1920), 781–4
Cuoco, Lorin and William H. Gass (eds) Literary St Louis: A Guide, St Louis,

MO: Missouri Historical Press, 2000
Doolittle, Hilda (‘H. D.’), End to Torment: A Memoir of Ezra Pound, New
York: New Directions, 1979
——, Hymen, New York: Henry Holt, 1921
Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, 1: The Inferno (ed. Herman Oelsner, tr.
J. A. Carlyle, series ed. Israel Gollancz), London: Temple Classics, Dent,
1900
——, The Divine Comedy, 2: The Purgatorio (ed. Herman Oelsner, tr. Thomas
Okey, series ed. Israel Gollancz), London: Temple Classics, Dent, 1901
——, The Divine Comedy, 3: The Paradiso (ed. Herman Oelsner, tr. Philip H.
Wicksteed, series ed. Israel Gollancz), London: Temple Classics, Dent,
1899
Dardis, Tom, Firebrand: The Life of Horace Liveright, New York: Random
House, 1995
Darroch, Sandra Jobson, Ottoline: The Life of Lady Ottoline Morrell, London:
Cassell, 1976
Dasenbrock, Reed Way, ‘Pound’s Demonology’, American Literary History, 1.
1 (Spring 1989), 231–9
Davie, Donald, Ezra Pound, New York: Viking, 1975
Day, Robert A., ‘The “City Man” in The Waste Land: The Geography of Remi-
niscence’, PMLA, 80. 3 ( June 1965), 285–91
Dempsey, James, The Tortured Life of Scofield Thayer, Gainesville: University
Press of Florida, 2014
Deutsch, Babette, ‘Another Impressionist’, New Republic, XIV (16 Feb. 1918),
89
——, ‘Orchestral Poetry’, Dial, LXX. 3 (Mar. 1921), 343–6
——, ‘The Season for Song – A Page on the Poets – T. S. Eliot’s Weird and
Brilliant Book’, New York Evening Post (29 May 1920)
Dickey, Frances, ‘May the Record Speak: The Correspondence of T. S. Eliot
and Emily Hale’, Twentieth-Century Literature, 66. 4 (Dec. 2020), 431–62
—— and John Whittier-Ferguson, ‘Joint Property, Divided Correspondents:
The T. S. Eliot–Emily Hale Letters’, Modernism/modernity, 5. 4 (29 Jan.
2021)
Donoghue, Dennis, ‘Three Presences: Yeats, Eliot, Pound’, Hudson Review,
LXII. 4 (Winter 2010), 563–82
Douglas, C. H., Economic Democracy, London: Cecil Palmer, 1920
Drew, Elizabeth, T. S. Eliot: The Design of His Poetry, New York: Scribner,
1949
Drury, John, ‘World’s Greatest Poem’, Chicago Daily News, 14 Feb 1923, 15

Dryden, John (tr.), Ovid’s Epistles: With his Amours, London: Printed for C.
Bathurst, T. Davies, W. Strahan, W. Clarke, and R. Collins, T. Becket, T.
Cadell, G. Robinson and S. Bladon, 1776
Dryden, John (tr.), The Works of Virgil, vol. 3, London: Printed for Jacob
Tonson, 1721
Du Bois, W. E. B., Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil, New York: Har-
court, Brace & Co., 1920
Du Bois, W. E. B., The Souls of the Black Folk: Essays and Sketches, Chicago: A.
C. McClurg, 1903
—— and Martha Gruening, ‘The Massacre of East St Louis’, Crisis, 14. 5
(Sept. 1917), 219–38
Du Pin, Louis Ellies, A New History of Ecclesiastical Writers: Containing an
Account of the Authors of the Several Books of the Old and New Testament:
of the Lives and Writings of the Primitive Fathers . . . Also a Compendious
History of the Councils, with Chronological Tables of the Whole . . . The Second
Edition, Corrected. [The Editor’s Preface Signed: W.W., i.e. William Wotton],
vol. 2, London: Abel Swalle and Tim Childe, 1693
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Harvard University Press, 1934
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1899
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lected Essays and Travel Writings, Edmonton: University of Alberta Press,
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——, James Joyce, 1959, revised edition, New York: Oxford University Press,
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Different Voices: Mixing Genres in The Waste Land’s Pub’, Narrative, 16. 3
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XXII. 4 (Oct. 1972), 417–29
——, ‘The Style of the Master’,in T. S. Eliot: A Symposium (eds Richard
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——, Using Biography, London: Chatto & Windus, 1984
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Cambridge University Press, 2011
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——, ‘Towards Propertius’, Paideuma: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and
Poetics, 1. 1 (Spring/Summer 1972), 63–74
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Overview’, Journal of Modern Literature, 35. 2 (Winter 2012), 83–97
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Land – from Aiken’s House . . .’, Journal of Modern Literature, 22. 1 (Fall
1988), 183–6
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——, Ezra Pound and the Cantos: A Record of Struggle, New Haven, CT: Yale
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tions’, Poetry (Chicago), II. 5 (Aug. 1913), 177–87
———, Return to Yesterday: Reminiscences 1894–1914, London: Gollancz/
New York: Liveright, 1931
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13 Dec 2016
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Modern Poetry’, Essays in Criticism, XV. 4 (Oct. 1965), 428–45
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The Waste Land’, Yale Review, 78. 2 (Winter 1989), 235–53
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——, ‘The “Lost” Manuscripts of T. S. Eliot’, Times Literary Supplement,
3480 (7 Nov. 1968), 1237–40
——, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound: Collaborators in Letters, New Haven: Henry
W. Wenning /C. A. Stonehill, 1970
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——, ‘The Waste Land’ 1972, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1972
——, ‘The Waste Land: Paris 1922’, in Eliot in His Time: Essays on the Occasion
of the Fiftieth Anniversary of The Waste Land (ed. Walton A. Litz), Prince-
ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973, 67–94
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Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983
——, Philosophy and Opinions (ed. Amy Jacques Garvey), second edition,
London: Frank Cass, 1967
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2001
Gilmer, Walker, Horace Liveright: Publisher of the Twenties, New York: David
Lewis, 1970
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Holt, 2017

Gordon, John, ‘T. S. Eliot’s Head and Heart’, ELH, 62. 4 (Winter 1995),
979–1000
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——, Eliot’s New Life, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988
——, The Imperfect Life of T. S. Eliot, London: Vintage, 1998; revised edition,
2012
——, ‘The Waste Land Manuscript’, American Literature, 45. 4 ( Jan. 1974),
557–70
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Grant, Joy, Harold Monro and the Poetry Bookshop, London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1967
Grant, Michael (ed.), T. S. Eliot: The Critical Heritage, 2 vols, London: Rout-
ledge & Kegan Paul, 1982
Graves, Robert, ‘Lawrence Vindicated’, New Republic, 21 Mar. 1955, 16
Graves, Robert, Goodbye to All That, London: Jonathan Cape, 1929
—— with Laura Riding, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, London: Heinemann,
1927 (reissued as The Common Asphodel, Manchester: Carcanet, 1949)
Gregory, Horace and Marya Zaturenska, A History of American Poetry,
1900–1940, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1940
Grieve, Thomas F., Ezra Pound’s Early Poetry and Poetics, Columbia: Univer-
sity of Missouri Press, 1997
——, ‘Pound’s Other Homage: Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’, Paideuma: Modern
and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, 27. 1 (Spring 1998), 9–30
Grigson, Geoffrey, ‘Recollections of Wyndham Lewis’, Listener, 57 (16 May
1957), 786
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AMS, 1978
Gunn, Thom, The Occasions of Poetry, London: Faber & Faber, 1982
H. D., see Doolittle, Hilda

Haffenden, John, ‘“Literary Dowsing”: Valerie Eliot Edits The Waste Land’, T.
S. Eliot Studies Annual, 2. 1 (2018), 133–50
——, ‘Vivien Eliot and The Waste Land: The Forgotten Fragments’, PN
Review 175, 3. 5 (May–June 2007), 18–23
Hale, W. G., ‘Pegasus Impounded’, Poetry (Chicago), XIV. 1 (Apr. 1919),
52–5
Hall, Donald, ‘Ezra Pound: The Art of Poetry No. 5’, Paris Review, 28 (Sum-
mer/Fall 1962), 22–51
——, Remembering Poets: Reminiscences and Opinions – Dylan Thomas, Robert

Frost, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, New York: Harper & Row, 1979
——, ‘T. S. Eliot, The Art of Poetry No. 1’, Paris Review, 21 (Spring–Sum-
mer 1959), 47–70
Hamilton, Ian, Robert Lowell: A Biography, New York: Random House, 1982/
Hardy, Thomas, Late Lyrics and Earlier, with Many Other Verses, London:
Macmillan, 1922
——, Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses, London: Macmillan, 1917
Hargrove, Nancy Duvall, T. S. Eliot’s Parisian Year, Gainesville: University
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Notes
Frontmatter
1 TSE, ‘Leadership and Letters’, 7.
2 EP, ‘For T. S. E.’, 109; rep. Tate, 89.
3 Agadir earthquake, 29 Feb. 1960: Maxwell, 16–25.
4 TSE–EP, 29 Jan. 1960, Beinecke EPP, [Series I,] b. 15, f. 674.
5 EP’s ‘order dismissing indictment’ was made by Chief Judge Bolitha J. Laws
on 18 April 1958 (TSE sent a telegram: ‘congratulations and joyful
greetings = possum and valerie’, 21 Apr. 1958, Beinecke EPP, b. 15, f.
673); EP–TSE, 15 Sept. 1959, Beinecke EPP, b. 15, f. 673.
6 EP–TSE, 15 Sept. 1959, Beinecke EPP, b. 15, f. 673.
7 TSE–EP, telegram 30 Oct. 1959 (transmitted 31 Oct. 1959), Beinecke EPP, b.
15, f. 673, and Eliot Estate.
8 TSE–EP, 28 Dec. 1959, Beinecke EPP, Box 15, f. 673.
9 Hall, Remembering Poets, 114.
10 TSE, TWL, Texas TSEC.
11 EP, ‘Song fer the Muses’ Garden’, EP–TSE, 28 Mar. 1935, EPSL, 272 (361).
Armistice
1 See Thorn, 50; Persico, 134–6, 350–1; see also Richard Rubin, ‘Where the Great
War Ended’, New York Times, Travel (28 Dec. 2014), 1; Jacques Kelly, ‘Henry
Gunther: the Baltimorean who was the last U.S. battlefield death in World War
I’, Baltimore Sun, (31 Mar. 2017); Christina Tkacik, ‘The heroic, perplexing tale
of the Baltimore man who was the last killed in WWI – minutes before Armi-
stice’, Baltimore Sun (9 Nov. 2018); Christopher Klein, ‘The Last Official Death
of WWI Was a Man Who Sought Redemption’, history.com (9 Nov. 2018;
updated 5 June 2019).
2 Dan Rodricks, ‘The Sad, Senseless End of Henry Gunther’, Baltimore Sun (11
Nov. 2008).
3 TSE–JQ, 13 Nov. 1918, TSEL1, 299.
4 TSE–EHH, 14 Oct. 1914, TSEL1, 66.
5 TSE–HWES, 13 June 1917, TSEL1, 203.
6 EP–JQ, 15 Nov. 1918, EPSL, 141 (201).
7 EP, ‘Through Alien Eyes, I’, 252.
8 EP–JQ, 11 Sept. 1918, TSEL1, xxviii.
441
9 EP–JJ, 22 Nov. 1918, EPLJ, 145.
10 EP–WCW, 3 Feb. 1909, EPSL, 7 (41).
11 EP, ‘V’, HSM, 13.
12 TSE–HWES, 23 Dec. 1917, TSEL1, 242.
13 See Perinot, 44; for more on Eliot’s pre-war friendships in Paris see Hargrove.
Some critics have speculated that the relationship with Jean Verdenal was a
sexually intimate one (see James E. Miller), and that Verdenal may have been
represented in TWL by the figure of the hyacinth girl (see G. Wilson Knight),
a notion apparently contradicted by the unsealing in 2019 of Eliot’s letters to
Emily Hale, to whom he wrote on 3 Nov. 1930 (Princeton EHL, b. 1, f. 1): ‘And
I want to ask you please, to re-read the hyacinth lines in <Part I.> The Waste
Land, and the lines toward the very end beginning “friend, blood shaking my
heart” (where we of course means privately of course I) and compare them with
Pipit on the one hand and Ash Wednesday on the other, and see if they do not
convince you that my love for you has steadily grown into something finer and
finer. And I shall always write primarily for you.’
14 TSE, POO, 5; P1925, 7.
15 TSE, ‘A Commentary’, Criterion, XIII (Apr. 1934), 451–4.
16 EP, GB, 44, 46, 49.
17 EP, GB, 17, also 136.
18 EP–WL, [Aug. 1917], EPLL, 93.
19 Olson, 45; see also EP, ‘Canto XVI’, Cantos, 71 (71): ‘And Henri Gaudier went
to it, / and they killed him, / And killed a good deal of sculpture’.
20 EP, ‘The Revolt of Intelligence – VI’, 177.
21 EP, ‘Cantus Planus’, LR (‘Devoted Chiefly to Ezra Pound . . .’), V. 7 (Nov. 1918),
1.
22 Lewis, ‘Ezra’, 137.
23 Monroe, ‘An International Episode’, 94; rep. LR, 34.
24 EP, ‘Upon the Harps of Judea’, LR (‘Devoted Chiefly to Ezra Pound . . .’), V.
7 (Nov. 1918), 6; also EP, ‘Imaginary Letters – IV’, 21; also jh, ‘The Episode
Continued’, 36.
25 TSE, ‘Introduction’, LE, xii.
26 Aldington, Life for Life’s Sake, 199.
27 VW–RF, [18 Nov. 1918], VWL2, 296.
28 EP–MM, 1 Feb. 1919, EPSL, 148 (210).
29 EP–JJ, 12 Dec. 1918, EPLJ, 148–9.
30 TSE, ‘Ezra Pound’, 327; rep. ‘Ezra Pound by T. S. Eliot’, Peter Russell, Ezra
Pound, 26.
31 CA–JG, 31 Oct. 1962, Joy Grant, 101.
32 VW, 15 Nov. [1918], VWD1, 218–19.
33 TSE–HWES, 23 Dec. 1917, TSEL1, 242.
34 TSE–CA, 10 Jan. 1916, TSEL1, 137; TSE–BR, Monday [17 Jan. 1916], TSEL1,
142; TSE–CWE, 29 Mar. 1919, TSEL1, 331; TSE–HWE, 14 Sept. 1919,
TSEL1, 395; TSE–JQ, 9 May 1921, TSEL1, 557; also VHE–MH, [16 July
1919], TSEL 381; see also VHE–CWE, 28 June 1917, TSEL1, 206; VHE–
442 | Notes to pages 000–000

CWE, 11 Mar. 1918, TSEL1, 255; VHE–TSE, 20 Aug. [1920], TSEL1, 493;
VHE–CWE, 25 Jan. 1921, TSEL1, 537; VHE–MH, [13? 20? Dec. 1921],
TSEL1, 618.
35 TSE–HWES, 23 Dec. 1917, TSEL1, 242.
36 TSE–EH, 3 Nov. 1930, Princeton EHL, b. 1, f. 1.
37 EP–JQ, 18 Dec. 1918, TSEL1, xxviii.
38 TSE–CWE, 22 Dec. 1918, TSEL1, 310.
39 VHE–CWE, 15 Dec. [1918], TSEL1, 309.
40 TSE–JQ, 7 Sept. 1922, TSEL1, 750.
41 TSE, ‘Directions to my Executors’, 25 Nov. 1960, Houghton TSEP.
PART I
1 EP, ‘Harold Monro’, Criterion, XI. XLV ( July 1932), [581–92], 590.
I.
1 VHE, 1 Jan. 1919, Bodleian VHED2, 6r: the poet and novelist Frederic Man-
ning was also present.
2 VHE, 3 Jan. 1919, Bodleian VHED2, 6v.
3 VHE, 9 Jan. 1919, Bodleian VHED2, 8r.
4 18 Crawford Mansions, Crawford Street (Homer Row), Marylebone W1 (now
W1H 4JP), where the Eliots lived between [16] Mar. 1916 and [8] Nov. 1920.
5 TSE, ‘Thomas Stearns Eliot’ (1921), 108; (1935), 219.
6 TSE–GB, 18 Sept. 1930, TSEL5, 321.
7 Aldous Huxley, in Spender, ‘Remembering Eliot’, 59.
8 Boyle, [70].
9 TSE–HWE, 5 Nov. 1916, TSEL1, 173.
10 TSE–CWE, 8 Dec. 1918, TSEL1, 306.
11 HWES–TLE, 3 Jan. 1919, TSEL1, 314.
12 For an account of TSE’s 1915 visit see Sencourt, 51–2.
13 TSE–HWE, 6 Sept. 1916, TSEL1, 166.
14 VHE, 8 Jan. 1919, Bodleian VHED2, 7v.
15 TSE–CWE, 12 Jan. 1919, TSEL1, 316.
16 TSE–HWE, 12 Jan. 1919, TSEL1, 316.
17 VHE–CWE, 12 Jan. 1919, TSEL1, 317.
18 TSE–CWE, 19 Jan. 1919, TSEL1, 317.
19 TSE–HWE, 12 Jan. 1919, TSEL1, 316.
20 The service took place on 9 Jan. 1919, at the Unitarian Church of the Messiah,
508 North Garrison Avenue, at the corner of Locust and Garrison Streets, St
Louis, Missouri.
21 Henry Ware Eliot Snr was cremated and his ashes laid at Lot 3128, Block 32–3,
Bellefontaine Cemetery, St Louis, MO, 10 Jan. 1919; TSE–MWC, 8 Aug. 1930,
TSEL5, 282–3.
Notes to pages 000–000 | 443

22 TSE visited St Louis on 16 Jan. 1933.
23 TSE–EH, 7 Feb. 1933, Princeton EHL, b. 4, f. 3.
24 Read, 26 Oct. 1918, Contrary Experience, 139; Lewis, ‘The War Baby’, 14–41;
Barry had two children with Lewis, who said ‘I have no children, though some, I
believe, are attributed to me. I have work to do.’ (Grigson, 786).
25 Iris Barry, ‘Ocean’, ‘Flirtation’, ‘Cauchemar’, ‘Nightfall’, PD, II. 8 (Dec. 1914),
356–7.
26 EP–ISC, 27 July 1916, EPSL, 90–1 (141–2).
27 EP–HM, [n.d. 1916], Chicago, in Fogelman, 200n.; in the event, HM took eight
poems for PC, VIII. 4 ( July 1916), 187–90, while EP published six in LR, IV.
4 (Aug. 1917), 17–19; the same issue carried a single sentence review by EP of
TSE’s POO: ‘The book-buyer can not do better.’ (EP, ‘List of Books’, 11).
28 EP–ISC, 27 July 1916, EPSL, 91 (142).
29 EP–ISC, 31 Jan. 1917, Buffalo, Box 741, f. 42.
30 Tea party at Serafina Astafieva’s new Russian Dancing Academy on the King’s
Road, 18 Feb. 1917, which would inspire TSE’s portrait of Astafieva as ‘Grish-
kin’ of ‘friendly bust’ and ‘pnueumatic bliss’ in ‘Whispers of Immortality’.
31 The New China Restaurant, was at 107 Regent Street (Muirhead, 20); EP–ISC,
14 Feb. 1917, Buffalo, b. 741, f. 49.
32 Meyers, ‘New Light on Iris Barry’, 287.
33 Glinert, 404.
34 Iris Barry, 165.
35 Hartley, 47.
36 TSE–JQ, 6 Jan. 1919, TSEL1, 315.
37 TSE–JQ, 8 Sept. 1918, TSEL1, 283.
38 EP, ‘In Explication’, 8; rep. ‘Henry James’, Instigations, 109.
39 Mencken, 143.
40 TSE–JQ, 6 Jan. 1919, TSEL1, 315.
41 TSE–JHW, 21 Apr. 1919, TSEL1, 338–9.
42 TSE, FPV, 23.
43 TSE recorded in Empson, ‘The Style of the Master’, 35.
44 TSE–CWE, 19 Jan. 1919, TSEL1, 318.
45 TSE–JQ, 26 Jan. 1919, TSEL1, 319.
46 EP–HLP, 25 Mar. 1919, EPLP, 438.
47 TSE–HWE, 27 Feb. 1919, TSEL1, 324.
48 EP–JQ, postmark 9 Mar. 1915, EPLQ, 20.
49 EP–JQ, postmark 11 Aug. 1915, EPLQ, 31, 37.
50 TSE, [‘biographical note’], TSE–AFD, 5 Nov. 1945; see ‘An Autobiographical
Sketch’, The Poems of T. S. Eliot, 2, xi; ‘Autobiographical summary’, The Complete
Prose of T. S. Eliot, 6, 698–9.
51 TSE, ‘Portrait of a Lady’, Others, I. 3 (Sept. 1915), 35–40; reprinted in Others: An
Anthology of the New Verse (ed. Alfred Kreymborg), New York: Alfred Knopf, [25
Mar.] 1916, the first appearance in book form in the US of TSE’s poetry.
52 TSE, ‘Poems: ‘Preludes [I–IV]’, ‘Rhapsody of a Windy Night’, Blast, 2 ( July
1915), 48–51.

