Interesting: I've always felt the Guinness reading emphasised just how
chilling the 'central' voice of the poem is.

On 25 April 2010 22:01, Desmond Swords <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> The jump-cut in Wasteland is down to Pound, I imagine, who turned the
> lunacy Tom wrote during his nervous and the marital breakdown of his first
> marriage with Viv - into vintage wine.
>
> "I came to persuade myself that I was in love with Vivienne simply because
> I wanted to burn my boats and commit myself to staying in England. And she
> persuaded herself that she would save the poet by keeping him in England. To
> her, the marriage brought no happiness. To me, it brought the state of mind
> out of which came The Waste Land."
>
> Pound of course, fixing the competition by making it the first ever winner
> of Dial Magazines New Writing bounty of $2000, and once the rest of the
> guerdon was totted up, this one poem brought him £130 more than his annual
> wages at Lloyds £630 ($2,800).
>
> In todays money about $36,000. Not bad for one long poem; and summat the
> Foetry heads in the poetry police, would wet themselves with pure orgasmic
> joy over, if this blatant rigging was still the norm. Apoplectic with moral
> outrage, websites would be buring a hole in the spin-alley of English
> Letters, and hopefully I'd be chief advocate prosecuting the perps.
>
> ~
>
> A poster on Carol Rumen's regular poetry threads on the Daily Sport
> website, known only as 'pinkroom' (who, going on the evidence, i suspect is
> a 'known' poet writing incognito) - has a good a definition of Eliotic
> jump-cuts as anyone:
>
> "...the lyrical poet's voice is segueing in and out of all this other
> stuff, a play for sounds and voices... memories, bits and pieces of his
> reading, overheard conversation/slices of life, pub-talk, birdsong, music.
>
> The frequent allusions/liftings from various renaissance dramatists are
> perhaps a clue here as they tended to throw in everything but the kitchen
> sink... biblical/classical allusions/poetry/romance/slack street talk. In
> some ways Stearns is in some ways re-inventing that.
>
> I'm also wondering about the influence of the radio. This was the hot new
> tech of the day and the effect of tuning in to one channel then another must
> have had a profound influence upon the like of Ez, Tom... even Willy B. So
> interesting that these big poems of this early/mid 20s period are divided up
> into sections... almost like switching channels to a different
> voice/music...even language altogether."
>
> I benefitted hearing it read on youtube by Alec Guinness and the 25 minute
> piece came fully alive, in an orally hypnotic way one may not grasp and
> 'find perplexing when sight read for its meaning only': as Heaney did prior
> to hearing the actor Robert Speaight read Eliot's poetry aloud, when of a
> similar age to Eliot at the time of The Waste Land's composition.
>
> Listening to Guinness reading, I was also lucky enough to have benefited
> from the 'framed presentation of the poem with hyperlinked notes,
> definitions, translations, cross references, texts of works alluded to,
> commentary, and questions to the reader': created by Rickard A. Parker, and
> one which I think you will find should you visit, a scrupulous and
> thoroughly researched bit of slog that cuts out the bewilderment that comes
> with having to google them ourselves.
>
> http://world.std.com/~raparker/exploring/thewasteland/table/explore6.html
>
> ~
>
> Tom had rushed into marriage with Viv after just three months of meeting
> the Oxford Governess, in March 1915, whilst still a virgin and full time
> thinker; in his first post-Harvard scholarship year at Merton College Oxo.
> Though obsessed by sex when a virgin, after experiencing it, he seems to
> have found it too messy for his liking, and during the writing of this poem,
> had a fixation with the female as Harlot, I suspect. A surmation for which
> there is both compelling biographical and textual evidence in the poem
> itself. In line 131, when the two voices are asking what's inside each
> other's heads:
>
> 'What shall I do now? What shall I do?'
> 'I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street
> 'With my hair down, so.
>
> Coded reference to a prostitute, in Eliots time they walked with their hair
> down in the street.
