April Hates U

On reading The Waste Land every year

This is not an April Fool’s joke (I’m gay; we don’t celebrate). I really do read The Waste Land every year. It’s a way to welcome a season I’ve never quite liked. I’m not sure if April is the cruelest month, but I do know spring is not my temperament, and the poem’s revulsion at the stirring and the mixing and the breeding — even if it’s all just Eliot’s own sexual neurosis at work — offers a touchstone: here we are again, caught in the wheel of death and rebirth. You might as well make peace with it.

From the very beginning I fell for Modernism — probably because it was what everyone around me feared or lamented. Ulysses, they hissed, as though reading it were punishment. Conrad, they yawned. With the same certainty, they waved off Woolf and balked at Faulkner. From the way they rolled their eyes, The Waste Land seemed at the top of this particular pyramid, a pleasureless poem “no one” would ever want to read — which of course meant I wanted to read it. And reading it was extraordinarily difficult, particularly for a rather stupid young student who nonetheless knew what he didn’t know, and knew he wanted to know it. I guess Eliot and I have at least one thing in common: Some people never get over being raised in the Midwest.

Oddly, this dynamic — of knowing what you don’t know — is something Eliot alludes to in “The Function of Criticism,” distinguishing between a reductive simplification of the Classic and the Romantic¹, or the outer and the inner voice. In a Classic attitude, “men cannot get on without giving allegiance to something outside themselves”; there are rules or laws by which we comport ourselves, or at least orient ourselves, as readers and writers. The Romantic attitude, on the other hand, Eliot ridicules as a kind of nihilistic egalitarianism: “If I like a thing, that is all I want; and if enough of us, shouting all together, like it, that should be all that you (who don’t like it) ought to want.” If everything is preference — if we’re to just let people enjoy things, as Disney-watching adults are always threatening — then criticism itself is irrelevant, and a difficult or experimental poem only aspires to pretension, not to literature. Conversely, to aspire toward literature would be to suppose some form of Eliot’s “outside allegiance” or “devotion” to which an artist “must surrender and sacrifice himself.”

A simpler way to say this is that I wanted to read The Waste Land, when I was young, because I believed in it more than I believed in myself. And I believed in The Waste Land because I believed in poetry, in literature. More importantly, it never occurred to me not to believe in literature; I’d simply accepted it the way some kids never get around to rejecting their familial dogma of Christ and shame — or margarine and Mrs. Butterworth's, for that matter.

---

Every time you read it, The Waste Land is an axis of departure. If Joyce once joked² with one of his translators that he’d “put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant,” Eliot seems to have had the same idea. The Waste Land is a 434-line poem; my edition (Barnes & Noble Classics!) has 85 footnotes — these in addition to the 51 that Eliot originally included with the poem (mostly to boost the page count of the 1922 edition). His own notes run from the referential — “Cf. Ecclesiastes XII, v” — to the strangely personal, including several observations on the “hermit-thrush which I have heard in Quebec Province… Its ‘water-dripping song’ is justly celebrated.” Added together, they function less like footnotes and more like auto-criticism, especially as he defines it in “The Function of Criticism”:

We must ourselves decide what is useful to us and what is not; and it is quite likely that we are not competent to decide. But it is fairly certain that “interpretation” (I am not touching upon the acrostic element in literature) is only legitimate when it is not interpretation at all, but merely putting the reader in possession of facts which he would otherwise have missed.

The Waste Land, then, seems to be “at risk” of failing to offer certain facts to the reader — facts Eliot clearly wanted the reader to know.

This time around, I was caught off guard by his note on Tiresias, which opens this passage about the tryst between the typist and some “young man carbuncular” (a phrase I say to myself sometimes when its rhythm caterpillars into my head):

At the violet hour, when the eyes and back
Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits
Like a taxi throbbing waiting,
I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,
The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights
Her stove, and lays out food in tins.

