On the third, the verso of the ending of “A Game of Chess,” Vivien has written, “Make any of these alterations-or none if you prefer. First class trouble review skin#This gala volume is the first to reproduce manuscripts and typescripts in color and boasts of various “additional materials,” namely those bills and the versos of three leaves: on one of these Eliot has jotted down a couple of cosmetic skin creams that he has been instructed to purchase for his first wife, Vivien, at a pharmacy on the Champs-Élysées, and on another a compressed account of the plot of The Duchess of Malfi. First class trouble review archive#The Albemarle receipts were not included by Valerie Eliot in her 1971 edition of the drafts of The Waste Land but have been added to this centenary edition, which seems aimed at the Eliot aficionado ready to pore over every scrap surviving in the archive and eager to discover new angles on a poem more exhaustively interpreted than any in the language-or rather languages, for it is the most polyglot of poems. While the male characters seem caught up in a quest for spiritual purification, water, for the women, is for comfort or hygiene. But satire or ribaldry pervades the ablutions carried out by the poem’s women:Įliot’s note to these lines refers to an Australian “ballad” that was, as his most recent editors, Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue, point out, popular with Australian soldiers at Gallipoli in a bawdier form with which Eliot was in all likelihood familiar: Her tresses fanned by little flutt’ring Loves ĭisguise the good old female stench./ hearty female stench.Īn aquatic metaphor is just as scathingly applied to her taste in literature: “Fresca was baptised in a soapy sea/Of Symonds-Walter Pater-Vernon Lee.” For the male characters water can be transformative (“Those are pearls that were his eyes”) or tragic (“ Oed’ und leer das Meer”) or eschatological (“Then a damp gust/Bringing rain”) or elegiac (as in “Death by Water”) or biblical (“By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept”) or mythical (“I sat upon the shore/Fishing, with the arid plain behind me”-a reference to the legend of the Fisher King) or epic (as in the excised account of a sea voyage beyond “the farthest northern islands”) or invested with elemental yearning (“If there were water/And no rock”) or redemptive (“This music crept by me upon the waters”). This ended, to the steaming bath she moves, Like most of the symbols deployed in The Waste Land, water ends up accruing meanings that are quite different for its male and female characters: among the rituals that the husband in “A Game of Chess” thinks might soothe the “nerves” of his frantic wife is “The hot water at ten,” while the drafts for this section depict in Augustan couplets the socialite Fresca performing her morning toilette: Eliot scholars piecing together the creation of the most influential poem of the twentieth century in the reading room of the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, which acquired this material in 1958, were therefore able to ascertain that Eliot took just two baths between October 22 and 28, four the following week, and seven the week after that, including two on November 5. While there, he had composed sections of what became part 3 of The Waste Land, “The Fire Sermon,” in which an oblique reference is made to this seaside town: “On Margate Sands./I can connect/Nothing with nothing.” Though a “First Class Family Hotel,” as the heading on its bills declares, the Albemarle charged extra for baths, which cost a shilling. Eliot assembled and dispatched to the New York lawyer and bibliophile John Quinn a packet containing drafts of The Waste Land as well as a notebook of early poems tentatively entitled Inventions of the March Hare and a selection of loose-leaf manuscripts of individual poems, he included in the package (surely inadvertently) the receipts for the three weeks he’d spent in the Albemarle Hotel, Cliftonville, Margate, in October and November of the previous year.
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