Modern Mind

about capitalism as he was, but as the 1920s wore on and reflection about World War I matured, an unease persisted. What characterised this unease, however, was that it concerned more than capitalism, extending to Western civdisation as a whole, in some senses an equivalent of Oswald Spengler’s thesis that there was decay and ruin everywhere in the West. Without question the man who caught this mood best was both a banker – the archsymbol of capitalism – and a poet, the licensed saboteur.
    T. S. Eliot was born in 1888, into a very religious Puritan family. He studied at Harvard, took a year off to study poetry in Paris, then returned to Harvard as a member of the faculty, teaching philosophy. Always interested in Indian philosophy and the links between philosophy and religion, he was infuriated when Harvard tried to separate the one from the other as different disciplines. In 1914 he transferred to Oxford, where he hoped to continue his philosophical studies. Shortly after, war broke out. In Europe, Eliot met two people who had an immense effect on him: Ezra Pound and Vivien Haigh-Wood. At the time they met, Pound was a much more worldly figure than Eliot, a good teacher and at that time a better poet. Vivien Haigh-Wood became Eliot’s first wife. Initially happy, the marriage had turned into a disaster by the early 1920s: Vivien descended steadily into madness, and Eliot found the circumstances so trying that he himself sought psychiatric treatment in Switzerland. 8
    The puritanical world Eliot grew up in had been fiercely rational. In such a world science had been dominant in that it offered the promise of relief from injustice. Beatrice Webb had shared Eliot’s early hopes when, in 1870, she said, ‘It was by science, and by science alone, that all human misery would be ultimately swept away.’ 9 And yet by 1918 the world insofar as Eliot was concerned was in ruins. For him, as for others, science had helped produce a war in which the weapons were more terrible than ever, in which the vast nineteenth-century cities were characterised as much by squalor as by the beauty the impressionists painted, where in fact the grinding narratives of Zola told a grimmer truth. Then there was the new physics that had helped remove more fundamental layers of certainty; there was Darwin undermining religion, and Freud sabotaging reason itself. A consolidated edition of Sir James Frazer’s
The Golden Bough
was also published in 1922, the same year as
The Waste Land,
and this too hit hard at Eliot’s world. It showed that the religions of so-called savages around the world were no less developed, complex, or sophisticated than Christianity. At a stroke the simple social Darwinian idea that Eliot’s world was the current endpoint in the long evolutionary struggle, the ‘highest’ stage of man’s development, was removed. Also subverted was the idea that there was anything special about Christianity itself. Harvard had been right after all to divorce philosophy and religion. In Max Weber’s term, the West had entered a phase of
Entzauberung,
‘unmagicking’ or disenchantment. At a material, intellectual, and spiritual level – in all senses – Eliot’s world was laid waste. 10
    Eliot’s response was a series of verses originally called
He Do the Police in Different Voices,
taken from Charles Dickens’s
Our Mutual Friend.
Eliot was atthe time working in the colonial and foreign branch of Lloyds Bank, ‘fascinated by the science of money’ and helping with the prewar debt position between Lloyds and Germany. He got up at five every morning to write before going into the bank, a routine so exhausting that in the autumn of 1921 he took a prolonged leave. 11 Pound’s poem
Hugh Selwyn Mauberly,
published the year before, had a not dissimilar theme to
The Waste Land.
It explored the sterility, intellectual, artistic, and sexual, of the old world afflicted by war. In
Mauberly,
1920, Pound described Britain as ‘an old bitch, gone in the teeth.’ 12 But
Mauberly
did not have either the vividly savage images of
He Do the Police,
nor its shockingly original form, and Pound, to his credit, immediately recognised this. We now know that he worked hard on Eliot’s verses, pulling them into shape, making them coherent, and giving them the tide
The Waste Land
(one of the criteria he used was whether the lines read well out loud). 13 Eliot dedicated the work to Pound, as
il miglior fabbro,
‘the better maker.’ 14 His