By David "Chet" Williamson Sneade
“You are the music while the music lasts.” – T.S. Eliot
“You are the music while the music lasts.” – T.S. Eliot
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| Painting by Tim Gannon |
The Waste Land,
written by T.S. Eliot has been called the single most influential poetic work
of the 20th century and is widely recognized as one of the first
great American poems to utilize the rhythms of jazz. It was first published
stateside by Scofield Thayer of Worcester
In the 1920s, Thayer published
The Dial, an art and literary
magazine which featured works by such cutting edge writers as Hart Crane, Ezra
Pound, and W.B. Yeats, and important artists like Gaston Lachaise, Charles
Demuth, and Odilon Redon.
The Waste Land was
the lead item in the now famous issue of November 1922. With its modern themes,
revolutionary techniques and sharp-eyed look at post-WWI realities, it was both
hailed and ridiculed and as Michael North notes, comparisons of “this new
poem to jazz became almost ritualistic.”
In his book, Inside the Great Divide: Literature and
Popular Culture in the Birth Year of the Modern, North writes: “In his
influential review, Edmund Wilson noted how the language of The Waste Land
turned ‘suddenly and shockingly into the jazz of the music halls.’ John McClure
called Eliot’s poem, ‘the agonizing outcry of a sensitive romanticist drowning
in a sea of jazz.’ And Burton Rascoe, writing in the New York Herald Tribune, called Eliot the “poet laureate and
elegist of the jazz age.”
April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
The
relationship of Thayer and Eliot went back to their days at Milton Academy Massachusetts Worcester December 12, 1889 , was no stranger to literary achievement. His uncle,
Ernest Thayer is the author of the classic poem, Casey at the Bat.
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| Thayer's passport |
Thomas Sterns Eliot was born
in St. Louis , Missouri September 26, 1888 . Originally from New England , the Eliot family left the area in order to establish their own Unitarian Church St. Louis
Thayer and Eliot crossed paths again at Harvard, where Tom (1909 and 1914) studied philosophy and Scofield (1913) majored in literature. In 1914 the aspiring young writers found themselves in
Watson was the magazine’s
president, while Thayer was its sole editor. The first issue under their
direction was published in January 1920 (January-June), and from the start it
was trumpeted as an art and literary magazine with serious import, featuring
literary works by Sherwood Anderson, Amy Lowell, and Carl Sandburg, as well as
art pieces by Eyre De Lanux, E.E. Cummings, and Oswald Herzog.
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| Young Eliot |
In their book, The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of
Modernist Magazines, editors Peter Brooker and Andrew Hacker noted that,
“The influence which the Dial quickly acquired as a cultural arbiter and
taste-maker allowed it to formally reconstitute modernism as a transatlantic
project.”
London
The Waste Land was first published in the October 1922 issue of The Criterion, a London-based publication. In December of the same year, it was published in book form. Its opening line, “April is the cruelest month,” is among the most recognizable in modern verse.
With its allusions to the Fisher King and The Holy Grail legends, The Waste Land utilizes a revolutionary, almost hallucinatory blend of voices, jumping between those of smarting satire and clear-eyed prophecy that shift in time and space. With its dark themes of disillusionment and despair, The Waste Land predicts the prevailing winds of change coming in 20th century.
The Waste Land was first published in the October 1922 issue of The Criterion, a London-based publication. In December of the same year, it was published in book form. Its opening line, “April is the cruelest month,” is among the most recognizable in modern verse.
With its allusions to the Fisher King and The Holy Grail legends, The Waste Land utilizes a revolutionary, almost hallucinatory blend of voices, jumping between those of smarting satire and clear-eyed prophecy that shift in time and space. With its dark themes of disillusionment and despair, The Waste Land predicts the prevailing winds of change coming in 20th century.
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| Eliot typing |
The poem’s jump-cutting style
is often associated with jazz. Ralph Ellison, the African-American writer whose
1952 novel Invisible Man won
the National Book Award, cited The
Waste Land for its seminal influence on his decision to become a
writer.
In an interview in the Paris Review, Ellison said: “In 1935, I
discovered Eliot’s The Waste Land, which moved and intrigued me but
defied my powers of analysis -- such as they were -- and I wondered why I had
never read anything of equal intensity and sensibility by an American Negro
writer.”