Tiresias, Eliot pointedly underlines, “although a mere spectator and not indeed a ‘character,’ is yet the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest.” All the men in the poem are Tiresias, and all the women too: “The two sexes meet in Tiresias. What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem.” This is a bizarre “fact” to include — especially among notes that mostly resemble citations or definitions. It would also imply that Tiresias is Madame Sosostris, the “famous clairvoyante” who deals out the fortune at the beginning of the poem:

Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are the pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations.
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see.

Who, I wonder, can see what’s on the merchant’s back? If what Tiresias sees is the substance of the poem, it intrigues me what he — in the form of Madame Sosostris — cannot see.³

---

Eliot, of course, loathed personal or biographical criticism. His most circulated essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” demands that the poet “develop or procure the consciousness of the past… What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.” Poetry, in his realm, “is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.” Coyly — if it doesn’t feel too icky to call Eliot coy — he adds a caveat: “Only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.”

Not among Eliot’s notes is his allusion to Psalm 137: “By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept.” Leman is his substitute for “the rivers of Babylon,” where the Jews, in exile, “wept, when we remembered Zion.” Later in the same section, an unspecified voice (there are a lot of them) says:

On Margate Sands.
I can connect
Nothing with nothing.
The broken fingernails of dirty hands.
My people humble people who expect
Nothing.

Margate is coastal resort in Kent, where Eliot and his wife, Vivienne, traveled in 1921 to rest from an ambiguous “nervous disorder.” It’s also where he began writing The Waste Land. The waters of Leman, in turn, refer to Lac Léman, the French name for Lake Geneva, where Eliot traveled alone after Margate to continue recuperating — and to finish the poem. Their marriage, famously, was not a happy one, and it’s hard, despite the poet’s insistence, not to read the poem’s fear of sex as its author’s fear of sex, especially as the poem revels not in self-sacrifice, exactly, but in ascetic self-denial. Just after the Margate line, Eliot concludes his “Fire Sermon” by braiding the Buddha with St. Augustine:

To Carthage then I came

Burning burning burning burning
O Lord Thou pluckest me out
O Lord Thou pluckest

burning

In another footnote, he offers more facts: “The collocation of these two representatives of eastern and western asceticism, as the culmination of this part of the poem, is not an accident.” This phrasing is absurd. Are there parts of the poem, then, that are accidental? The lengths to which Eliot depersonalizes himself, disguises himself, starts to seem like a fetish or fantasy, not a critical stance. He’s the man who wants to be erased while leaving footprints across the “arid lands” behind him. He wants you to see that he’s not there.

---

Early in The Waste Land, a voice offers a veiled threat or warning: “Son of man, / You cannot say, or guess, for you know only / A heap of broken images.” I don’t remember when over the years that I underlined it, but it’s hard not to link “A heap of broken images” with Madame Sosostris’s cards, which Eliot himself occludes or blurs (or “obnubilates,” as he writes elsewhere) by fabricating an imaginary deck of his own: “I am not familiar with the exact constitution of the Tarot pack of cards, from which I have obviously departed to suit my own convenience,” as he admits in another footnote — a relatively colloquial and personal footnote, I’d like to point out.

Last week, while writing about art and algorithmically generated slop, I came across Harold Rosenberg’s “The Cubist Epoch,” originally published in the New Yorker in 1971. The Cubists, he wrote, in attempting to fully and stylistically render three dimensions on a flat surface, “made art esoteric by projecting into the mind of the spectator the secrets and problems of the studio.” As a kind of stylistic but less agnostic precursor to Surrealism, Cubism “provided a new pictorial language superbly suited to dealing with modern experience.” Through collage,

