The drafts

The earlier title

The typescripts of Parts I and II carry the heading “He Do the Police in Different Voices,” with “Part I” and “Part II” beneath it. The words are Betty Higden’s, in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (Book I, chapter 16). She is praising Sloppy, the foundling who lives with her and turns her mangle, for the way he reads the police news aloud from the paper, doing the voices: “You mightn’t think it, but Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in different voices.” The title page of the typescript reads “The Waste Land,” and Eliot’s note at the head of his notes says that the title, the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism were suggested by Jessie L. Weston’s book on the Grail legend, From Ritual to Romance. Dickens is not mentioned in the notes.

References Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, bk. I, ch. 16; Facsimile (1971), pp. 4 and 10.

The epigraph that was replaced

The title page of the typescript carries, under “The Waste Land,” a passage from the novella Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, ending with the last words of Kurtz, the trader dying up the river: “The horror! the horror!” Ezra Pound, who went through the typescript, wrote, on 24 January 1922, that he doubted Conrad was “weighty enough to stand the citation”; Eliot answered that it was “much the most appropriate I can find, and somewhat elucidative”; Pound then told him to do as he liked about Conrad. Eliot nevertheless replaced it with the sentence from Petronius’s Satyricon in which Trimalchio, the host of the dinner, says that he saw the Sibyl of Cumae hanging in a jar, and that when the boys asked her what she wanted she answered, “I want to die.” The Sibyl had been granted long life, but not youth; the story is told in Ovid, Metamorphoses XIV.

References Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ch. 3; Petronius, Satyricon 48; Ovid, Metamorphoses XIV 130–153; Facsimile (1971), title page of the typescript; Letters, vol. 1, Ezra Pound to Eliot, 24 January 1922, and Eliot’s reply; Pound, Letters, ed. Paige, nos. 181–183.

The cancelled opening: a night out in Boston

at line 1

In the typescript, Part I opens with fifty-four lines about a night out in Boston, told by one of a party of young men in loose, chatty verse: drinks at “Tom’s place”; a show; a call at Myrtle’s, where he is refused but given a bed, a bath and breakfast; a brush with a policeman on the way out, which a man he knows smooths over; and a walk home at sunrise. The lines are struck through in pencil. The facsimile edition of 1971, edited by Eliot’s widow Valerie Eliot, attributes the cancellation to Eliot, and the pencilled comments of Ezra Pound, who went through the typescript, begin only after the cancelled lines; whether Pound read them is not recorded. “April is the cruellest month” stood at the top of the typescript’s second page. Pound wrote little on the rest of Part I: he queried a few words and let the section stand.

References Facsimile (1971), the typescript of Part I; Edmund Wilson (1971); Ellmann (1971); Litz (1973).

“In the Cage”

at line 77

In the typescript Part II was headed “In the Cage”; it was renamed “A Game of Chess” before publication. Critics have connected the old title with Henry James’s story of that name (1898), about a telegraphist who reads other people’s messages, and with the Sibyl of the poem’s epigraph, who hangs in a jar; but that epigraph, from Petronius, came in only in 1922, after the title was written. No explanation of Eliot’s is recorded.

Ezra Pound went through the typescript. Against the opening lines he wrote “too tum-pum at a stretch”, and Eliot cut “swinging” from line 78, which is why that line is a foot short. In the dialogue that follows, the typescript had the man think that the two of them “met first” in rats’ alley; the phrase was cut. The typescript’s answer to “What is the wind doing?” was two lines about the wind carrying away the dead; the published text has “Nothing again nothing”. Pound also queried “closed carriage” as dated; it became “a closed car” (line 136).

Eliot’s wife Vivien read the section too. Against the opening she wrote that she did not see what he had in mind; beside the nervous dialogue, “WONDERFUL” and, up the margin, “Yes & wonderful wonderful”; at the end of the pub scene, “Splendid last lines”. Two lines of the pub scene are hers, pencilled in the margin: 153, “If you dont like it you can get on with it”, and 164, “What you get married for if you dont want children?”, which replaced a line of Eliot’s own. She asked for a line after 137, “The ivory men make company between us”, to be taken out, and it was; Eliot wrote it back in from memory in a fair copy he made in 1960 to be sold for the London Library.

