120 MULTIPLE AUTHORSHIP AND THE MYTH OF SOLITARY GENIUS be rejected, as might emendations or contributions by other hands, because they are clearly constitutive of the very fabric of the text. Yet failing to acknowledge these debts, Coleridge fails to free his work from them, so to speak—fails to author them. Thus the plagiarized texts have no author, or, if they have one, the author is not Coleridge. This being so, the plagiarisms will necessarily continue to be a problem for any critic attempting to evaluate or interpret the prose in which they occur. 6 Pound's Waste Land One of the more tantalizing of the unsolvable questions in literary history is the precise nature of the collaboration between Wordsworth and Coleridge—the actual processes of their interaction, the proportionate shares of responsibility—in the celebrated work of the late 1790s that so radically affected the subsequent course of English poetry. The two men met in 1795, were neighbors and constant companions in Somersetshire in 1797 and 1798, and traveled together (in Germany and Scotland) and saw each other (in the Lake District) frequently thereafter. We have an enormous accumulation of contemporary and retrospective biographical detail in letters, journals, notebooks, and records of conversations. Some of that material would seem to speak to their collaboration—Wordsworth's urgent requests for Coleridge's help with The Recluse, for example, and a great many statements by both men concerning the composition of The Ancient Mariner. In fact, however, we have no solid documentary evidence for any aspect of their practical working relationship (in the examples given, Wordsworth never received Coleridge's ideas for The Recluse— Coleridge says that he sent them from Malta but that his letter was destroyed by Gibraltar authorities when the English acquaintance to whom he had consigned it died of plague1—and the details for The Ancient Mariner, which in any case are inconsistent with one another, are sketchy). As a consequence, even the most assured critical statement on the subject is only a hypothesis, and the opinions vary widely for many different reasons, not excluding the individual critic's imaginative identification with one or the other of the principals and the consequent projection of the critic's own personality into the interpretation. At one extreme of generalization, there is H. W. Garrod's frequently quoted remark that "Coleridge may fairly be thought of as the guardian angel of Wordsworth's poetical genius. Perhaps, indeed, Coleridge's greatest work is Wordsworth—and, like all his other 121 122 MULTIPLE AUTHORSHIP AND THE MYTH OF SOLITARY GENIUS Pound's Waste Land 123 work, Coleridge left it unfinished." As an example of the other extreme, there is Norman Fruman's depiction of Coleridge's almost pathological dependence on the older poet: "whereas Wordsworth was perfectly capable of writing superbly in complete isolation, Coleridge seems scarcely to have been able to write independently at all, after separating from Wordsworth." Squarely in the middle are the descriptions by Thomas McFarland and Paul Magnuson, already mentioned in the introductory section of Chapter 4, of the Coleridge-Wordsworth intellectual relationship as a symbiosis or lyrical dialogue.2 Nobody knows for sure what really went on. It ought to be of more than passing interest, in this connection, to consider a similarly epoch-making literary collaboration between two important writers 120 years later—that of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot in the creation of The Waste Land. In this case we do have documentary evidence—Eliot's manuscripts with Pound's alterations and marginal criticisms, which have been in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library since 1958 and were made widely available nearly two decades ago in a facsimile edition by Eliot's widow3—and we can thus strengthen our speculations with some detailed factual information. Both individually and as a pair, Pound and Eliot were very different persons from what we know of Wordsworth and Coleridge, to be sure. But still it is possible that our better-evidenced knowledge of the later relationship can throw light on certain aspects of the earlier. In any case, The Waste Land stands as a notable instance of multiple authorship of a major poem that is constantly attributed to one author alone. 1 The abundance of superficial and circumstantial similarities between Eliot and Coleridge is quite striking. They were born well outside the cultural centers in which they eventually became prominent. Each was the youngest child in a large family of middle-aged parents and dominant siblings. They were precociously intelligent, dreamy and bookish at school, developing strong philosophical and metaphysical bents that entered into practically all their intellectual activities, whatever the ostensible subject at hand. As young men they tried supporting themselves on income from periodical essays, book reviews, and public lectures; and both, beset by serious financial problems, were to an extent rescued by patrons. They made disastrous marriages and agonizingly separated from their wives a decade or more afterward. They suffered various gruesome illnesses and physical afflictions all their lives. They drank too much. To add a few of the more bizarre coincidences (coincidences merely): both matriculated at "Cambridge" (Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in Eliot's case; Cambridge University in Coleridge's); both at one time were sages in Highgate (Eliot taught in the junior school there); both had friends named Mary Hutchinson; both were afraid of cows! As psychological entities, Eliot and Coleridge were prone to instability, lassitude, anxiety, and depression. There is continuous evidence of a marked lack of self-confidence in each case; they seem to have been constantly dependent on external support and esteem. They were unusually adept at imitation and assimilation, frequently turning to other writers' works as a necessary stimulus to their own (and both, in the process, at some time or other incurring charges of