53 TSE, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, PC, VI. 3 ( June 1915), 130–5; EP–
HM, 10 Apr. 1915, EPSL, 57 (101).
54 EP–JQ, 11 Apr. 1917, Berg JQP; Gallup, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, 8.
55 Arthur Waugh, 226.
56 Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust, London: Chapman and Hall, 1934; Brides-
head Revisited, London: Chapman and Hall, 1945; Unconditional Surrender,
London: Chapman and Hall, 1961.
57 Unsigned, TLS, 805 (21 June 1917), 299; unsigned, Literary World, LXXZIII (5
July 1917), 107.
58 EP, ‘T. S. Eliot’ (1917), 264–71; rep. Instigations, 196–202.
59 EP, ‘Drunken Helots and Mr Eliot’, 72–4.
60 TSE, Dante, 8.
61 TSE, ‘Matthew Arnold (March 3, 1933’, UPUC, 118–19.
62 TSE, [A speech by T. S. Eliot] (27 Apr. 1960), Transcripts of annual dinner
speeches, Royal Academy of Arts, RAA/SEC/25/5/11; see ‘Royal Academy
Speech (1960)’, The Poems of T. S. Eliot, 1, 1227; ‘Speech at the Royal Academy
of Arts dinner’, The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, 8, 392–3.
63 TSE, [A speech by T. S. Eliot] (27 Apr. 1960).
64 TSE, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, PC, VI. 3 ( June 1915), 130–5.
65 Spender, ‘Remembering Eliot’, 42.
66 EP, ‘T. S. Eliot’(1917), 271; rep. Instigations, 202.
67 VHE–HWE, 1 June 1916, TSEL1, 153.
68 VHE–MH, Tuesday [Dec? 1917], TSEL1, 239.
69 VHE–CWE, 28 June 1917, TSEL1, 207.
70 Osbert Sitwell, ‘T. S. Eliot’, Texas OSC, b. 14, f. 1, b. 24, f. 1; TSEL1, 334n.
71 TSE–HWE, 6 Apr. 1919, TSEL1, 334.
72 TSE, ‘Eeldrop and Appleplex – I’, 7–8.
73 Lewis, ‘Note on Tyros’, 2.
74 TSE–WL, 26 Sept. 1923, Cornell; WLL, 135; TSEL2, 223; TSE told John
Quinn they were ‘crude stuff ’ (TSE–JQ, 9 July 1919, TSEL1, 373; EP–JQ, 1
Apr. 1917, Berg JQP.
75 Lewis, Self Condemned, 6.
76 EP–WCW, 11 Sept. 1920, EPSL, 158 (223).
77 EP–DS, 3 Mar. 1914, EPLS, 314–15.
78 DS–EP, 9 Mar. [1914], EPLS, 321; Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering, 277.
79 Lewis, Self Condemned, 6.
80 EP–HLP, 10 Jan 1919, EPLP, 432–3.
82 EP, ‘“Tarr”, by Wyndham Lewis’, 35 (rep. Instigations, 215); EP ‘Books Current’,
161–3 (rep. Instigations, 205); EP, ‘T. S. Eliot’ (1917), 271 (rep. Instigations, 202).
83 EP–HLP, 10 Jan. 1919, EPLP, 433; VHE, 10 Jan. 1919, Bodleian VHED2, 8r.
84 EP–IWP, 23 Jan. 1919, EPLP, 434.
85 TSE, ‘A Note on Ezra Pound’, 3.
86 Virginia Woolf, 25 Jan. 1915, VWD1, 28; also VW–MLD, 22 Feb. [1915],
VWL2, 59.

87 Leonard Woolf, Beginning Again, 234.
88 How to Print (rev. edn), London: Model Printing Press Co., 1902, 60pp; an
advertisement from the Company at the time encourages prospective buyers
to ‘Send for our Illustrated Pamphlet “HOW TO PRINT”, containing an
abridged history of the Art of Printing, Instructions in Printing, Catalogue of
Type, &c. Post free, 7d.’; it carries the banner, ‘Everyone his own printer’ and
states that the machine ‘Can be worked by a child of 10’; see also Lee, 815n9.
89 The Excelsior Printers’ Supply Company took over the Model Printing Press
Company based in neighbouring 16/20 Farringdon Avenue after it became in-
solvent in 1906. When Excelsior registered as a limited company in 1916 it con-
tinued to manufacture ‘Model’ presses built on the previous company’s design
in Walthamstow by Peter Hooker. It seems reasonable to suppose that they sold
this as their own-brand entry-level machine, and may have done so to Leonard
and Virginia Woolf in 1917. The bill, recorded by Leonard, came to £19. 5s. 5d.
90 VW–VB, 26 Apr. [1917], VWL2, 150.
91 VW–MLD, 22 Feb. [1915], VWL2, 60.
92 When the Press moved to Tavistock Square in 1924, the Woolfs would transfer
their machinery setting to that building’s basement, locating their printing press
in a former scullery and their offices in the kitchen, and where a ramshackle
lavatory was stocked with galley proofs to use as toilet paper; Lehmann, 10.
93 Virginia Woolf, 9 Jan. 1924, VWD2, 283.
94 LW–TSE, 19 Oct. 1918, TSEL1, 285.
95 Virginia Woolf, 15 Nov. 1918, VWD2, 219; TSE–VW, 29 Jan. 1919, TSEL1, 320.
96 Keynes, Economic Consequences of Peace, 32–3.
97 TSE–HWE, 27 Feb. 1919, TSEL1, 323.
98 VHE–CWE, 7 Apr. 1919, TSEL1, 335–6.
99 TSE–HWE, 27 Feb. 1919, TSEL1, 322.
100 TSE–CWE, 27 Feb. 1919, TSEL1, 324.
101 EP–HLP, 6 Nov. 1918, EPLP, 425.
102 EP–IWP, 15 Nov. 1918, EPLP, 425.
103 EP, ‘De Gourmont’, 2.
104 TSE–HWE, 27 Feb. 1919, TSEL1, 324.
105 VHE, 3 Mar. 1919, Bodleian VHED2, 21r; 2 Mar. 1919, Bodleian VHED2, 21r.
106 TSE–CWE, 27 Feb. [1919], TSEL1, 324.
107 TSE–HWE, 27 Feb. 1927, TSEL1, 324.
108 TSE–MWC, 8 Aug. 1930, TSEL5, 281.
109 Charlotte Eliot, William Greenleaf Eliot, 38.
110 Sencourt, 15.
111 Teasdale, ‘Sunset: St Louis’, Flame and Shadow, 22–3.
112 Tennessee Williams; see also Cuoco, 196.
113 Angelou, 57.
114 Whitman, 135.
115 Steffens, ‘Tweed Days in St Louis’, McClure’s Magazine (Oct. 1902), collected
in Steffens, 31–2, 38, 64, 103; Henry Ziegenhein was city mayor 1897–1901
responsible for the quip about the street lighting.

116 Scott Joplin moved into St Louis in 1901 from Sedalia, MO, a few hours along
Interstate 70.
117 MM–CG, 1962, in Cuoco, 239.
118 Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 254–5.
119 TSE, ‘Introduction’, in Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, xii.
120 Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 302; TSE, ‘Introduction’, in Twain, Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn, xii.
121 TSE–MWC, 8 Aug. 1930, TSEL5, 281.
122 Henry Ware Eliot Snr, ‘A Brief Autobiography’, Washington WGEPP, fo. 3.
123 TSE–MWC, 8 Aug. 1930, TSEL5, 282.
124 Stravinsky, 92–3.
126 WGE in Charlotte Eliot, William Greenleaf Eliot, 131.
127 WGE–THB, 13 Jan. 1849, in Charlotte Eliot, William Greenleaf Eliot, 144.
128 TSE, ‘American Literature and Language’, CC, 44.
129 Ulysses S. Grant, in Galusha Anderson, 100.
130 EP–HLP, 23 Aug. 1917, EPLP, 401–2.
131 TSE–CWE, 11 Apr. 1917, TSEL1, 193.
132 Du Bois and Gruening, 219.
133 Du Bois and Gruening, 219; ‘Editorial’ (unsigned), Crisis, 14. 5 (Sept. 1917),
215–16; Garvey, ‘Speech by Marcus Garvey, July 8, 1917’, The Marcus Garvey
and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, I, 213.
134 ‘Negroes Leaving East St Louis’, St Louis Argos, VI. 14 (20 July 1917), 1.
135 TSE, ‘Introduction’, in Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, xiii.
136 TSE–CWE, 1 July 1917, TSEL1, 208.
137 Du Bois, ‘The Forethought’, Souls of the Black Folk, vii.
138 Du Bois, ‘The Souls of the White Folk’, Darkwater, 51–2.
139 TSE–BR, 26 Mar. 1919, TSEL1, 330.
140 TSE–BR, 3 Feb. 1919, TSEL1, 320–1.
141 BR–CM, 6 Feb. 1919, McMaster BRA, b. 6.66; also Turcon, 32.
142 VHE–OM, [Dec. 1919], TSEL1, 423.
143 TSE–BR, 14 Feb. 1919, TSEL1, 322.
144 TSE, ‘Ode’, AVP, 30.
145 The Eliots married on 26 June 1915; their first honeymoon took place at the
Lansdowne Hotel, Eastbourne, c.26 June–2 July 1915; the second at a guest-
house, 8 Hartingdon Mansions, Eastbourne, c.4–16 Sept. 1915.
146 The honeymoon is dramatised in Michael Hastings’ Tom and Viv, Act I, Part 1,
61, which may be taken from interviews that Hastings conducted with Maurice
Haigh-Wood in 1980; in what may be a blurring of two events, Haigh-Wood
also recalled Eliot sleeping in a deckchair in the hallway at Russell’s Bury Street
flat.
147 BR–OM, 9 Sept. 1915, Texas OMC, b. 25, f. 5.
148 Russell, Autobiography, I, 212.
149 Russell, July 1915, Autobiography, II, 54; also Morrell, Ottoline at Garsington, 57;
Aldous Huxley similarly used the word ‘vulgar’ to describe Vivien, AH–JH, 22 June

1918, AHL, 156; Russell lived at 34 Russell Chambers, Bury Street, London WC.
150 Russell, Autobiography, II, 19.
151 TSE, ‘Mr Apollinax’, POO, 35–6; AVP, 52; P1920, 58; the ‘veil’ was lifted by
Louis Untermeyer, ‘Irony De Luxe’, 381–2.
152 Russell, [c.10 Nov. 1915] Autobiography, II, 55; BR–OM, 10 Sept. 1915, TSEL1,
126n.
153 Spender, Eliot, 49–50; Russell, [c.10 Nov. 1915] Autobiography, II, 56.
154 VHE–ST, 2 Aug. 1915, TSEL1, 120.
155 OM–BR, 9 Sept. 1915, TSEL1, 126n.
156 Morrell, Ottoline at Garsington, 120.
157 BR–OM, Mon. night [Sept. 1916] Autobiography, II, 74.
158 VHE–CWE, 22 Oct. 1917, TSEL1, 224–7.
159 Russell stayed at Lemons Farm in 1918 and possibly earlier on the site of
Lemons Croft, Beechwood House, which may be the location described by
Constance Malleson in ‘Lemons Cottage, Abinger Common, Nr: Dorking’, n.d.
[c.1918], unfinished TS, McMaster LCM, b. 6.74, f. 2.
160 TSE–CWE, 24 Oct. 1917, TSEL1, 227.
161 VHE–CWE, 22 Oct. 1917, TSEL1, 227.
162 BR–CM, 30 Oct. 1917, McMaster BRA, b. 6.65.
163 BR–CM, 25 Oct. 1917, McMaster BRA, b. 6.65; BRSL2, 129n.
164 31 West Street, Marlow, Buckinghamshire; TSE–CWE, 9 June 1918, TSEL1,
266.
165 BR–CM, 6 Jan. 1918, in Monk, 516; TSEL1, 266n.
166 Russell, ‘The German Peace Offer’, 1; rep. Autobiography, II, 106; Marx and
Engels, Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei, 5; Marx and Engels, Manifesto of
the Communist Party, 10.
167 Russell, Autobiography, II, 29–30.
168 Malleson, 126–7.
169 Schuchard, Eliot’s Dark Angel, 124.
170 BR–CM, 27 Nov. 1918, McMaster BRA, b. 6.65.
171 VHE’s letter to BR, now lost, is recorded by Constance Malleson: ‘I do hope
that you aren’t very distressed about Mrs Eliot. I really don’t know what to
say about her letter – except that I’m distressed if you are.’ (CM–BR, 19 Jan.
1919, McMaster BRA, b. 6.62); in an unpublished typescript in the McMaster
archives, Phyllis Urch has annotated the letter with a footnote: ‘Mrs Eliot had
written Russell saying that she disliked fading intimacies and therefore intended
breaking off all friendship with him.’ Phyllis Urch (ed.), ‘Letters to Bertrand
Russell from Constance Malleson 1916–1969’, unpublished TS, fo. 309, Mc-
Master, Boxes 6.62–6.63; I am grateful to Sheila Turcan for her transcription;
BR–TSE, 19 Mar. 1919, TSEL1, 330n.
II.
1 TSE, in Hall, ‘T. S. Eliot’, 56.
2 TSE–CA, 21 Aug. 1916, TSEL1, 158.

3 TSE, ‘Bleistein with a Cigar’, TS1, Berg TSECP, [Poems].
4 TSE–CCA, 13 Oct 1927, TSEL3, 752; also TSE, ‘The Modern Mind’, UPUC, 130.
5 EP, ‘Canto LXXIV’, Cantos, 458–60 (464–6).
6 Lewis, et al., ‘Manifesto [II]’, 33.
7 TSE, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent – II’, 72.
8 TSE, ‘Dante as a “Spiritual Leader”’, 441–2.
9 TSE, ‘Modern Tendencies in Poetry’, 17.
10 Clutton-Brock, 322.
11 TSE, ‘Matthew Arnold’, UPUC, 106.
12 TSE–EHH, 26 April [1911], TSEL1, 19.
13 TSE–EHH, 26 July 1914, TSEL1, 55; TSE–HWE, 13 June 1917, TSEL1, 242;
TSE–EHH, 23 July 1917, TSEL1, 211; also TSE–EHH, 21 Mars [Mar. 1915],
TSEL1, 100; TSE–EP, 31 Oct. 1917, TSEL1, 230; TSE–CWE, 3 July 1920,
TSEL1 476; TSE–CWE, 9 Aug. 1920, TSEL1 488; CWE–TSE: 1 Aug. 1920,
TSEL1, 482.
14 VHE–MH, 9 Oct. [1917], TSEL1, 222.
15 DP–EP, [25 Sept. 1913], EPLS, 261.
16 Keynes, ‘Einstein’, Collected Works, 382–4.
17 LS–LW, 20 June 1905, LSL, 68.
19 LW–MG, 30 Aug. 1967, LWL, 559.
20 Forster, 26.
21 EP–JQ, 27 July 1922, Berg JQP; see also Dardis, 95.
22 JQ–TSE, 26 Feb. 1923, Berg JQP; also TSEL2, 71n.
23 TSE–JQ, 12 Mar. 1923, TSEL2, 71.
24 TSE–JQ, 28 Sept. 1919, TSEL1, 401.
25 EP–HWE, 2 Feb. 1919, EPLP, 436.
26 EP, ‘A Canticle’, 1.
27 EP, ‘The Death of Vorticism’, 45, 48.
28 EP, GB, 101.
29 Lewis, ‘Enemy of the Stars’, 55.
30 TSE–CWE, 29 March 1919, TSEL1, 331.
31 JMM–TSE, [c. April 1919], TSEL1, 340n.
32 TSE–JQ, 25 May 1919, TSEL1, 354; Nichols, ‘An Ironist’, 7.
33 TSE–CWE, 29 Mar. 1919, TSEL1, 331.
34 TSE, ‘The New Elizabethans and the Old’, 134–6.
35 TSE, ‘A Romantic Patrician’, 265–7; rep. ‘A Romantic Aristocrat’, SW, 22–8.
36 TSE, ‘American Literature’, 236–7.
37 TSE, ‘Kipling Redivivus’, 297–8.
38 TSE, ‘Criticism in England’, 456–7.
39 TSE, ‘The Post Georgians’, 171–2.
40 TSE–RL, 1 June 1961, Houghton.
41 Dudley Fitts, ‘It’s Fidelity to the Spirit That Counts’, NYT Book Review (12 Nov.
1961), 5–6.
42 RL–SHS, 14 Nov. 1961, RLL, 392; Dryden, ‘The Preface’, Ovid’s Epistles, [xvii].

