A century ago, a man with a double life published one of the most celebrated, anthologised and dissected poems in English literature. TS Eliot spent six days a week at the offices of Lloyds bank and crammed the business of poetry and literary criticism into the evenings and Sundays. This allowed him to write The Waste Land, a densely allusive work that drew on Ovid, Dante, Shakespeare, Jacobean tragedy, tarot and the Upanishads to create a dazzling portrait of both the ruins of postwar Europe and the inner alienation of modernity. But it was not, as Matthew Hollis’s captivatingly exhaustive “biography of a poem” demonstrates, a work conceived or executed in isolation; and chief among Eliot’s enablers were his wife, Vivien, and his fellow poet and indefatigable literary fixer, Ezra Pound, who looms almost as large in the book as does Eliot himself.
One of the numerous illuminating anecdotes of their entwined lives sees TS Eliot deliver a parcel to James Joyce in Paris at their first ever meeting. Entrusted with the gift by Pound but forbidden from knowing its contents, Eliot, alongside his fellow traveller Wyndham Lewis, ceremoniously presented the package as the trio assembled at a Left Bank hotel and waited as Joyce struggled with its strings until, for want of a knife, a pair of nail scissors was found. Within, a clearly second-hand pair of brown shoes, prompted by Pound’s anxiety that Joyce, whom he liked and admired, was short of funds and in need of sturdy footwear. “‘Oh!’ said Joyce faintly, and sat down.” That night the Château Latour flowed, and subsequently a humiliated Joyce settled every bill.
It is a typical and strangely sad instance of where Pound’s scattergun energy would lead – as his own writing faltered, and was increasingly met with indifference or outright derision, his gargantuan efforts on others’ behalf remained undiluted, even when misguided. By the end of Hollis’s narrative, Joyce has published Ulysses, Eliot The Waste Land, and Pound has quit England, well on his way to an exile that would include his arrest by Allied forces for broadcasting from fascist Italy and incarceration in a hospital for the criminally insane. Towards the end of Pound’s life, Hollis records, he told his daughter: “I should have listened to the Possum”, his nickname for Eliot.
It is because the Possum listened to Pound that The Waste Land is as it is; their collaboration, Hollis argues, didn’t merely make it better – it allowed it to become a poem rather than a collection of fragments: “They had found a way for the poem to exist within them both at the same moment, possessed by neither but possessing of both.” As Eliot, on leave from the bank suffering nervous exhaustion, progressed from the Kent seaside to Switzerland, where he would consult a doctor recommended by Lady Ottoline Morrell, he wrestled with every element of the poem, from metre, word and line to section order and titles. At every point he sent drafts to Pound, whose interventions – minutely detailed, exacting, vivid – radically altered both the words on the page and the mindset with which Eliot approached it.
There is much else beside close textual reading in this impressive examination of artistic creation. Hollis is expert at blending biographical detail with literary criticism. He charts Eliot’s peculiar upbringing in St Louis, Missouri, his conflicted relationship with his mother and the horror that was his marriage to Vivien Haigh-Wood, who lived almost the last decade of her life in a psychiatric hospital. He reports the antisemitism that disfigured Eliot’s and Pound’s work, without minimising or mitigating it, as they did, and he is alive to the egotism that also resulted in professional missteps and personal cruelties. It’s a testament to his own talent at dissecting his subject matter and infusing it with imaginative empathy that the reader comes away from his “biography” ready to look at The Waste Land with fresh eyes.
• The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem by Matthew Hollis is published by Faber (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
