The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem

The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem by Matthew Hollis.

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I really want to like The Waste Land. I love some of its parts. I love “April is the cruelest month” and “Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.” But I've been handicapped by not being able to understand the damned thing.

Part of the problem is that the search for meaning in this poem is a search for fool's gold. T.S. Eliot never intended the poem to be an integrated, unitary whole. As we learn from Matthew Hollis in The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem, Eliot wrote the five parts of The Waste Land - I. The Burial of the Dead, II. A Game of Chess, III. The Fire Sermon, IV. Death by Water, V. What the Thunder Said - as independent units, often taking sections from prior unpublished poems to put into The Waste Land. Sometimes, Eliot would strip a section of vast quantities of text.

Another part of the problem is that the poem is deliberately cacophonous. The Burial of the Dead section shifts from voice to voice, creating a kaleidoscopic effect. I think this is the intent as Eliot is communicating that modernity is a jumble of sensory inputs that confuses the modern mind (as of 1920, at least.) In 1920, modernity was funneling the news of the world to the average citizen by movies, radio, and newspapers. Moderns had just gone through a Great War, which was a world war in scope. That war had killed millions. It was followed up by a Great Pandemic that killed millions more on the home front. 

In 1920, most people probably thought there was too much information to keep up with. The term “Future Shock” would not be coined until the 1960s by Alvin Tofler, but many people were experiencing Future Shock in the 1920s. (In contrast, in the 2020s, we experience Future Shock but don't notice it or talk about it anymore.)

With that long wind-up, I am here to tell you Hollis's book will not solve the interpretative conundrum of The Waste Land. There are some clues at a pretty high level, at the level of unit structure, for example. For the most part, Hollis does not touch the meaning of individual lines. There is some discussion of our friend Phlebas and whether his Phoenician background is a stand-in for a Semitic antecedent (and therefore alludes to anti-semitism.) We get no insight into summer over why “Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee” or who “Marie” is.

For me, what this book mostly provided was an introduction to the English literary world in the early 20th century. Hollis's is an encyclopedia. His book is well-written and minutely researched. The main figure of the text is T.S. Eliot, which is not a surprise, but Eliot sometimes seems to get edged out in favor of Ezra Pound. At times, it seems like Hollis's real mission is to re-acquaint the literary world with Pound's importance to the world of literature and poetry.

In the 1910s, Pound was an indispensable man in the English literary world. Pound acted as editor to influential journals. He also acted as a coach and mentor to those with literary talent. Pound discovered Eliot and rued the fact that Eliot was squandering his time as a bank teller at Lloyd's of London. In the 1920s, Pound befriended and found ways to subsidize James Joyce as he wrote Ulysses. During the same time, Pound had one of the two priceless manuscripts of The Waste Land, which he edited with a heavy hand. Pound was responsible for two of the incomprehensible Great Works of the Twentieth Century.

Pound also befriended a young, unpublished Ernest Hemingway:

“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

Hollis, Matthew. The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem (p. 318). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

Pound's loyalty to his friends was something that would not be forgotten by some - but not all - of them despite Pound's disgrace after World War II:

“For his friends, said Hemingway and Eliot alike, Pound was both advocate and defence. He found publishers for their writing, review coverage for their books, journals to carry their work; he found audiences for their music and buyers for their art. When they were hungry he fed them, when they were threadbare he clothed them. He witnessed their wills and he loaned his own money, and encouraged in each of them a fortitude for life. ‘And in the end,' said Hemingway, ‘a few of them refrain from knifing him at the first opportunity.'

Hollis, Matthew. The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem (p. 319). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

I am always fascinated by the way in which historical figures overlap and act like real human beings. For example, Hollis implies that philosopher Bertrand Russell seduced Eliot's wife, Vivian: 

“Russell had been a cuckoo in the nest of the Eliots' short marriage. He had dazzled and spoiled and harried Vivien, and had taken something very precious in the form of the couple's fidelity to each other. The cottage at Marlow would cast a shadow over the marriage until Eliot was able to release himself from the rent 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.

Hollis, Matthew. The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem (pp. 49–50). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

Eliot had been Russell's student at Harvard.

“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.

Hollis, Matthew. The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem (p. 45). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

This is the kind of detail that rounds out historical knowledge. For example, Hollis mentions Russell's arrest for advocating pacifism, which left Eliot, who was maybe 29 at the time, looking for someone to replace Russell as a tenant in a country cottage. 

Vivien Eliot does not come off in the best light. Eliot abandoned her in 1932 but remained married to her until her death in an asylum in 1946. Eliot explained:

“‘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

Hollis, Matthew. The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem (pp. 9–10). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

That has to be some consolation.

This book is a firehose of information. However, I never felt like I got into Eliot's self-understanding. We certainly get information on his personal life, but the overall impression of Eliot is a sense of diffidence. For example, I would have been interested in knowing what Eliot's thoughts were on becoming Anglican. How did that conversion affect him? He seems to have become more conservative and traditionalist as he got older, so it seems that the conversion had meaning to him. But on the whole, I never got any sense of an answer to these questions.

Admittedly, Hollis's focus is on The Waste Land, which means that the time period Hollis is interested in is the same period during which The Waste Land was being formed, approximately 1915–1923. This is going to prevent a lot of reflection on a lot of issues. Nonetheless, Hollis makes space for topics that happen after 1923, such as Ezra Pound's disgrace and rehabilitation.

I like the book, but would I recommend it? And to whom?

I liked the book because I like history, and I got a sense of a slice of history I know next to nothing about, i.e., literary history. That said, large chunks of text meant nothing to me but probably would to someone with more knowledge about “Fusionism” and various poets and writers.
So, I would not recommend this book to someone with a casual interest in the subject. On the other hand, if literature is your bag, then this is a good book for you.