43 EP–FES, 8 July 1922, EPSL, 178 (246).
44 EP–ARO [? Apr. 1919], EPSL, 150 (212).
45 EP, SR, vi.
46 EP–WHDR, 18 Mar. 1935, EPSL, 271 (360).
47 TSE, ‘Introduction’, in EP, SP1928, 19.
48 RL–EP, 20 Mar. [1954], RLL, 222.
49 EP, quoted in HM–WCW, 7 Apr. 1913, Monroe, A Poet’s Life, 272.
50 EP: ‘Obviously crowned lovers at unknown doors, / Night dogs, the marks of a
drunken scurry,’ QPA, 35; cf. Propertius, Elegies (trans. G. P. Goold), Loeb Clas-
sical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990, 228–9, Book III,
ll. 47–8: ‘quippe coronatos alienum ad limen amantes / nocturnaeque canes ebria
signa fugae’ (228); ‘For you will sing of garlanded lovers at another’s threshold
and the tipsy tokens of midnight escapade’ (229).
51 W. G. Hale, 52–5.
52 EP–HM, 14 Apr. 1919, Chicago HMP.
53 EP–WGH, [n.d.] unsent, enclosure in EP–MS, 19 Mar. 1920, May Sinclair
Papers, Ms. Coll. 184, Kislak; see also Carpenter, 340.
54 Dryden, ‘The Preface’, Ovid’s Epistles, [xx], [xxii].
55 EP–ARO, [? Apr. 1919], EPSL, 149 (211).
56 EP–HWP, [? Apr. 1919], EPLP, 440.
57 EP, ‘Sestina: Altaforte’, ER, II. 3 ( June 1909), 419–20; EP–HM, 14 Apr. 1919,
Harriet Monroe, Papers, Chicago.
58 EP–ARO, [? Apr.] 1919, EPSL, 148–9 (211).
59 EP–FES, 8–9 July 1922, EPSL, 178 (245).
60 EP–HM, Dec. 1918, Chicago HMP; EP, ‘Small Magazines’, 691.
61 Monroe, ‘Miss Monroe Re Ezra Pound’, 86–7.
62 HM–EP, 1 Nov. 1919, Beinecke EPP, b. 35, f. 1459.
63 WCW, ‘Belly Music’, Others ( July 1919), 27–31.
64 Ellen Williams, 296.
65 EP–HWP, [?Apr. 1919], EPLP, 439–40.
66 TSE, ‘The Method of Mr Pound’, 1065–6.
67 EP–JQ, 25 Oct. 1919, EPSL, 151 (213).
68 EP–JJ, 30 May 1919, EPLJ, 156.
69 EP–HLP, [?Apr. 1919], EPLP, 441.
70 WL–JQ, 3 Sept. 1919, WLL, 111.
71 Margaret Anderson, ‘Announcement’, 5.
72 EP–MA, [29 Nov. 1916], EPLLR, 4.
73 jh, ‘Lost’, 5.
74 EP–MA, [26 Jan. 1917], EPLLR, 6.
75 EP–SN, ‘24 Maggio, Anno XIV’ [24 May 1936], EPLN, 215.
76 TSE, ‘Poems’ (‘Le directeur’, ‘Mélange adultère de tout’, ‘Lune de miel’, ‘The
Hippopotamus’, LR, IV, 3 ( July 1917), 8–11; ‘Four Poems’ (‘Sweeney among
the Nightingales’, ‘Whispers of Immortality’, ‘Dans le restaurant’, ‘Mr E liot’s
Morning Service’), LR, V, 5 (Sept. 1918), 10–14; W. B. Yeats, ‘The Wild Swans
at Coole’, LR, IV. 2 ( June 1917), 9.

77 Weaver, 6.
78 EP–JQ, 26 Feb. 1916, EPLQ, 60.
79 EP–ACH, EPLH, 5 May 1916, 138.
80 Marsden, ‘The Lean Kind’, 1; ‘Views and Comments’, 44.
81 TSE–EP, 9 July 1919, TSEL1, 375.
82 EP–JQ, 26 Aug. 1915, EPLQ, 41; TSE–HWES, 31 Oct. 1917, TSEL1, 228.
83 EP–JQ, 26 Feb. 1916, EPLQ, 60.
84 EP–ACH, Mar 1913, EPSL, 14 (49).
85 AH–JH, 3 Aug. 1917, AHL, 132.
86 TSE–JQ, 9 July 1919, TSEL1, 375.
87 EP–JQ, 31 Oct. 1920, EPLQ, 198.
88 West, 86.
89 EP, ‘In a Station of the Metro’, PC, II. 1 (Apr. 1913), 1–12; rep. NF, I. 5 (15 Aug.
1913), 87–8; rep. in ‘How I Began’, 707.
90 EP, ‘Vorticism’, 465–7; an earlier version appeared in ‘How I Began’, 707.
91 EP, ‘Δώρια’ [Doria], PR, I. 2 (Feb. 1912), [77–81] 78, rep. Ripostes, 42; EP ‘And
the days are not full enough’, retrospective epigraph for Lustra, in P1926, 80.
92 TSE–BP, [Apr. 1919?], TSEL1, 332–3.
93 EP–HLP, 30 May 1919, EPLP, 442; I am grateful to Tim Dee for the sug-
gestion that what Pound may have observed were long-eared owls, and either
ospreys or short-toed eagles.
94 EP–HLP, 30 May 1919, EPLP, 441.
95 EP, ‘Pastiche. The Regional. II’, 156.
96 EP–HLP, 30 May 1919, EPLP, 441–2.
97 EP–JJ, 10 June 1919, EPLJ, 157–8.
98 EP–JJ, 10 June 1919, EPLJ, 159; JJ–HSW, 20 July 1919, EPLJ, 160.
99 DP–HHS, ‘Friday’, postmarked 25 July [1919], Ezra Pound Collection, Hamil-
ton (n.n., ID 216).
100 EP, ‘Provincia Deserta’, PC, V. 6 (Mar. 1915), [251–4], 252, rep. L1916, 62,
L1917, 67; EP, ‘Excideuil’, ‘Walking Tour’ [1912] Beinecke EPP, [Series IV.
Manuscripts], b. 103, f. 4328–30, WTSF, 26.
101 EP, SR, 5.
102 EP, ‘Canto VIII’, as ‘Malatesta Cantos. (Cantos IX to XII of a Long Poem)
– IX’, Criterion, I. 4 ( July 1923), 366, rep. as ‘Canto VIII’, Cantos, 32 (32).
103 EP, SR, 35.
104 EP, ‘Troubadours’, 426, rep. PD1918, 166.
105 EP, SR, 30.
106 EP, SR, 27–8.
107 EP, SR, 13.
108 EP, ‘Arnaut Daniel: II’, Instigations, 296.
109 EP–HLP, 30 May 1919, EPLP, 441.
110 EP–OS, 29 May 1919, Ezra Pound Collection, Hamilton (60, ID 230).
111 EP, ‘Arnaut Daniel: Razo’, 44–9; rep. Instigations, 286–95.
112 Leonard Woolf, Beginning Again, 241, 243; Virginia Woolf, 19 Mar. 1919,
VWD2, 257.

113 Virginia Woolf, 10 Apr. 1919, VWD1, 262.
114 VHE–CWE, 7 Apr. 1919, TSEL1, 336.
116 Lee, 440.
117 VW–DJCG, 17 Apr. 1919, VWL2, 350.
118 VHE–MH, [8 May? 1919], TSEL1, 344–5.
119 VHE–MH, [10 May 1919], TSEL1, 346.
120 TSE–EHH, 17 June 1919, TSEL1, 364.
121 VE–VD, [8? May. 1919], VWL2, 355.
122 TSE–JR, 1 June 1919, TSEL1, 358.
124 EP–HM, 30 Sept. 1914, EPSL, 40.
125 TSE, ‘Whispers of Immortality’, TS[1] (ribbon), Berg TSECP, [Poems]: TSE’s
comments to EP given in footer; EP’s suggested re-title given on recto, with
perceived influences (‘Webster / Don[n]e / Gautier’) given on verso.
126 TSE, ‘Try This on Your Piano’ / ‘Whispers of Immortality’, TS[3] (ribbon), Berg
TSECP, [Poems]; EP, undated [1917], TS accompanying TSE, ‘Try This on
Your Piano’ / ‘Whispers of Immortality’, TS[3] (carbon), Berg TSECP, [Poems];
see IMH, 371; The Poems of T. S. Eliot, 2, 351.
127 EP, undated [1917], TS accompanying TSE, ‘Try This on Your Piano’ / ‘Whis-
pers of Immortality’, TS[3] (carbon), Berg TSECP, [Poems].
128 TSE, ‘Mr E liot’s Sunday Morning Service’, TS, Berg TSECP, [Poems].
129 TSE, introducing ‘Sweeney Among the Nightingales’, Harvard, 13 May 1947.
130 TSE, ‘Sweeney Among the Nightingales’, P1919, [5].
131 KM–JMM, 19 Nov. 1919, KMCL3, 104.
132 TSE, ‘Sweeney Among the Nightingales’, P1919, [5]; see Julius, 86–7.
133 EP’s cancellation in TSE, [‘A Cooking Egg’], TS (ribbon), Berg TSECP, [Po-
ems].
134 TSE–EP, 31 Oct. 1917, TSEL1, 230; see also AH–JH, 13 Dec. [1917], AHL,
141; LS–CB, 31 Dec. 1917, LSL, 380.
135 TSE, ‘A Cooking Egg’, Coterie, 1 (May Day 1919), 44, rep. rev. AVP, 24; P1920,
22.
137 ‘London’s explosion was at Silvertown’, NYT (29 Jan. 1917), 3.
138 Lewis, ‘Long Live the Vortex!’, 8; see Julius, 136–9.
139 TSE, ICS, 71.
140 Clutton-Brock, 322.
141 Virginia Woolf, 14 June 1920, VWD1, 281.
142 Unsigned [Leonard Woolf ], ‘Is This Poetry?’, Athenaeum, 4651 (20 June 1919),
491.
143 VW–TSE, 28 July [1920], VWL2, 437.
144 [Leonard Woolf ], ‘Is This Poetry?’, 491.
145 TSE–JR, 17 May 1919, TSEL1, 350.
146 William Carlos Williams, ‘Prologue’, 76–7; rep. Kora in Hell, 26.
147 WCW–HG, 5 May 1944, WCWSL, 224–6.

148 JQ–TSE, 26 Aug. 1919, TSEL1, 389–92.
149 LS–DC, 14 May 1919, LSL, 433.
150 TSE–LS, 1 June 1919, TSEL1, 357.
151 LS–MH, 15 May 1919, LSL, 434.
152 TSE–LS, 1 June 1919, LSL, 446–7, TSEL1, 357, Holroyd, II, 775.
153 VHE–OM, [4? June 1919], TSEL1, 359.
154 Morrell, Ottoline at Garsington, 96.
155 VHE–OM, [4? June] 1919, TSEL1, 359.
156 Bertrand Russell, Satan in the Suburbs, 39; BR–RS, 28 May 1968, Robert Bell,
113.
157 TSE–OM, 14 Mar. 1933, TSEL6, 562–3.
158 TSE–MH, Tuesday [10 June 1919], TSEL1, 360–1.
159 TSE–EHH, 5 Sept. 1916, TSEL1, 161.
160 Tennyson, Beckett, 111.
161 Bede, IV. 13, 226.
162 Henry of Huntingdon, II. 17, 18.
163 TSE–CA, 21 Aug. 1916, TSEL1, 159.
164 See Mary Hutchinson, ‘T. S. Eliot’, unpublished biographical sketch, Texas
MHP, b. 1, f. 2, fos. [1]–4.
165 VB–VW, ‘Sunday’ [22 Aug. 1915], VBSL, 186.
166 KM–OM, [?24 June 1917], KMCL1, 312.
167 Virginia Woolf, 16 May 1919, VWD1, 272.
168 VHE–MH, Tuesday [17 June 1919], Texas MHP, b. 12, f. 7.
169 VHE–MH, Thursday [19 June 1919], Texas MHP, b. 12, f. 7.
170 VHE, 21 June 1919, Bodleian VHED2, 48v.
171 TSE–OM, Monday [23 June 1919], TSEL1, 365.
172 VHE–MH, Tuesday [17 June 1919], Texas MHP, b. 12, f. 7.
173 VHE–MH, ‘Tuesday’ [17 June 1919], Texas MHP, b. 12, f. 7.
174 VHE–MH, ‘Wednesday’ [2 July 1919], Texas MHP, b. 12, f. 7.
175 TSE–CWE, 29 June 1919, TSEL1, 367; TSE–MH, Tuesday [1 July 1919],
TSEL1, 369.
176 TSE–CWE, 29 June 1919, TSEL1, 367.
177 VHE, 9 July 1919, Bodleian VHED2, 53r.
178 LS–MH, 17 July 1919, LSL, 448.
179 VHE, 10 July 1919, Bodleian VHED2, 53v.
III.
1 EP, ‘Pastiche. The Regional. VIII[–IX] [i.e. VII]’, 284.
2 EP, ‘Canto LXXXVII’, Cantos, 588 (594).
3 EP, ‘Canto LXXX’, Cantos, 530 (536); EP, ‘Canto LXXIV’, Cantos, 439 (445):
‘yet say this to the Possum: a bang, not a whimper, / To build the city of Dioce
whose terraces are the colour of stars.’
4 EP, ‘Canto XLVIII’, Cantos, 243 (243).
5 EP, ‘Canto LXXVI’, Cantos, 466 (472).

7 EP, ‘Canto XXIII’, Cantos, 109 (109).
8 TSE, ‘Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar’, ‘Sweeney Erect’, AL, II.
3 (Summer 1919), 103–5; EP, ‘Homage to Sextus Propertius, I’, NA, XXV. 8 (19
June 1919), 132–3, rep. from PC, XIII. 6 (Mar 1919).
9 TSE–JR, 1 June 1919, TSEL1, 358.
10 EP, The Fourth Canto: proof, Beinecke EPP, [Series IV. Manuscripts,] b. 70, f.
3123.
11 Yeats, The Cutting of an Agate.
12 TSE, ‘A Foreign Mind’, 552–3.
13 TSE–JQ, 9 July 1919; TSEL1, 375.
14 Yeats, The Wild Swans at Coole.
15 EP, ‘Canto LXXXIII’, YPR, 6 (1947), 3–8; Cantos, 547–8 (553–64).
16 TSE, ‘Lecture Notes for English 26: English Literature from 1890 to the Pres-
ent Day’, The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, 4, 774.
17 See Foster, 616n.; Wilde, 153–4, 159–62; Yeats, ‘Seanchan the Bard and the
King of the Cats’, Irish Fairy Tales, 141–50; TSE, ‘The Poetry of W. B. Yeats’,
115–27, rep. as ‘Yeats’, OPP, 252–62.
18 TSE, ‘Lecture Notes for English 26: English Literature from 1890 to the Pres-
ent Day’, The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, 4, 774.
19 TSE, ‘The Poetry of W. B. Yeats’, 115–27; ‘A Commentary’, Criterion, XIV ( July
1935), 610–13.
20 Yeats, ‘Introduction’, Oxford Book of Modern Verse, xxi–ii; Yeats assigned more
pages to Edith Sitwell (19pp) than he did to Eliot (13pp) and Pound (7pp).
21 VHE–OM, [Dec. 1919], TSEL1, 423.
22 TSE, ASG, 55.
23 Hardy, ‘Going and Staying’, LM, I. 1 (Nov. 1919), rep. Late Lyrics and Earlier,
26.
24 Hardy, Literary Notebook II, Dorset County Museum, see Gittings, 193.
25 Hardy, in Graves, Goodbye to All That, 378–9.
26 Gunn, 90n.
27 TSE, ‘The Education of Taste’, 61.
28 TSE, ‘Whether Rostand Had Something about Him’, 665–6.
29 Antony and Cleopatra, 2.2.198, 2.2.242.
30 King George V, letter, Daily Express (19 July 1919).
32 Virginia Woolf, 19 July 1919, VWD1, 292.
33 Virginia Woolf, 20 July 1919, VWD1, 294.
34 TSE–CWE, 9 Aug. 1920, TSEL1, 488.
35 VHE–MH, 16 July 1919, TSEL1, 381.
36 VHE, 20 July 1919, Bodleian VHED2, 56r.
37 VHE–MH, Wednesday, [25? Aug. 1920; i.e. 27 Aug. 1919], TSEL1, 495.
38 RA–TSE, 18 July 1919, RAAL, 50.
39 RA–AL, 11 Oct. 1919, RAAL, 53.
40 Aldington, ‘London (May 1915)’, Images, [39–40] 40.

41 RA–TSE, 18 July 1919, RAAL, 50.
42 RA–TSE, 18 July 1919, RAAL, 50.
43 TSE, ‘Reflections on Contemporary Poetry [IV]’, 39.
45 Aldington, Life for Life’s Sake, 96, 94 (also 100).
46 Aldington, Life for Life’s Sake, 95; Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, 11.
47 EP–IWP, 16 July 1919, EPLP, 443; EPLP, 451n.; EP–HLP, 13 July 1919,
EPLP, 442.
48 EP, ‘Homage to Sextus Propertius, II [i.e. IV]’, ‘Difference to Opinion’ (1919),
NA, XXV. 10 (3 July 1919), 170; ‘Homage to Sextus Propertius, IV [i.e. VIII]’,
NA, XXV. 14 (31 July 1919), 231.
49 EP–IWP, 16 July 1919, EPLP, 443.
50 EP–IWP, 21 July 1919, EPLP, 444.
51 The premiere of The Three-Cornered Hat took place at the Alhambra Theatre,
London, 22 July 1919, commissioned by Sergei Diaghilev of the Ballets Russes
and choreographed by Léonide Massine, to music by Manuel de Falla.
52 Nancy Cunard, 22 July 1919, Texas NCD2.
53 TSE–HWE, 2 Jul 1919, TSEL1, 377–8.
54 TSE–MH, 9 July 1919, TSEL1, 387.
55 TSE–JQ, 9 July 1919, TSEL1, 373–5.
56 TSE–MH, Wednesday [9? July? 1919], TSEL1, 371.
59 TSE–SS, 16 July 1919, TSEL1, 380.
60 TSE–MH, [11? July 1919]. TSEL1, 377.
61 TSE, Eliot Estate HWE, [2].
62 TSE–JR, 9 July 1919, TSEL1, 372.
64 TSE, ‘Gerontion’, TS[1], Berg TSECP, [Poems].
65 TSE–MH, [9? July? 1919], TSEL1, 372.
66 JJ–HSW, 1 May 1935, JJL[1], 366.
67 Joyce, ‘Ulysses, II’, 43–4; rep. ‘Ulysses – Episode II’, 14.
68 TSE, ‘On a Recent Piece of Criticism’, 90–4.
69 Benson, 142; TSE, ‘Gerontion’ TS1–2, Berg TSECP, [Poems], rep. P1920.
70 TSE, ‘Philip Massinger’, 325–6.
71 TSE–MH, 6 Aug. 1919, TSEL1, 387.
72 VHE, 9 Aug. 1919, Bodleian VHED2, 61r.
73 TSE–CWE, 3 Sept. 1919, TSEL1, 392–3; Baedeker, Northern France, xvii.
74 TSE–CWE, 14 Oct. 1919, TSEL1, 406–7.
75 EP, SR, 44–5.
76 EP, ‘Sestina: Altaforte’, English Review, II. 3 ( June 1909), 419–20; rep. Exulta-
tions, 14–15.
77 EP, ‘Excideuil’, Beinecke EPP, b. 103, f. 3138–43; WTSF, 26.
78 EP–JQ, 6 Aug. 1919, TSEL1, 384n.
79 TSE–CWE, 14 Oct. 1919, TSEL1, 406–7.

