Hypercivilized as he was, and dressed with bleak propriety for his day job at Lloyds Bank, Eliot on the brink of The Waste Land was nonetheless a shaman, a real one, and to manifest the dire spiritual condition of the tribe, he had to undergo-in his buttoned-up way-the regulation shamanic dismembering. He was in quietly raving and silently groaning fragments. That Eliot, 33-year-old poet/critic, acclaimed but still struggling, was in pieces. This-long-chewing Eliot, consolidated Eliot, powerfully and ponderously integrated Eliot, extending his personality over the young poet-was not the Eliot who wrote The Waste Land. When Eliot spoke, Hughes remembered later, “I had the impression of a slicing, advancing, undeflectible force of terrific mass.”įrom the July/August 2005 issue: Christopher Hitchens on The Waste Land
Eliot in the 1960s, he was deeply struck by the older man’s physical presence: the strength of his hands (“thick, long, massive fingers”) and the slowness and deliberateness with which he ate. And now imagine that the author of this poem-the poet himself-is a haunted-looking commuter whom you half-recognize from the subway platform. Now imagine this poem making news, going viral, becoming the poem-hailed over here, reviled over there-such that everybody is obliged to react to it, and every poem yet unwritten is already, inevitably, altered by it. Imagine that this poem-which also mysteriously contains all of recorded literature-is written in a form so splintered, so jumpy, but so eerily holistic that it resembles either a new branch of particle physics or a new religion: a new account, at any rate, of the relationships that underpin reality. Imagine, if you will, a poem that incorporates the death of Queen Elizabeth II, the blowing up of the Kerch Bridge, Grindr, ketamine, The Purge, Lana Del Rey, the next three COVID variants, and the feeling you get when you can’t remember your Hulu password. That’s why muddy old, sprouty old April, bustling around in her hedgerows, brings us down.
We will not be delivered from this, or not anytime soon. We are living in the demesne of the crippled king, the Fisher King, where everything sickens and nothing adds up, where the imagination is in shreds, where dark fantasies enthrall us, where men and women are estranged from themselves and one another, and where the cyclical itch of springtime-the spasm in the earth the sizzling bud even the gentle, germinal rain-only reminds us how very, very far we are from being reborn.
We’ve stopped dead and we’re going rotten.
View MoreĪpril is the cruellest month because we are stuck. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.
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