In my earlier encounter with The Waste Land, before watching the recent BBC documentary, due to the absence of essential autobiographical information I had found it almost impossible to achieve a satisfactory understanding of its first line: ‘April is the cruellest month.’
The documentary blurb on iPlayer reads:
2022 marks the centenary of one of the defining poems of the 20th century, The Waste Land. TS Eliot’s groundbreaking work first exploded into the world on 15 October 1922 and has continued to resonate with successive generations.
For decades, Eliot actively discouraged biographical interpretations of his work, developing an ‘impersonal theory’ of poetry in which the private life of a poet was deemed irrelevant. Instead, numerous scholars have been guided by Eliot’s own seven pages of footnotes to the poem.
But in 2020, there were dramatic new revelations that demonstrated how, behind Eliot’s mask, there was a much more personal story to be found within The Waste Land – which can now at last be explored.
I went back to the poem in the hope that it would make more sense, but it was still rather opaque, to say the least. I was prompted to do some more digging later, as I explained in an earlier post, because of the debt I owed to Eliot’s footnotes which pointed me towards The Golden Bough, whose library reference connected me with the Bahá’í Faith. That’s not my focus right now, but it triggered me to make a public commitment on this blog to explore more, a commitment it has remained hard to follow through with.
The footnotes were either a deliberate misdirection to disguise the personal nature of the poem or simply padding required by the publisher to make the text a bit longer (more on that later). Ironic that a possible deception should have led me to important truths!
What this project has forced me to do, as I knew it would, is confront the challenges of modernist poetry yet again. Whether it has helped me resonate more to the poem or even understand it a bit better remains to be seen as this sequence progresses.
The Cruelty of April
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.
So let’s start with my first challenge. Why on earth did Eliot condemn April as ‘the cruellest month’?
From my late teenage years studying English literature the lines from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales have echoed round my brain whenever I heard the word April, whether I wanted them to or not:
Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licóur
Of which vertú engendred is the flour;
(Not that there’s been such a drought in the UK this year – it’s been the wettest March for most of us since 1981!)
The notes to the Poetry Foundation copy of The Waste Land text gave me the beginnings of a clue:
The Waste Land begins with a subversion of the first lines of the prologue to the Canterbury tales by Chaucer. He paints April as a month of restorative power, when spring rain brings nature back to life… It’s an image repeated to the point of cliché in subsequent centuries. But in the wasteland of Eliot’s modern world, in the ruins of the World War I, the Chaucerian image of a fertile, resurrected April become suffused with cruelty. It is, ironically, winter that ‘kept us warm’.
My father fought in First World War as did all my uncles. Though he never spoke of it, my mother did, and from my earliest years I picked up a sense of the horror it had held for them both. I was born before the end of Second World War and watched my dad walk in though the kitchen door some mornings towards the war’s end after working in the Civil Defence overnight. Only one specific memory survives which is where he let me wear his cap and the dust got in my eyes. I’m sure though that the fear of air raids, the siren sound and the blackout blinds will remain embedded in my visceral memory for ever.
So, yes, I get why the trauma of the recent war would’ve have left its mark on Eliot but why was April the flag for him?
A book I’d read more than twenty years ago provided the answer I had forgotten:[1] ‘His dear friend, the Frenchman, Jean Verdenal, who had become a medical officer in November 1914, had been killed on 2 May in the Dardanelles.’ This quote is from a biography of Vivienne Eliot, his first wife, by Carolyn Seymour-Jones. It’s called Painted Shadow. I had revisited it when I began to feel that Matthew Hollis’s The Waste Land: a biography of a poem wasn’t providing me with the answers I needed if the poem was ever going to make any kind of real sense to me.
To be fair, Hollis does refer to Verdenal:[2]
Eliot would dedicate his first book, Prufrock and Other Observations, ‘To Jean Verdenal, 1889 to 1915’, adding in time ‘mort aux Dardanelles’. 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.’
Seymour-Jones uses the very same quotation but goes on to make the intensity of Eliot’s reaction more accessible:
Lilacs became Eliot’s symbol of loss: ‘April is the cruellest month, breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/Memory and desire.’ Eliot would have heard of Verdenal’s death in May or June, and the shock and sorrow of this news may well have precipitated his proposal to Vivienne. The poet’s anguish was immense. It seems that Verdenal was later transfigured in his imagination into Phlebas, the drowned Phoenician in ‘Death by Water’ in The Waste Land. . . . This is a cry of grief which has given rise to the suggestion that The Waste Land is in essence an elegy for Jean. The medical officer, like Phlebas, was ‘a fortnight dead’, when Eliot, on the rebound, proposed to the young English woman he scarcely knew.
What has initially seemed at least partly inexplicable was beginning to make more sense.
It is possible though that she takes the matter too far, partly because she did not have access to the later correspondence that was released to scholars in 2020.
Her perspective is that The Waste Land is an elegy:[3]
A later critic, James E. Miller, has compared The Waste Land to Tennyson’s mourning for the dead of Arthur Hallam in In Memoriam. . . . He identified Phlebas the Phoenician as Jean Verdenal…
. . . The current image in The Waste Land, to which Eliot returns obsessively, is of Verdenal walking towards him in the Luxembourg Gardens, his arms full of lilacs.