80 EP, ‘Canto IX’ [‘Malatesta Canto’], TS1, Beinecke EPP, b. 70, f. 3138–43 (see
also Moody, ‘Bel Esprit and the Malatesta Cantos’, 81); rev. as ‘Malatesta Can-
tos. (Cantos IX to XII of a Long Poem)’, Criterion, I. 4 ( July 1923), 363–84.
81 DS–HHS, 15 Aug. 1919, Ezra Pound Collection, Hamilton (n.n., ID 218).
82 TSE–LS, [25? Aug. 1919], TSEL1, 388.
83 EP–HLP/IWP, 22 Aug. 1919, EPLP, 446.
84 EP, Beinecke EPP, b. 103, f. 4328–30; WTSF, 19.
85 EP, ‘Poems: Provincia Deserta’, PC, V. 6 (Mar. 1915) [251–7] 252; rep. L1916,
62, L1917, 62.
86 Du Pin, 65.
87 St Hilary of Poitiers, 374.
88 TSE–CWE, 2 Oct. 1919, TSEL1, 404.
89 TSE, ‘A Sceptical Patrician’, 361.
90 TSE, ‘War-paint and Feathers’, 1036.
91 TSE, ‘Tarr’, 106.
92 TSE, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent [I]’, 55.
93 EP, ‘And So shu stirred in the sea’, PC2015, 27.
94 EP, ‘a quando?’, PC2015, 129.
95 EP, ‘Mr Eliot’s Looseness’, 95–6.
96 EP, ‘Canto LXXIV’, PC1948, 5 (10); Cantos, 441 (447).
97 Kenner, The Pound Era, 336.
98 EP, ‘Canto CVII’, Cantos, 772 (778).
99 EP, ‘from Canto LXXX’, PC, LXVIII. 6 (Sept. 1946), [310–21] 313; Cantos 524
(530).
100 Eliot and Pound visited the chateau between 12–15 or 20–21 August, most
likely the first of these dates since there is no evidence that Eliot returned to
Excideuil after Les Eyzies on 19/20 August and from where he probably went
straight on to rendezvous with the Pounds at Breve.
101 EP, ‘Canto XXIX’, HH, III. 3 (Apr./June 1930), [358–75] 366; rep. DTC (Lon-
don 1933, 150).
102 EP, ‘Another Canto’ [Canto XII], ‘Two Cantos’, TR, I. 1 ( Jan. 1924), [10–14],
13; rep. Cantos, 53 (53); ‘Canto XXI’, Cantos, 98 (98); ‘Canto LXXVIII’, Cantos,
481 (487).
103 EP, ‘One Canto’ [Canto XIII], ‘Two Cantos’, TR, I. 1 ( Jan. 1924), [10–14] 11;
rep. ‘Canto XIII’, Cantos, 59 (59).
104 EP, ‘Canto XXIX’, HH, III. 3 (Apr./June 1930), [358–75] 366; rep. DTC (Lon-
don 1933, 150).
105 TSE, Dante, 60.
106 TSE, Dante, 61.
107 TSE, LG, 13.
108 TSE, ‘Literature and the Modern World’, 13.
109 TSE–WFS, 9 Aug. 1930, TSEL5, 287.
110 TSE–JQ, 26 Apr. 1923, TSEL2, 116.
111 TSE, Dante, 33.
112 TSE, ‘Literature and the Modern World’, 11–15.

113 Baedeker, Southern France, 89; EP–HLP/IWP, 22 Aug. 1919, EPLP, 446.
114 EP, ‘Brive’, Beinecke EPP, b. 103, f. 4328–30; WTSF, 35.
115 (EP–HLP, 3 Sept. [1919], EPLP, 447.
116 TSE–LS, [25? Aug. 1919], TSEL1, 388.
117 VHE–MH, 31 Aug. 1919, TSEL1, 392n.
118 VHE–MH, Wednesday, [25? Aug. 1920; i.e. 27 Aug. 1919], TSEL1, 496.
119 VHE, 31 Aug. 1919, Bodleian VHED2, 66v.
IV.
1 TSE–SS, Sunday [14 Sept. 1919], TSEL1, 396; also TSE–CWE, 3 Sept. 1919,
TSEL1, 392.
2 ‘This Seattle Dog Wears Flu Mask’, Seattle Star (2 Nov. 1918), 2; subsequent sto-
ries included ‘Pasadena “Flu” Mask Law Wide In Scope; Dogs, Cars Don ’Em’,
Los Angeles Evening Express (20 Jan. 1919), 13; ‘Umpires had it Soft – These
Players Couldn’t Bite ’Em’, Richmond Palladium and Sun-Telegram (Indiana), (10
Feb. 1919), 12.
3 TSE–CWE, 3 Sept. 1919, TSEL1, 393.
4 VHE, 2–5 Sept. 1919, Bodleian VHED2, 67r–v.
5 VHE, 6 Sept. 1919, Bodleian VHED2, 68r.
6 VHE, 7 Sept. 1919, Bodleian VHED2, 68r.
7 VHE, 9–12 Sept. 1919, Bodleian VHED2, 68v–69v.
8 VHE–MH, [?20 Sept. 1919], Texas MHP, b. 12, f. 7.
9 TSE–HWE, 7 Jan. 1947, TSEL8, 439.
10 VHE–MH, Friday night [3 Oct. 1919], TSEL1, 406.
11 TSE–EHH, 5 Sept. 1916, TSEL1, 161–2.
12 VHE, 20 Sept. 1919, Bodleian VHED2, 71v.
13 VHE–MH, 26 Sept. 1919, TSEL1, 398–9.
14 VHE–MH, [3 Oct. 1919], TSEL1, 406.
15 VHE–MH, 29 Oct. [1919], TSEL1, 410–11.
16 VHE–MH, Wednesday eve [?1 Oct. 1919], Texas MHP, b. 12, f. 7.
17 VHE, 29 Sept. 1919, Bodleian VHED2, 73v; VHE–MH, 3 Oct. 1919, TSEL1,
405–6.
18 VHE–MH, n.d. [?17–22 Oct. 1919], Texas MHP, b. 12, f. 7.
19 VHE–MH, 12 May [1926], Texas MHP, b. 12, f. 7.
20 VHE–MH, 2 June 1931, TSEL5, 581.
21 TSE–EP [12? Sept. 1919], TSEL1, 395.
22 EP–HLP, 15 Sept. 1919, EPLP, 448.
23 TSE, ‘Gerontion’, TS[1], Berg TSECP, [Poems]; Dante Alighieri, ‘Canto
XXXIII’, The Divine Comedy, 1. The Inferno, 121–3, 378 (tr. 379).
24 Blast, 1 (20 June 1914), 21.
25 TSE–SOF, 21 Feb. 1944, SOURCE TK.
26 TSE–JQ, 28 Sept. 1919, TSEL1, 400.
28 TSE, ‘Ben Jonson’, TLS, 930 (13 Nov. 1919), 637–8.

29 TSE–CWE, 2 Oct. 1919, TSEL1, 404.
30 TSE, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent [I]’, Egoist, VI. 4 (Sept. 1919), [54–5]
55.
31 TSE, ‘Hamlet and His Problems, Athenaeum, 4665 (26 Sept. 1919), 940–1 .
32 EP, ‘Pastiche: The Regional – I’, NA, XXV. 7 (12 June 1919), 124.
33 EP, ‘Pastiche: The Regional – XVIII’, NA, XXVI. 3 (20 Nov. 1919), 48.
34 EP, ‘The Revolt of Intelligence – VI’, NA, XXVI. 11 (15 Jan. 1920), 176.
35 EP–JQ, 25 Oct. 1919, EPSL, 151 (213).
36 Ovid, Ars amatoria (II. 165), Art of Love. Cosmetics. Remedies for Love.
Ibis. Walnut-tree. Sea Fishing. Consolation (trans. J. H. Mozley; rev. G. P.
Goold), Loeb Classical Library 232, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1929, 77; EP–HLP, [late Oct. 1919], EPLP, 450.
37 EP–JQ, 2 Dec. 1918, Berg JQP; VETC, 17.
39 EP–JQ, 25 Oct. 1919, EPSL, 151 (213).
40 EP, ‘Mr Pound and his Poetry’, 1132.
41 TSE, ‘Mr Pound and his Poetry’, 1163.
43 TSE, ‘A Note on Ezra Pound’, 3–9.
44 KM–JMM, 28 Oct. 1919, KMCL3, 54.
45 KM–JMM, 4 Nov. 1919, KMCL3, 70.
47 EP, ‘[Canto] IV’, PC2015, 21.
48 EP, FC; rep. Dial, LXVIII. 6 ( June 1920), 689–92; P1918, 73–7.
49 EP, ‘Three Cantos: The Fifth Canto’, Dial, LXXI. 2 (Aug. 1921), 198–201;
P1918, 78–82.
50 EP–HLP, [? Apr. 1919], EPLP, 441; EP–JQ, 6 Oct. 1921, Berg JQP.
52 TSE’s lecture at Central Buildings, Westminster, 28 Oct. 1919, was part of the
ALS’s series ‘Modern Tendencies in Art’, and was published as ‘Modern Ten-
dencies in Poetry’, 9–18.
53 EPLP, 451n.
54 EP–IWP, [2 Nov. 1919], EPLP, 451.
55 TSE–JQ, 5 Nov. 1919, TSEL1, 413.
56 VHE, 5 Nov. 1919, Bodleian VHED2, 82v.
57 VHE, 8 Nov. 1919, Bodleian VHED2, 83v.
58 ‘The First Two-Minute Silence in London’, Manchester Guardian, (12 Nov.
1919).
59 VHE, 17, 21, 23 Nov. 1919, Bodleian VHED2, 86r, 87r, 87v.
60 Don D. Moore, 314.
61 Archer, 126.
62 TSE, ‘Syllabus for a Tutorial Class in Modern English Literature’.
63 TSE, ‘The Duchess of Malfi at the Lyric’, 37.
64 Valerie Eliot, ‘The Waste Land’, broadcast script, 4.
65 TSE, ‘The Death of the Duchess’, TS1, Berg TSECP, Waste Land.

66 Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, IV. 2.
67 Eliot may have intended the penultimate line, ‘I am steward of her revenue’, to
have been voiced by the Duchess’s conduit in the play, Antonio.
68 TSE, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent – II’, 72–3.
69 Eliot had initially described sulphurous acid as the chemical product of this
reaction, but was corrected in letters beginning in 1926; see TSE–PWR, 9 July
1926, TSEL3, 212–13 and 212n.
70 JK–RW, 27 Oct. 1918, JKL, 157.
71 ‘Preface’, Wordsworth and Coleridge, xiv.
72 TSE, ‘The Preacher as Artist’, 1252–3.
73 Warren, ‘The Fire-Sermon’, Maha Vagga (I. 211), 352.
74 TSE, ‘The Preacher as Artist’, 1252–3.
75 EP–HLP, 13 Dec. 1919, EPLP, 455.
76 EP–JQ, 24 Nov. 1919, EPLQ, 179.
77 TSE–EP, postmark 2 Dec. 1919, TSEL1, 421.
78 EP, ‘Three Cantos: The Seventh Canto’, Dial, LXXI. 2 (Aug. 1921), [198–208]
205; rep. P1921, 87–90.
79 TSE–EP, [27 May? 1923], TSEL2, 141.
80 ‘These fragments you have shelved (shored)’: EP, ‘Canto IX’ [‘Malatesta Canto’],
TS1, Beinecke EPP, b. 70, f. 3138–43; rev. excluding the line as ‘Malatesta Can-
tos. (Cantos IX to XII of a Long Poem)’, Criterion, I. 4 ( July 1923), 363–84; rev.
including the line as ‘Canto VIII’, DTC, 32; Cantos, 28 (28); TSE would insist
on the removal the line for the Criterion printing.
81 EP, ‘Ode pour l’élection de son sépulchre’, HSM, 9; rep. ‘H. S. Mauberly’ [sic],
Dial, LXIX. 3 (Sept. 1920), [283–7] 283.
82 EP–FES, 8–9 July [1922], EPSL, 181 (249).
83 EP–ST, 7 June 1920, EPLD, 39l ; ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’, MS [TS] and
galleys, Texas JRP, b. 9. f. 5.
84 Laughlin, 173.
85 EP–JL, in preparing DRL, 1958; PT, 1308n., SPT, 301.
86 imitator: Scourfield, 1033; ‘Vocat asetus in umbram’ (‘The heat calls us to the
shade’): Nemesianus, Ecologae IV. 38, Duff and Duff, 480 (481).
87 EP–TEC, cited in Thomas E. Connolly, 59.
88 EP, ‘II’, HSM, 10.
89 EP, ‘II’, HSM, 13.
90 EP–FMF, 30 July 1920, EPLF, 35–7; EP, ‘Envoi (1919)’, HSM, 21.
91 EP–FES, 8–9 July [1922], EPSL, 180 (248); EP–FES, 8–9 July [1922], EPSL,
181 (249).
92 TSE–CWE, 6 Jan. 1920, TSEL1, 427.
93 VHE, 30–1 Dec. 1919, Bodleian VHED2, 96v–97r.
94 TSE–SS, 12 Jan. 1920, TSEL1, 430; VHE, 28 Dec. 1919, Bodleian VHED2,
96r.
95 VHE, 31 Dec. 1919, Bodleian VHED2, 97r.
96 TSE–CWE, [Postmark 18 Dec. 1919], TSEL1, 424.
97 TSE–CWE, 6 Jan. 1920, TSEL1, 427–8.

98 ‘8 Killed, 66 Injured in Vienna Red Riot’, NYT, 17 June 1919, 19.
99 TSE, ‘To the Editor of The Transatlantic Review’, 95–6.
100 TSE–CWE, 6 Jan. 1920, TSEL1, 428.
101 TSE, ‘John Maynard Keynes’, 47–8.
102 Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, 278.
103 Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, 100, 278.
104 Percy Byshee Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, Act I, ll. 619–20 (Keynes follows
the 1820 text ruin which was a corruption of the MS ravin, restored by Mary
Shelley in her 1839 edition based on PBS’s own errata); Keynes, The Economic
Consequences of the Peace, 278.
105 EP–JQ, 21 Feb. 1920, EPLQ, 185.
106 EP, ‘Canto XXII’, Dial, LXXXIV.2 (Feb. 1928), 113–17; Cantos, 102 (102).
107 EP–HLP, 22 Feb. 1920, EPLP, 461; EP–JQ, 21 Feb. 1920, EPLQ, 185.
108 EP, ‘C. H. Douglas, Etc.’, 16.
109 Douglas, 6; EP, VC, 13.
110 EP, ‘Canto Thirty-Eight’, NEW, III. 24 (28 Sept. 1933), 564–5; Cantos, 190
(190): ‘and the power to purchase can never / (under the present system) catch
up with / prices at large’.
111 EP, ‘Canto LXXI’ (trans. Giovanni Cecchetti), PN, 5 ( Jan. 1955), 9–10; Cantos,
416 (416).
112 See EP, WMF.
113 EP, SC, 21; also EP, ABC, 46.
114 EP, ‘The Revolt of Intelligence – VIII’, 287–8.
115 EP, ‘Imaginary Letters – IV’, 21; jp, ‘The Episode Continued’, 36.
116 EP, ‘Upon the Harps of Judea’, LR (‘Devoted Chiefly to Ezra Pound . . .’), V. 7
(Nov. 1918), 6.
117 Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering, 273–4.
118 EP–MA, [29 June 1917], EPLLR, 85.
119 EP, ‘The Revolt of Intelligence – V’, 153.
120 Edward Hicks Parry, 11 Feb. 1973, Kislak CGC, b. 2, f. 51; the letter forms a
discussion on ‘suburban prejudice’ in Carpenter 19–25 and Moody, Ezra Pound,
I, 10–11, and also Wilhelm, The American Roots of Ezra Pound, 73–5.
121 TSE–SS, 12 Jan. 1920, TSEL1, 431.
122 VHE–CWE, 5 Jan. 1920, TSEL1, 426.
123 TSE–CWE, 6 Jan. 1920, TSEL1, 428.
124 TSE to MT, 2 Apr 1951, Bodleian MT.
125 TSE–MWC, 8 Aug. 1930, TSEL5, 281.
126 TSE–EH, 7 Sept. 1931, Princeton EHL, b. 2, f. 2; TSE, ‘The Influence of Land-
scape upon the Poet’, Dædalus, 89 (Spring 1960), 420– 2.
127 The Eliots moved in 1905 to 4446 Westminster Place, although TSE lived there
for only a year.
128 Stravinsky, 92–3.
129 Matthews, 11–12.
131 TSE, ‘Address’ (at the Centennial Celebration of the Mary Institute), From Mary

to You: Centennial, 1859–1959, St Louis, MO: Mary Institute, 1959, 133–6; ‘In
the rank ailanthus of the April dooryard’: TSE, DS, 7.
132 TSE–EH, 7 Sept. 1931, Princeton EHL, b. 2, f. 2; TSE, Animula.
133 TSE–EH, 7 Sept. 1931, Princeton EHL, b. 2, f. 2.
134 Mary Trevelyan [Nov. 1949], Bodleian MT.
135 Charlotte C. Eliot, William Greenleaf Eliot, 101.
136 TSE, ALAL, rep. TCC, 44.
138 ‘The Clayworking Plants of St Louis’, Brick (May 1904), 235–9.
140 Morley, 110–33; rep. Tate, 108–9.
141 Empson, ‘My God, man, there’s bears on it’, 198.
142 In an historical review of the Missouri justice system, St Louis County Circuit
Judge Noah Weinstein credited the 1901 Probation Act as ‘the first positive
legislation in Missouri in the general direction of our modern conception of
juvenile court legislation’; Noah Weinstein, ‘The Juvenile Court Concept in Mis-
souri: Its Historical Development – The Need for New Legislation’, Washington
University Law Quarterly, Feb. 1957, [17–56] 24.
143 Charlotte C. Eliot, William Greenleaf Eliot, v; ‘Ring, Easter Bells!’, Easter Songs,
9.
144 Charlotte C. Eliot, Savonarola; Matthews, 9.
145 TSE–CWE, 27 Aug. 1927, TSEL3, 648.
146 TSE–EH, 27 Jan. 1931, Princeton EHL, b. 1, f. 2.
147 TSE–EH, 2 Apr. 1935; TSE–EH, 19 Feb. 1936, Princeton EHL, b. 6, f. 6.
148 TSE–MWC, 8 Aug. 1930, TSEL5, 281.
150 TSE, ‘Why Mr Russell Is a Christian’, 177–9.
151 Janet Adam Smith, 1060.
152 TSE, ‘The Jim Jum Bears are at their Tricks’, TS[1], Houghton TSEMP, see The
Poems of T. S. Eliot, 1, 302–3.
153 The Eliots summered at The Downs between 1896 and 1909; earlier visits had
them based at Hawthorne Inn, Wonson’s Point.
154 Matthews, 17–19.
155 TSE, ‘Publisher’s Preface’, vii–viii.
156 EP–HLP, 14 Jan. 1920, EPLP, 457.
157 Colin, 211.
158 EP–HLP, 21 Jan. 1920, EPLP, 460.
159 EP, ‘Londres et Ses Environs’, 2–3; ‘London and its Environs’ (trans. Hender-
son), 278.
160 EP, ‘A Letter from London’, 1.
161 FSF–HSW, 21 Feb. 1917, Texas FSFC.
163 J. C. Squire, ‘The Man who wrote Free Verse’, 128.
164 Virginia Woolf, 21 Apr. 1918, VWD1, 143; in the 1918 general election, Squire
gained 641 votes, 11 per cent, and lost his £150 candidate’s deposit.