plagiarism). In both men's histories there is a lengthy record of books, lectures, collections, and other projects that were planned and announced but never carried out. There are elements of the trickster in both characters; they were inventors of comic pseudonyms (compare the rhythm and appearance of Eliot's "Charles Augustus Cony-beare" with Coleridge's "Silas Tomkyn Comberbache"). As to their careers and general achievements, Eliot and Coleridge are important to us today for a small canon of poetic masterpieces and for a larger body of influential critical writings that made them, while they were alive, the leading theorists of their time. Their single best-known poems—The Waste Land and The Ancient Mariner—share some principal themes and symbols: sickness of soul, emotional barrenness, spiritual death, inability to connect, the terror of isolation, the arrival of life-giving rain, with only partial recovery at the end; as Florence Marsh writes in the first paragraph of an extended comparison of the two works, "both are essentially religious poems concerned with salvation. In both, the protagonist needs to recover from a living death, from spiritual dryness."4 In their prose, Eliot and Coleridge wrote memorably (if not always coherently) about Shakespeare, the history of literature, the functions of poetry and criticism, and organic unity and its converse, the dissociation of sensibility. Among many other activities, they both contributed plays to the London theater. Of all the major writers of the nineteenth century, Coleridge is the one with whom Eliot should have most identified and sympathized, and there is plentiful evidence that he did make such an identification. The following, for example, from his paragraph-long 124 MULTIPLE AUTHORSHIP AND THE MYTH OF SOLITARY GENIUS Pound's Waste Land 125 "potted biography" of Coleridge written in the 1920s (the decade of The Waste Land) for a National Portrait Gallery postcard is em-pathically both censorious and admiring: "His life was ill-regulated; weak, slothful, a voracious reader, he contracted an unhappy marriage and much later the habit of taking laudanum. . . . The greatest English literary critic, he was also the greatest intellectual force of his time."5 Something of the same sort of self-reflexivity pervades Eliot's December 1932 Norton lecture on Wordsworth and Coleridge: Coleridge was one of those unhappy persons ... of whom one might say, that if they had not been poets, they might have made something of their Jives, might even have had a career; or conversely, that if they had not been interested in so many things, crossed by such diverse passions, they might have been great poets. It was better for Coleridge, as poet, to read books of travel and exploration than to read books of metaphysics and political economy. He did genuinely want to read books of metaphysics and political economy, for he had a certain talent for such subjects. But for a few years he had been visited by the Muse . . . and thenceforth was a haunted man. ... he was condemned to know that the little poetry he had written was worth more than all he could do with the rest of his life. . . . Sometimes, however, to be a "ruined man" is itself a vocation. His identification with Coleridge is again signaled in the.final sentence of the concluding Norton lecture (31 March 1933): "The sad ghost of Coleridge beckons to me from the shadows."6 A few years later, Virginia Woolf noted in her diary that Eliot had acquired the habit of beginning sentences, "Coleridge and I. . . ."7 And in a lecture of 1955, he told his audience that "Coleridge . . . was rather a man of my own type."8 While there are not nearly so many circumstantial similarities between Coleridge's miglior fabbro, Wordsworth, and Ezra Pound, those that exist are fundamental. Like Wordsworth at the time of Lyrical Ballads, Pound was centrally concerned with the reform of poetry (especially the language of poetry). As with Wordsworth, his most important work is a long unfinished poem on (to borrow Wordsworth's description for The Recluse) man, nature, and society. In standard literary history, each is a (and frequently is the) pioneering figure in a major movement—Romanticism and Modernism, respectively. Most to the point, however, is Pound's personality. Egotistical and self-willed, Pound can be thought of as a twentieth-century version of what Keats called "the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime"; his bumptious aggressiveness and strong sense of purpose contrast sharply with Eliot's indecision and self-doubts. While actually born not quite three years before Eliot, Pound in biographical retrospect seems to have been much older, and must have seemed so at the time to Eliot; Wordsworth was two and a half years older than Coleridge, and one suspects a similar disparity between the real and the perceived differences in their ages (and there was more involved than just age: Coleridge in a letter of late 1801 describes himself and "W. & his sister" as "three persons . . . but one God," the god being, of course, Wordsworth).9 In his 1932 Norton lecture on Wordsworth and Coleridge, Eliot comments only briefly on the question of which character was the more dominant: "Their influence upon each other Was considerable; though probably the influence of Wordsworth upon Coleridge, during their brief period of intimate association, was greater than that of Coleridge upon Wordsworth." A few paragraphs later he adds, "I doubt whether the impulse in Coleridge would have been strong enough to have worked its way out, but for the example and encouragement of Wordsworth."10 Whether or not Eliot himself was conscious of the parallel that I am proposing here, this last statement has an uncanny appropriateness as a description of Pound's help in the production of The Waste Land 2 The complete chronology of The Waste Land is somewhat uncertain, but a number of facts are by now well established.11 Eliot's earliest recoverable references—to a "long poem" that he has been planning for some time and hopes to begin writing shortly—occur in letters of November and December 1919 to John Quinn (the American lawyer and arts patron) and to Eliot's mother. By early February 1921 he had shown Wyndham Lewis some parts of it, and on 9 May he told Quinn that it was "partly on paper."12 Part 3, "The Fire Sermon," seems to have been the earliest section completed, at London and perhaps also Margate in September and October 1921. The rest—the bulk of the lines of both the surviving manuscripts and the much reduced printed text—was written in a rush in London and Lausanne in November and December. Pound read and marked parts of the manuscripts on two occasions, first in the middle of November 1921, when Eliot stayed with him in Paris on his way to Lausanne for a month's "rest 126 MULTIPLE AUTHORSHIP AND THE MYTH OF SOLITARY GENIUS Pound's Waste Land 127 cure" in the care of the analyst Dr. Roger Vittoz, and a second time in early January 1922, when he again stopped in Paris on his way back to London. The manuscripts extant in the Berg Collection and published in the facsimile edition of 1971 are a hodge-podge of holograph drafts, fair copies, and typescripts, fifty-four leaves in all, including a title leaf and marked and revised carbon copies of some of the typescript portions. Though Eliot called these sheets "all of the manuscript in existence" just before he shipped them off to Quinn in the fall of 1922,13 a great deal else has been lost or destroyed—draft versions of material that we have only in fair copy or typescript, fair copies (and American and British printer's copies) of some of the text that we have only in draft, and no doubt other manuscript materials that we now know nothing about. The main items that survive in this batch, which Eliot sent to his benefactor Quinn almost as if he were offering a private display of multiple authorship in process, are the following: 1. "He Do the Police in Different Voices: Part I. The Burial of the Dead," 130 lines on three pages of typescript (rectos of three leaves). Eliot canceled the whole of page 1 (lines 1-54 in the facsimile edition numbering) in pencil; pages 2 and 3 (55-130), which Pound marked for revision, are an early version of the printed text lines 1-76. 2. "He Do the Police in Different Voices: Part II. A Game of Chess," 98 lines on three pages of typescript (rectos of three leaves) marked by both Pound and Eliot's wife, Vivien, and a carbon copy of the typescript with some holograph notations by Eliot—the equivalent of the printed text lines 77-172. 3. "The Fire Sermon," 240 lines on five pages of typescript (rectos of five leaves) plus holograph draft on the verso of leaf 1, a carbon copy of the typescript, and further holograph draft for this section of the poem on four other leaves (Facsimile pp. 28, 36, 48, 50, 52)—early versions of the printed text lines 173-311. Pound marked both the original typescript and the carbon, as well as the recto of the last leaf of draft in this section (p. 50). 4. "Part IV. Death by Water," 93 lines on four rectos of holograph fair copy and again (shortened to 92 lines) on four rectos of typescript. The last 10 lines in both versions are the equivalent of the printed text lines 312-21. Pound commented on the first page of the fair copy and marked the typescript throughout. 5. "What the Thunder Said," 117 lines on six rectos of untitled pencil draft and again (shortened to 113 lines) on four rectos of typescript—the equivalent of the printed text lines 322-434. Pound commented at the top of the first page of draft and made a few markings in the typescript. 6. Twelve additional leaves of lyrics and fragments, some dating from as early as 1914 to 1916, that contributed toward, or (in the case of the three typescript items) were once considered for inclusion in, the early text of the poem (Facsimile pp. 90-122): a holograph draft and fair copy of "The Death of Saint Narcissus" (containing early versions of the printed text lines 26-29); typescripts of "Song" (originally "Song for the Opherion"), "Exequy" (with draft of part of an additional stanza on the verso), and "The Death of the Duchess" (containing early versions of the printed text lines 108-10,136-38), all three marked by Pound; a 13-line draft beginning "After the turning of the inspired days" (containing a version of the printed text line 322); a 5-line holograph fragment beginning "I am the Resurrection and the Life"; a 33-line draft fragment beginning "So through the evening, through the violet air" (containing early versions of the printed text lines 378-85); holograph drafts of short poems entitled "Elegy" and "Dirge"; a fair copy of "Dirge," with a comment by Pound; and a 5-line draft fragment beginning "Those are pearls that were his eyes. See!" (which became the printed text line 48). These are the main materials, amounting to a thousand lines of verse (not counting the carbon copies and some other repetitions of passages), out of which Pound and Eliot excavated the world-famous Waste Land, published in both the Criterion (in London) and the Dial (in New York) in the middle of October 1922. It is of course impossible to consider the drafts objectively. Many readers know the printed poem by heart (indeed, one can almost collate the manuscripts against the standard text without book); the discarded passages of the manuscripts, some 300 lines in items 1-5 in the preceding list and another 260 in item 6, cannot be other than decidedly unfamiliar by comparison. Though every now and then a critic professes to admire, and even prefer, the flatter, more sprawling version of the manuscripts,14 the majority view is that the 434 lines of The Waste Land as we know it were lying hidden from the beginning in the 1000 lines of draft, rather in the manner of one of Michelangelo's slumbering figures waiting to be rescued from the block of marble. But Michelan- 128 MULTIPLE AUTHORSHIP AND THE MYTH OF SOLITARY GENIUS Pound's Waste Land 129 gelo, in this analogy, was both artist and reviser simultaneously. In the case of The Waste Land, it took one poetic genius to create those 434 lines in the first place, and another to get rid of the several hundred inferior lines surrounding and obscuring them. Part 1 in the manuscripts