References Facsimile (1971), pp. 10–11; Ricks and McCue, textual notes on lines 77–79, 78 and 120–122; Pound, Letters, ed. Paige, nos. 181–183; Miller (1977); Gish (1988); Thormählen (1978); Montgomery (1979); Cambridge Companion to The Waste Land (2015), ch. 7 (Brooker); Cox and Hinchliffe (1968).

The seventy lines about Fresca

at line 173

In the typescript “The Fire Sermon” opened with some seventy lines of heroic couplets on a fashionable woman, Fresca: her waking, her breakfast in bed, her visit to the “needful stool” with a novel of Richardson’s, her letter, her bath, her reading. Eliot said later that it was written in imitation of The Rape of the Lock by the poet Alexander Pope; critics also compare the poems of Jonathan Swift on what is found in a fine lady’s dressing room. Ezra Pound, who went through the typescript, struck it out. Eliot recalled in 1946 that Pound’s objection was that Pope had done this so well it could not be done better, and that one cannot parody Pope without writing better verse than Pope, “and you can’t”. The printed section begins with the river. On the dating of the drafts by the scholar Lawrence Rainey (2005), its opening lines, 173–182, were the last lines written for the poem, in Paris in January 1922.

References Facsimile (1971), introduction and the typescript of Part III; Ricks and McCue, textual history of The Waste Land, 5. The “Fresca couplets”; Eliot, “Ezra Pound,” Poetry (1946); Paris Review interview (1959); Rainey, Revisiting The Waste Land, ch. 1.

Pound and the typist

at line 215

In the typescript the scene ran in regular quatrains and was longer. The draft gave the clerk his age, a spotty face, greasy hair, table manners and boasts, and gave the typist a kimono and a Japanese print. Tiresias hedged: in the draft the clerk was “Perhaps a cheap house agent’s clerk”, and the lines around it set him down as one of the loiterers anyone might see in any public place at any hour. Ezra Pound, who went through the typescript, wrote that the verse was “not interesting enough as verse” for so much of it. Against the hedge he wrote “Perhaps be damned”, and beside the typist’s “one half-formed thought may pass” (printed at 251 as “allows one half-formed thought to pass”) he told Tiresias to make up his mind whether he knew or not. The clerk’s exit, a couplet in which he stopped at a corner to urinate and spit, was marked by Pound and dropped; the dots at 248 fall where it stood. A passage that stood before the scene, addressed to London (“London, the swarming life you kill and breed”), went too.

References Facsimile (1971), the typescript of Part III; Facsimile (1971), p. 47; Ricks and McCue, commentary on lines 222–230; Ricks and McCue, commentary on line 251.

The Thames-daughters in draft

at line 266

The river song, the Elizabeth and Leicester lines and the three daughters’ speeches are generally taken to be the lines Eliot drafted at Margate in November 1921, where, he told a friend, he had written “some fifty lines” sitting in a shelter on the front. They reached print with few marks from Ezra Pound, who went through the typescript, and the words he did write here, “OK” and “echt” (genuine), are approving. Eliot’s own revision shortened the first daughter’s speech. His note, which identifies three daughters who “speak in turn” from 292 to 306, was added, like all the notes, for the book edition of December 1922.

References Facsimile (1971), pp. 48–53; Letters, vol. 1, Eliot to Sydney Schiff, 4 November 1921; Rainey, Revisiting The Waste Land, ch. 1.