165 EP–WCW, 11 Sept. 1920, EPSL, 158.
166 Virginia Woolf, 12 Mar. 1924, VWD2, 297.
167 J. C. Squire, ‘A House’, Marsh, 25.
168 Virginia Woolf, 3 Jan. 1918, VWD1, 95; TSE–RA, 3 Oct. 1921, TSEL1, 587;
TSE–JQ, 25 Jan. 1920, TSEL1, 435.
169 TSE, ‘Verse Pleasant and Unpleasant’, 43.
170 EP–WCW, 11 Sept. 1920, EPSL, 158 (222).
171 Graves with Riding, 118–19 (112–13).
172 Aldington, Life for Life’s Sake, 100; Ford Madox Hueffer [Ford], ‘Impressionism
– Some Speculations’, 182.
173 TSE–JCS, 10 Sept. 1919, TSEL1, 394.
174 EP–ST, 24 Mar. 1920, EPLD, 15; EP, ‘Historical Survey’, 39.
175 TSE–ST, 30 June 1918, TSEL1, 269.
176 EP–ST, 25 Jan. 1920, EPLD, 11.
177 E. E. Cummings, ‘Seven Poems’, Dial, LXVIII. 1 ( Jan. 1920), 22–6.
178 TSE–CWE, 26 Jan. 1920, TSEL1, 436; EP–HW, 30 June 1920, EPSL, 154
(218).
179 TSE–CWE, 15 Feb. 1920, TSEL1, 444.
180 TSE–CWE, 21 [i.e. 22] Feb. 1920, TSEL1, 446.
181 TSE–JQ, 25 Jan. 1920, TSEL1, 435.
182 Arbuthnot, 38.
183 Untermeyer, ‘Ezra Pound – Proseur’, 83–4.
184 Aiken, ‘A Pointless Pointillist’, 306–7.
185 Carnevali, 211–21.
186 Nichols, ‘Poetry and Mr Pound’, 6.
187 Nichols, The Assault and Other War Poems from ‘Ardours and Endurances’, xi, 56, 58,
70.
188 T. Sturge Moore, 32.
189 Nichols, ‘Invocation’, Invocation and Peace Celebration, Hymn for the British
Peoples, 5.
190 Lewis, ‘Mr Ezra Pound’, 5.
191 EP, ‘Propertius and Mr Pound’, 5.
192 Nichols, ‘Mr Nichols writes’, 5.
193 Fletcher, 23–5.
194 Aldington, ‘A Book for Literary Philosophers’, 215.
195 Sinclair, 658–8.
196 EP–BB, c.May 1935, Beinecke EPP, b. 6, f. 280.
197 EP, HSM, 22, 26, 27.
198 EP–FMF, 30 July 1920, EPLF, 35.
199 EP–MEB, 23 Feb. 1934, EPSL, 254 (339).
200 TSE–JQ, 26 Mar 1920, TSEL1, 459.
201 EP–TH, [?Feb. 1921], in Hutchins, ‘Ezra Pound and Thomas Hardy’, 91–104;
EP–HLP, 1 Sept. 1920, EPLP, 470; WBY–EP, 23 Aug. 1920, ALS Yale (I am
grateful to John Kelly for this letter).
202 TSE, ‘Introduction’, SP1928, vii, xv, xxiv; SP1949, 7, 13, 20.

203 EP–FES, 8–9 July [1922], EPSL, 181 (249).
204 EP, ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’, P1926, 185.
205 EP–HM, Jan. 1931, EPSL, 230 (310).
206 EP–FES, 8–9 July [1922], EPSL, 180 (248).
V.
1 TSE–JR, 1 Feb. 1920, TSEL1, 438.
2 Robert Nichols, ‘An Ironist’, 7.
3 Beare, 30.
4 TSE–DG, 21 Feb. 1936, Gallup, T. S. Eliot, 26.
5 Dante, ‘Canto XVVI’, ll. 145–8, The Divine Comedy: The Purgatorio, 330.
6 TSE–JR, 3 Oct. 1919, TSEL1, 405.
7 ‘Therefore I do implore you’: Longfellow, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri,
170n.; ‘I pray you’: Binyon, 326; ‘To you we pray’: Jordan, 349; ‘Now I beg you’:
Kirkpatrick, 588n.
8 Dante, ‘Canto XVVI’, ll. 145–8, The Divine Comedy: The Purgatorio, 331.
9 TSE, Dante, 34.
10 TSE–DG, 21 Feb. 1936, Gallup, T. S. Eliot, 26.
11 Cloud, 72, 74.
12 TSE–VW, 12 Nov. 1935, TSEL7, 827.
13 TSE–JR, 3 Oct. 1919, TSEL1, 405.
14 John Middleton Murry, 239.
15 Unsigned, ‘A New Byronism’, TLS, 948 (18 Mar. 1920), 184.
16 Nichols, ‘An Ironist’, 7.
17 TSE–HWE, 15 Feb. 1920, TSEL1, 441.
18 Deutsch, ‘The Season for Song’, NYEP (29 May 1920), Berg BDP, b. 10, f. 3
(date uncertain; given in Brooker, 40).
19 Beare, 30–1.
20 TSE–HWE, 15 Feb. 1920, TSEL1, 441.
21 HWE–CWE 27 Apr. 1920, TLSE1, 467n.
22 Arthur Waugh, 386; also William Carlos Williams, ‘Prologue’, 76–8; Leonard
Woolf (unsigned), ‘Is This Poetry?’, 491.
23 John Middleton Murry, 239; unsigned, ‘A New Byronism’, TLS, 948 (18 Mar.
1920), 184; unsigned, ‘Some Recent Verse’, OT, 4 April 1920, 7; Untermeyer,
‘Irony de Luxe’, 381–2.
24 Morgan, 135–6.
25 Cyril Connolly, 8.
26 Deutsch, ‘The Season for Song’, NYEP (29 May 1920), Berg BDP, b. 10, f. 3
(date uncertain; given in Brooker, 40).
27 ‘W. S. B.’, Braithwaite, 6.
28 Strobel, 157–9.
29 Cummings, ‘T. S. Eliot’, 781–4.
30 ST–EP, 8 Mar. 1920, EPLD, 13.
31 EP–ST, 24 Mar. 1920, EPLD, 15.

32 EP–ST, 24 Mar. 1920, EPLD, 17.
33 EP–TEL, 20 Apr. 1920, Bodleian PTEL, f. 1214.
34 EP–ST, 24 Mar. 1920, EPLD, 15.
35 EP, ‘Dramedy’, 315, the first in a weekly theatre column.
36 Virginia Woolf, 18 June 1919, VWD1, 282; 6 Mar. 1920, VWD2, 22; 20 Apr.
1920, VWD2, 32.
38 Unsigned, ‘Paris: A Poem by Hope Mirrlees’, TLS (6 May 1920), 286.
39 Unsigned, ‘List of New Books’, Athenaeum, 4699 (21 May 1920), 686.
40 Cocteau (tr. Hugo), 43–96.
41 TSE, ‘The Post Georgians’, 171–2.
42 TSE had reviewed Cinnamon and Angelica: A Play by John Middleton Murry, in
the previous week’s issue of the Athenaeum: ‘The Poetic Drama’, 635–6.
43 Unsigned, ‘Paris A Poem by Hope Mirrlees’, TLS (6 May 1920), 286.
44 Hope Mirrlees, ‘The Mysterious Mr Eliot’, BBC TV, 3 Jan. 1971, also ‘Eliot’s
Life’, The Listener, 85. 2181 (14 Jan. 1971), 50.
45 Virginia Woolf, 23 Nov. 1920, VWD2, 75.
46 Virginia Woolf, 18 May 1920, VWD2, 40.
47 KM–SW, [late Mar. 1921], KMCL4, 201–2.
48 KM–SS & VS, [10 May 1919], KMCL4, 9.
49 KM–SS & VS, 14 May 1920, KMCL4, 11.
50 EP–HLP, 20 May 1920, EPLP, 464; TSE–JQ, 10 May 1029, TSEL1, 464.
51 EP–ST, 1 June 1920, EPLD, 34.
52 James Joyce, ‘A Memory of the Players in a Mirror at Midnight’, Dial, LXIX. 1
( July 1920), 26.
53 ST–EP, 30 Apr. 1920, EPLD, 25.
54 EP–HLP, 20 May 1920, EPLP, 464.
55 ST–EP, 30 Apr. 1920, EPLD, 26.
56 W. C. Blum [ James Sibley Watson], 422–3.
57 EP–ST, 14 Oct. 1920, EPLD, 164.
58 EP, ‘Historical Survey’, 41.
59 TSE–EP, 30 May 1920, TSEL1, 466.
60 EP–HLP, postmark 29 Apr. 1920, EPLP, 463.
61 EP–MMC, n.d. [c.1910], Kislak CGC, Kislak EPRC.
62 EP, ‘Prologomena’ [sic], 72; rep. PD1918, 103.
63 EP–JJ, 13 May 1920, EPLJ, 165.
64 JJ–FB, Jan. 1920, JJL1, 134; EPLJ, 163.
65 EP–HLP, 6 Apr. 1917, EPLP, 393; EP–HLP, 23 Aug. 1917, EPLP, 404.
66 EP, ‘Books Current – Joyce’, 161–3; ‘In the Vortex: Joyce’, Instigations, 207.
67 JJ–EP, [31 May 1920], EPLJ, 167–9, as 5 June 1920, JJL2, 467–9.
68 EP–JJ, 2 June 1920, EPLJ, 170–1.
69 JJ–HSW, 12 July 1920, JLL, 142.
70 EP, ‘Canto LXXVI’, SR, LV. 1 ( Jan./Mar. 1947), [56–67] 60; Cantos, 470 (476).
71 EP–JQ, 19 June 1920, EPLJ, 178.
72 EP, ‘Indiscretions; or, Une Revue de Deux Mondes – I’, 56–7; rep. PD1958, 3–6.

73 EPLP, 465n.
74 EP ‘Indiscretions . . . VII’, 156; PD1958, 29.
75 EP, ‘Indiscretions . . . IX’, 188; PD1958, 37.
76 Now 314 2nd Avenue S, Hailey, Idaho 83333.
77 EP ‘Indiscretions . . . III’, 92, PD1958, 15–16.
78 Longfellow, ‘Mezzo Cammin’, Selected Poems, 356.
79 EP, ‘Indiscretions . . . X’, 204; PD1958, 41.
80 EP–DS, [25 Mar. 1914], EPLS, 337.
81 William Carlos Williams, Autobiography, 64.
82 Homer Pound, interviewed by Mary Dixon Thayer, Philadelphia Evening Bulle-
tin, 20 Feb 1928; see Norman, Ezra Pound, 15.
83 EP–TH, 31 Mar 1921, see Davie, 46.
84 EP, ‘Indiscretions . . . II’, 77; PD1958, 8.
85 EP, ‘Indiscretions . . . XII’, 236; PD1958, 46.
86 EP, ‘Canto 97’, HR, IX. 3 (Autumn 1956), 387–98; Cantos, 687 (693).
87 EP in Hall, ‘Ezra Pound’, 40.
88 Wilhelm, The American Roots of Ezra Pound, 82.
89 Carlyle, ‘Lecture I: The Hero as Divinity. Odin. Paganism: Scandinavian My-
thology’, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, 2; ‘Lecture III: The
Hero as Poet. Dante: Shakespeare’, 70.
90 Carlyle, ‘Lecture II: The Hero as Prophet. Mahomet: Islam’, 41.
91 Carlyle, ‘Lecture III’, 70; ‘Lecture II’, 41.
92 EP, ‘Und Drang’, Canzoni, 43.
93 EP, ‘The New Sculpture’, 67–8.
94 Ford Madox Ford, Return to Yesterday, 392 (409).
95 EP, ‘De Gourmont’, 1–19.
96 EP–JQ, 11 Aug. 1915, EPLQ, 37.
97 See EP–Amy Lowell, 26 Nov. 1913; EP–MA, [Sept.] 1917; EP–MA, [?Jan.]
1918; EP–WCW, 11 Sept. 1920; EP–Robert McAlmon, 2 Feb. 1934; all EPSL.
98 EP–JQ, 8 Nov. 1920, EPLQ, 203.
99 EP–JQ, 4 June 1920, Berg JQP; TWL Facs, xviii.
100 TSE–EP, [ June? 1920], TSEL1, 468.
101 Unsigned, ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’, TLS, 963 (1 July 1920), 427.
102 EP, ‘The Fourth Canto’, Dial (New York, LXVIII. 6 ( June 1920), 689–92, rep.
from FC.
103 Edmund Wilson, ‘Mr Pound’s Patchwork’, 323–3.
104 Muir, ‘Recent Verse’ (1922), 288.
105 Bodenheim, 87–91.
106 Leavis, 105, 115.
107 EP–R. P. Blackmur, 30 Nov. 1924, EPSL, 190 (261), TSEL1, 951.
108 EP, SP1928.
109 Muir, ‘Recent Verse’ (1920), 186–7.
110 TSE, ‘The Perfect Critic, II’, 102–4.
111 Sylvia Beach, 23.

114 Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering, 294.
115 AH–BGB, 30 July 1920, AHL, 189; Virginia Woolf, 16 May 1919, VWD2, 272.
116 TSE–SS, [4 Aug. 1920], TSEL1, 483.
117 VHE–TSE, [16? Aug. 1920], TSEL1, 492.
118 VHE–TSE, 20 Aug. [1920], TSEL1, 493.
121 TSE–CWE, 20 Sept. 1920, TSEL1, 501.
122 TSE–HWE 13 Sept. 1920, TSEL1, 499.
123 TSE–CWE, 20 Sept. 1920, TSEL1, 501–2.
124 Chesterton, ‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard’, The Ballad of St Barbara, 13.
125 TSE, ‘G. K. Chesterton’, 785.
126 EP–JQ, 21 Aug. 1917, EPSL, 116 (170).
127 TSE, ‘In Memory of Henry James’, 1–2; ‘Observations’, 69–70.
128 Chesterton, Alarms and Discursions, 57.
129 EP, ‘The New Cake of Soap’, Blast, 1 (20 June 1914), 49.
130 Chesterton, ‘The New Jerusalem. The Crusade. Chapter XI’, Daily Telegraph (10
Sept. 1920), The New Jerusalem, 219.
131 EP, ‘The Crusades’, 12.
132 TSE, ‘G. K. Chesterton’, 785.
133 TSE, ASG, 20.
134 TSE–VHH, 10 May 1940, TSEL9, 518.
135 TSE–IB, 9 Feb. 1952, TSEL9, xxx, 914n.
136 TSE–PG (Fact Magazine), 28 Apr. 1964, TSLE9, 518n.
137 EP, ‘Mr Eliot’s Quandaries’, 558–9; TSE, ‘Mr T. S. Eliot’s Quandaries’, 662–3.
138 TSE, ‘The Use of Poetry’, 215.
139 TSE–CWE, 6 Oct. 1920, TSEL1, 506.
140 VHE–OM, 27 Mar. [1926], TSEL3, 114.
141 VHE–EK, [21? Dec. 1925], TSEL2, 804.
142 VHE–MH, 29 Sept. 1928, TSEL4, 265–6.
143 TSE, TWLF, 127.
144 WS–TSE, 26 May 1932, TSEL6, 216n.
145 William Carlos Williams, Autobiography, 158.
146 WCW–DI, 9 Aug. 1948, WCWSL, 267.
147 William Carlos Williams, I Wanted to Write a Poem (30) 42; ‘Prologue’, 79, rep.
Kora in Hell, 28.
148 William Carlos Williams, ‘Prologue’, 77, rep. Kora in Hell, 26; I Wanted to Write a
Poem (30) 42.
149 EP–WCW, 11 Sept. 1920 [second letter], EPSL, 160 (225).
150 EP–WCW, 10 Nov. 1917, EPSL, 124 (181); EPLW, 31; quoted in Williams,
Kora in Hell, 14.
151 William Carlos Williams, ‘Prologue’, 79; rep. Kora in Hell, 28.
152 EP–WCW, 11 Sept. 1920, EPSL, 156, 157 (221).
153 EP–WCW, 11 Sept. 1920, EPSL, 158 (223).

154 EP, ‘Indiscretions . . . VII’, 157.
155 TSE, ‘The Possibility of a Poetic Drama’, 441–7.
156 Aldington, ‘The Sacred Wood’, 191–3.
157 Frazer, I, 1–108.
158 TSE, SW, ii; Petronius, ‘LXXXIII’, Satyricon (tr. Heseltine), 167.
159 TSE, SW, vii; TSE would dedicate P1925, 5: ‘To / Henry Ware Eliot / 1843–
1919’.
160 Tace et fac, Be silent and act.
161 Marianne Moore, ‘The Sacred Wood’, 336–9.
162 unsigned, ‘Poetry and Criticism’, TLS, 985 (2 Dec. 1920), 795.
163 Lynd, 359–60.
164 Aiken, ‘The Scientific Critic’, 593–4.
165 MacCarthy, 418–20.
166 EP, ‘Londres et ses Environs’, 2–3; ‘London and its Environs’ (tr. Henderson),
278.
167 TSE–PMJ, 19 Jan. 1927, TSEL3, 384.
168 L. W. [Leonard Woolf ], ‘Back to Aristotle’, 834–5.
169 EP–ST, 25–6 Nov. 1920, EPLD, 184–5.
170 EP, ‘The Island of Paris: A Letter, October 1920’, 515–18.
171 EP–JQ, [postmark 8 Nov. 1920], EPLQ, 201–3.
172 EP–JQ, [postmark 8 Nov. 1920], EPLQ, 204.
173 ‘British Music Society: An “Unknown” Programme’, Times (15 June 1921), 8.
174 Carson, 45.
175 EP (‘William Atheling’), ‘Music’ (25 Nov. 1920), 44.
176 EP, ‘The Island of Paris: A Letter, October 1920’, 518.
177 EP, ‘Vers Libre and Arnold Dolmetsch’, 90–1; PD1918, 151; EP–FMF, 30 July
1920, EPLF, 35.
178 EP (‘William Atheling’), ‘Music’ (23 Dec. 1920), 92–3.
179 Dunbar, ‘Sympathy’, Lyrics of the Hearthside, 40.
180 EP, ‘The Island of Paris: A Letter. November 1920’, 635–6.
181 VHE–MEB, 17 Nov. 1920, TSEL1, 520.
182 TSE–WL, 15 Oct. 1920, TSEL1, 508.
183 TSE–CWE, 3 Apr. 1921, TSEL1, 547.
184 Daily Mail (11 November 1920)
185 ‘The Unknown Solider’, produced by Simon Hollis and Jo Wheeler, BBC World
Service, 6 Nov. 2018; Michael Gavaghan, The Story of the British Unknown War-
rior, Preston: M&L Publications, 1995, Fourth Edition, Le Touquet, 2006.
186 TSE–CWE, 2 Dec. 1920, TSEL1, 524.
187 Pension Casaubon, 151 bis rue St-Jacques, Hôtel Louis XIV, Porte et Balcon,
Vème arr., Latin Quarter; JV–TSE, 5 Feb. 1912, TSEL1, 31; TSE–EHH, 26
Apr. [1911], TSEL1, 16; see also Hargrove 10, 31–2, and George Watson, 468.
188 TSE, 6 Dec. 1920, TSEL1, 525.
189 TSE–CWE, 22 Jan. 1921, TSEL1, 536.
190 EP–HLP, 27 Dec. 1920, EPLP, 477.
191 EP, FTS; EP–HLP, 13 Dec. 1920, EPLP, 475.

192 A. R. Orage (‘R.H.C.’), ‘Readers and Writers’, 126.
193 TSE–EP, [22 Dec. 1920], TSEL1, 527.
194 TSE–EP, [22 Dec. 1920], TSEL1, 528.
195 EP–HLP, 27 Dec. 1920, EPLP, 477.
Part II
1 William Force Stead, ‘Some Personal Impressions of T. S. Eliot’, 63.
The Burial of the Dead.