This is something I would like to believe as my A level in English Literature involved a year-long study of In Memoriam. It affected me powerfully, perhaps in part because of the subliminal grief I ingested from my parents whose grief for the daughter who died before I was born was never assuaged.
The depth, darkness and power of Tennyson’s poem are illustrated by such verses as these from Number 50. They express a darkness beyond the purely personal and extending into the existential, as seems also to be the case with The Waste Land. So much so in the latter case that for many years it was taken to be just a commentary on the times rather than also in equal measure an expression of grief.
Be near me when my light is low,
When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick
And tingle; and the heart is sick,
And all the wheels of Being slow.Be near me when the sensuous frame
Is racked with pangs that conquer trust;
And Time, a maniac scattering dust,
And Life, a Fury slinging flame.Be near me when my faith is dry,
And men the flies of latter spring,
That lay their eggs, and sting and sing
And weave their petty cells and die.
Perhaps the intensity of the opening lines of The Waste Land are best explained by grief. Seymour-Jones clearly thinks so:[4]
In the first section of The Waste Land, ‘the burial of the dead’, Eliot again makes it clear that his remembrance is not of a ‘hyacinth girl’ with whom he is in love, but of a male partner, who may indeed be symbolised by the God Hyacinth, killed by Apollo when the two are playing at discus.
She feels that what she concludes is Eliot’s ambivalent sexuality explains both the grief and the poem:[5]
Eliot’s remark that Tiresias, in whom the two sexes meet, is the ‘most important person in the poem, uniting all the rest’, stresses the androgynous impulse which is central to the poem.
Hollis doesn’t quite see it that way. After quoting the lines in German which translated mean[6] Fresh blows the winds for home, my Irish girl, where do you roam?, he flags up ‘the hyacinth girl, who, after a decade’s silence, Eliot would tell Emily Hale was for her – his last romantic connection to America… 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.’
After he committed Vivienne to an asylum in 1938:[7] ‘I was never quite a whole man,’ Eliot told Emily Hale. ‘The agony forced some genuine poetry 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.’ . . . he embarked on a romantic correspondence with her that he would sustain until his wife’s death in 1947.’
Given that a significant focus of the first part of The Waste Land is elegy in the aftermath of war, and given the importance of those themes in my own background, why don’t I resonate strongly to it?
If he’d written ‘April was the cruellest month” it might’ve helped, but there still would’ve been a degree of misdirection there. Verdenal died in May (though only just), not April.
A more detailed answer to that will be the focus of the next posts, as I take a look at various forms of concealment. We are definitely not in the realms of confessional poetry here, not that this was always a winner in my book. Robert Lowell’s Complete Poems lurked almost unread for years on my shelves before I took it to Oxfam for someone else to enjoy.
More on that later.
And the Rest of the Opening
As for the rest of the opening section, Madame Sosotris baffles me completely, but I will be coming back to ‘the drowned Phoenician Sailor’ later in the context of Verdenal.
Also the Poetry Foundation footnote on the phrase ‘unreal city’ leaves me dissatisfied.
Eliot wrote:
Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
They write:
The “Unreal City” is borrowed from Baudelaire’s “The Seven Old Men”: “Unreal city, city full of dreams,/Where ghosts in broad daylight cling to passers-by.” Eliot’s “Unreal City” is modern London. The urban scene that makes up the final piece of the first section of The Waste Land is set in the city is financial district where Eliot worked at Lloyds bank. Eliot’s London, Baudelaire’s Paris, and Dante’s Inferno merge into a hellish tableau. The phrase “Unreal City” returns in the third section of the poem.
The word Baudelaire uses is ‘fourmillant’ which means ‘swarming’ so they have mistranslated it. That word fits Eliot’s subsequent lines far better, so why did he not use it? ‘Unreal’ perhaps disguises the borrowing but he plays on the idea of ‘ghosts’ in his description, throngs ‘undone’ by so much ‘death.’ They cross the bridge like the living dead. Perhaps ‘unreal’ captures the sense of incredulity within him implied by ‘I had not thought.’
Louis Sass picks up on the high regard Eliot held Baudelaire:[8]
Although Baudelaire (1821–67) lived before the era of modernism, this poet and critic – whom T. S. Eliot described as ‘the first counter-romantic in poetry’ and considered far in advance of his time – was perhaps the first great harbinger of the modernist spirit.
The Baudelaire sonnet, Obsession, that I attempted to render in English has a darkness akin to what we find in The Waste Land and the fact that Eliot initially chose to place a quote from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness at the beginning of his poem speaks to the relevance of this to an understanding of the poem:
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!’
Hollis[9] feels it ‘might have lent so much to the poem had Eliot allowed it.’ Instead he gave in to Ezra Pound’s insistence that it should be deleted. Thanks, Ezra, for making this journey so much more difficult!
There is another example of Baudelaire in translation at the end of this post to enrich the possible connections.
Enough for now.
References
[1]. Painted Shadow – pages 79-80.
[2]. The Waste Land: a biography of a poem – pages 4-6.
[3]. Painted Shadow – page 294.
[4]. Op. cit – page 300.
[5]. Op. cit. – pages 300-01.
[6]. The Waste Land: a biography of a poem – page 234.
[7]. Op. cit. – page 380.
[8]. Madness and Modernism – pages 61-62.
[9]. The Waste Land: a biography of a poem – page 356.
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