Reading T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is like sustaining a concussion: it’s going to hurt, you won’t always understand what’s going on, you may hallucinate or lose consciousness, and it’s best if you lie down for a bit. The poem is basically an extended exploration of man’s angst—except in this case, the man is T.S. Eliot, one of the greatest poets and most erudite men of the 20th century.

Should you come away from The Waste Land with an aching noggin, take heart: a prominent literary critic once said that the poem couldn’t be “read,” only “reread”—in other words, only on repeated readings does the poem start to make sense. Should that prove too daunting, at your next cocktail party why not distract your friends by passing along these nuggets about the origins and ideas behind The Waste Land.

1. Show off. Eliot had a top-notch education—he attended prestigious boarding schools, got his B.A. at Harvard, studied at Oxford and the Sorbonne, and would have gotten a Ph.D. from Harvard had he bothered to defend his thesis. He learned Latin, Greek, French, German, Sanskrit, and the ancient Indian language Pali; he studied French Symbolist poetry, Buddhist philosophy, Renaissance theater, and epiphenomenalism (whatever that is).

The problem? Eliot couldn’t resist flaunting all this knowledge. As a result, The Waste Land is a minefield of footnotes. Before you even get to the first line, you’ve got an allusion to Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, a quote in Greek, and another quote from Dante’s Purgatory in Italian. Later you find whole passages in German, French, Italian, and Sanskrit. The take-away message? Never play Trivial Pursuit with T.S. Eliot.

2. Nix the Dickens. Eliot’s close friend Ezra Pound is famous in literary circles for his extensive revisions of the manuscript of The Waste Land. One of his changes? To cross out the original title, “He do the Policemen in Different Voices.”

Huh?

It’s just Eliot slipping in another obscure allusion, this time to Charles Dickens’ last novel Our Mutual Friend. The quote comes from the character Mrs. Betty Higden, referring to the talents of an orphan named Sloppy:

‘I aint, you must know,’ said Betty, ‘much of a hand at reading writing-hand, though I can read my Bible and most print. And I do love a newspaper. You mightn’t think it, but Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in different voices.’

In other words, Sloppy changes his voice when he reads the newspaper, “doing different voices” for different characters. Eliot is here pointing to his own practice of writing different “voices” of a wide range of characters in The Waste Land. Clever—but a bit of stretch. Pound knew what he was doing.

3. The vivacious Viv. Most of the “characters” in The Waste Land are figments of Eliot’s imagination—except for one: his wife, Vivien. Eliot met Vivien Haigh-Wood in Cambridge in 1914 and married her three months later. Haigh-Wood was a socialite flapper working as a governess; Eliot was a 26-year-old over-educated self-confessed virgin. The couple quickly discovered they were sexually incompatible, so Haigh-Wood (known as Viv) consoled herself by having an affair with Eliot’s mentor, philosopher Bertrand Russell.

Eliot learned later that Viv’s family had attempted to forestall the marriage because of Viv’s history of mental instability. He struggled to endure Viv’s screaming outbursts, anorexia, constipation, neuralgia, and “catarrh of the intestines” (whatever that might be). Eliot describes her hysterical speech in The Waste Land:

‘What shall I do now? What shall I do?’
‘I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street
‘With my hair down, so. What shall we do tomorrow?
‘What shall we ever do?’

Not surprisingly, the relationship didn’t last. Eliot headed to the U.S. in 1928 on a lecture tour: while out of the country, he had his attorney send Viv a letter announcing their separation. On his return to England, he went into hiding to escape her. An increasingly unstable Viv started hanging around outside the doors of Faber & Faber where Eliot worked; the famous poet had to escape out the back door. After alienating friends and family and joining the British Union of Fascists, Viv’s brother Maurice had her committed to an insane asylum, where she died in 1947.

Feminist biographers have attempted to restore Viv’s reputation—certainly, anyone would find marriage with the fastidious Eliot difficult. (He found the very thought of menstruation repulsive and thought shaving in front of his wife was too intimate.) In any case, we can thank Viv for putting a great poet through great anguish—out of which came great poetry.

4. Don’t explain. Eliot was adamant in his refusal to help eager readers interpret his poems. Of The Waste Land, he said, “I wasn’t even bothering whether I understood what I was saying.”

5. The Groucho Connection. Remember that Saturday Night Live skit with Chris Farley where he would interview famous celebrities simply by describing parts they had played and quoting from their movies—to their great unease? Now substitute T.S. Eliot for Farley and Groucho Marx for the succession of celebrities.

Rather surprisingly, the Nobel Laureate adored Marx movies, and in 1964 Eliot achieved one of his life goals by having the great comedian and his wife to dinner. A somewhat intimidated Groucho boned up on Eliot’s poetry and reread King Lear just in case, but all Eliot wanted to do was quote Groucho’s old lines. Eliot refused to talk about his poetry, or Lear for that matter, and before long the Marxes were making their excuses and heading for the door.

See Also…

Can You Feel Lit? Macbeth

Elizabeth Lunday writes about art, architecture and literature for sources such as mental_floss and her blog, The Dilettante. Her first book, Secret Lives of the Artists: What Your Teachers Never Told You About Master Painters and Sculptors, will be released in Fall 2008 by Quirk Books. It contains the outrageous and uncensored profiles of the world’s greatest artists, complete with hundreds of little-known, politically incorrect, and downright bizarre facts—like who died of syphilis, who beat his wife, and who was convicted of murder. She’s also written about a wide range of other topics from archeology to wastewater management, and once you’ve written about wastewater management, you can write about anything.

