Books: He Do the Police In Different Voices

The Waste Land of T. S. Eliot, if not this century’s greatest poem in English, is certainly its most famous. Long, difficult and often enigmatic, it is full of quotations. It flits into parodies of other men’s poems and prose, and is widely quoted, often unconsciously by some people who may think that the title, which has passed into the language, means a vacant lot. The poem is taught in English-lit classes, and could be called the Odyssey or the Divine Comedy of the pre-Ginsberg generation.

In ways too obscure or subtle to analyze, this great work, written in 1922, vibrated like a tuning fork to the pitch of high-strung post-World War I survivors. They were the generation who responded with masochistic enthusiasm to the question, “Who would have thought Death had undone so many?” and who liked to be told elsewhere that they were “hollow men, the stuffed men, headpiece filled with straw.”

Like a land mine under a cathedral, the original manuscript of The Waste Land has been hidden at the New York Public Library. Only a few people have known that it is there. Eliot himself believed it to be lost, and is thought to have hoped for oblivion for it. It was exploded last week with the publication of a biography of an avant-garde patron, New York Lawyer John Quinn. He owned the Eliot document, and his estate turned the material over to the library. It will take many sabbatical years of the Eliotian scholastic industry to measure the full meaning of the work.

The initial blast was the revelation that The Waste Land was originally titled He Do the Police in Different Voices. There is no clue to what Eliot meant by this unfortunate title. An off-the-cuff guess is that Eliot was alluding obscurely to cockney slang or to a vaudeville routine. Another speculation is that this was a working subtitle expressing Eliot’s preoccupation with authority: one of the main theological theorems of The Waste Land is that God, who utters words like datta (give) and shantih (the peace that passes all understanding), speaks neither sense nor English but, like men, in many voices and even in bad grammar.

The famous dedication of The Waste Land is “For Ezra Pound, il miglior fabbro,” which even nonscholars of Italian can figure out to mean “the better craftsman.” In this context, “craftsman” means “editor.” It is well known that Eliot’s great friend Poet Ezra Pound had been a severe editor who cajoled, bullied or advised Eliot to cut out half of what Pound described, with characteristically inaccurate flamboyance, “the longest poem in the English langwidge” (434 lines in the final version). A facsimile edition of Eliot’s first draft, riddled with Pound’s penciled comments, will be published in September 1969. Until that time, the draft, with other notes and the unpublished manuscript, will remain encapsulated: the New York Public Library has declined to allow scholars or journalists to do more than inspect (without taking notes) a few pages selected from its hoard.

Shored Against Ruin. Mrs. Valerie Eliot, the poet’s widow, was given photographic copies of all the documents by the library, and she gave Yale Scholar Donald Gallup exclusive access to them. In the 20 hours available to him, Gallup produced several pages of detailed notes for the Times Literary Supplement, plus four illustrations photographed from the text. Of 57 sheets in the original Waste Land, 42 were unused; it is impossible at this stage to assess how much Ole Ez (as Pound liked to sign himself to friends) cut out, and to what extent Eliot was his own critic. But it is clear that a unique collaboration was involved in the birth of a masterpiece, and the honorary midwife deserves all credit for so splendid an outcome of a long and difficult labor.

The curious can see from Gallup’s notes that in the much quoted line, “These fragments I have shored against my ruin,” the words “shored against” originally read “spelt into.” This was probably Eliot’s own emendation, but other alterations are clearly the work of the man who looked over the master’s shoulder. “Dogaral” (doggerel), noted Ezra on one passage, and Eliot humbly struck the offending words from his text. But Eliot sometimes balked. Ezra had condemned Eliot’s description of a nightingale’s “inviolable voice” as “too purty” (pretty), but Eliot seems to have thought that no adjective could be too “purty” for a nightingale, and the word “inviolable” stands.

Tum-Te-Tum. Nor does Pound appear to have accepted the liturgical cadence of Eliot when he spoke in his own poetic voice. The opening of the Game of Chess section (originally called In the Cage) begins:

The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,

Glowed on the marble . . .

This passage, which evokes both Shakespeare’s Cleopatra and the historic Queen Elizabeth (who were both barge owners), seemed to Pound as “too tum-te-tum at a stretch.” Eliot fortunately could not help writing poetic poetry. His verse, as it was written, tum-te-tums today in many a mind, and the Boston lady’s chair in that passage is still a “burnished throne.”

Pound wrote WONDERFUL in penciled capitals along the entire first page of A Game of Chess, and Pound was right. Elsewhere, his critical pruning seems to have worked well against the too lush proliferation of Eliot’s young genius. Whole passages, in fact, were stricken where Eliot bowed to Pound’s radical diagnosis.

Doodles. And so, between Eliot and Pound, what began as a mere esthetic experiment—the mixing of time and place, vulgar anecdote and ancient legend, ethics and pop songs, classical gods and modern nonheroes—became a great work. A kind of miracle happened: the ferule of the teacher became the poet’s magic wand.

The New York Public Library manuscripts of course will be a pedant’s prize. Task forces of scholars are probably even now forming up, all determined to ignore Eliot’s advice, promulgated over many critical, rigorous years in the Criterion, that a work of art must manifest its own significance. Ahead lie long years of scholastic second guesses, tracing the skill beneath the scroll and the doodles that underlie The Waste Land’s grand design.