Tom and Vivien Eliot Do Narrative in Different Voices: Mixing Genres in The Waste Land's Pub

"He do the police in different voices," T.S. Eliot's original title for the poem that became The Waste Land, announces the poem's interest in voices and in the types of readerly performance made possible by narrative fiction.¹ Borrowed from Dickens's Our Mutual Friend (1865), the phrase is taken from the mouth of "old Betty Higden, a poor widow," who describes the reading practices of Sloppy, a foundling who reads Betty the newspaper out loud: "You mightn't think it, but Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in different voices" (198).² Eliot's allusive gesture thus describes a specific type of reader—a working-class reader who surprises expectations and who plays with the possibilities of story-telling. Focusing on the aborted title's reference to Dickens allows us to glimpse The Waste Land's multiple links to the cluster of associations surrounding nineteenth-century novels and nineteenth century popular reading practices; the allusion points to a realm bristling with story-telling, with the voices of women and of working-class figures, with popular culture, with narrative techniques, and with the desires and demands of a mass reading audience.

Historically, the poem's significant connections to the cultural province of the nineteenth-century novel and to narrative technique have been obscured by the ways in which the poem has been canonized as the emblematic modern lyric, sculpted by Eliot and Pound to reject and exclude just those elements suggested by the cancelled title. Critics like Lawrence Rainey and David Chinitz have importantly revised the tendency of critical history to cast The Waste Land as a neoclassical poem that must be read according to the dictates of "Tradition and the Individual Talent," as an "impersonal" poem un-tethered to popular culture and to Eliot's local and personal history.³ For example, Rainey argues that the poem is importantly connected to aesthetic models like the music hall and the popular genre of typist fiction. Building on the recent body of scholarship on a more "popular" version of Eliot, I argue that The Waste Land is crucially linked to the narrative modes, the female and working-class voices, and the readerly practices and desires associated by many modernist writers with nineteenth-century novelistic print culture. I read The Waste Land's initial invocation of Dickens's novel in conjunction with the poem's later pub scene in "A Game of Chess," in which the speaker's narrative performance echoes the many-voiced story-telling sensibilities of Sloppy, Dickens's working-class figure who transforms newspapers into polyvocal narratives.

This essay contends that The Waste Land's composition, content, pre-circulation, and development through drafts demonstrate Eliot's pervasive engagement with mixing genres, genders, classes, and cultures in the production of his poem.⁴ By revisiting the drafted version of the poem and by focusing on the pub sequence in particular, I recover the mostly obscured collaboration of Vivien Eliot in the making of the poem: I show that Vivien played a crucial role as co-author of the "A Game of Chess" pub sequence and that her revisions helped to develop the poem's interest in narrative performance and in the cluster of concerns often associated with the nineteenth century novel. My reading of The Waste Land repositions Vivien at the center of the poem's labor and interprets the pub sequence from "A Game of Chess"—the moment in the published poem that Vivien most heavily annotated and most effectively helped to shape—as a narrative performance crisscrossed by class, gender, and intensified readerly desires. Crucially, the pub sequence is the site of the poem's most substantial experimentation with narrative form and the moment when Vivien's voice as collaborator is most transformative. By focusing on the narrative moment in the pub and by recovering the role of Vivien's voice in shaping the poem, I argue that narrative elements and female voices are central to the making and meaning of The Waste Land...