“Literary Dowsing”: Valerie Eliot Edits The Waste Land

Summary

On the appearance in November 1971 of Valerie Eliot's facsimile edition of The Waste Land, the anonymous reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement (TLS)—the writer was in fact the academic critic Donald Davie—sought to open up some of the biographical implications suggested by the sensational first publication of such drafts as the early “Fresca” section of the poem. The critic, who dubbed the poet a “whining hypochondriac,” concluded:

[W]hat should we have done with a poem which explicitly aligned itself with the ancient tradition of Juvenal and Dryden, Pope and Swift, the poems written by men against women […] ? If this publication of the drafts presents us with it, well and good—let us come to terms, as best we can, with the fact that the most influential poem of our time was impelled by a hatred and fear […] of woman as a sexual partner.

Such robust and indeed disrespectful handling of the poet's buried life by the TLS critic alarmed the publishers Faber & Faber, for on December 17, 1971 the chairman, Peter du Sautoy, published a gallant response, which yet strikes me as mistaken in one specific claim: “The whole purpose [my emphasis] of Valerie Eliot's careful introduction to this book is to explain […] that his first marriage was a desperately unhappy one, on account of Vivien Eliot's physical, nervous and mental collapse, and that The Waste Land grew out of this misery.”

Given the evidence of Valerie Eliot's notably skillful editorial labors, which set out the contextual chronology of the poem, and which quoted so generously from Eliot's letters of the period, it hardly seems possible that anyone should have come to the conclusion that her sole (and far from straightforward) aim was to urge a thesis, let alone anything so flagrantly tendentious as Peter du Sautoy proclaimed. Mrs. Eliot was universally credited with offering simply the material evidence.

One way of putting the matter is this: Mrs. Eliot's “whole purpose” (to use Peter du Sautoy's phrase) was to demonstrate that the poet was a martyr to his miserable marriage. Another way of putting the same proposition is this: The Waste Land is one of the literary masterpieces of the century, and we are altogether grateful that Eliot wrote it, but it was mostly his wife's fault.