As a play, Macbeth’s got it all: spooky witches, murderous noblemen, dying kings, persistent ghosts, and a portable forest. But there’s more to Shakespeare’s famous drama than all the surface theatrics. The story behind Macbeth is as fascinating as the play itself.

1. A Scottish play. When he wrote his drama around 1606, Shakespeare was capitalizing on a new fascination with Scotland as England welcomed its new king James I of England–aka James VI of Scotland. The Virgin Queen Elizabeth I died in 1603; she was succeeded by James, the son of Elizabeth’s second cousin Mary Queen of Scots. Insular Englishmen had a generally poor opinion of their northern neighbors–substitute “Scotsman” for “Redneck” in those “You Know You’re a Redneck” jokes and you get the idea. When James took the throne and brought with him a bevy of Scottish courtiers, the English needed to bone up on their Scottish history–and stop the jokes fast.

2. Ripped from the headlines.
Just like Law & Order, Shakespeare wasn’t above borrowing from current events. Except he had to do it very carefully. The heavily censored Elizabethan theater banned the portrayal of reigning monarchs. In 1604, Shakespeare’s troop, the King’s Men, had tried to get around this ban with a play called The Tragedy of Gowrie, which depicted the attempted assassination of King James by the Scottish nobleman the Earl of Gowrie in 1600. Gowrie had invited James to his castle and then tried to kill him, an action not only treasonous but also in violation of the rules of hospitality; it was later asserted Gowrie had engaged in witchcraft. But The Tragedy of Gowrie hit too close to home and was quickly banned by the court. The manuscript has been lost, and we don’t even know who wrote it. However, a year or so later, Shakesepeare created Macbeth. In the plot, a courtier involved in witchcraft invites a king to his castle and then kills him. Just like Law & Order gets out of legal trouble by changing the names and circumstances of its “ripped from the headlines” plots, Shakespeare avoided scandal by setting the events of his play in the distant past.

3. A little eye of newt. James I had some peculiar interests, including a bizarre obsession with witchcraft. He participated in the questioning of accused witches and wrote a learned treatise called Daemonologie in 1597 in which he asserted the true aim of witches is to overthrow the king of the realm. So the inclusion of the Three Witches in Macbeth is more than a literary device: it’s a way of capturing the attention of the most important member of Shakespeare’s audience, the king.

4. Flattery will get you everywhere. Another way to capture the king’s interest was to butter him up. James believed he was descended from the Scottish nobleman Banquo. Historical records potray Banquo as one of the murderous Macbeth’s chief allies, but Shakespeare makes him the most honorable of men who refuses to help Macbeth kill the king . Shakespeare also portrays the royal succession from Banquo as unbroken and whole, “power without end” down to the present day and James. James certainly found this gratifying—who doesn’t want to be told their ancestors were great guys?—and the English people liked hearing it, too. The waning years of Elizabeth’s rule, when the succession was up in the air, were enormously worrying. James brought with him two sons and a fertile wife, reassuring the English there would be no messy power struggle or civil war.

5. Equivocation with get you nowhere. Reassurance about the stability of James’ rule was particularly welcome in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot. A group of Catholics, then a repressed minority, planted gunpowder under the Houses of Parliament in London with the intention of setting it off on November 5, 1605 at the formal State Opening with the King, his family, and most of the nobility of the realm in attendance. The plot was discovered and the conspirators seized, among them a Jesuit priest named Henry Garnet. Garnet had in fact opposed the plot, but that didn’t stop authorities from torturing and then executing him.

What the English hated the most about Garnet was his promotion of the “doctrine of mental equivocation.” Equivocation was a way to deceive someone in order to protect yourself or others without telling an out-and-out lie, which was a mortal sin. Under this doctrine, if the police asked, “Have you taken Mass?” a Catholic might answer, “No,” and then add in his or her own mind, “not since last night.” If asked, “Are you a priest?” a Catholic priest could reply, “No,” and think to himself, “I’m not a priest of Apollo.”

English Protestants—lawyers in particular—found this outrageous. And so when Shakespeare wrote Macbeth, he included a dig at the king’s enemies. In a short comic bit, Macbeth’s porter imagines he is the gatekeeper in hell coming to greet new arrivals. “Here’s an equivocator,” he says of an imaginary sinner, “who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven.”

6. “The Scottish Play.” Macbeth is famously believed by actors to be “cursed.” Saying the name of the play and of its two title characters is taboo within the theater, resulting in the euphemism “the Scottish play.” Why would this particular play be cursed and not other Shakespearean dramas? Some say it’s because the Bard stole actual spells from a coven of witches. Others say a real dagger was substituted for a fake dagger in the first performance, resulting in a death. Whatever the origins of the curse, should you accidentally utter the fateful word you have a few options to redeem yourself: either utter Hamlet’s line “Angels and ministers of grace defend us,” or leave the room, spin around three times while swearing, spit over your left shoulder, and the knock on the door and wait for an answer before entering.

Elizabeth Lunday writes fun and informative articles about art, architecture, and literature for sources such as mental_floss and her blog, The Dilettante. Her first book, Secret Lives of the Artists: What Your Teachers Never Told You About Master Painters and Sculptors, will be released in Fall 2008 by Quirk Books. It contains the outrageous and uncensored profiles of the world’s greatest artists, complete with hundreds of little-known, politically incorrect, and downright bizarre facts—like who died of syphilis, who beat his wife, and who was convicted of murder. She’s also written about a wide range of other topics from archeology to wastewater management, and once you’ve written about wastewater management, you can write about anything.