1 TSE, ‘Thomas Stearns Eliot’ (1921), 107.
2 TSE–ST, 1 Jan. 1920 [i.e. 1921], Beinecke EPP, b. 31, f. 809; TSEL1, 529–31.
3 EP, ‘Briefer Mention’, 110.
4 VHE–CWE, 25 Jan. 1921, TSEL1, 538.
5 TSE–ST, 30 Jan. 1921, TSEL1, 539.
6 TSE–ST, 17 Oct. 1920, TSEL1, 509.
7 TSE–CWE, 22 Jan. 1921, TSEL1, 535; TSE–ST, 30 Jan. 1921, TSEL1, 539.
8 TSE, ‘London Letter: March, 1921’, 452.
9 Monro, Some Contemporary Poets (1920), 111, 119, 174, 180, 193.
10 Monro, Some Contemporary Poets (1920), 89.
11 TSE, ‘London Letter. March, 1921’, 449.
12 Unsigned, ‘Obituary Verses’, SWG, 2 Feb. 1921, 10.
13 TSE–ST, 30 Jan. 1921, TSEL1, 539.
14 ST–TSE, 10 Feb. 1921, TSEL1, 539n.
15 Virginia Woolf, 16 Feb. 1921, VWD2, 90.
16 EP, ‘Briefer Mention’, 110.
17 TSE–CWE, 2 Dec. 1920, TSEL1, 524; TSE–CWE, 31 Oct. 1920, TSEL1, 516;
TSE–CWE, 20 Sep. 1920, TSEL1, 502; TSE–HWE, 13 Sept. 120, TSEL1, 499.
18 TSE–JQ, 5 Nov. 1919, TSEL1, 413.
19 TSE–CA, 10 Jan. 1916, TSEL1, 138.
20 WBY–MsF, 8 Feb. [1921], WBYL, 665; Aldous Huxley, ‘Volpone’, 6.
21 TSE, ‘London Letter: May, 1921’, 686.
22 WL–VS, 6 Feb. 1921, BL SP.
23 WL–SS, 7 Feb. 1921, BL SP.
24 TSE, ‘I am the Resurrection and the Life’, MS, Berg TSECP [Waste Land];
TWLF, 110–1.
25 ‘The Order for the Burial of the Dead’, The Book of Common Prayer.
26 That Eliot was using a Corona at this time is evidenced by John Middleton
Murry, who told Katherine Mansfield that he had sold his old typewriter for
£5.10.0 to buy a Corona: ‘the machine Aldous Huxley and Eliot have and swear
by. It costs £15.15.0.’ JMM–KM, c.25 Mar. 1920, JMMLM, 312n; TSE–HWE,
3 Oct. 1921, TSEL1, 585.
27 TSE–MB, 2 Jan. 1921, TSEL1, 532.

28 TSE, ‘The Romantic Englishman’, [4].
29 TSE, ‘He Do the Police in Different Voices: Part I. The Burial of the Dead’, TS,
fo. [1], Berg TSECP [Waste Land]; TWLF, 4–5.
30 Valerie Eliot, Eliot Estate EVE, [1].
fo. 2, Berg TSECP [Waste Land]; TWLF, 6–7.
32 Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘General Prologue’, The Canterbury Tales, 1.
33 TSE, ‘Conclusion’, UPUC, 148.
35 TSE, ‘Introduction’, Seneca his Tenne Tragedies, x; rep. ‘Seneca in Elizabethan
Translation’, SE, 69.
36 Stravinksy, 92.
37 Schwartz, 199.
38 Ezekiel 6:4.
40 See Weston, 76; TSE, ‘He Do the Police in Different Voices: Part I. The Burial
of the Dead’, TS, fo. 3, Berg TSECP [Waste Land]; TWLF, 8–9.
42 TSE–CA, 21 Aug. 1916, TSEL1, 158.
43 TSE–MC, 5 Dec. 1924, TSEL2, 550; TSE–HC, 8 Sept. 1927, TSEL3, 688.
44 TSE–MUC, 16 Dec. 1929, TSEL4, 714–15.
45 TSE–GC, 26 Feb. 1936, TSEL8, 86.
46 TSE–HWE, 30 Dec. 1936, TSEL8, 420.
47 TSE–ELM, 7 Mar. 1940, TSEL9, 442.
48 Gallup, ‘The “Lost” Manuscripts of T. S. Eliot’, 1238–9.
49 TSE–JQ, 21 Sept. 1922, TSEL1, 748.
51 Virginia Woolf, 16 Feb. 1921, VWD2, 90.
52 TSE–CWE, 13 Feb. 1921, TSEL1, 541.
53 Justice John J. McInerney, in ‘Greenwich Village’s Editoresses Fined’, NYH (22
Feb. 1921), 8 (some contemporary sources give McInerney’s ‘unintelligible’ as
‘unintelligent’).
54 James Joyce, ‘Ulysses, Episode XIII (Continued)’, 43.
55 ‘Improper novel costs Woman $50’, NYT (22 Feb. 1921), 6; ‘Ulysses Adjudged
Indecent; Review Editors are Fined’, NYH (22 Feb. 1921), 8.
56 EP–JJ, [c. Oct.] 1920, EPLJ, 185; also EP–JQ, 31 Oct. 1920, EPLQ, 199
A Game of Chess.
1 ‘Andrew Marvell’, 26/7 Feb. or 5/6 Mar. 1921; ‘Prose and Verse’, ?19/20 Mar.
1921; ‘The Romantic Englishman’, c.2 Feb.–c.26–7 Mar. 1921; ‘The Lesson of
Baudelaire’, ‘Song’, ?26/7 Mar. 1921.
2 TSE, ‘He Do the Police in Different Voices: Part II. In the Cage A Game of
Chess’, TS ribbon and carbon, fo. [1], Berg TSECP [Waste Land]; TWLF,
10–11, 16–17.

3 Petronius, Trimalchio’s Banquet, 32 (Eliot’s personal copy, with thanks to the
Estate).
4 Petronius, Satyricon, §48; TSE, ‘The Waste Land’, TS title page, Berg TSECP
[Waste Land]; TWLF, 2–3.
5 Antony and Cleopatra, 2.2.198.
6 TSE–BP, 17 Mar. [1921], TSEL1, 546.
7 The Tempest, 1.2.488.
8 TSE, ‘He Do the Police in Different Voices: Part II. In the Cage A Game
of Chess’, TS ribbon and carbon, fo. 2, Berg TSECP [Waste Land]; TWLF,
12–13, 18–19.
9 The Tempest, 1.2.401, 1.2.303.
10 The Tempest, 1.2.399–404.
Chess’, TS ribbon, fo. 3, Berg TSECP [Waste Land]; TWLF, 14–15.
12 RA–HEM, 24 Oct. 1920, RAAL, 63.
13 TSE, ‘Prose and Verse’, 4.
14 Poe, 299.
15 Flint, 198; EP–HM, Jan. 1915, EPSL, 49 (91).
16 TSE, ‘The Music of Poetry’, OPP, 32.
19 Virginia Woolf, 22 Mar. 1921, VWD2, 103.
20 Aiken, ‘The Scientific Critic’, 593–4; TSE–CWE, 27 Apr. 1921, TSEL1, 555.
21 Deutsch, ‘Orchestral Poetry’, 343, 345.
22 Deutsch, ‘Another Impressionist’, 89.
23 TSE–ST, 17 Oct. 1920, TSEL1, 509–10.
24 CA–JF, 28 Sept. 1920, CASL, 56.
25 CA–RNL, 8 Nov. 1922, CASL, 72.
26 See Fred D. Crawford.
27 Aiken, The Jig of Forslin [V.3], 91, cf. TSE, TWL [V] l. 384.
28 Aiken, The Charnel Rose, [III. 6], 46, cf. TSE, TWL, ll. 248, 250, 255.
29 Aiken, The House of Dust, [I. i], 12, cf. TSE, TWL, ll. 65, 170.
30 Aiken, The House of Dust, [III. 8], 83, cf. TSE, TWL, ll. 382–3.
31 Aiken, The House of Dust, [IV. 3], 130, cf. TSE, TWL, ll. 113–14. Aiken, The
House of Dust, [III. 10], 69 and 96, cf. TSE, TWL, ll. 133–4.
32 CA–RNL, 8 Nov. 1922, CASL, 72.
33 CA–RNL, 10 June 1925, CASL, 105.
35 TSE–DG, 25 July 1962, Beinecke DCGP, b. 23 (129).
36 TSE, ‘Song. [For the Opherion]’, TS, Berg TSECP [Waste Land]; TWLF, 98–9.
37 EP–TSE, 24 Saturnus An I [24 Jan. 1922], [28? Jan. 1922], Houghton TSECP,
b. 3 (107, 108), TSEL1, 625, 630.
38 TSE, TWL, ll. 266–7; ‘Doris’s Dream Songs’ [II (‘The wind sprang up at four
o’clock’)], Chapbook ([Nov.] 1924), 36–7.
39 TSE, ‘Song to the Opherian’, Tyro, I (Apr. 1921), 6; also ‘Song’, TS, Berg

TSECP [Waste Land], TWLF, 98–9.
40 WL–JQ, 14 June 1920, WLL, 120.
41 WL–AB, 14 Apr. 1921, WLL, 124.
42 Lewis, ‘Note on Tyros’, 2; ‘The Children of the New Epoch’, 3.
43 Lewis, ‘Roger Fry’s role of Continental Mediator’, 3.
44 Lewis, ‘Paris Versus the World’, 25.
45 TSE, ‘London Letter: May, 1921’, 686–91.
46 WL, ‘Vorteces and Notes: Relativism and Picasso’s Latest Work’, 140.
47 EP–WL, 27 Apr. 1921, EPLL, 127.
48 WL–AB, 14 Apr. 1921, WLL, 124.
49 TSE–RA, 7 Apr. 1921, TSEL1, 550.
50 TSE–JQ, 28 Sept. 1919, TSEL1, 401.
51 TSE, ‘A French Romantic’, 703.
52 TSE–RA, 7 Apr. 1921, TSEL1, 550.
53 TSE–JMM, 22 Apr. 1921, TSEL1, 554.
54 TSE–SS, 3 Apr. 1921, TSEL1, 549.
55 Sylvia Beach, 63–4.
56 JJ–HSW, 10 Apr. 1921, JJL, 162.
57 JJ–HSW, 24 June 1921, JJL, 165.
58 JJ–HSW, 3 Apr. 1921, JJL, 161.
59 TSE–DP, 22 May, 1921, TSEL1, 564; EPP, 20 Apr. 1921, EPLP, 483.
60 EP–HLP, 20 Apr. 1921, EPLP, 483; EP–AB, Apr. 1921, EPSL, 166.
61 JJ–HSW, 23 Apr. 1921, JJL3, 41–2.
62 Joyce, Ulysses (§15.138), 565.
63 JJ–CL, 21 Sept. 1920, JJSL, 270, 271n. (trans.).
66 TSE–JQ, 9 May 1921, TSEL1, 557.
67 EP–MA, 22[?] Apr. 1921, EPLLR, 265; EP–AB, Apr. 1921, EPSL, 166 (230).
70 TSE, ‘Contemporanea’, 84.
71 TSE, ‘Ulysses, Order, and Myth’, 483.
72 TSE–JQ, 9 May 1921, TSEL1, 558.
73 TSE–JJ, 21 May 1921, TSEL1, 561, 562.
75 Virginia Woolf, 19 Dec. 1923, VWD2, 278.
76 HWES–TLE, 7 Mar. 1914, TSEL1, 41.
77 Charlotte C. Eliot, William Greenleaf Eliot, 301–2.
78 Charlotte C. Eliot, William Greenleaf Eliot, 311.
79 TSE, ‘Fragment of an Agon’ Criterion, V. 1 ( Jan. 1927), 74–80; rep. SA, 28.
80 TSE–DP, 22 May 1921, TSEL1, 564.
81 TSE–DP, 22 May 1921, TSEL1, 564.

Chess’, TS ribbon, fo. [1], Berg TSECP [Waste Land]; TWLF, 10–11.
Chess’, TS ribbon, fo. 2, Berg TSECP [Waste Land]; TWLF, 12–13; Gardner,
‘The Waste Land: Paris 1922’, 76–7.
Chess’, TSs ribbon and carbon, fo. 2, Berg TSECP [Waste Land]; TWLF,
12–13, 18–19. In a letter of 20 June 1961 from Faber secretary Angela Milne to
Valerie Eliot for the proofs for the Giovanni Mardersteig limited edition of The
Waste Land, Eliot was asked whether the line ‘hurry up please it’s time’
should read with or without the apostrophe; in an annotated of 20 June 1961, he
underlined it ’s and wrote in the margin ‘Yes It’s’ (Eliot Estate, with thanks to
John Haffenden).
85 TSE, ‘The Death of the Duchess’, TS, fos. [1–2], Berg TSECP [Waste Land],
TWLF, 104–7; ‘He Do the Police in Different Voices: Part II. In the Cage A
Game of Chess’, TSs ribbon and carbon, fo. 2, Berg TSECP [Waste Land];
TWLF, 12–13, 18–19.
86 TSE, FR, II. ii, 102.
87 TSE–HRC (Ann Bowden), 11 May 1961, Texas TSEC, b. 3, f. 20.
88 Valerie Eliot, TWLF, 126n.
89 TSE, ‘The Waste Land’, Eliot Estate VOB1, 20r.
90 TSE–CA, 21 Aug. 1916, TSEL1, 157.
91 TSE, ‘Petit Epître’, TS, Berg TSECP [Poems]; pub. in IMH, 86–7.
92 TSE, ‘Ode’, TS, Berg TSECP [Poems], l. 12: ‘Children singing in the or-
chard’ (AVP, 30); also, ‘First Caprice in North Cambridge’, MS, Berg TSECP
[Notebook], [p.] 4, ll. 3–4: ‘the distant strains / Of children’s voices’ (IMH, 13);
‘Prufrock’s Pervigilium’, MS, Berg TSECP [Notebook], [p.]. 32, l. 5: ‘I heard
the children whimpering in corners’ (IMH, 43); ‘The Burnt Dancer’, TS, Berg
TSECP [Poems], ll. 20–2: ‘Children’s voices in little corners / Whimper whim-
per through the night / Of what disaster do you warn us’ (IMH, 62).
93 TSE, ‘Ash-Wednesday’, [V] l. 25: ‘For children at the gate’ (AW, 19); ‘A Song for
Simeon’, l. 13: ‘where shall live my children’s children’ (SS, [2]); ‘Marina’, l. 20:
‘Whispers and small laughter between leaves and hurrying feet’ (Marina, [1]);
‘The Rock: X’, l. 37: ‘We are children quickly tired: children who are up in the
night’ (Rock, 85); (c.1933); ‘Landscapes: I. New Hampshire’: ‘Children’s voices in
the orchard’ (VQR, X. 2 (Apr. 1934), 200, WM); ‘Burnt Norton’: ‘the children in
the apple-tree’ m ll. [I] 40 and [V] 35–6: ‘the leaves were full of children’, ‘the
hidden laughter / Of children in the foliage’ (CP1936, 186, 191; BN, 10, 15);
‘Little Gidding’ [V], l. 35: ‘the children in the apple-tree’ (LG, 15).
94 Enid Faber, ‘Recollections of Vivienne Eliot’, 10 Nov. 1950’, TSEL2, 593n., also
Slater, [495–8] 496; VHE–MHW, 14 May 1936, Bodleian, MS Eng. lett. c. 383:
‘that I never had children in my life, I thank God, and never wished to, since I
was a little girl of about twelve’ (my thanks to John Haffenden).
95 VHE, Bodleian VHED2.
96 Enid Faber, ‘Recollections of Vivienne Eliot’, TSEL2, 593n., also Slater, 496.
97 The writer was the columnist and critic Charles Whibley.

98 TSE–TES [late Feb.? 1911], TSEL1, 15.
99 TSE–EP, 2 Feb. [1915], TSEL1, 93.
100 TSE–EH, 21 June 1932, Princeton EHL, b. 3, f. 3; 6 Aug. 1934, Princeton
EHL, b. 5, f. 6; 9 Aug. 1932, Princeton EHL, b. 3, f. 5.
101 TSE–EH, 27 Aug. 1933, Princeton EHL, b. 4, f. 7.
103 See Childs, 99–120.
104 TSE, ‘The Rock’, MSs, Bodleian WTSE, fos. 164–5.
106 VHE, on TSE, ‘He Do the Police in Different Voices: Part II. In the Cage A
Game of Chess’, TS ribbon, fo. 3v, Berg TSECP [Waste Land], TWLF1971,
15n., TWLF2022, 137.
The Fire Sermon.

1 White Star Line Famous Big 4, New York: White Star Line / The International
Mercantile Marine Company, 1909.
2 National Archives, Board of Trade: Commercial and Statistical Department and
successors: Inwards Passenger Lists, SS Adriatic, White Star Dominion Line,
NA, BT 26/704/29.
3 TSE–RA, 23 June 1921, TSEL1, 568.
4 TSE–OM, 14 July 1921, TSEL1, 571.
5 TSE–RA, 23 June 1921, TSEL1, 568.
6 TSE, ‘London Letter: September, 1921’, 452–5.
7 Marianne Moore, ‘The Sacred Wood’, 339; TSE–MM, 3 Apr. 1921, TSEL1,
547.
8 MM–TSE, 17 Apr. 1921, MMSL, 152–3.
9 MM–Bryher, 7 July 1921, MMSL, 164.
10 MM–TSE, 15 July 1921, MMSL, 171.
11 MM–TSE, 18 Jan. 1934, MMSL, 317–18.
12 TSE–MM, 31 Jan. 1934, TSEL7, 54.
13 TSE, ‘London Letter: July, 1921’, 213–17.
14 MLH–TSE, 23 Aug. 1921, TSEL1, 577; TSE–RA, 4 July 1922, TSEL1, 691.
15 TSE, TSE, ‘London Letter: July, 1921’, 214; The Tempest, 1.2.404.
16 TSE, ‘London Letter: July, 1921’, 213.
17 EEC–E/RCC, samedi, 23 juillet [1921], EEC[S]L, 79.
18 Stein, 246.
19 ST–AG, [c. Aug. 1921], Beinecke DSTP, b. 33, f. 868–90.
20 Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 28.
21 Huddleston, 82 (122), 121 (144).
22 Bowen, 48.
23 Crosby, 255 (New York: Ecco, 1979, 264–5).
24 EP, GK, 105.
25 See Josephson.

26 Lewis, Blast and Bombardiering, 277.
27 TSE–RA, 6 July 1921, TSEL1, 569.
28 TSE–OM, 14 July 1921, TSEL1, 571.
29 VHE–ST, 20 July 1921, TSEL1, 571–2.
30 TSE, ‘London Letter: September 1921’, 452.
31 VHE–ST, 20 July 1921, TSEL1, 571–2.
32 TSE, ‘The Fire Sermon’, TSs ribbon and carbon, fo. 2, Berg TSECP [Waste
Land]; TWLF, 26–7, 40–1.
34 The Tempest, 1.2.393–4.
35 TSE, ‘Notes’, TWL1922, 57.
36 EP, ‘A Communication’, 97–8.
37 TSE, ‘Introduction’, Seneca his Tenne Tragedies, viii; SE, 67.
38 TSE–JE, 9 May 1939, TSEL9, 153.
39 EP, ‘Three Cantos’ (‘The Fifth Canto’, ‘The Sixth Canto’ [first two-thirds only],
The Seventh Canto’), Dial, LXXI. 2 (Aug. 1921), 198–208.
40 EP–IWP, 18 Sept. [1921], EPLP, 489; DP–IWP, 20 Sept. 1921, EPLP, 489.
41 National Archives, Board of Trade: Commercial and Statistical Department and
Successors: Outwards Passenger Lists, NA, BT 27/115354.
42 TSE–SS, 25 Aug. 1921, TSEL1, 578.
43 CWE–HWE, 14 Oct. 1921, TSEL1, 575n.
44 HWE–CWE, 30 Oct. 1921, TSEL1, 596.
45 CWE–HWE, 14 Oct. 1921, TSEL1, 575n.
46 VHE–HWE, 23 Aug. 1921, TSEL1, 576.
47 HWE–CWE, 30 Oct. 1921, TSEL1, 596.
48 VHE–HWE, Tuesday 23 [Aug. 1921], TSEL1, 577.
49 TSE–DP, 21 Aug. 1921, TSEL1, 574.
50 TSE–MH, 15 Aug. 1921, TSEL1, 573.
51 VHE–HWE, Tuesday 23 [Aug. 1921], TSEL1, 576.
52 TSE–RCS, 22 Aug. 1923, TSEL2, 189.
53 TSE–HWE, 3 Oct. 1921, TSEL1, 585.
54 VHE–HWE, 23 Aug. 1921, TSEL1, 576.
55 TSE–MH, 1 Sept. 1921, TSEL1, 579.
56 TSE–RA, Wednesday [7 Sept. 1921], TSEL1, 579–80.
57 TSE–RA, 16 Sept. 1921, TSEL1, 581.
58 TSE, ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, 669–70.
59 EP–ST, 9 & 10 Mars. [Mar.] 1922, EPLD, 236.
60 TSE–HWE, 3 Oct. 1921, TSEL1, 584.
61 EP, ‘Canto XIX’, ‘Cantos XVII–XIX’, TQ, I. 2 (Autumn/Winter 1925/1926),
5–16; Cantos, 85 (85).
62 EP–IWP, 22 Oct. [1921], EPLP, 489, 490.
63 TSE–HWE, 3 Oct. 1921, TSEL1, 584.
64 CWE–HWE, 14 Oct. 1921, TSEL1, 575n.
65 TSE–RA, [3? Oct. 1921], TSEL1, 586.
66 TSE–HWE, 3 Oct. 1921, TSEL1, 585.

