Exploring ‘The Waste Land’ (4/4): What does Eliot tell us?

The artist’s inborn talents, developed abilities, innate and acquired qualities of character, personal inclinations, and the degree of spiritual maturity obtained at a given point in . . . life, along with the characteristics [they] may have assimilated from [the] national culture, [the] local culture, and the surrounding geography and climate – all such factors combine to guarantee a dazzling and most attractive diversity in artistic self-expression.

(Ludwig Tuman Mirror of the Divine – page 118)

Eliot’s Perspective on Poetry

What can we learn from Eliot to help us decode the complexity of The Waste Land? Unsurprisingly his view includes thoughts on capturing a dystopian present:[1]

 . . . art born from a war-torn world could – should – find inspiration in subjects not previously thought beautiful. That poetry should be a meeting ground for beauty and not-beauty was a thought engaging Eliot in 1919.

Eliot argues that this demands depersonalising the art:[2]

The progress of an artist is continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality. (Eliot 1919)

Which is where we bump up against possibly his most famous dictum:[3]

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 factors, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. (Eliot – 1919)

We are a long way from poetry as personal self-expression here:[4]

[For Eliot] 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 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.

This can shape the poem into[5] ‘the rapid and unexpected combination of images apparently unrelated.’

Any help?

During a recent conversation with a former colleague we discussed Frida Kahlo and T. S. Eliot. I mentioned my dislike of modernist fragmentation, and used Wilfred Owen as an example of a poet who wrote of horrors, but coherently enough for the reader to share the experience and understand enough to empathise. It clicked, as I said this, that poetry for me has to create an experience I can recognise – capitulation to unintelligible chaos doesn’t work for me. Abstruse, elusive allusiveness turns me right off.

If I’m arguing that poetry should create a comprehensible experience, and a poem’s obscurity creates an experience of bewilderment in the face of the supposedly meaningless chaos of modern life, is that acceptable because that actually is all there really is, or does there need to be some compensating perspective to redress the balance and avoid falling into some kind of nihilistic swamp? I know what my heart is saying.

When Eliot, towards the end of The Waste Land writes, ‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins’ and uses spiritually loaded words at the very close, he’s at the very least expressing a degree of resistance in the face of the darkness surely. Is that enough? I’m not sure.

Louis Sass has something to say that might help me navigate this quicksand.

First in terms of the fragmentation I find so challenging he writes that in modernism:[6]

There is also a desire to occupy, if only for a moment, as many points of view as possible, an impulse expressed in the multiperspectivism of analytic Cubist painting, in portraits by Picasso, as well as in such poems as T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and Wallace Stevens’s Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird – in which a multiplicity of perspectives implies that reality includes our attempts to see it.

While I accept that all we have is a simulation of reality which we construct rather than simply perceive, I’m not sure I can comfortably buy the whole of that package.

Sass also flags up the sense that words cannot convey deep experience (I’ve met that already in the context of NDEs where one experiencer felt that trying to express in words what they had gone through was like trying to ‘paint a smell.’):[7]

. . . an acute awareness of the abstract or categorical nature of language, and of the consequent impossibility of describing the individual objects, or immanent moments of our experience. This concern has precursors in romanticism as well as in mysticism, but only in the Modernist period did it come to dominance – permeating the work of Rilke, Musil, T. S. Eliot, and many other writers, all of whom share the malaise and frustration expressed in the essay on Eugène Ionesco’s lament: ‘There are no words for the deepest experience. … Of course, not everything is unsayable in words, only the living truth.’

He claims to find in works such as Eliot’s[8] ‘the lamenting of the devitalisation and disarticulation of modern existence.’ Disarticulation would demand fragmentation of a work of art to convey it remotely adequately. I remain vexed though by the same questions, ‘Is that really all there is? Shouldn’t the poem include more?’

Sass argues that disconnection, according to Eliot, is at the core of our condition:[9]

T. S. Eliot diagnosed the modern condition as a ‘dissociation of sensibility’: a widening rift between thought and emotion, intellect and sensation, and a general failure to achieve ‘unification of sensibility.’

We’re in McGilchrist’s territory of The Master and his Emissary and The Matter with Things again here. As I’ve gone over that at length elsewhere I won’t rehash it all here again.

Eliot’s Mental State

I had originally thought that I would need to spend more time integrating a sense Eliot’s mental state into this exploration, but given that at most, in terms of the poem, a degree of depression might have been involved I think I can get away with a more cursory approach.

Yes, the poem is to some degree rooted in depression and disconnection. It does raise issues about the possible connection between creativity and suffering: how many happy, married poets and painters are there after all? As Frida Kahlo put it, ‘Pain drove her to paint.’ The BBC documentary on Frida Kahlo quotes her as saying at one point about one painting, ‘I had to paint it because I felt murdered by life,’ her pain was so great.

