The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (116 page)

The president of Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana, impressed by Pound’s learning and his trips to Europe, appointed him to the faculty. The literary associations of Crawfordsville consisted of the fact that Lew Wallace, author of
Ben Hur
, had lived there. And the Presbyterian elders were not prepared for Pound’s freewheeling tastes and shocking ways. He spiked his tea at college gatherings from his flask of rum, and actually smoked cigarettes. “For I am weird untamed,” he wrote “that eat of no man’s meat.” He had been warned that he would have to marry if he was to stay in Crawfordsville. But when he struck up an acquaintance with an English actress who performed as a male impersonator in the local theater, he was suspected of being “bisexual and given to unnatural lusts.” He felt “stranded in a most Godforsaken area of the middle west,” the sixth level of Dante’s hell.

Dismissed in disgrace, he had little chance for another American academic post, and sailed for Europe in 1908. In Venice he published a little volume of his poems at his own expense, then settled in London, where he joined the literary circle of William Butler Yeats. The group was dominated by a philosophical poet and critic, T. E. Hulme (1883–1917), who had much in common with Babbitt. Hulme became a philosopher of the Imagist school of poetry, hated Romantic optimism, and pleaded for a “hard dry” art and poetry. He opposed Bertrand Russell’s pacifism, and himself was killed in the War. Pound worked at odd journalistic assignments. As London correspondent for
Poetry
, founded and edited by Harriet Monroe (1860–1936), he sponsored a catholic assortment of the best writers of the age—Robert Frost, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and Ernest Hemingway.

Pound earned his title as “midwife of twentieth-century modernism,” for he helped bring to public life the rebels against the Romantics, who by then were the literary establishment. Wordsworth and his generation had expressed Revolutionary individualism, the movements for Independence and the Rights of Man. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven!” Theirs was the joy of the ebullient self, to be expressed in the language of common men. A century later, in the age of Eliot, the
cycles of nineteenth-century revolution had run their course. The latest “revolution,” on the eastern borders of Europe, had paradoxically sought salvation not in the individual self but in the mass. In four years of world war, as Ezra Pound observed in 1920:

How should the poet respond?

In that discomfited postwar world it was not so curious that someone as different as Pound should have been Eliot’s promoter and mentor. Both were American expatriates seeking the poet’s response to what they saw as a confused and dreary world. And Pound’s personal response was passionate. He was a political person, which explained his success in promoting the publication of authors he admired. But in politics he was a crank and a Utopian, a willing victim of panaceas. In London he had found employment with an iconoclastic socialist magazine,
The New Age
. It was bought by Major Douglas, a self-made economist with a prescription for all social evils. His “social credit” scheme was based on the notion that depressions could be avoided and social justice attained by the manipulation of the monetary system. This became an obsession for Pound, who, loving conspiratorial theories, made it (like almost any other notion that caught his fancy) a basis for his rabid anti-Semitism, which in turn provided the foundation of his theory of history. With the rise of Mussolini in Italy Pound became an enthusiastic Fascist and even came to the United States in 1939 to persuade the country not to go to war. Incidentally, Pound was an energetic and unscrupulous salesman for the vicious hoax “the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” even when he knew it was a forgery. “For God’s sake, read the Protocols,” he urged listeners in 1942.

In 1924 Pound left London for Paris, where he briefly joined Gertrude Stein’s circle. Then on to Rapallo, on the coast near Genoa, where he would live for the next twenty years. When war came, having failed to persuade Americans to support Mussolini by his book
Jefferson and/or Mussolini
(1935) and his trip back to the United States, he became a tireless Fascist propagandist. In hundreds of radio broadcasts he exploded diatribes against Jews, America, and Democracy. Arrested by American forces in 1945, he was confined in the prison for military criminals in Pisa, where he wrote more of his
Cantos
, which had begun in Homeric vein:

Returned to the United States to be tried for treason, he was pronounced “insane and mentally unfit for trial.” For the next twelve years (1946–58) he was confined in St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., for the criminally insane. There Pound held bizarre court, edited his poetry, wrote letters, received visitors, and became an icon for artistic freedom when, over loud objection, the Bollingen Prize was awarded him by the Library of Congress. In 1958 the charges against him were dropped, and he returned to Rapallo and Venice, where he died in 1972.

The disciple of the wild and belligerently political Pound was the withdrawn and respectable T. S. Eliot. While Pound was the public advocate of panaceas and of hate, Eliot was on a traditional search for personal salvation. Dante was his ideal poet. “The poetry of Dante,” Eliot wrote, “is the one universal school of style for the writing of poetry in any language. And the less we know of a poet before we read him, the better. For the poem is a thing in itself, and should be enjoyed even before it is understood.” Both Pound and Eliot were refugees from the self, but it was Pound oddly who would help Eliot find his refuge in poetry.

After leaving Merton College in 1915 Eliot discovered, somewhat to his surprise, that he would have to earn his own living. He had met and impulsively married the vivacious but mentally disturbed Vivien Haigh-Wood, of a wealthy and respectable English family, whom he had met at Oxford. Bertrand Russell, who was to have several affairs with her after her marriage, called her “light, a little vulgar, adventurous.” Her mental illness, never clearly described, was unknown to Eliot before their marriage. The disorder became so serious after 1933 that she and Eliot lived separately. She entered a mental hospital in 1938, where she died in 1947. When Eliot married her in 1915, he saw more cheerful prospects. He went to America alone in a futile effort to explain his marriage to his family, who thought it only proved that he would never amount to anything. Back in England he taught briefly in a private grammar school. When Vivien would not go to America, he tried to earn a living in London. First he gave a series of university extension lectures on literature, which listeners found so dull that his appointment was not renewed. Then in 1917, with the help of Vivien’s family, he secured a post in the Colonial and Foreign Department of Lloyd’s
Bank. They were told he knew the European languages, but in fact he knew only French and Dante’s Italian. The routine work in a formal environment suited his temperament and he stayed there for the next nine years.