67 TSE–RA, [13 Oct. 1921], TSEL1, 590.
68 TSE–HWE, 3 Oct. 1921, TSEL1, 585.
69 Met Office, Monthly Weather Report, 38. 10 (Oct. 1921).
70 Keble’s Penny Guide 1885, Margate Museum.
71 Margate Museum.
72 Thanet Advertiser and Echo (15 Oct. 1921), 2.
73 TSE–RA, 13 Oct. 1921, TSEL1, 590.
74 VHE–ST, 13 Oct. 1921, TSEL1, 592.
75 Betjeman, ‘Margate, 1940’, Listener (24 Oct. 1940), rep. New Bats in Old Belfries,
29–30, both as ‘Margate’.
76 Advertisement, Cliftonville Hydro, Margate, c.1905, quoting ‘Opinions of the
press’, Truth publication.
77 Advertisement, the Albermarle, 47 Eastern Esplanade, Cliftonville, 1903.
78 Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal (1834).
79 Thanet Advertiser and Echo (15 Oct. 1921), 2.
80 Advertisement, Parade Cinema, 21 Oct. 1921, rep. Prominade, 2018, 22.
81 TSE, ‘Dramatis Personae’, 303–6.
82 TSE–RCS, 9 Oct. 1921, TSEL1, 589.
83 VHE–VS, 26 Oct. 1921, TSEL1, 593.
84 TSE–JH, 26 Oct. 1921, TSEL1, 594.
85 VHE–MH, 28 Oct. 1921, TSLE1, 594.
86 [Unsigned], TLS, 963 (1 July 1920), 427; TSE–RA, [postmark 29 Oct. 1921],
TSEL1, 595.
87 TSE–Julian Huxley, 31 Oct. 1921, TSEL1, 598.
88 EP, ‘The Little Review Calendar’, 2; EP, GK, 96.
89 EP–HLM, 22 Mar. 1922, EPSL, 174 (240).
90 Albemarle receipts, Berg TSECP [Waste Land]; TWLF2022, 141–3.
91 TSE–HWE, [postmark] 1 Nov. 1921, TSEL1, 599.
92 TSE–RA, 6 Nov. 1921, TSEL1, 603.
93 Vittoz, 35 (tr. 25–6).
94 VHE–VS, 26 Oct. 1921, TSEL1, 593.
95 TSE, ‘O City, City, I have heard + hear’ [‘The Fire Sermon’], MS, Berg TSECP
[Waste Land] (my brackets and italics); see TWLF, 36–7.
96 TSE, ‘London, the swarming life you kill + breed’ [‘The Fire Sermon’], MS, Berg
TSECP [Waste Land] (my brackets and italics); TWLF, 36–7.
97 EP, on TSE, ‘The Fire Sermon’, TS ribbon, fo. 3, Berg TSECP [Waste Land];
TWLF, 30–1.
98 TSE, ‘The river sweats’ [‘The Fire Sermon’], MS, Berg TSECP [Waste Land];
TWLF, 48–9.
99 TSE, ‘Highbury bore me. Highbury’s children’ [‘The Fire Sermon’], MS, Berg
TSECP [Waste Land]; TWLF, 50–1.
100 TSE–SS, Friday night [4? [i.e. 11] Nov. 1921], TSEL1, 602.
101 TSE, ‘Highbury bore me. Highbury’s children’ [‘The Fire Sermon’], MS verso,
Berg TSECP [Waste Land]; TWLF, 52–3.
102 TSE, ‘Highbury bore me. Highbury’s children’ [‘The Fire Sermon’], MS verso,

Berg TSECP [Waste Land]; TWLF, 52–3 (full stop visible on 52 but not tran-
scribed by on 53).
103 Tempest 1.2.400–08.
104 The Tempest, 1.2.400–08; TSE, ‘Dirge’, MS (first draft), Berg TSECP [Waste
Land], TWLF, 118–19, where the sheet is described as ‘verso of “Elegy”’ (119n.),
however the tear of the page, which is similar to two other Margate leaves
(TWLF 48 and 52/4), suggests that ‘Dirge’ is more likely to be the top or ‘recto’
sheet (and most likely written first), and ‘Elegy’ the verso (second).
105 TSE, ‘Elegy’, MS, Berg TSECP [Waste Land]; TWLF, 116–17.
106 TSE, ‘Exequy’, TS, Berg TSECP [Waste Land], TWLF, 100–1, 130n; Purgato-
rio, ‘XXVI’, ll. 147, 143 (Oeslsner, 330–1).
107 TSE–DG, 26 Nov. 1946, Beinecke DCGP, b. 23 (92).
108 TSE–SS, Friday night [4? [i.e. 11] Nov. 1921], TSEL1, 601.
109 TSE–SS [16? Nov. 1921], TSEL1, 604.
110 VHE–BR, 1 Nov. 1921, TSEL1, 599.
111 Vittoz, 35 (tr. 26).
112 Vittoz, 37 (tr. 27).
113 Eliot’s personal copy, with thanks to the Estate.
114 TSE–SS [16? Nov. 1921], TSEL1, 604.
115 TSE–MH, [17 Nov. 1921], TSEL1, 607.
116 TSE–Glenway Westcott, 16 Nov. 1921, TSEL1, 605.
117 TSE–RA, 17 Nov. 1921, TSEL1, 606.
Death by Water.
1 EP, ‘Historical Survey’, 39; EP–JH & MA, 21 May [1921], EPLLR, 277.
3 TSE–RA, 17 Nov. 1921, TSEL1, 606.
4 TSE, ‘The Lesson of Baudelaire’, [4].
6 EP–HAMM (Secretary, Simon Guggenheim Foundation), 31 Mar. 1925, Be-
inecke EPP, b. 25, f. 1081–2; Gallup, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, 28.
7 EP, ‘Historical Survey’, 39–40.
8 TSE–Woods, 21 Apr. 1919.
9 TSE, ‘The Three Voices of Poetry’,; rep. OP, 89.
11 H. D., Hymen, New York: Henry Holt, 1921; TSE–RA, 17 Nov. 1921, TSEL1,
606.
12 RA, TSEL1, 601n.
13 TSE–RA, 17 Nov. 1921, TSEL1, 606.
14 Graves, ‘Lawrence Vindicated’, 16.
15 Aldington, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, 11.
16 TSE, [‘Richard Aldington’], 24–5.
17 Aldington, Stepping Heavenward, 57.
18 Aldington, Stepping Heavenward, 47–8.

19 GF–HRCW, 11 Nov. 1931, TSEL5, 733.
20 Aldington, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, 17–18.
21 Aldington, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, 19–20.
22 TSE, [‘Richard Aldington’], 24–5.
23 EP–ST, 5 Dec. 1921, EPLD, 222; ST–TSE, 18 Dec. 1921, TSEL1, 616.
24 VHE–MH, Tuesday [20? [i.e. 13?] Dec. 1921, TSEL1, 619; a partially discern-
ible postmark on the envelope at the Harry Ransom Center appears to read 13
15 [hrs] / 13 12 / 21’, Texas MHP, b. 13, f. 1.
25 70 bis rue Nortre Dame des Champes, Paris.
26 VHE–MH, Tues. [20? [13?] Dec. 1921], TSEL1, 619.
27 EP–HLP, 3 Dec. [1921], EPLP, 490.
28 DP–IWP, 20 Sep. 1921, EPLP, 492.
29 EP–HLP, 3 Dec. [1921], EPLP, 491.
30 Joyce, in Sylvia Beach, 27.
31 See Mikriammos, 392; EP–JQ, 19 Dec. [1921], Berg JQP; see also Norman,
248; Stock, 299; Wilhelm, Ezra Pound in London and Paris, 288; Mikriammos,
387.
32 EP–HLP, 15 Oct. 1924, EPLP, 543.
33 Lewis, Blast and Bombardiering, 277.
34 EMH–HGJ, 20 Mar. 1922, E[M]HL1, 335.
36 Hemingway, ‘Homage to Ezra’, 74.
37 Swayne, 243.
38 Der Schweizerischen meterologischen Beobachtungen, Annalen der Schweiz-
erischen Meteorologischen Zentral-Anstalt, Zürich: Buchdruckerei zur Alten
Universität, 1921.
39 TSE–OM, 30 Nov. 1921, TSEL1, 608; Baedeker, Switzerland (1911), 300.
40 The Hôtel Pension Ste Luce was demolished in 1933 and replaced with Galerie
Sainte-Luce, which still stands on its site. The neighbouring Hôtel Élite Laus-
anne was built at 1 Avenue Sainte-Luce in 1938.
41 Jean-Jacques Eggler, Archiviste Adjoint, Ville de Lausanne, correspondence
with the author, 28 Oct. 2019: ‘Called Cimerose (or Cime Rose), the house
of Dr. Roger Vittoz, built in 1897, first bore the address Avenue d’Ouchy 67
until 1918, then was changed to avenue des Tilleuls 2. It still exists today at this
address.’
42 Julian Huxley, 124; Morrell, Early Memoirs, 220–1.
43 OM–BR, 8, 10, 12, 13 Oct. 1911, McMaster BRA, b. 2.38; besides her visit of
Oct. 1911, Morrell returned in Feb., June and Oct. 1912, and in Nov. 1913; she
returned again, after Eliot’s visit, in June 1921.
44 Morrell, Journal 1913, Ottoline, 237–8.
45 Julian Huxley, 124.
46 Vittoz, 31 (tr. 21).
47 The starting date of TSE’s treatment is unknown, but given that his earliest
arrival in Lausanne is Tue. 22 or 23 Nov. 1921, then it seems likely that the
treatment doesn’t begin before Thu. 24 Nov. and possibly later; letter to OM is

Wed. 30 Nov. – therefore a week at most of treatment, which could be as little as
three days if it began on Mon. 28 Nov.
48 TSE–OM, 30 Nov. 1921, TSEL1, 608.
49 TSE’s copy, Blick ins Chaos: drei Aufsätze, Cambridge, GBR/0272/HB/B/16.
50 TSE–HH, 13 Mar. 1922, TSEL1, 645.
51 Hesse, 6, (tr. 610).
52 ST, 11 Dec. 1921, Dempsey, 100–1.
53 Hesse, 20 (tr. 618); TSE, ‘Notes’, TWL1922, 62.
54 EP–HLP, 3 Dec. 1921, EPLP, 490.
55 EP–ST, 5 Dec. 1921, Beinecke DSTP, b. 13, f. 581; EPLD, 222.
56 TSE–MH, [postmark 4 Dec. 1921], TSEL1, 609.
57 Today, the Payot Librarie Bookshop trades from Place Pépinet, in Lausanne.
58 TSE Estate copy, inscribed by Eliot, with the place and date, 1921.
59 TSE–WL, [postmark 3 Dec. 1921], TSEL1, 609.
60 TSE–NRF, 5 Dec. 1921, TSEL1, 609.
61 Vittoz, 31 (tr. 21).
62 TSE, ‘Introduction’, The Pensées of Pascal, vii–xix.
63 TSE, ‘* From which, a Venus Anadyomene’, MS, Berg TSECP [Waste Land];
TWLF, 28–9.
64 Arthur Rimbaud, ‘Vénus Anadyomène’, LR, V. 2 (Feb. 1918), 23; EP, Instigations,
30.
65 TSE, ‘* From which, a Venus Anadyomene’, MS, Berg TSECP [Waste Land];
TWLF, 28–9.
66 TSE, ‘Death by Water’, MS, fo. [1], Berg TSEC [Waste Land]; TWLF, 54–5.
67 TSE, ‘Death by Water’, MS, fo. 3, Berg TSEC [Waste Land]; TWLF, 58–9.
68 TSE, ‘Death by Water’, MS, fo. 4, Berg TSEC [Waste Land]; TWLF, 60–1.
69 TSE, ‘Dirge’ MS fair copy, Berg TSECP [Waste Land]; TWLF, 120–1.
70 EP–HLP, [25 Dec. 1921], EPLP, 492.
71 Bodenheim, 87–91.
72 Bishop, 13–14.
73 Monroe, ‘Ezra Pound’, 90–7.
74 EP–HLP, [25 Dec. 1921], EPLP, 492.
75 TSE–APGG, 14 Dec. 1921, TLSE1 616.
76 TSE–HWE, 13 Dec. 1921, TSEL1, 614.
77 HWE–CWE, 12 Dec. 1921, TSEL1, 613.
78 TSE–KA, 12 Nov. 1935, TSEL7, 825.
79 TSE, ‘After the turning of a thousand the inspired days’, MS, Berg TSECP
80 The Book of Common Prayer, ‘The Order for the Burial of the Dead’ (‘though he
were dead, yet ſhall he live’ (John 11. 25, 26)).
81 TSE–FMF, 14 Aug 1923, TSEL2, 188; TSE, ‘Notes’, TWL1922, 62.
82 TSE, ‘[What the Thunder Said]’, MS, fo. 2, Berg TSECP [Waste Land];
TWLF, 72–3.
TWLF, 74–5.

85 Philippians 4:7; TSE, ‘Notes’, TWL1922, 64.
TWLF, 80–1.
87 TSE–SW, 19 Dec. 1921, TSEL1, 617.
88 HWE–CWE, TSEL1, 620n.
What the Thunder Said.

1 HL–LL, 17 Dec. 1921, Dardis, 87.
2 HL–EP, 5 Apr. 1923, Egleston, 227; EP–JQ, 20 June 1920, Berg JQP, b. 34, f. 4.
3 EP–WL, 21 Jan. [1926], EPLL, 163; EP–JRF, 5 Apr. 1922, Houghton JRF, b. 1
(4).
4 Djuana Barnes, A Book.
5 EP–JRF, 5 Apr. 1922, Houghton JRF, b. 1 (4).
6 Sherwood Anderson, 518.
7 Cerf, 40–1.
8 Albert Boni interview, 1972, Tamiment Library, New York University, Egleston, 28.
9 Lenin, ‘Foreword’, Reed, v.
10 Hicks, 353.
11 Trotzky, The Bolsheviki and World Peace.
12 EP, ‘Canto LXXX’, PC, LXVIII. 6 (Sept. 1946), 310–21; Cantos, 519 (525).
13 VHE–MH, 12 Jan. 1922, TSEL1, 622.
14 TSE–EP, 1 June 1934, TSEL7, 210; Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering, 267.
15 HL–JQ, 24 Mar. 1922, Egleston, 226.
16 Egleston, 225.
17 EP–JQ, 21 Feb. 1922, EPLQ, 206.
18 EP–TSE, [28? Jan. 1922], TSEL1, 631.
Chess’, TS ribbon, fo. [1], Berg TSECP [Waste Land]; TWLF, 10–11.
21 TSE–EP [n.d.], Houghton TSEP, b. 3 (109), dated [26? Jan. 1922] in TSEL1,
628.
22 EP, annotation of TSE–EP, n.d., Houghton TSEP, b. 3 (109) (dated [26? Jan.
1922] in TSEL1, 628), returned with EP–TSE, n.d., (‘Say early in 1922 TSE’),
Houghton TSEP (108) and [28? Jan. 1922] in TSEL1, 630.
23 EP, annotation of TSE, ‘The Fire Sermon’, TS carbon, fo. [1], Berg TSECP
[Waste Land]; TWLF, 38/9.
24 EP, annotation of TSE, ‘The Fire Sermon’, TS carbon, fos. 4–5, Berg TSECP
25 EP annotation of TSE, ‘The Fire Sermon’, TS ribbon, fo. 4, Berg TSECP
26 EP annotation of TSE, ‘The Fire Sermon’, TS ribbon, fo. 3, Berg TSECP

27 Hemingway, ‘Wanderings: Mitrailliatrice’, PC, XXI. 4 ( Jan. 1923): 193, rep.
as ‘Mitraigliatrice’, Three Stories & Ten Poems, 49: ‘Make this Corona / Their
mitrailleuse.’
28 Corona Typewriter Company, How to Use Corona, The Personal Writing Machine,
Groton, NY: Corona Typewriter Co. Inc., n.d. [c.1920], 10.
29 Eliot may have produced the pages as early as 5 January, but more likely on 9
January after visits to Jacques Rivière on 6th, an unsuccessful attempt to call
upon André Gide on 7 January in Auteuil (he had left for Bruxelles), and after
Pound had used it himself or correspondence on 8 January.
30 EP–IWP, 8 Jan. 1922, EPLP, 493.
31 TSE, ‘Death by Water’, TS, fo. [1], Berg TSECP [Waste Land]; TWLF, 62–3.
32 TSE, ‘What the Thunder Said’, TS, 4 fos., Berg TSECP [Waste Land]; TWLF,
82–9.
33 TSE–BR, 15 Oct 1923, TSEL2, 257.
34 EP–ST, 23 Apr. 1922, EPLD, 237.
35 Edmund Spenser, ‘Prothalamion’, l. 110, 495.
36 TSE, ‘The rivers tent is broken and the last fingers of leaf ’, MS, ‘The Fire Ser-
mon’, TS ribbon, fo. [1]v, Berg TSECP [Waste Land]; TWLF, 24–5.
37 VHE–MH, 12 Jan. [1922], TSEL1, 622.
38 TSE, ‘Death by Water’, TS, fo. 4v, TWLF1971, 69n., TWLF2022, 138.
39 TSE–MH, [late Jan. 1922?], TSEL1, 633.
40 EP–TSE, [28? Jan. 1922], TSEL1, 631; TSE–EP, [26? Jan. 1922], TSEL1, 629.
41 EP–ST, 8 Feb. 1922, EPLD, 227.
42 EP–FMF, 13 Jan. 1922, EPLF, 63.
43 EP, ‘Eighth Canto’, Dial, LXXII. 5 (May 1922), 506–7; rep. as ‘Canto II’, Cantos,
7–8 (7–8).
44 EP, ‘Eighth Canto’, Dial, LXXII. 5 (May 1922), 508; rep. as ‘Canto II’, Cantos, 9
(9).
45 EP–JQ, 21 Feb. 1922, EPLQ, 206.
46 EP, ‘Eighth Canto’, Dial, LXXII. 5 (May 1922), 508; rep. as ‘Canto II’, Cantos, 9
(9).
47 EP–FMF, [21 Mar.] 1922, EPLF, 65–7.
48 WL–OM, 22 Jan. 1922, Texas OMC, b. 13, f. 4.
49 TSE–EP, 30 Aug. 1922, TSEL1, 736; TSE–AF, 22 Feb 1928, TSEL4, 63; TSE–
MLH, 12 Nov. 1927, TSEL3, 822.
50 Weston, 11.
51 Tennyson, ‘Morte D’Arthur’, ll. 200–3, Poems, II, 13.
52 Thomas Malory, Le morte d’Arthur, II, 240.
53 Madison Cawein, ‘Waste Land’, PC, I. 4 ( Jan. 1913), 104–5, rep. as ‘Wasteland’,
Minions of the Moon, 122–3; it may have first appeared as ‘Waste Land’ in 1912
edition of the journal the Revelator (unverified); see Richard f. Patteson, ‘An
additional source for “The Waste Land”’, Notes and Queries 23. 7, 300–1; Robert
Ian Scott, ‘The Waste Land Eliot didn’t write’, TLS (8 Dec. 1995), Christopher
Hitchens, Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere, London:
Verso, 2000, 297; Townsend, 82.

