Saturday commute xli: Au revoir, Hotel Albemarle

Mr T.S. Eliot's first meagre volume of twenty-four poems was dropped into the waters of contemporary verse without stirring more than a few ripples. But when two or three years had passed, it was found to stain the whole sea.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, 

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

And the dry stone no sound of water. ..

1921 was not a good time to be Thomas Stearns Eliot. In 1921 he was 33 years old and it had become impossible for him to write in his own home, which had reduced his health to a shambles. Lloyds gave him 3 months' leave, and he went down to the sea, to the Hotel Albemarle.

He would move on to Lausanne, and would substantially complete the poem we have been reading this week. Cited above, in the periodical which ultimately publish-ed it, Edmund Wilson does not exaggerate the effect of his first work. Now there came a poetic shore without a shoreline.

Unreal City

Under the brown fog of a winter noon

Mr Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant

Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants

C.i.f. London: documents at sight,

Asked me in demotic French

To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel

Followed by a weekend at the Metropole. ..

I, too awaited the expected guest.

He, the young man carbuncular, arrives,

A small house agent's clerk, with one bold stare,

One of the low on whom assurance sits

As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.

.. Only

There is shadow under this red rock,

(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),

And I will show you something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you,

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

What is constant in this poem is a dearth of water; Wilson's comment is titled, The Poetry of Drouth. You and I know what the water is, and why there is a title set aside for it in Matter, here. The poem casts a light in it, we recognise. 

Now he says, the dust doesn't hold one's shadow, and for an Eliot this is considerable news. For the dar-ling of the Harvard establishment and a good bit of London, too, it's not the nicest thing one could observe: there is no water; the water is dust. As my embarcadero, wherever I go wading now, I recall the Albemarle with cognitive as-tonishment, and thanks.

Edmund Wilson

The Dial, 73

December, 1922

The Norton Critical Edition©

op. cit.

T. S. Eliot

The Waste Land

  I    The Burial of the Dead

        ll 19 - 24

  III The Fire Sermon

       ll 207 - 214

          230 - 234

 I    The Burial of the Dead

       ll 24 - 30

op. cit.

i         Beggars would ride

ii iii Balcon 6