TS Eliot: Into the Waste Land, and The Four Quartets - BBC iPlayer (Reviewed by Richard Thomas)

These two programmes were dished up for our delectation by BBC 4 a month or so ago, complementing BBC 2’s "Return to T S Eliotland" (reviewed separately, below).  They will be available on BBC iPlayer for another eleven months.  The first is in “Talking Heads” format, while the second is a televisual version of the solo recitation of the whole of The Four Quartets which Ralph Fiennes has been performing in various theatres in recent months.  Both are well worth watching.

The main thrust of "Into The Waste Land" is that knowledge gained from the release in 2020 of Emily Hale’s letters from their 50 year embargo has made it clear that the poem is built around a strong current both of romantic longing and of the poet’s agony, brought about by his disastrous inability to bring the longing to fruition – which indeed, in the opinion of some of the talking heads, together form the poem’s main genesis.  It is not, as had been the view hitherto, an abstract threnody for the past, accentuated by the horrors of the first world war.  It is a love poem – or rather a failed love poem – magnified into that threnody, and not really abstract at all.

This had long been the hunch of the main talking head, the academic and biographer Lindall Gordon, who had surmised in one of her earlier books on Eliot (three of them) that the key to the poem’s angst was lost or failed love, presumably for Emily Hale, whom Gordon had identified as the “hyacinth girl”.  This supposition had been derided at the time by a number of eminent critics, but she had stuck to it, determined to live long enough (she is now in her eighties) to be able to prove it right as soon as the embargo was lifted.  And sure enough she was at the gates of the Princeton Library at that very moment, and the content of hundreds of the newly accessible letters soon vindicated that long-held hunch.  The poem was the result of an emotional breakdown.

Eliot had then many years later left a posthumous time-bomb, designed to coincide with the lifting of the embargo, in the form of a lengthy and emphatic denial of any serious connection, emotional or literary, with Emily Hale.  He had also ensured that all her letters to him had been burnt.  These two posthumous interventions had more or less confirmed the “guilt”, or desperate regret, that had underlain his composition of the poem.  For, after all, he had declared his love for Hale, immediately before leaving for England and Oxford, where he had then almost instantly met and married Vivienne (or Vivien- she used both versions) Haigh-Wood, a surprising and impetuous act that led inexorably into a miserable failed marriage, with Vivienne’s gradual descent into the mental illness that led, in 1938, to her commitment to an asylum, where she died in 1947.

But the programme is not only about the poem’s emergence from Eliot’s Hale-induced emotional breakdown.  It is a skilful and wide-ranging exegesis of the whole poem, exploring the origins and identities of the various incidents and characters, such as the drive in the car and the “echt Deutsch”, and demonstrating how much both Vivienne and Ezra Pound edited and improved the text.  The talking heads, who include biographers, academics, actors, poets, a composer and a drag model, are wise and instructive.  I only wish, however, that they could be identified more than once, as there are too many of them to remember throughout a fairly intense ninety  minute programme.

Simon Russell Beale reads the excerpts beautifully, and there are plenty of helpful illustrations.  It is a pity however that most of them are displayed as though under rippling water, presumably to render them as “memories” – an irritating and unnecessary affectation.

There is not much that needs saying about the Ralph Fiennes programme, entitled Four Quartets.  It is simply a brilliant tour de force.  Over eleven hundred lines, delivered from memory, perfectly.