With Eliot, in so far as we have some kind of definition of his mental health problems, they come down to what his therapist Vittoz termed aboulie or ‘want of will’: the psychiatrist Harry Trosman:[10]

‘argues that Eliot’s equilibrium was easily vulnerable to injury as a result of his deprived childhood, in which he felt ‘isolated and uncomfortable in his ill fitting masculinity…’ This diagnosis accords with Eliot’s own sense of a disintegrating self, and Trosman’s theory that The Waste Land served as a form of ‘self analytic work’ is supported by Eliot’s own confession, when he writes towards the end of the poem: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” He was, according to Trosman, describing ‘a process of partial integration.’

Both Eliot and Vivienne had problems:[11]

‘Nerves’ was the condition attributed to both Vivien and Eliot, by doctors and friends, and even to each other…

The world situation disturbed him deeply in that he wrote:[12]

‘The whole of contemporary politics, etc. oppresses me with a continuous physical horror, like the feeling of growing madness, madness in one’s own brain,’ he wrote.

So much so that,[13] ‘By the end of September [1921], Eliot’s health had broken down completely. 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.’

He learned a possible diagnosis:[14] aboulie according to Dr Vittoz. ‘Eliot didn’t possess the English edition [of the text describing this], but if he had he would’ve seen the word translated as lack of will.’ He planned to go to Switzerland for treatment.[15]

The crucial consideration here is that after working with Vittoz to regain control of his inscape[16] by learning ‘to focus without distraction upon the object of attention, which in this case would be the poem,’ he had ended up after the treatment[17] ‘clear minded, and in control of events, and had written in excess of two hundred lines of the poem in less than a month.’

It is interesting though that he saw this process as exemplifying the way illness and enhanced understanding can be linked:[18]

‘It is a common place that some forms of illness are extremely favourable, not only to religious illumination, but too artistic and literary composition,’ Eliot would write in 1931.… ‘in this state long passages may be produced, which require little or no retouch.’ At this moment, the writer… has a sense of being a receptor, not a maker.

This was possibly the case here as well:[19]

 . . . 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.

And[20] ‘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.’ So do I in terms of its being the best part – not sure yet whether anything could justify the rest.

‘Void Devouring the Gadget Era’ by Mark Tobey

So, where does all this leave me?

My attempt to explain my struggle to understand The Waste Land may be almost as confusing as the poem itself, but here’s my attempt to summarise my current reactions. They may, of course, change again as time goes by.

I need poetry to be more honest than The Waste Land seems to be, though that does not mean more ‘confessional.’

I do not go to art to replicate the dissonance of the modern world but to transcend it. If the mirror I look into distorts what I see in the same way as my culture does, then my understanding remains as warped as ever.

Also the more obscure the poem the more necessary the biographical context becomes. The existential context is just as, if not more important than the intellectual context. Tracking down references is not enough. The question becomes rather ‘Why should they matter to the author or to me as reader, and in what way?’ A poem, like an hallucination or a dream, is rooted in the felt life of its author. It can only be fully decoded in terms of that life.

I completely disagree with Eliot’s divorcing the poem from the personality. Every trope conveys us a truth about the poet. Every objective correlative must be saturated in personal significance or it’s not poetry. It surely has to be a bridge between the poet’s inscape and the reader’s. When the bridge collapses the poem fails.

There is a possible caveat to this dismissal. Among the issues I discussed with my colleague was how great art can sometimes come from such flawed sources – Caravaggio for example. Is the poet or the painter different from and greater than the person? A quote I can’t find right now, from Hollis I think, contained the suggestion from one critic that in his best poems Pound, the poet, is better than Pound, the man. That could make some kind of sense of Eliot’s idea that there should be no personality in poetry. It may be a paradox that contains a wise insight that is not to be taken too literally.

Even though I think I understand The Waste Land somewhat better than I did before, I’m left in Stephanie Burt’s territory of Don’t Read Poetry – no poetry is for everyone and this poem therefore is probably not for me.

Perhaps The Waste Land really is just a dispiriting capitulation to despair. Or maybe not.

This next quote seems a good place to end:[21]

The danger threatening modern man is that instead of being a complete person at any given moment, he will be split into unrelated fragments . . .

Poetry, as experiential mine detector, needs to help us avoid that kind of existential death. I’m not sure The Waste Land plays its part in that, unlike some of his later, perhaps less highly regarded poetry.

References

[1]. The Waste Land: a biography of a poem – page 53.
[2]. Op. cit. – page 130.
[3]. Op. cit. – page 131.
[4]. Op. cit. – page 142.
[5]. Op. cit. – page 247.
[6]. Madness and Modernism – page 106.
[7]. Op. cit. – pages 150-51.
[8]. Op. cit. – page 285.
[9]. Op. cit. – page 296.
[10]. Painted Shadow – page 289.
[11]. The Waste Land: a biography of a poem – page 244.
[12]. Op. cit – page 255.
[13]. Op. cit – page 288.
[14]. Op. cit – page 298.
[15]. Op. cit – page 307.
[16]. Op. cit – page 309.
[17]. Op. cit – page 337.
[18]. Op. cit – page 326.
[19]. Op. cit – page 327.
[20]. Op. cit – page 348.
[21]. From The Artist as Citizen Thomas Lysaght in The Creative Circle edited by Michael Fitzergerald – page 143.

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Exploring ‘The Waste Land’ (3/4): madness, mood and modernism

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 19^th 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 19^th 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.

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