¹ See Grover Smith, Jr, T. S. Eliot's Poetry and Plays (Chicago, 1958), p. 68; Time (6 March 1950), p. 24.

² Hugh Kenner, The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot (New York, 1959), p. 145. A year later Ezra Pound wrote to William Carlos Williams that Eliot had had one breakdown and was close to another one, but that he insisted on supporting himself by work at the bank rather than lead a hand-to-mouth existence and devote himself wholly to writing. See D. D. Paige, ed., The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941 (New York, 1950), pp. 172–174. Eliot recently remarked that working in a bank had been very useful, since it made him concentrate and kept him from writing too much; we should probably take “useful” as referring only to the production of literature. See “The Art of Poetry I: T. S. Eliot,” Paris Review, No. 21 (Spring-Summer, 1959), p. 65. Eliot remained at Lloyd's Bank until 1925.

³ “Eliot, T(homas) S(tearns),” Current Biography Yearbook: 1962 (New York, 1963), p. 123.

⁴ Quoted by Leon Edel, Literary Biography (New York: Anchor Books, 1959), p. 76.

⁵ “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Selected Essays (New York, 1960), pp. 7–8.

⁶ Edel, p. 77. See his illuminating discussion of the relevance of poetic data to biographical investigation, with particular reference to Eliot's writings, pp. 70–89.

⁷ For example, the Norwegian critic Kristian Smidt, in an article in the Oslo Aftenposten, 25 September 1963, p. 3, cols. 1–6, reports that Eliot identified the fog in “Prufrock” as a St. Louis memory, the white horse in “Journey of the Magi” as part of a remembered French landscape with no mythic significance, and Mr. Eugenides in The Waste Land as a real person (see n. 19, below). Smidt's article was brought to my attention through the kindness of Professor Grover Smith of Duke University.

⁸ See Smith, p. 84. Charles Norman states that “the mélange of foreign phrases at the beginning [of The Waste Land] was not, as some critics afterwards said, portents of the collapse of Western civilization, but the talk of patients” (Ezra Pound, New York, 1960, p. 251).

⁹ It is perhaps worth noting that in his Paris Review interview (pp. 63–64) Eliot stated: “In The Waste Land, I wasn't even bothering whether I understood what I was saying.”

¹⁰ Eliot's notes are now so well known to have been written partly as a learned spoof and partly to fill two gatherings in sextodecimo that scholars' earlier devotion to them has been replaced by indifference; but some of them take on a new meaning if we look at them through the City man's eyes.

¹¹ Notably “Gerontion,” “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” the Sweeney poems, and “Whispers of Immortality.”

¹² Smidt states (col. 4) that Eliot has indicated that he saw himself in the role of Tiresias as he composed the poem, identifying with the soothsayer as the “I” of the narrative.

¹³ Here one may speculate whether The Waste Land's indebtedness to Ulysses, seen by several critics in the “dull canal … round behind the gashouse” passage, may not be general as well as specific. In this connection see Giorgio Melchiori, The Tightrope Walkers (New York, 1956), pp. 53–88.

¹⁴ Kenner, p. 146. See Paige, p. 169, for the Eliot-Pound correspondence on the retention of “Phlebas.” Eliot, in his Paris Review interview, said that the MS of the original, uncut version has been lost, to the best of his knowledge (p. 53); that among other alterations Pound cut out two entire sections, one on a shipwreck, the other an imitation of The Rape of the Lock (p. 53); and that the longer, original version was “just as structureless, only in a more futile way” (pp. 53–54).

¹⁵ It is pertinent to recall here that the name has a definite source, admitted by Eliot, in Aldous Huxley's Crome Yellow. See Smith, p. 76.

¹⁶ The Lombards were, of course, redoubtable merchants and bankers, and the street takes its name from the Lombard moneylenders who settled in that part of London in the twelfth century.

¹⁷ Kenner, p. 162.

¹⁸ Time (6 March 1950), p. 23.

¹⁹ While Smyrna of course suggests Phoenicia and Phlebas, it was already in the news of the day as a Near Eastern trouble spot, a center of the Greek-Turkish conflict that was rapidly reaching a crisis. See Smith, p. 87. Eliot told Smidt (col. 4) that he had actually received such an invitation to a weekend at the Metropole from a man from Smyrna who was in fact unshaven, and in fact had a pocket full of currants. (The homosexual implications read into the episode by several critics, he said, did not occur to him.) The name Eliot gave his character is another matter; though “Eugenides” guarantees that he is “well-born,” he is far from well-bred.

²⁰ See Smith, p. 88.

²¹ See Paige, pp. 169–171, for the correspondence with Pound regarding Eliot's deletion of the epigraph “The horror! The horror I” The first three paragraphs of Heart of Darkness present us with a scene at “the turn of the tide”; the captain of the yawl, who is a “Director of Companies”; and the “tanned sails of the barges,” which drift with the tide and form “red clusters of canvas.”

²² Smith finds (pp. 309–310, n. 59) a similarity between this speech and the words of Conrad's Russian trader in ivory.

²³ If one seeks an extra-literary source or clue for the “burning,” it may be remembered that the City area is precisely that which was devastated by the Great Fire of London in 1666. The Monument, a constant reminder of the Fire, is visible from almost any point in the financial district; but a walker in the City finds at every turning a plaque or tablet reminding him of what was swept away by the conflagration.

²⁴ “Burnt Norton,” iii; “East Coker,” iii.

²⁵ Smith (p. 78) sees St. Mary Woolnoth as a Grail castle, an interpretation which adds yet another twist to the poem's irony; but the crowd does not go “past” it, as he states, but rather “to where [it] kept the hours.”

²⁶ St. Magnus was an earl with territories in the Orkneys, a man of peace who was much persecuted by his pagan relatives because he refused to fight unjustly. He escaped them by diving from a ship and swimming to land, where he was protected by King Malcolm of Scotland, but was later tricked into a rendezvous and murdered by order of his cousin, though for political and not religious reasons. See Alban Butler, The Lives of the Saints, ed. Herbert Thurston and Norah Leeson, 12 vols. (New York, 1933), iv, 183–184.

²⁷ See Smith, p. 89. Eliot's citation of a book on the City churches in his note to l. 264 of The Waste Land would indicate that his knowledge of their background was more than superficial.

²⁸ Matthew xxvii.46, 48; Mark xvi.34; John xix.28–30. Although the Biblical “ninth hour” is of course not ours, the multiple associations of the number nine should be enough, in a poetic statement at least, to overcome the discrepancy.

²⁹ The feast day of St. Magnus the Martyr falls on the 16th of cruel April, and it is probably worth noting that in 1922, six months before the first appearance of The Waste Land in The Criterion, Easter Day also fell on April 16th.

³⁰ The church is not “opposite” Fishmongers' Hall, as Smith states (p. 89). Fishmongers' Hall is on Upper Thames Street, on the water side, and some hundreds of yards upstream.

³¹ This emphasis upon the details of the church's interior is justified by Eliot's note to l. 264 of The Waste Land. If St. Magnus contained “to [his] mind one of the finest among Wren's interiors,” his acquaintance with the church must have been more than casual.