Wasteland by W. Scott Poole

Author:W. Scott Poole
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Nonfiction
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2018-08-08T16:00:00+00:00

“The Hollow Men”

T. S. Eliot, poet of nightmare cities like Lang’s, watched from the sidelines as the disaster of the postwar years unfolded. A bitter conservatism took hold of him, a philosophical despair evident in The Waste Land further soured by both his gloomy personal life and his reactionary political influences.

Eliot’s marriage continued to degenerate. He and Vivienne Haigh-Wood simply had not known each other very well, and it’s actually difficult to imagine a pair more fundamentally unsuited. Eliot, even at age twenty-­six, had the demeanor of a stuffy old man with a fairly severe case of sexual repression thrown in for good measure. Eliot told his friend Conrad Aiken that he had gotten married to lose his virginity. He apparently lacked the imagination to find another way to accomplish the task.

Haigh-Wood fully embraced the liberated spirit and attitudes of the age. She smoked in public and danced to jazz, activities Eliot seems to have sniffed at uncomfortably. Surprisingly, some of the more disorienting moments in The Waste Land employed jazz-like rhythms that caused a distinct split over the poem’s value when it first appeared. The weird syncopations seemed out of step with the classical allusions, and this in some ways may have been part of Eliot’s point. He wanted to express disdain for the modern age, to describe the cacophony he thought he saw across the tea table when he looked at his own wife.

Her influence, possibly negative, on his poetry aside, few of Eliot’s friends and admirers cared for her. Virginia Woolf called her “a bag of ferrets” around Eliot’s neck. If it’s a canard that Haigh-Wood slept with Russell during her own honeymoon, she certainly began an affair with the famous mathematician and essayist soon thereafter. Eliot remained unhappy and, we must remember, so did she.62

Eliot suffered from more than the unhappiness of a bad match. His 1925 poem “The Hollow Men,” while brief in comparison to The Waste Land, has at least as many ghosts of the Great War shambling about in it. The dead inhabit it as spirits that still roam the empty places, “the dead land . . . cactus land.” Corpses shuffle about in echo chambers of memory that are themselves filled with death dolls, the empty husks that so many feared the war had revealed as the true story of the human experience.

The poem opens with snatches of speech heard in crowded streets that chills the reader to the bone. “Mistah Kurtz—he dead / A penny for the Old Guy.” Eliot evokes Kurtz from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the man who saw mass slaughter and became the living, or rather the dying, embodiment of Europe in its grave. Kurtz had looked into the heart of things and seen only horror.

“A penny for the Old Guy” echoes the traditional cry of British children on Guy Fawkes Day. In American culture it reads a bit like “Trick or treat?” its implicit threat defanged by time and frequent use. In the case of Guy Fawkes Day, it accompanies the burning of a stuffed effigy, a true hollow man set on fire.

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