The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
How Margate made T S Eliot go pop
In 1921, a weary bank clerk was sent to the seaside ‘to do nothing’. He tried – but accidentally wrote the poem of the century instead
It’s 1921, and in Margate the sunniest October on record is fading into a cool November. On a bench in a shelter down by the beach, a tired-looking man of 33 is trying very hard to do nothing. This does not come easily to him. He is, by temperament, a worker and a worrier, but he is under instructions from his doctor to do nothing.
His employer, Lloyds Bank, has given him three months’ paid leave for that very purpose.
So he does nothing, or almost nothing. He sketches passers-by. He practises scales on a mandolin. And he writes the lines at the heart of what will become the most influential poem of the next 100 years:
On Margate Sands.
I can connect
Nothing with nothing.
The broken fingernails of dirty hands.
My people humble people who expect
Nothing.
We think of The Waste Land as a poem of the metropolis, what TS Eliot calls the “unreal city” in all its guises: “Jerusalem Athens Alexandria/ Vienna London…” But it’s also a poem of a small seaside town in Kent. It’s like an end-of-the-pier show: a whirl of popular songs and music-hall crosstalk, theatre and jazz, where Madame Sosostris – with her bad cold and “wicked pack of cards” – will read the tarot for any passing tourist. Eliot saw “fine art [as] the refinement, not the antithesis, of popular art”. In his journalism, he attacked the “staleness” of the middle-class literary scene, but celebrated “the culture of the people” expressed in music-hall, and its rhythms run through his verse. Eliot threw himself into “pop” art, and The Waste Land was the result.
Eliot arrived at the Albemarle hotel in Margate that October with a few pages of fragments he’d been tinkering with for years. He left with a draft of a masterpiece that changed the shape of literature. He later revised it in the mountains of Lausanne, Switzerland, where he went the following month for psychiatric treatment, but “the Albemarle draft has a stronger autobiographical feeling”, according to the critic Lyndall Gordon. “It stresses a suffering individual rather than a culture.”
In 1921, Tom Stearns Eliot was unhappy. He had left a promising career at Harvard (he wrote a PhD thesis in philosophy), settling in England against his family’s wishes, after what they saw as a bad marriage to the troubled daughter of an English painter, Vivien HaighWood. He desperately wanted to convince his family “that I have not made a mess of my life, as they are inclined to believe”. But his industrialist father died before he had the chance to prove it. To Eliot’s distress, he had amended his will to ensure that – in the event of the poet’s death – none of his inherited money would go to Vivien.
A family visit in the summer of 1921 was a chance to repair relations. Eliot’s brother, his sister and his “frighteningly energetic” 77-year-old mother all crossed the
Atlantic to see him for the first time since 1915. But it was an exhausting disappointment; his mother, he realised, had not forgiven him.
“I really feel very shaky, and seem to have gone down rapidly since my family left,” Eliot wrote on October 3. By the time he visited Margate, he had experienced what Vivien called a “serious breakdown”. His doctor ordered him “not to exert [his] mind at all”.
The Waste Land manuscript is, in fact, mostly a typescript. “Composing on the typewriter, I find that I am sloughing off all my long sentences,” Eliot wrote; typing made his words “staccato”. But in the draft he gave his friend and editor Ezra Pound in the last weeks of 1921 – republished this month as The Waste Land Facsimile – the lines about “Margate sands” are handwritten. In the bundle of papers Eliot sent Pound, along with the pages of poetry, he also included his Margate hotel bill. The new edition reproduces these papers in colour for the first time, encouraging questions such as: why on earth did Pound insist on scribbling his notes in green crayon?
To read the Facsimile is to be transported back in time, to 1921 and Margate, where the fragments Eliot had gathered over many years took on new resonances. In his deletions and changes, we can hear the poet think. “A chain of reasoning whereof the thread was gone/ Gathered strange images through which we walked along.” Something isn’t right, he thinks. Should “we” be “I”? Should “along” be “alone”? He tries both versions.
Should “we” be “I”? Eliot’s marriage to Vivien is disintegrating. She has slept with his former university tutor, Bertrand Russell; he is still in love with a woman he left behind in America, Emily Hale.
In a letter, Eliot admits to disobeying his doctor: “I am supposed to be alone, but I could [not] bear the idea of starting this treatment quite alone in a strange place, and I have asked my wife to come with me.” That missing “not” is an odd slip. Perhaps he could bear it – he was alone in Margate for two weeks before Vivien arrived. Still, they seem to have had a pleasant time.
“Margate is rather queer, and we don’t dislike it,” Vivien wrote. Another line from the Facsimile: “It is terrible alone, it is sordid with one more.”
Let’s take a walk with Eliot. As he leaves the Albemarle hotel in Cliftonville, east of Margate proper, he can see a bandstand, and beyond that the sea. He could turn right, towards the high white cliffs of Botany Bay, just half an hour away on foot. (From the Facsimile: “He walked first between the sea and the high cliffs/ Where the wind made him aware of his legs passing each other/ And of his arms crossed over his breast.”)
But today he turns left, walking west along the promenade into town, where he’ll find a place to sit and work on a poem he is still planning to call “He Do the Police in Different Voices”. The title we know it by will come later. He could take the tram, but it’s only 10 minutes on foot, so let’s imagine he walks.
Perhaps a poster catches his eye; a local cinema will soon be screening a film called Wasted Lives. In the Facsimile, he writes of “the sweating rabble in the cinema”. (“Rabble” is wrong, he thinks, crosses it out, tries “thousands”, crosses that out, too.)
To his left is Dreamland, the letters still fresh on the hoarding of a grand amusement hall that opened the previous year in a former railway building facing the sea. As he walks, the sun beats down. In 1921, Margate has the lowest annual rainfall ever recorded anywhere in Britain. The Waste Land is a dry place to be. “Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand,” Eliot writes. “The sun beats,/ And the dead tree gives no shelter.” This pale poet is not one of nature’s sunbathers. Fortunately, just past Dreamland, a cool grey shadow falls across the benches of Nayland Rock shelter. (From the Facsimile: “Come under the shadow of this grey rock.”)
Wasted lives, dream land, rock shelter. What else might be running through Eliot’s mind as he sits playing his mandolin? Perhaps a song: after the lines rhyming “nothing” with “nothing”, the very next words are “la la”. Elsewhere, the “pleasant whining of a mandoline” works its way into the poem. Maybe he thinks of other writers – Pound, say, or
James Joyce. Eliot had met Joyce in Paris the year before and has recently read parts of a novel Joyce is writing. It will become that other defining masterpiece of modernism, Ulysses. (In Pound’s ironic words, “It is after all a grrrreat littttterary period.”)
In Ulysses, Leopold Bloom is also thinking of “Margate with mixed bathing and firstrate hydros and spas”. Bloom plans a tour for his wife, Molly, an opera singer: “What about English wateringplaces? Brighton, Margate. Piers by moonlight. Her voice floating out. Those lovely seaside girls.” Molly is more interested in lovely seaside boys. In her famous, unpunctuated reverie, she pictures them, “those fine young men I could see down in Margate strand bathing place from the side of the rock standing up in the sun naked like a God or something and then plunging into the sea with them why arent all men like that”.
The handwritten draft of Eliot’s Margate lines reads: “On Margate Sands/ There were many others.” A poet’s mind, Eliot wrote, “is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.”
The achievement of The Waste Land is in the new whole it creates from its “heap of broken images”. On Margate sands, Eliot connected nothing with nothing to make something, something that will be read for as long as there are readers.
The Waste Land is like an end-of-the-pier show, a whirl of jazz and Tarot readers