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

Author:Matthew Hollis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2022-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

W O N D E R F U L, Vivien wrote in the margin beside ‘My nerves are bad tonight’; wonderful, again beside the lines of knowing and seeing and remembering nothing; & wonderful, once more beside those of the streetwalker who will wear her hair down.82 But Vivien was no cheerleader, and she had pertinent textual suggestions of her own to make. It was probably she rather than he who struck out the lethargic line about Lil’s husband ‘coming back out of the Transport Corps’: Discharge out of the army?? Eliot pencilled, in what was effectively an editorial query to his editor-of-the-moment, Vivien; no, ‘demobbed’, seven words reduced to one, for which the hand was Pound’s (plausibly pencilled over Vivien’s), but the ear and the English idiom Vivien’s.83 And she commented on the typescript elsewhere, too. ‘No, ma’am, you needn’t look so old fashioned at me’: Eliot’s line in draft; If you don’t like it you can get on with it, Vivien had replaced assertively. Eliot’s stiffened ‘It’s that medicine I took in order to bring it off’ became Vivien’s flowing ‘It’s that [them] pills I took to bring it off’.

Not that she judged everything so perfectly. ‘Something of that’, Eliot’s ladies had said in the draft; Somethink, Vivien prompted, refining the ear; but Eliot explained in the margin I want to avoid trying to show pronunciation by spelling; Eliot and Vivien were speaking to one another through the draft. Beside the hot water at ten she prompted the improbable hot water bottle!, which was surely a picture of the Eliots’ evenings, though a misstep here; and she had a thought that the publican’s great acoustic – HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME – was premature: Perhaps better not so soon, wrote Vivien in the margin, Could you put this later; Eliot would consider the comment, and transcribe it onto the carbon copy for further reflection.84

Vertically, in pencil, beside the first twenty-seven lines, Vivien wrote in the right-hand margin Don’t see what you had in mind here. And she was right to do so: she had identified by far the most ritualised of all the sections of the draft to date – passages that possessed a formality of address beyond the iambic pentameter they were cloaked in that were ornate in tone as well as form – and distant too: remote origins without the necessary accompanying personal quality. Not only in the image of Philomel had the opening passage brought with it a brutal sexual violation: the section had carried the hint of frozen intimacy that culminated in four lines imported by Eliot from ‘The Death of the Duchess’, the estranging poem which he had shared with Pound in the autumn of 1919, and possibly with Vivien too. Further lines introduced from the same poem would conclude the scene of bad nerves, and beside those Vivien marked the more ambiguous, Yes. Was this an appreciation or an agreement? Or was it simply a recognition of having read the lines in

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