The voyage that was cut

at line 312

“Death by Water” ran to some ninety lines in the typescript, of which the published ten are the last. It opened with rhymed quatrains about a sailor on shore leave and went on, in blank verse, to a fishing voyage told by one of the crew. The schooner goes out past the Dry Salvages, the rocks off Cape Ann, to the fishing banks. On the way out the gear fails; at the banks the fish run well; one night on watch the narrator hears three women singing high up the mast; then a wall of ice stands dead ahead and the ship is lost. Eliot said later that the passage had been inspired by the canto of Dante’s Inferno in which Ulysses tells how he sailed beyond the limits of the known world and went down with his ship; critics hear Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses” in it as well. Ezra Pound, who cut the poem, wrote “Bad” on the manuscript, adding that he could not attack it until he had a typescript, and on the typescript he went through the voyage line by line and spared so little that in the end the whole of it went; the ten lines on Phlebas were left. Eliot asked, “Perhaps better omit Phlebas also???” Pound replied that he did advise keeping Phlebas, “in fact I more’n advise”: the pack of tarot cards in Part I introduces him, as the drowned Phoenician Sailor, and he “is needed ABSOlootly where he is. Must stay in.” Among the short poems Eliot thought of adding to the sequence was “Dirge”, a parody of Ariel’s song in The Tempest (“Full fathom five thy father lies”) in which the drowned man is Bleistein, the Jewish caricature of Eliot’s own poem “Burbank with a Baedeker” (1919), and Ariel’s sea-change becomes decay. Pound advised leaving the additions out, and Eliot agreed.

References Facsimile (1971), the typescript of Part IV, and p. 129; Pound, Letters, ed. Paige, nos. 181–183; Paris Review interview (1959); Eliot, The Dry Salvages (1941), headnote; Ellmann (1971); Edmund Wilson (1971); Perloff (1981); Shakespeare, The Tempest I.ii.

“OK from here on I think”

at line 322

At the head of the typescript of Part V Ezra Pound, who cut the poem, wrote “OK from here on I think,” and cut almost nothing; he had cut heavily in the earlier parts. Eliot wrote the section at Lausanne between late November 1921 and 2 January 1922, while under treatment by Dr Roger Vittoz, a Lausanne doctor who treated nervous disorders by exercises in concentration, for the breakdown in his health for which Lloyds Bank had given him three months’ leave. In an essay on Pascal in 1931 he wrote that in some forms of illness “long passages may be produced which require little or no retouch,” a sentence readers have applied to Part V, though Eliot did not. Several passages of the poem are older than 1921. Lines 322 to 330 draw on a fragment beginning “After the turning of the inspired days,” and lines 378 to 385 on another beginning “So through the evening, through the violet air,” both printed in the 1971 facsimile; the shadow of the red rock in Part I came from Eliot’s own earlier poem “The Death of Saint Narcissus” (1915), where the rock is grey, and Phlebas from his French poem “Dans le Restaurant” (1918).

References Facsimile (1971), the typescript of Part V, and pp. 108–109 and 112; Keane (2011); The Spectator, 1 January 1972; Gold (2000); Rainey, Revisiting The Waste Land; Eliot, “The Pensées of Pascal” (1931); Miller (1977); Ricks and McCue, textual history, notes on lines 322 and 377–378.

What happened to the papers

at line 434

In October 1922 Eliot gave the drafts, with the pencil marks of Ezra Pound, who had gone through the typescript, and of Eliot’s wife Vivien on them, to John Quinn, the New York lawyer and collector who had negotiated his American contracts; Quinn accepted them on condition that he could buy the notebook of Eliot’s early poems, for which he paid $140. After Quinn’s death in 1924 the papers passed to his sister and then to her daughter, Mary Conroy, and were thought lost. She found them in storage in the early 1950s and sold them to the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library in 1958; the library announced the acquisition in October 1968, nearly four years after Eliot’s death. The facsimile edition of 1971 by Valerie Eliot, the poet’s widow, printed every page. Eliot himself said in 1946 that the poem had left Pound’s hands “reduced to about half its size.”

References Menand (1997); Edmund Wilson (1971); Facsimile (1971), introduction; Eliot, “Ezra Pound,” Poetry (1946).