begins with a 54-line monologue on pub-crawling and Boston low life: First we had a couple of feelers down at Tom's place, There was old Tom, boiled to the eyes, blind, (Don't you remember that time after a dance, Top hats and all, we and Silk Hat Harry, And old Tom took us behind, brought out a bottle of fizz, With old Jane, Tom's wife; and we got Joe to sing "I'm proud of all the Irish blood that's in me, "There's not a man can say a word agin me"). Then we had dinner in good form, and a couple of Bengal lights. When we got into the show, up in Row A, I tried to put my foot in the drum, and didn't the girl squeal, She never did take to me, a nice guy—but rough; The next thing we were out in the street, Oh was it cold! ... This is "language really used by men" in a way that Wordsworth never dreamed of. The descriptions and dialogue are tedious throughout; there is nothing of the earthy liveliness of the ladies discussing Albert and Lil in the pub scene of part 2 (printed text lines 139-72), and no telling point achieved by the unrelieved inanity of the passage. Eliot made deletions and marginal revisions in several lines and then canceled the entire page (and passage) with vertical strokes in pencil. In this instance it is uncertain whether the wholesale deletion was his or Pound's idea. In tonal inaccuracy and uselessness to the project as a whole, the passage is very much like some others that we know Pound objected to in later parts of the manuscripts; since Eliot was thoroughly dependent on Pound at this time in matters of literary judgment, the better likelihood is that the decision was Pound's.15 With the next two pages of the opening section, beginning with "April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land," we are on solid and very familiar ground, the seventy-six lines that, after minor revisions by Pound and Eliot (and then by Eliot or an editor at a later stage), became part 1 of the printed poem. Pound marked, underlined, circled, queried, and deleted several lines in the six paragraphs and wrote "Marianne," "J.J." (for James Joyce), and "Blake. Too often used" in the margins. Eliot kept (or restored) three lines that Pound deleted—the printed text's lines 48 , 67-68—and dropped two others: the parenthetical "I John saw these things, and heard them" between lines 56 and 57, and "I have sometimes seen and see" following "Unreal City" in line 60. In the extant typescript of part 2, "A Game of Chess," Pound changed Eliot's original wording in nineteen lines. He commented marginally on the regularity of the meter ("3 lines too tum-pum at a stretch," "too penty"), ridiculed the phrasing in Eliot's original "one tender Cupidon" (" 'one' wee red mouse," Pound scrawled), seemingly faulted the overly accurate realism of several lines of speech ("photography," "photo."), objected to certain vaguenesses ("had is the weakest point," "dogmatic deduction but wobbly as well"), and again, as in part 1, noted echoes of other writers ("Beddoes," "J.J."). Pound's deletions and revisions are responsible for the printed text's wording in lines 80, 91-92, 94, 105, 109, 121-22, and comments and other markings by him brought about changes in lines 78, 98, 103-4, 106-7, 125, 136, 139, 149-50. Vivien Eiiot, whose marginal pencil-ings show that she especially liked this section of the poem ("WONDERFUL," "Splendid last lines"), contributed the printed text's lines 153 and 164 and part of 159. Part 3, "The Fire Sermon," originally opened with seventy lines of Popian couplets (plus an additional seventeen lines of couplets and triplets on an inserted sheet) describing a Belinda-like Fresca at her toilet: Admonished by the sun's inclining ray, And swift approaches of the thievish day, The white-armed Fresca blinks, and yawns, and gapes, Aroused from dreams'of love and pleasant rapes. Electric summons of the busy bell Brings brisk Amanda to destroy the spell; With coarsened hand, and hard plebeian tread, Who draws the curtain round the lacquered bed, Depositing thereby a polished tray Of soothing chocolate, or stimulating tea. . . . It is extremely shallow imitation, as Pound indicated by his comments on the carbon copy—"Too loose," "rhyme drags it out to diffuse-ness," "trick of Pope etc not to let couple[t] diffuse 'em"—and by his cancellation of the entire passage in the original typescript. Pound also worked over the rest of this section in both the typescript and the 130 MULTIPLE AUTHORSHIP AND THE MYTH OF SOLITARY GENIUS Pound's Waste Land 131 carbon, censuring Eliot's tentativeness ("dam per'apsez," "Perhaps be damned," "make up yr. mind," "you Tiresias if you know know damn well or else you dont"), commenting on circumlocutions ("B—II—S," presumably for "Bullshit," beside Eliot's "London, the swarming life you kill and breed, / Huddled between the concrete and the sky," and "Palmer Cox's brownies" as a humorous illustration of Eliot's "Phantasmal gnomes, burrowing in brick and stone and steel"), and finding fault with most of the lines describing the typist and the clerk ("verse not interesting enough as verse to warrant so much of it," "inversions not warranted by any real exegience of metre," "Too easy," "mix up of the couplet & grishkin not good," "probaly over the mark"). Besides canceling the seventy-odd lines at the beginning of the section, Pound deleted twenty lines after the printed text's 214, single lines after 217 and 229, two lines after 248, and three lines after 258. His markings and comments prompted Eliot to reduce twelve lines describing the typist to half that number in the final text (222-27) and twenty lines describing the clerk to a mere four (231-34). Other markings produced (or helped produce) the final version of lines 207, 208, 212, 214, 215, 251, 252, 254. All told, in one way or another Pound changed more than 130 lines of Eliot's draft in this section. On the first page of Eliot's holograph fair copy of part 4, "Death by Water," ninety-three lines describing a fisherman's voyage and shipwreck off the New England coast, Pound wrote, "Bad—but cant attack until I get typescript." When he subsequently had the typescript in hand (it