One of the highest services [poets] perform is to reacquaint us with our true feelings which we put away in our need to manipulate our workaday world.
(Roger White from Poetry and Self-Transformation in The Creative Circle – page 3)
All that we have explored so far leads to the question – is The Waste Land a disguised autobiography, an indictment of the modern world or what?
Some Hints
Seymour-Jones is in no doubt:[1]
‘This is Tom’s autobiography,’ exclaimed Mary Hutchinson, when she first read The Waste Land.
She unpacks various implications:
The poem’s intense emotion, so tightly controlled, its springs disguised by a trail of footnotes which lead away from the source, led the critic Edmund Wilson to hail Eliot’s greatness despite the poem’s obscurity. . . . Wilson’s thesis . . . that it is the suffering of the artist which inspires creativity, was true of Eliot… The poet’s anguish was as complex as the man: its roots lay in his grief for Jean Verdenal and a love cut short by death, the cruel comparison to an unloved wife who reproached him with sexual failure, and his disillusion with the postwar world.
She also makes reference to the Arthurian legend of the Holy Grail, and the impotent Fisher King, who rules a waste land.
She feels readers were deliberately distracted from the personal elements:[2]
The obscurity of the poem, whose four hundred lines contained, quotations from, allusions to, and parodies of a daunting list of earlier writers from Buddha to Wagner, led critics away from any attempt to relate the poem to the facts of Eliot’s life. . . .
The footnotes, including the reference to The Golden Bough which led me to find the book about the Bahá’í Faith on Hendon library’s shelves which in turn triggered this attempt to do the poem justice, were ‘a carefully laid wild goose chase.’
She then unpacks an intriguing and plausible theory:
Together they functioned as a smokescreen behind which Eliot hid his need to confess, while over future decades, his impersonal theory of poetry put an embargo on decoding a poet’s work as a personal statement. Yet Eliot tapped into the mood of despair and dissolution of 1921, precisely because he was writing about his own inner despair and disillusion. He used the material of his own life and made it universal.
We can blame Ezra Pound for some of the obfuscation in that his ‘radical revision . . . . removed much of the personal element . . . . and made it more opaque.’
Hollis picks up on other ploys to confuse the reader:[3]
Tiresias, ‘the most important personage in the poem, said Eliot, in a wilful misdirection for his notes of the summer of 1922; never the most important, but a person of importance nonetheless.… for the poem was not to be a collage of various voices spliced together, but a single voice speaking variously, to create . . . ‘an emotional unit’.
Even if the notes were not initially designed to mislead the reader, they were not there to clarify any of its content:[4]
It could have been at his reading of the poem at Hogarth house on 18 June that the idea of notes to The Waste Landfirst arose as a way of elucidating the poem… It seems more likely that they were written in a concentrated effort that summer for the sole purpose of fulfilling [the publisher’s] demand for a longer extent.
. . . He would call them a ‘remarkable exposition of bogus scholarship’…
So The Golden Bough may have been at best a filler to enable publication, or at worst one of the red herrings designed to distract the reader from the poem’s real meaning.
Fragmentation
We need to turn now to what might be implied by what Seymour-Jones terms ‘his impersonal theory of poetry.’
Whether the fragmentation of The Waste Land was meant to assist in a process of obfuscation is impossible to determine for sure. What it almost certainly represents is an attempt to capture the sense of disintegration Eliot was experiencing around him, both at a personal and at the societal level.
Phrases like ‘These fragments’ and ‘a heap of broken images,’ give us a strong clue to part of the problem. They capture not just a quality of this poem, but also of modernism more generally.
My clinical experience, recently reinforced by reading Madness and Modernism by Louis Sass, has led me to think that making sense of a modernist poem and interpreting the meaning of psychotic experiences are remarkably similar in some respects. Having access to context is essential in both cases. By context, I do not mean the web of allusions both can be entangled in, but the life situations in which the allusions and the text itself are embedded.
Never before have I thought of poetry and psychosis as being in any way linked. It occurs to me that modernist fragmentation may be triggered by the same sense of painful meaninglessness as seems to haunt the psychotic experience.
I always knew, ever since I started studying psychology, that my early interest in books was to do with learning about people. I also learned that dream work came easily to me because of having worked with poetic imagery. What I had failed to understand was that decoding poetry prepared me for decoding schizophrenic speech and experiences.
Madness and Meaning
Take John’s story as a simple example.
I was part of a Team running a 12-bedded unit working with people whose diagnosis of schizophrenia had been labelled ‘treatment resistant,’ which should be translated as meaning not helped by medication. As a result their lives were constantly disrupted by recurrent episodes of psychosis usually leading to several hospitalisations a year. People referred to us generally stayed at least two years, sometimes longer, and were carefully assessed to determine, if possible, the exact roots and meaning of their psychotic experiences. Strong relationships were built over time with all the residents who would allow this to happen. The revolving door lifestyle generally speaking no longer plagued them after that.