it blended images with objects and made objects into images. Collage is this century’s outstanding contribution to mystification — it holds the seeds of events fabricated for the purpose of being described in the mass media, and of political personages reshaped by professionals to capture votes through matching other people’s faces and temperaments. The decentralized composition of Cubist painting and the derivation of its forms from geometry and from random objects — for example, Picasso’s Absinthe Glass, Bottle Pipe, and Musical Instruments on a Piano — resulted in the “democratization” of data and asserted that the identity of things lies not in the things themselves but in their placement and function. Cubist paintings and collages could contain anything — matchbooks, menus, wine bottles, contents of the artist’s pocket — and this caused the everyday world to feel at home in art. Cubist disintegration of the object emphasizes that an apple in a painting may in actuality be the result of a hundred acts of looking and applying paint. In addition to the solution it offered to the problem of transporting objects from deep space to a flat surface, Cubism’s replacement of linear perspective by two-dimensionality provided a metaphor of the psychic condition of modern man. Twentieth-century philosophers talk of the “flattening out” of the individual, and aspects of Cubism have reappeared in literature — Joyce, Pound, Eliot, Marianne Moore make use of collage, parody, and verbal “faceting” — and in music and the theatre. In sum, there is a Cubist epoch, and it is impossible to grasp the full dimensions of present-day experience without the Cubist reformulation of the sensibility.

Cubism, as emblematic of the Modernist sensibility, communicates “surface” as three dimensional. A vase on a table is a vase enclosed within a surface. A guitar player is wrapped in a guitar player’s skin and clothing. A pair of naked bathers wear the look of naked bathers. Eliot alludes to this kind of opacity himself in a rather dense dialectic between poem and footnote. In the poem’s final section, as the thunder sounds, someone says:

I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison

“Cf.,” he adds in a footnote, “Inferno, XXXIII, 46.” In Henry F. Cary’s translation (Eliot didn’t need one), the lines are: “I / Heard, at its outlet underneath, lock’d up / The horrible tower.” Earlier, when Eliot professes his modest, passing knowledge of the tarot, he notes that “The Hanged Man,” is a “member of the traditional⁴ pack.” Given this familiarity — whatever he said, Eliot certainly knew his way around a tarot deck — it’s hard not to overlook the tower (torre) in Dante’s passage. The final section of The Waste Land depicts a dry thunderstorm. In the Rider-Waite deck, The Tower — symbol of hubris and shattered illusions, a great ambition erected in the wrong place — is struck by lightning, its occupants suspended in midair as they fall, halfway between the living and the dead.

Each in his tower, each in his prison. Here Eliot adds another note — a note to a note — to further complicate the turn of this key. He quotes the British idealist philosopher F. H. Bradley, whose Appearance and Reality conjures its own metaphor for subjectivity, for the isolated soul:

My external sensations are no less private to myself than are my thoughts or my feelings. In either case my experience falls within my own circle, a circle closed on the outside; and, with all its elements alike, every sphere is opaque to the others which surround in… In brief, regarded as an existence which appears in a soul, the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul.

Here, buried at the end of the poem, is a cliché so simple, so elemental, it’s hard to believe it could possibly conclude one of the most infamously difficult poems ever written: that each of us is opaque, wrapped in a façade, alone and unknowable. It’s Eliot’s version of Dorothy and her friends in Oz finding out they had what they wanted most all along. Yet in many ways this is the poem’s greatest gesture, to give what you’ve already been given. Shantih shantih shantih: “the Peace which passeth understanding.” That you will live and die is inconsequential, and it’s all there is to know. You don’t have to see it to feel it walking beside you every step of the way, but whether it haunts or comforts is up to you.

---

Thank you for reading. The title for this piece comes from the lolcats translation of The Waste Land, which serves as a kind of terminally online millennial SparkNotes, if you need it to.

1. Not to be confused, necessarily, with Romanticism

2. As often as they get lumped together, there is one devastatingly important difference between Joyce and Eliot: only one of them had a sense of humor.

3. This mystery foretells, I think, my favorite lines of the poem, the ones I quote most often, which channel all at once Shackleton’s expedition in Antarctica, the Road to Emmaus, and the inevitable that walks beside all living things:

Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one talking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
—But who is that on the other side of you?

4. As is “The Man with Three Staves,” an “authentic member” of the pack, who, Eliot says, “I associate, quite arbitrarily, with the Fisher King himself.” This is the figure at the end of the poem: “I sat upon the shore / Fishing, with the air plain behind me / Shall I at least set my lands in order?” Eliot is likely thinking of the Three of Wands in the Rider-Waite Tarot.