Tag: T.S. Eliot

April is the cruelest month…

…’tis indeed this year, 100 years after the publication of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land that famously so begins. And for some much more so than for others. Embedded below a wonderful recitation by Jeremy Irons and Eileen Atkins (for BBC Radio 4 presumably).

In this early Spring 2022, my thoughts continue to be preoccupied with the once, and now again, “bloodlands” at the heart of Europe, and hope, pray even, that they will not be so for evermore. Reading the opening verses of Eliot’s immortal work anew, I am not wrapped in the memories of the Countess Marie and the Austro-German provinces, but think this time instead of other fertile lands in the here and now, one that produces food for the world, that would in any normal Spring be awakening from the long, cold winter and now instead perhaps just abandoned, a muddied quagmire left by monster tanks and trucks and man.

I. The Burial of the Dead

  April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

  What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
                      Frisch weht der Wind
                      Der Heimat zu
                      Mein Irisch Kind,
                      Wo weilest du?
“You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
“They called me the hyacinth girl.”
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Oed’ und leer das Meer.

[...]

The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot (1922)

The entire poem can be found all over the place of course. For instance, at the Poetry Foundation linked above and this annotated version at Bartleby. Audio files of Eliot’s own reading are here. And, this essay by Pericles Lewis (adapted from his Cambridge Introduction to Modernism) is informative.

“Ulysses” circa. 1922

Transatlantic reception

“Bloomsday” just gone reminded me to look again at what I knew to be Virginia Woolf’s complicated relationship with Joyce’s work, and in doing so an interest was sparked in general to the reaction to Ulysses on both sides of the Atlantic at the time. An encouraging gesture, if nothing else, towards sometime diving in and finally reading this classic of modernism myself!

Famously, with the exception of parts serialized in The Little Review between 1918 and 1920 (for instance, here is a link to Episode XI), Ulysses became the subject of scandal and extended obscenity trials, and was in fact banned in the United States and the UK until 1934 and 1936 respectively. Copies published and printed by Shakespeare & Co. in Paris did circulate, could be got to, and especially was so amongst the intelligentsia of the time, and consequently was reviewed by on both sides of the Atlantic.

And, that included by T.S. Eliot, with whom Woolf sparred with on the subject, and his November, 1923, review for The Dial can be read here that the British Library. Formally written and glowing in its praise, it is written as a refutation of an earlier review by Richard Aldington (English Review, 1921) – which I can not easily find, but does seem in tandem with the Eliot response a constant in the academic realm of Ulysses scholarship, and to that end this short article in the James Joyce Quaterly (Spring, 1973) that gives evidence that Aldington had in fact encouraged, or even initiated, a response from Eliot. (On another matter, I do know that this was all at a time when Aldington was, not only helping Eliot professionally, but also one of the initiators of a fund to help Eliot financially, a matter in which Woolf was also involved.)

This is a difficult to read facsimile, but unfortunately the best I can come up with, of the review by Gilbert Seldes that Leonard Woolf encouraged Virginia Woolf to read (upon which she decided she should temporarily stifle her verdict and take another look!). As I say, visually speaking, not an easy read, but it is to my mind at least a better read than Eliot’s. (May I say, Eliot may have few peers in twentieth century poetry, but his essay style is very highbrow to the point of pedanticism.)

And then there is this piece by the Irish critic, Mary Colum (who I don’t know, but do now!) in The Freeman on 19 July 1922. Perhaps lacking impartiality, due to an abiding friendship, but an excellent read just the same.