was typed on his own typewriter in Paris), Pound marked through the first eighty lines so vigorously that Eiiot considered removing the entire section. "Perhaps better omit Phlebas also???" he asked Pound, referring to the final ten lines, to which Pound replied: "I DO advise keeping Phlebas. In fact 1 more'n advise. Phlebas is an integral part of the poem; the card pack introduces him, the drowned phoen. sailor, and he is needed ABSoloootly where he is. Must stay in."16 In this case, while Eliot is demonstrably the author of part 4 of the printed text, Pound is responsible both for the continuing existence of the Phlebas lines that constitute this part and for the deletion of the eighty-plus lines that originally preceded them. In part 5, "What the Thunder Said," the errant and indecisive Eliot suddenly attained a degree of self-assurance nowhere evident in the preceding parts, and the lines, even in first draft, flowed in near-perfect form. No further excavation was needed. Pound, reading both the holograph draft and the typescript (again typed on his own typewriter—in this instance, scholars have suggested, possibly by Pound himself), made only a handful of markings—"OK from here on I think" at the top of the first page of draft, and small markings that altered the typescript to produce the final text in lines 337 and 392. As for the rest, principally the three poems that Pound read and marked in typescript at the end of the manuscripts ("Song," "Exe-quy," and "The Death of the Duchess," Facsimile pp. 98-106), Pound's role was mainly to say no. "I think your instinct had led you to put the remaining superfluities at the end," he wrote to Eliot; "I think you had better leave 'em, abolish 'em altogether or for the present. . . . The thing now runs from April ... to shantih without [a] break. . . . Dont try to bust all records by prolonging it three pages further." Eliot did as he was told ("Certainly omit miscellaneous pieces," he replied),17 and The Waste Land as we know it was the sensational result. In the process of shaping the poem, Pound had altered or stripped away some 350 to 400 of Eliot's lines (either 2 or 56 in part 1; 19 in part 2; 130 or so in part 3; 83 in part 4; 2 in part 5; and 118 in the three separate pieces at the end). Eliot in return, when he included the poem in his first collected edition, Poems 1909-1925 (1925), added a dedication that has been part of the work ever since: "For Ezra Pound / // miglior fabbro." The Italian phrase, from Purgatorio 26.117, is Dante's tribute to a Provencal troubadour whom Pound also admired and translated, Arnaut Daniel—"the better poet" (fabbro, or "maker," the literal meaning of Greek poietes) in both love songs and prose romances ("versi d'amore e prose di romanzi"). 3 While he shows considerable ambivalence about the survival of the manuscripts and the consequent possibility of public exposure of his rough drafts as well as Pound's markings, Eliot's private and public statements concerning the extent of Pound's contribution to the poem are forthright and generous. Writing on 21 September 1922, he tells Quinn, In the manuscript of The Waste Land which I am sending you, you will see the evidences of (Pound's] work, and I think that this manuscript is worth preserving in its present form solely for the reason that it is the 132 MULTIPLE AUTHORSHIP AND THE MYTH OF SOLITARY GENIUS Pound's Waste Land 133 only evidence of the difference which his criticism has made to this poem.18 i In an article in the April/June 1938 issue of Purpose, explaining the wording of his dedication to Pound, he says that he meant to "honour the technical mastery and critical ability manifest in [Pound's] own work, which had also done so much to turn The Waste Land\ from a jumble of good and bad passages into a poem."19 His best-known remark on the matter is a parenthetical aside in a September 1946 essay on Pound in Poefry: It was in 1922 that I placed before him in Paris the manuscript of a sprawling, chaotic poem called The Waste Land which left his hands, reduced to about half its size, in the form in which it appears in print. I should like to think that the manuscript, with the suppressed passages, had disappeared irrecoverably: yet on the other hand, I should wish the blue penciling on it to be preserved as irrefutable evidence of Pound's critical genius.20 t This last sentiment is reiterated in a comment by Valerie Eliot in an interview published in Esquire in 1972: "We never thought [the manuscript] would turn up, but Tom told me that if it did, I was to publish it. 'It won't do me any good,' he added, 'but I wouid like people to realize the extent of my debt to Ezra.' "2l Recognition of that debt has come rather slowly and grudgingly. In her 1971 transcription of the manuscripts, Valerie Eliot printed Pound's markings and comments in red ink, thus highlighting them as the most prominent feature of the facsimile edition. On the face of it, in Eliot's words of 1938, Pound turned "a jumble of good and bad passages into a poem." Yet a large contingent of Eliot scholars, even with this plain evidence before them, have insisted on minimizing Pound's contribution. Here is a brief sampling of assessments, mostly from the years immediately following publication of the facsimile: ... the author of "The Waste Land" knew from the beginning exactly what he wanted to express, even if at times the poetic persona was unsure of the voice by which to express it. . . . The manuscripts, of course, show how little Pound altered the poem and that his role of "il . miglior fabbro" was mainly to advise on stylistic, technical improvements, as any good teacher might comment on a pupil's work. (Gertrude Patterson, 1972) Eliot . . . exercised full control over that [published] text. . . . Since the publication of the facsimiles, there can be no doubt that The Waste Land was controlled by Eliot's architectonic skill at every stage of composition: Eliot responded to Pound's criticisms by modifying the text, not by altering his own purpose. (Grover Smith, 1972) Much of Pound's advice Eliot himself had in mind anyhow. (D. E. S. Maxwell, 1972) For both