“Damn per’apsez”. This slightly cryptic comment was written on one of the first drafts of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, arguably the greatest, most influential poem of the 20th century.
The annotation was by Eliot’s first great poetic mentor, the gifted, mad American poet Ezra Pound. Eliot had asked Pound to read the draft and make some helpful suggestions.
Eliot and Pound make for an unlikely dynamic duo. Eliot was formal, almost congenitally shy with some deep, but hidden eccentricities (when separated from his first wife, for example, he rented a flat in London where he often greeted guests while wearing green face powder and insisted that all his companions refer to him only as Captain). Pound was, as my aunt would have said, “too clever by half”, bombastic, self-confident and, in later life, a Fascist. (His disastrous views prompted my favourite American poet Delmore Schwartz to write to Pound declaring: “I want to resign as one of your most studious and faithful admirers”. I have often fantasised about writing to the editor of The Guardian in a similar manner.)
Pound took the young Eliot at his word. He waged war against any uncertainty in Eliot’s verse, twice damning the use of the word “perhaps” and working himself into such a lather over inappropriate use of the word “may” that he scribbled: “Make up yr mind, you Tiresias, if you know, know damn well or else you don’t”.
In Greek mythology, Tiresias was a blind prophet whose predictions were always right but were so gnomic that people often couldn’t understand them which, for a prophet, was a bit of a drawback.
Pound’s war against Eliot’s gnomic tendencies is captured in a Faber paperback facsimile edition of the transcript and poem. Even in this facsimile, you can sense Pound’s fury as he orders Eliot to make up his mind. You wince to contemplate Eliot’s reaction when he read the note: “Bad but can’t attack until I get the typescript.”
In the facsimile, you can also see the occasional interjection from Eliot’s tragic wife Vivien (she added the killer line: “What you get married for if you don’t want children?” to the poem’s mockney monologue). Her judicious counsel and Pound’s robust subbing helped transform The Waste Land from good to great.
As an editor, two things struck me about this process. First, that Pound was the greatest exponent of a vastly underrated editorial art – sub-editing or, to put it another way, the craft of taking a story and making the meaning clearer, more vivid and concise, partly by taking a metaphorical blue pencil to words like “may”, “perhaps” and “seems”.
Second, that compelling editorial – which The Waste Land certainly is – is not, as it is often portrayed, the work of some lone maverick genius but the fruit of intense collaboration where every opinion, angle, story, headline, caption can be debated and nothing is sacrosanct except your duty to the reader.
If you would like to remind yourself of the fruit of the Pound-Eliot labours go
here. I would particularly commend part IV Death By Water and the line “A current under sea picked his bones in whispers”. That’s one of the most evocative lines ever written by any poet anywhere – a line Pound had the good sense to leave alone.