Sunday/Wasteland

Steve King on Eliot's Wasteland:

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The consensus among Eliot's contemporaries seems to be that he was an odd case -- certainly Conrad Aiken was referring not to the poetry but the man when he said, "Eliot cries out for analysis." Siegfried Sassoon thought he had "cold-storaged humanity," and Ottoline Morrell called him "the undertaker." Virginia Woolf, one familiar with the type, saw a nervous neurotic; nor was she the only acquaintance to notice Eliot's use of pale green face powder, sometimes with lipstick. But she has also written in her diary of listening rapt to Eliot's after-dinner reading of The Waste Land: "He sang it & chanted it & rhymed it. It has great beauty and force of phrase; symmetry; & tensity. What connects it together, I'm not so sure...." One modern biographer, getting to the bottom of things, finds nascent or latent homosexuality in Eliot; this caused not only his breakdown in 1921, while writing The Waste Land, but a lifelong "aboulie and emotional derangement."

More helpful might be V. S. Pritchett's description of Eliot as "a company of actors inside one suit, each twitting the others." Eliot's manuscript title for the poem was "He Do the Police in Different Voices," taken from Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, where the orphan Sloppy is so praised for his dramatic abilities when reading out the crime news.

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James Joyce seems to have had more fun with his shot at The Waste Land. These are the beginning lines of a poem he included in a letter written in 1925, after spending a rainy few days at a Rouen hotel:

Rouen is the rainiest place getting
Inside all impermeables, wetting
Damp marrow in drenched bones.
Midwinter soused us coming over Le Mans
Our inn at Niort was the Grape of Burgundy

But the winepress of the Lord thundered over that
grape of Burgundy
And we left in a hurgundy.
(Hurry up, Joyce, it's time!)....