Pound and Eliot, the business of revision seems to have been largely a matter of surface craftsmanship. (Richard Sheppard, 1972) Pound's criticism tightened the poem, but did not otherwise alter its movement. (Denis Donoghue, 1974) Eliot evidently conceived The Waste Land from the start as an "ideo-grammic" collage, and any obstetrics Pound may have performed did nothing to change the original nature of the brainchild. . . . Not only must we conclude that the "editorial policy" in the composition of The Waste Land was Eliot's and not Pound's, but we must also seriously question whether Pound had a sympathetic understanding of Eliot's ultimate intentions. . . . Eliot is scrupulously independent in his judgment of Pound's advice. (Gareth Reeves, 1975) [Pound] edited the poem, he did not determine or influence the poem's basic form and content: in concept and expression it is distinctly Eliot's own. Pound freed the drafts of weak, at times poor lines; he tightened the poem's dramatic structure and rhythmic flow and speeded its movement. He suggested changes, drew attention to weaknesses, but always left the final decision to Eliot. (Ruth Pulik, 1977) As it turned out, Pound altered [the poem] relatively little. ... In his revision Pound concentrated on local infelicities more than on the integrity of the whole and kept Eliot from brooding about his lack of outline for several crucial days or weeks. (Ronald Bush, 1983) I do not . . . believe that Pound was responsible for the innovations in The Waste Land. An examination of the manuscript shows that, apart from a few minor revisions in diction, Pound's contributions were the removal of two long sections beginning "The Fire Sermon" and "Death by Water" and rather extensive revisions of the teatime episode in "The Fire Sermon." . . . But the strategy of the poem and the most powerful passages in the poem are not disturbed by Pound. (Harriet Davidson, 1985)22 134 MULTIPLE AUTHORSHIP AND THE MYTH OF SOLITARY GENIUS Pound's Waste Land 135 Patterson's "exactly ... of course" and Smith's "there can be no doubt" are clues to the precariousness of their positions; each had published a substantial book on Eliot, and naturally they were resistant to the idea of a second author for the most famous and influential poem in their poet's canon. Maxwell is indulging in mind reading. And the rest of the critics cited here, from Sheppard through Davidson, concur in the opinion that the poem represented in Eliot's manuscripts was essentially unchanged by Pound's deletion of several hundred of its lines and significant alteration of many others. Phrases like "surface craftsmanship," "did nothing to change the original nature," "always left the final decision to Eliot," "concentrated on local infelicities"—demonstrably wrong according to the biographical and textual evidence—are typical of their rhetoric. Critics who argue that Pound's contribution made an essential difference are proportionately fewer. Glauco Cambon, in one of the earliest reactions to publication of the facsimiles, speaks of Pound's "radical abridgment" and "drastic excisions, so instrumental to the attainment of The Waste Land's final shape," and adds a personal anecdote: I remember Austin Warren's remark, in a conversation we had many years ago in Ann Arbor, that but for "violent" Pound, basically "academic" Eliot might have missed out on his high goal of literary achievement. Thirteen years ago one had few hopes of ever recovering the original drafts of The Waste Land, but now that they have been unearthed, they bear Austin Warren out. Nobody can deny that Pound's aggressiveness managed to bring forth a deeper coherence from Eliot's own creative resources. Bernard Bergonzi's summary comment in his short biography of 1972 strikes a kindred note: "All in all, Pound's treatment of The Waste Land showed his intense feeling for what Eliot was trying to do. . . . Without Pound's attentions The Waste Land would still have been impressive, but it would have appeared, and remained, much more clearly a group of separate poems." Russell Kirk, another writer of 1972, says that "Pound mightily improved the poem. . . . Pound's taste was then superior to Eliot's, and what was deleted would have diminished the explosion of this bomb. . . . All of Pound's smaller changes . . . were for the better." The strongest statement of Pound's share in the collaboration is Lewis Turco's of 1979: If anything is clear about The Waste Land, it is that the poem had two authors, not one. Pound had as much to do with the making of the poem as did Eliot. ... we ought at least to insist that all future editions of the work bear the names of both authors.23 Writers of the 1980s have tended to give Pound the credit that Eliot (in the remarks quoted at the beginning of this section) said he deserved. In his 1983 book devoted to the poem, Grover Smith has somewhat revised his earlier estimate of Pound's importance: "Without [Pound] this poem would have been impossible: this Waste Land is the best of all possible Waste Lands. ... It did require Ezra Pound to bring it to conclusion." The; 1984 standard biography by Peter Ackroyd gives a reasonably balanced account of the effect of Pound's changes: When Ezra Pound began working on it, he removed most of the elements of stylistic reproduction—he considered the sequence in the manner of Pope to be simply parodic—and curbed the tendency of the poem towards dramatic and fictional exposition. Pound was, perhaps, the purer poet of the two; certainly he was never much interested in Eliot's skill as a dramatist. . . . And it might fairly be said in retrospect that he quite misunderstood the essential nature of Eliot's genius. . . . But Pound had an extraordinarily good ear, and he located in the typescripts of The Waste Land the underlying rhythm of the poem—the music of which Eliot was so distrustful and which he surrounded with more deliberate and dramatic kinds of writing. Pound heard the music, and cut away what was for him the extraneous material which was attached to it. ... In other words, Pound mistook or refused to recognize Eliot's original schema and as a