>
> And the mockney voices at 148
>
> He's been in the army four years, he wants a good time,
> And if you don't give it him, there's others will, I said.
>
> ~
>
> Eliot had been awarded his bachelor's degree, in philosophy, history,
> modern languages and literature, in 1909, and went straight into a year long
> M.A in English literature, studying under 'Irving Babbitt, the selective
> humanist, and George Santayana, the Spanish anti-idealist philosopher and
> poet'.
>
> 1910-11 was spent in Paris, enrolled in the Sorbonne, where he wrote
> juvenelia under the influence of Symbolist and first of the free-verse
> poets, Jules Laforgue - whose suitably young death aged 28 in 1887, cast a
> spell over the young and aristocratically minded Edwardian fogies such as
> Eliot - equal to the shade of Jim Morrison lulling its magnetisim across the
> brow of Mister Bono when he was still a Finglas messer studiously committing
> his thoughts on Joy Division to a pre-grey Irish radio legend Dave Fanning,
> in the (RTE) Donybrook studios of late seventies Dublin.
>
> After Paris, Eliot signed on for philosophy doctorate at Harvard, studying
> occidental and oriental schema between 1911 and 1914, when he was awarded a
> scholarship which sent him to Oxford for the remaining two years of his
> thesis on the British philosopher F. H. Bradley.
>
> It was there our 26 and a half year old virgin met his future first wife.
> Eliot and Haigh-Wood seemed to be of equal social status, but she was
> thought 'common' and 'vulgar' by the arsitocrats Aldous Huxley and
> philospher Bertrand Russell, who Eliot had studied under at Harvard, and who
> it has been speculated - by scholar Carole Seymour-Jones, in her book
> Painted Shadow - was shagging Viv when they both stayed at his flat as
> recent newlyweds, in a relationship that lasted up to 1919, when Russell
> ditched Viv for the aristocratic actress, Colette O'Neil.
>
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/oct/14/features.review
>
> ~
>
> If Eliot was in an environment where his new bride was being squired by a
> 43 year old philosopher, teacher and man 16 years his senior on whom he
> relied for entre into the Bloomsbury scene: who had betrayed his role as
> erastes to Eliot as the eromenos - there is no definitive written proof of
> this by any of the three parties. There is however, plenty of literary
> gossip. Eliot stated the opinion, in relation to his wife's mental health
> (in a letter to Russell's former mistress) 'He has done evil', and the
> inveterate horder Russell also took the unusual step of destroying all
> letters between himself and Mrs Eliot, whilst Evelyn Waugh famously wrote:
>
> 'that Mrs T. S. Eliot's insanity sprang from her seduction and desertion by
> Bertrand Russell'.
>
> By the time Eliot came to write The Waste Land in 1919 his private life was
> a mess, and his father had just died. The pyschological drama going on
> within the mind of this deeply serious and scholarly man, can be likened to
> a digital television picture fragmenting into disjointed parts, and when he
> regained his sanity, he was nursing deep scars from the sexual and emotional
> betrayal of his first wife, which crystallized into a monastic, high
> anglican sensibiltiy that defined his mature phase.
>
> ~
>
> But beyond the biographical, I think it is clear that his poem is a luring
> of the Muse. We begin with dry rock and end with water, being carouselled
> round a string of scenes flitting across the screen of the page, and thought
> written in high intellectual fragmentation, the potential gibberish was
> salvaged by Pound, who the dedication by Eliot reads when trasnlated from
> the Greek - 'the better craftsmen'. One who engineered the splash to happen
> in the most important area of po-biz behind the scenes, where the rich
> people patronize the artists who say the right things which do not offend
> their sensitivities, and is why we have the current crop of ab ab ab cat-mat
> casuals in the mag mag ma of a Brit-Po bovver-nots, with as much poetic nous
> as my arse.
>



-- 
David Bircumshaw
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