54 EP, HSM, 12.
55 Edmund Waller, ‘Panegyric to Lord Protector’, 41; Dryden, ‘The Seventh Book
of the Aeneis’ (l. 310), The Works of Virgil, 723.
56 Conrad, 196 (56–7), 204 (70), 483 (108), 495 (129).
57 Conrad, 649 (168); quoted by TSE, ‘The Waste Land’, TS [title page], Berg
TSECP [Waste Land]; TWLF, 2–3.
58 TSE, ‘Death by Water’, MS, fo. 3, Berg TSECP [Waste Land]; TWLF, 58–9.
59 TSE, ‘[The Death of St Narcissus]’, MS, fo. [2], Berg TSECP [Waste Land];
TWLF, 92–3; TSE, ‘Syllabus for a Tutorial Class in Modern English Literature’;
TSE, ‘Ben Jonson’, 637–8.
60 TSE–RA, 7 Apr. 1921, TSEL1, 550.
61 HWE–CWE, 27 Apr. 1920, TSEL1, 467n.
62 TSE, ‘Introduction’, Charles Baudelaire, 7–26.
63 EP–TSE, 24 Saturnus An I [24 Jan. 1922], Houghton TSECP, b. 3 (107),
TSEL1, 625.
64 TSE–ST, 20 Jan. 1922, TSEL1, 623.
65 EP–TSE, [28? Jan. 1922], Houghton TSECP, b. 3 (108), dated by TSE as ‘Say –
early in 1922’; TSEL1, 630.
67 HL–EP, 11 Jan. 1922, Beinecke WBEPP, 1, f. 5.
68 TSE–DG, 26 Nov. 1946, Beinecke DCGP, b. 23 (92).
69 EP–TSE, 24 Saturnus An I [24 Jan. 1922], Houghton TSECP, b. 3 (107),
TSEL1, 625.
70 TSE–EP, [26? Jan. 1922], Houghton TSECP, b. 3 (109); TSEL1, 629.
71 EP–TSE, [28? Jan. 1922], Houghton TSECP, b. 3 (108); TSEL1, 630.
72 EP–TSE, 24 Saturnus, An I [24 Jan. 1922], Houghton TSEP, b. 3 (107); TSEL1,
626.
625.
74 TSE–EP, [26? Jan. 1922], Houghton TSEP, b. 3 (108); TSEL1, 628.
75 TSE–ST, 20 Jan. 1922, TSEL1, 623.
76 T. S. Eliot, ‘Ezra Pound’, 326–38.
78 The thought is Helen Gardener’s, see ‘The Waste Land: Paris 1922’, 87–8.
79 TSE, ‘On a Recent Piece of Criticism’, 93.
81 TSE–JQ, 25 June 1922, TSEL1, 681.
626.
London 1960.
1 EP, in Rachewiltz, 306.
2 TSE–EP, 29 Jan. 1960, Beinecke EPP, b. 15, f. 674.
3 TSE–EP, 24 Aug. 1960, Beinecke EPP, b. 15, f. 674.

4 TSE–EP, 11 Nov. 1961, Beinecke EPP, b. 15, f. 674.
5 TSE–ST, 20 Jan. 1922, TSEL1, 623.
6 ST–TSE, 29 Jan. 1922, TSEL1, 632.
7 TSE–ST, 16 Mar. 1922, TSEL1, 651.
8 TSE–ST, 8 Mar. 1922, TSEL1, 639.
9 ST–TSE, 12 Mar. 1922, TSEL1, 644.
10 TSE–EP, 12 Mar. 1922, TSEL1, 641.
11 EP–ST, 9–10 Mar. 1922, EPLD, 236.
12 ‘Announcement’, Dial, LXX. 6, ( June 1921), 730–1; also, ‘Comment’, Dial,
LXXIII. 6 (Dec. 1922), 685–7.
13 EP–ST, 9–10 Mar. 1922, EPLD, 236.
14 TSE–JR, [5? Feb. 1922], TSEL1, 634.
15 TSE–JMM, [21 Feb. 1922], TSEL1, 637.
16 TSE–EP, 12 Mar. 1922, TSEL1, 641.
17 TSE–MF, 26 Feb. 1922, TSEL1, 638.
18 MF–TSE, 11 Mar. 1922, TSLE1, 638n.
19 TSE–TSM, 3 Apr. 1922, TSEL1, 655.
20 TSE–RCS, 27 June 1922, TSEL1, 685; TSE–EP, 19 July 1922, TSEL1, 708;
TSE–RA, 30 June 1922, TSEL1, 688.
21 Virginia Woolf, 12 March 1922, VWD2, 171.
22 Virginia Woolf, 12 March 1922, VWD2, 171.
23 Virginia Woolf, 12 March 1922, VWD2, 171; 3 Aug. 1922, VWD2, 187; 27 Sept.
1922, VWD2, 204.
26 EP–MA, 14 Apr. 1922, EPLLR, 283.
27 Heap (‘jh’), ‘The “Art Season”’, 60.
28 EP–HLP, 12 Apr. [1922], EPLP, 497–8; EP–WL, 14 July 1922, EPLL 133.
29 EP, ‘Credit and the Fine Arts’, 285.
30 TSE–RA, 30 June 1922, TSEL1, 688.
31 TSE–SB, 4 Apr. 1922, TSEL1, 658.
32 TSE, ‘Ulysses, Order, and Myth’, 483.
33 TSE–AAK, 3 Apr. 1922, TSEL1, 656.
34 TSE–AAK, 3 Apr. 1922, TSEL1, 656; TSE–AAK, 20 May 1922, TSEL1,
673: ‘It is true that I am most anxious to publish my poem in America in the
autumn, on account of copyright.’
35 AAK–TSE, 1 May 1922, TSEL1, 657n.
36 EP–JRF, 6 May 1922, Houghton JRF, b. 1 (7).
37 EP, ‘Credit and the Fine Arts’, 284–5; EP–WCW, 18 Mar. 1922, EPSL, 173
(239).
38 ST–GS, 9 Mar. 1922, Beinecke DSTP, b. 40, f. 1139.
39 GS– ST, 11 Mar. 1922, Beinecke DSTP, b. 40, f. 1139.
40 TSE–RA, 17 May 1922, TSEL1, 669; TSE–OM, [17? May 1922], TSEL1, 669.
41 TSE–RA, 4 July 1922, TSEL1, 690.
42 TS–RA, 13 July 1922, TSEL1, 699.

43 TSE–JQ, 25 June 1922, TSEL1, 681.
44 TSE–JQ, 19 July 1922, TSEL1, 707.
45 VHE–EP, 27 June 1922, TSEL1, 683–4.
46 TSE–EP, 19 July 1922, TSEL1, 708.
47 TSE–OM, [end July? 1922], TSEL1, 715.
48 Brother Savage, ‘Books and Bookmen’, Liverpool Daily Post and Echo, 16 Nov.
1922.
49 TSE–RA, 18 Nov. 1922, TSEL1, 790.
50 RA–TSE, 7 Dec. 1922, TSEL1, 802.
51 TSE–JQ, 19 July 1922, TSEL1, 707.
52 JQ–TSE, 1 Aug. 1922, TSEL1, 714n.
53 EP, ‘T. S. Eliot’ (1939), 24.
54 Clive Bell, 119; TSE–DHW, 26 June 1963, in Woodward, 260.
55 TSE, ‘The Frontiers of Criticism’, OPP, 109.
56 TSE–JQ, 19 July 1922, TSEL1, 706–7; JQ–TSE, 1 Aug. 1922, TSEL1, 714n.
57 GS–JSW, 31 Aug. 1922, TSEL1, 740; it seems likely that Eliot had included the
notes in TSE–JQ, 21 Aug. 1922, TSEL1, 729.
58 EP, ‘Communication’, 97–8.
59 TSE–GZ, 10 Feb. 1937, TSEL8, 492.
60 TSE, ‘The Frontiers of Criticism’, OPP, 109–10.
61 EP–JSW, n.d. [? Aug. 1922], EPLD,1 247.
62 JSW–ST, 12 Aug. [1922], TSEL1, 720; EPLD, 247.
63 TSE–JSW, 21 Aug. 1922, TSEL1, 731.
64 TSE–JQ, 21 Aug. 1922, TSEL1, 729.
65 TSE–JQ, 21 Sept. 1922, TSEL1, 748.
66 GS–HL, 7 Sept. 1922, Beinecke DSTP, b. 41, f. 1153.
67 Dial, LXXIII. 5 (Nov. 1922), 473n.: ‘An edition of The Waste Land with annota-
tions by Mr Eliot will presently be issued by Boni & Liveright.—The Editors.’
68 JQ–TSE, 7 Sept. 1922, TSEL1, 748n; GS–HL, 7 Sept. 1922, Beinecke DSTP,
b. 41, f. 1153.
69 VHE–SS, Monday [16 Oct. 1922], TSEL1, 765.
70 TSE–RA, 15 Nov. 1922, TSEL1, 786–7.
71 TSE–GS, 27 Dec. 1922, TSEL1, 813.
72 Texas [TK].
73 This account was told to me by Richard b. Watson, Head of Reference Ser-
vices, University of Texas at Austin, 23 Apr. 2014, and subsequently verified in
research by Exhibit A, Omar Pound Collection, Pound Library, Collection file,
Item 165, LH 5955, Reg 8681, also King, 30–45.
74 Rachewiltz, 46.
75 TSE–OM, [?mid Apr. 1923], TSEL2, 107.
76 TSE–EP, 20 May 1923, TSEL2, 140.
77 VHE, 18 Nov. 1935, Bodleian VHED4.

85 TSE, ‘Directions to my executors’, 25 Nov. 1960, Houghton TSEP.
86 TSE–EH, 14 Feb. 1947, Princeton.
87 Nancy Cunard, Texas NCS2, 11v.
88 Unsigned, ‘Medallions: III. Mr T. S. Eliot. The Exact Critic’, The Times (13 June
1922), Texas NCS2, 9v’ ‘Sept. Hendaye’: ‘Nancy at Hendage’, ‘Fuenterra Bia’, ‘At
Guadalupe’, ‘At Cap du Figuier’, Texas NCS2, 13r.
89 Through June, July and August, the average temperature rarely crept above 12ºC
(53ºF)
90 Nancy Cunard, ‘Letter’, Texas NCC, b. f. 4; Cunard, Selected Poems, 226–9.
92 NC–EP, 3 Oct. 1922, Wilhelm, ‘Nancy Cunard’, 209.
93 EP ‘Canto LXXX’, PC, LXVIII. 6 (Sept. 1946), 310–21; Cantos, 524 (530).
94 VHE–TSE, 5 Jan. [1926], TSEL3, 3.
95 TSE–EP, 13 Oct. 1925, TSEL2, 758.
96 T. S. Eliot, ‘Ezra Pound’, 326–38.
97 EP ‘Canto LXXX’, PC, LXVIII. 6 (Sept. 1946), 310–21; Cantos, 527 (533).
98 EP, draft letter to T. S. Eliot, n.d. [c.1959–60?], Toledo EPP, The Cantos (MSS-
057), b. 1, f. 1.
99 EP, ‘Canto CX’, DFC, 11; EP’s notebook has ‘our ruins’ (‘Notebook 2’, DFF).
100 TSE–EP, 13 Aug. 1959, Beinecke EPP, b. 15, f. 673.
101 EP, ‘From Canto CXV’, DFC, 24.
102 EP–FES, 8–9 July 1922, EPSL, 180 (247).
103 Cory, 38–9.
104 EP, in Hall, ‘Ezra Pound’, 47; EP, ‘Notes for CVII et seq.’, DFC, 32; Cantos, 817
(823).
105 EP, ‘From Canto CXV’, DFC, 24; Cantos, 808 (814).
106 Reck, ‘A Conversation’, 29; EP, MS note in Olga Rudge Venice notebook, Be-
inecke ORP: ‘That she wd. have save me / from idiocies in antisemitism.’
107 EP–MdR, 20 Aug. 1959, Beinecke EPP.
108 EP, ‘Canto CXVI’, DFC, 27; Cantos, 797 (803).
109 EP, comment to his French publisher Dominique de Roux, 1965, rep. Time, 5
Nov. 1965.
110 EP, ‘Notes from CXVII et seq.’, DFC, 32; Cantos, 816 (822)
111 TSE–EP, telegram 30 Oct. 1959 (transmitted 31 Oct. 1959), Beinecke EPP,
b. 15, f. 673, and Eliot Estate.
112 TSE–EP, 28 Dec. 1959, Beinecke EPP, b. 15, f. 673.
113 EP, quoted in Rachewiltz, 306.
114 TSE, ‘Ezra Pound’, 330; rep. ‘Ezra Pound by T. S. Eliot’, in Peter Russell, Ezra
Pound, 28.
115 EP–JQ, 21 Feb. 1922, EPLQ, 205–6.

Reviews
1 Unsigned, Times Literary Supplement, 1804, (26 Oct. 1922), 690.
2 Rascoe, ‘A Bookman’s Day Book – Thursday, October 26’, NYT, (5 Nov. 1922).
3 Unsigned, ‘The Sporting Spirit’, NYEP Literary Review (11 Nov. 1922), 1.
4 Unsigned, NYT Book Review (26 Nov 1922), 12.
5 Wilson, ‘The Poetry of Drouth’, 611–16.
6 Seldes, ‘T. S. Eliot’, 614–16.
7 Untermeyer, ‘Disillusion vs. Dogma’, Freeman, 6 (17 Jan. 1923), 453.
8 Wylie, ‘Mr Eliot’s Slug-Horn’, NYEP Literary Review (20 Jan 1923), 396.
9 Monro, ‘Notes for a Study of The Waste Land: An Imaginary Dialogue with T. S.
Eliot’, Chapbook, 34 (Feb. 1923), 20–4.
10 Aiken, ‘The Anatomy of Melancholy’, 294–5.
11 John Drury, ‘World’s Greatest Poem’, Chicago Daily News (14 Feb 1923), 15.
12 Unsigned, ‘Shantih, Shantih, Shantih: Has the Reader Any Rights Before the
Bar of Literature?’, Time, 1.1 (3 March 1923), 12.
13 Squire, ‘Poetry’, LM, 8, No. 48, October 1922, 655–7
14 Powell [‘C.P.’], ‘The Waste Land’, Manchester Guardian (31 Oct 1923), 7.

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T HE WA STE L A ND

by the same author

– Ezr a Pound, 1966

List of Illustrations xiii

Mr Eliot is well expressed by his name – a polished, cultivated,

At a particular date in a particular room, two authors, neither

– Ezr a Pound, 1932

Rain came to London in torrents. The snow that followed would

One bedroom, one bathroom, a sitting room, a kitchen (sort of ),

Let us gó then, yóu and Í,

Here began a formal metre: a trochaic tetrameter catalectic – a

When the éveníng is spréad oút agáinst the sky

Like a pátiént étherised upón a táble;

18 Crawford Mansions, Homer Row, Marylebone W1, was the

Eeldrop was a bank clerk, a theologian and a sceptic with a taste

He is well known, exciting various reactions of harmony or irritation;

The Paris Peace Conference had opened on 18 January, and the

‘There has been a great deal of pneumonic influenza about,’ Eliot

Eastward and westward storms are breaking – great, ugly

Tired. Misunderstood. Tortured. Tortuous. Four words that opened

When the bridegroom smoothed his hair

Where worried bodies of drowned men drift down in the green

I intended to be (except perhaps on very rare occasions) on merely

The rats are underneath the piles.

in his Missouri childhood home, and it was prevalent in England.

’Twas 1919 that brought down the Rum Trust –

Smuggling and speakeasies and rum-­running and bootlegging:

If there had been an opinion maker in London, until now it had

‘Please punch my face in order to save my soul,’ Pound told Har-

Belittled by the academy, betrayed by his editorial peers, it wasn’t

The collapse of Pound’s arrangement with Poetry in Chicago had

Huxley’s whatyoumay-­ callem-­ists were Imagistes, writers to

IN A STATION OF THE METRO.

The apparition of these faces in the crowd :

And the days are not full enough

It was a method – the movement of the outward and objec-

Homer Pound had seen many things in life, but a double-­decked

‘It is a small village with lovely ruins,’ Dorothy wrote on a postcard

for no known reason

‘Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics,’ wrote Pound, ‘which

I shall not want Capital in Heaven,

It was when Eliot reached these lines, according to Richard

Whether one writes a piece of work well or not seems to me a

London seemed to Eliot a place of disdain at that moment, from

The house overlooked the tidal Hards on Bosham Channel in the

Wonderful impression of Bosham in the evening, last thing. Full

The Pyrenean mountain town of Foix was furled in banners, swol-

No further reviews of ­Eliot’s Hogarth pamphlet appeared, although

Remote, extreme, foreign: such was the mind of W. B. Yeats. Sub-

To communicate impressions is difficult; to communicate a co-­

‘I have several times recently felt impelled to write you my admi-

The Pounds had travelled south west to Montréjeau, and by the

There could be no assimilation for him, he said: he felt he was on

De Bailhache, Fresca, Mrs Cammel, whirled

With their ‘fractured atoms’ the draft lines would anticipate

Here he sits, in a dry month, old and blind, being read to by a

Here I am, an old man in a dry month,

‘Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.’70 ­Eliot’s words in

Please send Gerontion back to me at once. I leave Saturday

Smuggling and speakeasies and rum-running and bootlegging:

Huxley’s whatyoumay- callem-ists were Imagistes, writers to

Homer Pound had seen many things in life, but a double-decked

No further reviews of Eliot’s Hogarth pamphlet appeared, although

To communicate impressions is difficult; to communicate a co-

‘Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.’70 Eliot’s words in

And he would recall Eliot’s presence there in lines written two

as tenthril thru grill-work

To say that Eliot’s choice of words is enigmatic is to leave a great

The emphasis was E liot’s own. The souls in purgatory suffer

Tom was ‘IMpossible’, the weekends were ‘rather unsatisfactory’,

Two of Eliot’s most influential essays were published that Sep-

Eliot had written of Donne as the most self-aware of writers:

‘We had Abigail Eliot to tea,’ wrote Vivien to Eliot’s mother on

2635 Locust Street, a roomy, late nineteenth-century two-storey

‘I congratulate you on an admirable book,’ Eliot told John Rodker,

The loss of Alsace-Lorraine in the west to France, of Northern