result rescued the poetry. Whether Pound mistook Eliot's genius or (like Keats's helpers) to some degree ignored it in pursuit of his own goals, Ackroyd's description makes clear that The Waste Land without Pound would not have been the "same" poem. And the 1985 and 1989 editions of the most standard of American literature anthologies have already informed thousands of undergraduate and graduate students that Eliot "cut huge chunks out of the poem on Pound's advice. Indeed . . . study of the manuscript before and after Pound's suggestions were incorporated has led some critics to suggest that we should think of The Waste Land as jointly authored."24 1 136 ' MULTIPLE AUTHORSHIP AND THE MYTH OF SOLITARY GENIUS 4 I would offer three brief points by way of provisional conclusion to this example of multiple authorship. The first concerns my opening speculation that the Eliot-Pound collaboration, for which we have detailed evidence in the manuscripts in the Berg Collection, might by analogy throw light on the less solidly documented collaboration 120 years earlier between Coleridge and Wordsworth. The conclusion has to be, I think, that the later relationship cannot illuminate the earlier in any way that a majority of scholars could agree on. Indeed, as a more particular examination of the scholarship would show, the Eliot and Pound critics disagree with one another concerning the two writers' responsibility for nearly every aspect of The Waste Land— structure, style, tone, dramatic voice, themes, philosophy—even with the evidence of the manuscripts before their eyes. There is no reason to think that Coleridge and Wordsworth scholars would be any closer to unanimity, and every reason to think that if we had, say, a set of manuscripts of The Ancient Mariner with Wordsworth's comments and revisions, the critics would just as avidly declare Coleridge's independence of Wordsworth, or, conversely, his heavy indebtedness to Wordsworth, according to their subjective interpretations of the documentary evidence. Although I stilt think that the Eliot-Pound and Coleridge-Wordsworth parallels are interesting and suggestive, I would not use the one case to prove anything about the other. More generally, or theoretically, just as it is historically inappropriate to assume a single author for a single text, so it is inappropriate to assume a given form of multiple authorship for a text. In every instance, recovery of the circumstances of literary production can proceed only on the assumption that each case is historically specific. Although Coleridge was something like Eliot, and Wordsworth something like Pound, it is virtually certain that no poem in Lyrical Ballads was constructed by Wordsworth carving out something from a mass of lines presented to him by Coleridge. The second point concerns the fragility and elusiveness of any concept of authorial intention in The Waste Land. In spite of the confidence of some of the pro-Eiiot critics quoted above ("knew . . . exactly what he wanted to express," "exercised full control"), the biographical evidence—especially the letters and other documents quoted by Valerie Eliot in her introduction to the facsimiles—shows Pound's Waste Land 137 Eliot to have been in the most precarious of mental states during the year in which he produced the drafts that he handed over to Pound (Ackroyd's chapter covering 1921 and 1922 is titled "The Collapse"). He wrote the greater part of the manuscript text while undergoing psychiatric treatment in Switzerland, and not least among the many elements of pure chance that had their effect were the facts that Paris lay between London and Lausanne, that Pound was in Paris, and that Eliot therefore would see Pound both going and returning just at the time when he was writing large passages of the poem. Eliot seems to have been entirely dependent on, and to have followed in every major detail, Pound's advice concerning what to keep and what to get rid of in the manuscripts. We know that there were fundamental differences between the two writers' aims, tastes, and ideas in poetry, but on this occasion Pound had his own way, with Eliot first acquiescing and then objectively admiring the result.25 The drafts that Pound worked over were unquestionably the product of genius; nobody has ever suggested that Eliot did not write the great lines and passages for which he is most famous. But the biographical evidence raises serious doubts about Eliot's consciousness of what he was doing, apart from the basic business of writing great passages and hoping for Pound's approval, Ackroyd makes a good point about the openness of the finished product: Pound imposed an order on it which it did not originally possess; as a result of his removal of the original context of the poem, it has become much easier for readers and critics to provide their own—to suggest a "theme" which the abbreviated sequences might be claimed to fit. The Waste Land provided a scaffold on which others might erect their own theories; so it is that it has been variously interpreted as personal autobiography, an account of a collapsing society, an allegory of the Grail and spiritual rebirth, a Buddhist meditation. Thus The Waste Land began a process of which Eliot has been the principal beneficiary, or victim. In the absence of philosophical or religious certainties, his poetry has been invested with a gnomic or moral force which it can hardly carry. A thin wash of "great truths" has been placed over The Waste Land and over Eliot's succeeding work. The poet himself was to be treated as a kind of seer, a position most unsuited to him.26 And several critics have quoted a remark from Eliot's 1953 National Book League Lecture, "The Three Voices of Poetry," as the poet's reflection on the way in which The Waste Land took shape; 138 MULTIPLE AUTHORSHIP AND THE MYTH OF SOLITARY GENIUS In a poem which is neither didactic nor narrative, and not animated by any other social purpose, the poet may be concerned solely with expressing in verse—using all his resources of words, with their history, their connotations, their music—this obscure impulse. He does not know what he has