Books: He Do the Police In Different Voices

• Share

(2 of 2)

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.