An 18 year-old young man was referred to us from the Acute Ward. He had been admitted on a section as a potential danger to others. He was convinced that Satan and Jesus were fighting a battle with fire in the world around him. Some people were even allying themselves with Satan in his view. He was determined to prevent this if he could and was threatening to kill those who, he believed, were on Satan’s side.
He was not able to give us any clear account of why or how he had come to this state of mind. However, because he was significantly younger than most of our residents, we were able in this instance to interview his mother, who was happy to share a detailed picture of his background and early experience.
It was a revelation. The most important insight came from her account of the incident that led her to leave her marriage. Her husband, the young man’s father, was an alcoholic. One day she walked into the living room, when her son was just a baby, and saw her drunken husband dragging the infant towards the coal fire with the clear intention of putting his feet in the flames. She managed to rescue the child and find a place of safety for them both.
A child of that age would not be able to form recoverable episodic memories that he could explain in words to anyone else. However, his emotional brain could well have retained vivid and powerful impressions of the incident in terms of the heat, the flames, the anger, fear and conflict. This would create plausible grounds to conclude he had been sufficiently traumatised to be vulnerable under stress later in life to a psychotic episode. It does not take a genius to see that his persecuting father, even from such vague but powerful memories, could end up being translated into Satan, his rescuing mother into Jesus, and the weapons of the conflict between them into flame, to symbolise the terror he couldn’t consciously recall, but which still flooded his mind.
My experience working in mental health pointed clearly towards the need for significant levels of careful research to unravel the meaning of hallucinations and delusions with the help of an individual’s history. Such efforts were not always successful. For example, if had not had access to John’s mother and if she had not been prepared to openly share such painful details, we would never have made the connection been his trauma and his hallucinations and delusions. However, in my view, absence of evidence in such cases, does not support the idea that such experiences are meaningless.
Obscurity
I struggle with modern poetry’s deliberate obscurity.
My sensibility is rooted in the 19th century thanks to my parents and the bookshelf they filled with Rider Haggard, Walter Scott, Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, Lyra Heroica and so on, along with with my mum’s tales of her parents conversion to Catholicism via the Oxford Movement and of her father listening to classical music at the Free Trade Hall.
Having my roots in the 19th century makes me out of tune with modernism – more than a bit of a dinosaur then, maybe. Though my parents lived through two world wars and the great depression my mother held onto an earlier brighter vision of the world and somehow shared it with me in a way that allowed me to draw on the more radically positive elements of that world to shape my perspective rather than leaving me locked in its sentimentality or trapped by modernism’s mechanical fragmentation. Whether that helped me recognise the power and truth of Bahá-u-lláh’s Revelation when The Waste Land footnote finally steered me towards is hard to say.
The Waste Land may have been inspired in the same way as Tennyson’s In Memoriam – by the death of a loved one. I may therefore be tempted to resonate to it because of my own childhood indirect experience of loss – the death of my sister, Mary, before was born, as well as by my parallel journeys to Eliot’s from my family’s faith to disbelief and back to faith of a different kind. If so I must be careful not to let those parallels warp my approach to the poem. Given how tough I am finding the going so far that seems unlikely.
Because of my being primed to respond to loss by my experience as a child of my parents’ grief some of my favourite lyrics are to be found in In Memoriam. Eliot’s The Waste Land does not match their elegiac power.
So what does it do?
Sass has some suggestions, for example,[5] he refers to it as ‘that anti-epic of modern life,’ and[6] after a reference to Wallace Stevens — As You Leave the Room, uses the phrase ‘The notion of a death-in-life’ which he explains as ‘a consciousness awake but not alive, a corpse with insomnia (to use Cesare’s image).’ He feels this notion ‘has haunted Western literature from romanticism up until the present: from Coleridge’s ancient mariner, to the speaker of Eliot’s The Waste Land, and on to Ham and Clove in Beckett’s Endgame.’
Stevens’ poem, as he questions the nature of his reality, includes expressions such as ‘I lived a skeleton’s life,’ ‘a disbeliever in reality’ and ‘A countryman of all the bones in the world.’
Eliot has his own ideas as well, to which we should,. of course, give appropriate weight.
More on that next time.
References
[1]. Painted Shadow – pages 290-91.
[2]. Op. cit. –page 292.
[3]. The Waste Land: a biography of a poem – page 283.
[4]. Op. cit. – page 375.
[5]. Madness and Modernism – page 231.
[6]. Op. cit. – page 456.
Everybody Means Something 