to say until he has said it; and in the effort to say it he is not concerned with making other people understand anything. He is not concerned, at this stage, with other people at all: only with finding the right words or, anyhow, the least wrong words. He is not concerned whether anybody else wili ever listen to them or not, or whether anybody else will ever understand them if he does. He is oppressed by a burden which he must bring to birth in order to obtain relief.27 In the drafts of The Waste Land Eliot may have been expressing just such an "obscure impulse"—not knowing "what he has to say until he has said it"—and Pound, far from helping Eliot find out what he had to say, may have further obscured the impulse so that it is no longer evident or recoverable. Who, then, is the author of The Waste Land published in October 1922? Eliot wrote the drafts; Pound is responsible for the principal revisions. But the authorship underlying any particular sequence, or passage, or detail is still very much up in the air. My third point concerns the extent to which the myth of single authorship enters into the critical analysis of this obvious collaboration: The Waste Land, if it were perceived to be a jointly authored poem, would inevitably become a lesser work than it is now taken to be. At present, critical appreciation of a masterwork requires it to be the product of a single organizing mind. If multiple authorship were accepted as the norm of literary production, then no critic would need to appropriate a work for one or another author; indeed, the multiplicity of contributors to a work could even be considered a mark of its significance! 7 American Novels: Authors, Agents, Editors, Publishers With the novel and (in the next chapter) plays and films, we at last encounter literature as commercial enterprise. Apart from timely loans from his publishers, Keats never received a penny from his poetry (and neither did the publishers). Mill and Wordsworth supported themselves as civil servants, offering their works principally for the edification of readers—then and, they hoped, for all time. Coleridge, who survived mainly on donations from patrons and friends, actually lost several hundred pounds when he published Sibylline Leaves and Biographia Literaria with the firm of Rest Fenner, which went bankrupt two years afterward. Eliot received all of $150, plus a prize of $2000, for the first publication of The Waste Land. To be sure, Eliot later became a shrewd businessman of letters, driving a hard bargain as a director of the London publisher Faber and Faber; but when he produced The Waste Land, he and his publishers were still operating in a nineteenth-century tradition of poetry writing and publishing primarily for the sake of art and fame. Of course, there have been best-sellers all along in English and other literatures. Shakespeare, nowadays chief presider over the immortals "among the English Poets," was in his own time a reckonable figure at the box office. Pope and the mid-century novelists— Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett—came closest to being best-selling, or at least self-supporting, British authors in the eighteenth century, and among the Romantics Byron and Scott are obvious examples. But it was with the rise of the novel in the nineteenth century, intimately connected with the development and growth of a mass readership—itself the product of accelerated growth in population, widespread educational reform, the increase of literacy, the institution 139 140 MULTIPLE AUTHORSHIP AND THE MYTH OF SOLITARY GENIUS American Novels: Authors, Agents, Editors, Publishers 141 of commercial and public lending libraries, and a host of technological improvements in printing and publishing—that literature for the first time became big business.1 Just as one would expect, commercial considerations more overtly began mixing with the artistic, and, as publishers turned an eye toward consumer response and sales figures, collaborative production became a frequent practice of authorship. J. A. Sutherland has documented a number of early collaborations (and collaborative situations) between publishers and writers in Victorian fiction. They include, among others, Richard Bentley's offer to Melville to have Pierre rewritten by a "judicious literary friend ... in a style to be understood by the great mass of readers"; Longman's alterations of the manuscript of Trollope's Barchester Towers to get rid of "vulgarity" and "exaggeration"; Bentley's persuading Anne Manning to enhance sales appeal by adding two chapters to The Ladies of Bever Hollow ("to give each volume a respectable girth"); George Smith's more pervasive influence, ultimately for the same reason, on the structure of Thackeray's Henry Esmond; the Mac-millans' detailed advice to Charles Kingsley affecting the point of view, style, and tone of Westward Ho! ("I am aiming altogether at popularity," wrote Kingsley, "and am willing to alter or expunge wherever aught is likely to hurt the sale of the book"); and Dickens's revisions (in his capacity as editor of All the Year Round) to make the serialized version of Bulwer Lytton's A Strange Story more conformable to readers' expectations.2 These are, for the most part, famous names, but while the quality of the output may vary, the Victorian practices that Sutherland describes are not categorically different from a great deal of book production today. Take, as an extreme modern example, the activities of Lyle Kenyon Engei, founder in 1973 of Book Creations, Inc., a "fiction factory" in Canaan, New York, that has "created" several thousand books in the last dozen or so years, with over 100 million copies in print. According to his New York Times obituary (13 August 1986), Engel originated ideas for series of books, usually about a family or community through many generations, prepared a detailed outline, hired writers to flesh out the characters and plot, then sold publication rights to paperback houses. ... A close friend of Pearl S. Buck, he created a series of hard-cover nonfiction books by the Nobel Prize-winning author, including "Tales of the Orient," "People