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At the time, Ellison was a
student at Tuskegee Tuskegee
“Now, the jazz musician, the
jazz soloist, is anything if not eclectic. He knows his rhythms; he knows the
tradition of his form, so to speak, and he can draw upon an endless pattern of
sounds which he combines on the spur of the moment into meaningful musical
experience, if he’s successful. I had a sense that all of these references of
Eliot’s, all of this snatching of phrases from the German, French, Sanskrit,
and so on, were attuned to that type of American cultural expressiveness which
one got in jazz and which one still gets in good jazz.”
In its ad copy for first
editions of The Waste Land, The
Manhattan Rare Book Company states: "Assembled out of dramatic vignettes
based on Eliot's London life, The
Waste Land's extraordinary intensity stems from a sudden fusing of
diverse materials into a rhythmic whole of great skill and daring.
“Though it would be forced
into the mold of an academic set piece on the order of Milton
“[Ezra] Pound, who helped
pare and sharpen the poem when Eliot stopped in Paris Lausanne
“To secure The Waste Land for The Dial, Thayer arranged in 1922
to award Eliot the magazine's annual prize of two thousand dollars and to
trumpet The Waste Land
It should be noted that the
1920s was commonly known as the Jazz Age, where people were almost expected to
“live fast, die young and leave a beautiful corpse.” While many of the writers
of the generation wrote about it, many women of the era lived it. Well
documented by F. Scott Fitzgerald in The
Great Gatsby, the women were shaking off the corsets of Victorian
restraint.
The wives of Fitzgerald
(Zelda), Eliot (Vivienne) and Thayer’s (Elaine) were all flappers, dancers who
celebrated life, music and excess in the Jazz Age.
London
Thayer suffered a worse fate.
His biographer Alyse Gregory described him as, “Slender of build, swift of
movement, always strikingly pale, with coal-black hair, black eyes veiled and
flashing, and lips that curled like those of Lord Byron, he seemed to many the
embodiment of the aesthete with over-refined tastes and sensibilities.”
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| e.e. cummings |
Thayer was also a troubled
soul. His marriage to Elaine Orr in 1916 ended a year later after her affair
with E.E. Cummings. By the mid-1920s, he began showing early signs of mental
illness and became a patient of Sigmund Freud. By 1926, he was
institutionalized for the rest of his life.
Operations of The Dial,
under the direction of Watson and editorship of writer/poet Marianne Moore,
continued until 1929. For years the Thayer collection was housed at the Worcester Art Museum New York City
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| Woman Carrying Fruit by Braque |
The collection includes works
by Alexander Archipenko, Pierre Bonnard, Constantin Brancusi, George Braque, Charles Burchfield, Marc Chagall, James Chapin, Charles Demuth, Arthur B. Davis, André Derain, Jacob Epstein, Duncan Grant, Herman Haller, Marsden Hartley, Rockwell Kent, Yosuko Kunyoshi, Gaston Lachaise, Marie Laurencin, Reinhold Lepsius, Wyndham
Lewis, Reinhold Lepsius, Jacques Lipchitz, Aristide Maillol, Manolo, Franz Marc, Jean Marchand, John Marin, Henry McBride, Henri Matisse, Kenneth Hayes Miller, Marianne Moore, Edvard Munch, Elie Nadelman, Georgia O'Keeffe, Pablo Picasso, Andé Denoyer
de Segonzac, Charles Sheeler, Paul Signac, Maurice de Vlaminck, Edouard Vuillard, and William Zorach.
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| Standing Woman by Lachaise |
Today, The Dial magazine is recognized by
literati around the world for its importance in documenting the Jazz Age.
Thayer’s papers are held at Yale University
Scofield Thayer died in May
of 1982 and is buried in Rural Cemetery 109 Grove Street , Worcester
Note: This is a work in progress. Comments, corrections, and
suggestions are always welcome at: walnutharmonicas@gmail.com. Also see: www.worcestersongs.blogspot.com Thank
you.
Special thanks to Tom Reney for his editorial commentary.
Special thanks to Tom Reney for his editorial commentary.
Look for the upcoming release of The Tortured
Life of Scofield Thayer by James Dempsey. Former Worcester Telegram & Gazette columnist and current instructor
at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Dempsey is also the author of The Court Poetry of Chaucer and Zakary’s Zombies. The new biography will be published
by University Press of Florida on February 18, 2014.
Resources
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