The Waste Land: Publisher’s Note

Karen Christensen

This was included in the 100th anniversary edition as an afterword.

In 1986, I was hired by Valerie Eliot, T. S. Eliot’s second wife, to help her edit his letters, which she had been gathering for over twenty years in their apartment in Kensington. Mrs. Eliot had lived there alone since her husband’s death in 1965.

On our first morning together, she settled me in an armchair opposite hers in the sitting room, with a tray of coffee and biscuits between us. After a chat about my subway journey and my baby (who was, to her delight, named Tom), she dictated a series of notes, which I diligently took down in shorthand.

I went to the study next door and typed them on a manual typewriter that sat on a wooden office desk placed back-to-back with a huge Wang word processing station. When I took the letters to Mrs. Eliot neatly organized in a Manila folder, I felt confident that she would be impressed with my efficiency.

A few minutes later, she walked back into the study, the folder in one hand and a single sheet of paper dangling between the fingers of the other.

She handed me the page. “My dear,” she said witheringly, “Waste Land is two words.”

I was mortified. But I made no further gaffes, and before long we were deep into correspondence between Eliot and virtually every other famous literary figure of the 1920s. In these letters, I learned about his fraught experience with Vivien, his first wife, as well as the evolution of The Waste Land. He wrote about the long poem he was working on, and later there were negotiations over publication and payment.

As we worked, Mrs. Eliot talked about the period when she had deciphered the original manuscript of The Waste Land after it was discovered in the archives at the New York Public Library. The facsimile edition of the manuscript that became her life’s scholarly achievement.

My responsibility had been to ensure that Mrs. Eliot would complete at least one volume of the Letters in time for the centenary of his birth on 26 September 1988. I stayed with her until the manuscript wasdelivered to Faber & Faber, and then left to fulfill a contract for my own first book. It never occurred to me at the time that I would one day be publishing another centenary volume, this time Eliot’s most famous poem. But then, over the years, the Eliots’ story has resonated in my life, and I have written a good deal about Valerie, including a feature in the Guardian Review.

A few years ago, I began to correspond with the novelist and poet Qiu Xiaolong after learning that he had translated many of Eliot’s poems into Chinese. Seeing how he incorporated Eliot into his detective novels set in modern China, I began to grasp something of what Eliot’s words have meant to people outside the English-speaking world. As a publisher who specializes in global connections, it occurred to me that a centenary edition would be an appropriate way to honor Eliot. I especially wanted to create an edition that would be as appealing and accessible as possible to all readers, even if English is not their native language.

To be fair, The Waste Land is known to be difficult and obscure even for native-English readers. There are countless books and study guides analyzing the language of poem. Some scholars and advisors thought I should create a new study guide for this project, but it seems to me more important simply to present the poetry in a beautiful edition so readers will experience Eliot’s work directly, as what Ezra Pound called “an emotional unit.” (Of course, this edition will also work well as a companion to existing study guides.)

Only after Qiu and I began working on this project did I remember the acknowledgements at the beginning of my first book: “When I started work on this book, I knew far more about ‘The Waste Land’ than I did about the ozone layer or sustainable agriculture.” That must have puzzled the readers of Home Ecology!

When The Waste Land was first translated into Chinese in 1936, interest in the poem was in part  due to its relevance in a country racked by civil war and facing Japanese invasion. One  reason for the continued appeal of T. S. Eliot’s most famous poem is that many of us today, reading about climate change, are fearful of a future wasteland.

I hope that this edition, from an international publisher with a long-standing connection to T. S. Eliot and a focus on sustainability, will be read around the world and show just how much his words echo concerns and experiences we have in common, across cultures and from generation to generation.

Karen’s interview in the Shanghai Review of Books. And the Guardian Review‘s “Dear Mrs Eliot,” in which Karen refers to her south London “waste land.”

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