The contrast between the temperaments of Pound and of Eliot was dramatized in Pound’s repeated efforts to “liberate” Eliot from his bank-clerical routine. But Eliot repeatedly refused to be liberated. He appears to have found a welcome security in the routine formality of his work, and he began writing poetry again. Now he seemed at ease in the observer’s role, which he might have lost if he were out on his own in the competitive world. In 1922 Pound led the movement to raise the Bel Esprit fund to provide a fellowship for Eliot to write his poetry without other employment. But the result of the movement and of Eliot’s reticence was embarrassing. The
Liverpool Daily Post
reported that after eight hundred pounds had been raised to free Eliot of his bank employment, he had taken the money with thanks and then said he would stay with the bank anyway. Eliot considered a libel suit against the newspaper, but was satisfied when they published his statement that he had had no intention of leaving the bank and that the fund had been raised without his consent. The episode unnerved him with fears that it might jeopardize his position at the bank, but his fears proved unfounded and he remained until 1925. Then he left for a five-year contract with the London publishing house Faber & Faber.

The poetry that established Eliot was written and published before he gave up his observer’s post at the bank. Significantly, his first modernist poem was published in the America whose culture he had fled. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” was published, at Pound’s urging, in
Poetry
magazine in Chicago in 1915.

Then in 1917, only four months after he entered the bank, his first volume of poems,
Prufrock and Other Observations
, appeared under the imprint of Harriet Weaver’s
Egoist
, which Pound had made a vehicle for Imagist poets. In this magazine she had just been publishing Joyce’s
Portrait of the Artist
in serial form. Pound had confidentially offered to publish this, Eliot’s first volume of poems, at his own expense if Harriet Weaver would let him
use her imprint. She agreed, and with the help of money from Dorothy Pound (not known to Eliot) five hundred copies were printed. Five years passed before these were all sold.

Some critics objected that Eliot’s work was not really poetry because the author had no notion of “the beautiful.” This was not surprising, for Eliot had spent the last five years behind a desk, in an urban routine not much different from Kafka’s in Prague about the same time. From this narrow perspective, how could poetic beauty bring order into “the vast panorama of futility which is contemporary history”? The months in 1921 when he was writing his most famous poem were especially dreary. His mother, Charlotte, whom he had not seen for six years, was coming to London. She had not met Vivien, whom the family blamed for Eliot’s decision not to return to the United States. And Vivien resented the affluent Charlotte’s refusal to support them in a more comfortable life. Now Eliot was painfully reminded of his estrangement from a family that had made much of tradition when, in June, Charlotte arrived with his father, Henry Ware, and sister Marian. England was suffering a disastrous drought. No rain fell for six months. Eliot himself was writing in the
Dial
of the new type of influenza, which left a dryness and a bitter taste in the mouth. It was a season like that which had inspired Rabelais’s dipsomania. Vivien was on the verge of a “breakdown.” Incidentally American authorities were harassing him to pay his income tax. When the family left in late August, Eliot’s doctor explained his feelings of anxiety and dread as a nervous disorder and told him to take a vacation. Lloyd’s gave him a leave of absence for his “nervous breakdown.”

While shaping
The Waste Land
in May 1921, Eliot was reading the later chapters of Joyce’s
Ulysses
. He wrote Joyce of his high admiration but added that he wished he had not read it. Later he applauded Joyce’s use of myth to bring order into a chaotic world, and acclaimed
Ulysses
as “the most important expression” of the age. Summing up this age was no easy matter. And when Virginia Woolf had lamented “We’re not as good as Keats,” Eliot retorted, “Yes we are.… We’re trying something harder.”

With the energetic aid of Pound (to whom
The Waste Land
was dedicated) and guided by the myths that his age had used to transmute religion into anthropology, Eliot set out to express in cryptic verse what Joyce had expressed in the cryptic prose of
Ulysses
. What meaning was there in the desiccation of his age? How to make an international anthem of emptiness? How to make 433 lines of poetry a classic expression of the modern self in quest of salvation?

Eliot’s friend and admirer Conrad Aiken said that
The Waste Land
succeeded “by virtue of its incoherence, not of its plan; by virtue of its ambiguities, not of its explanations.” Anyone coming to the poem fresh
today must be puzzled that it seemed to its first readers to have such a focused message.

Its five sections proceed from “The Burial of the Dead,” to “A Game of Chess,” “The Fire Sermon,” “Death by Water,” and “What the Thunder Said.” In what seems a contrived incoherence it begins with a lyrical passage (parodying Chaucer), “April is the cruellest month.” Occasional lyrical lines recur, interlarded with fragments of conversation and of quotations, allusions to obscure and well-known ancient classics, Sanskrit scriptures, ornithological treatises, and Antarctic expeditions. Search for structure seems futile in a poem that aimed to express incoherence, and which concluded in a phrase from the Upanishad:

The Waste Land
was published in October 1922 in the first issue of the
Criterion
, which Eliot was editing. He had failed to secure publication in the
Dial
when they refused to pay the £856 he demanded, but he allowed publication in their November 1922 issue with the understanding that he would receive their annual award of $2,000. An American edition in December of one thousand copies by Liveright quickly sold out, and the Woolfs published it at their Hogarth Press the next year. Eliot added his own notes to the published volumes at first only to avoid charges of plagiarism, then he enlarged the notes to seven pages to make the printed work long enough to be a book.