Jazz out of an open window. Poems from the balcony. We’ve all seen the images of quarantined Italians sharing their solitude across deserted courtyards and empty streets from facing buildings. Some play a saxophone or piano, some join in spontaneous choirs of popular or patriotic songs. Some dance, some juggle, some read stories. It’s a powerful display of art at its most relevant, and no doubt it’s happening in New York, Seoul, Tehran, Seattle.
Such scenes remind me of a memorable passage in Evelyn Waugh’s masterpiece, Brideshead Revisited. In the early 1920s, a small party of young gentlemen have gathered in an Oxford apartment for an leisurely luncheon of lobster Newberg and Cointreau. One of them stirs and goes to the French doors overlooking the college’s lawns.
[H]e stood on the balcony with a megaphone . . . and in languishing, sobbing tones recited passages from The Waste Land to the sweatered and muffled throng that was on its way to the river.
“I, Teresius, have foresuffered all,” he sobbed to them from the Venetian arches— . . .
Every student strolling beneath that balcony would have known the lines, maybe joined in reciting them. T. S. Eliot was the Jazz Age’s rock star poet. His 1922 Waste Land was a bombshell, stirring a generation like no other poem in the twentieth century. It was an anthem of disaffection after the Great War, of yearning for a lost sense of meaning, for fragments “shored against [the] ruins.” The poem bonded the era’s youth together, not only in the pain of what had been lost but in the evocative beauty of those gathered fragments.
In my historical mysteries Julia Kydd is proud of her passing acquaintance with Eliot, who like her moved in London’s Bloomsbury art and literary circles. In Relative Fortunes, The Waste Land makes two cameo appearances. First, the medium who conducts Vivian Rankin’s party séance has named herself—Madame Sosostris—after a character in the poem. Later, Julia commiserates with other printers who lost out to Horace Liveright for the American rights to publish the 22-page poem. Even today, it’s one of the great coups in modern publishing history.
Then and now, poems from the balcony signal resolve to hold fast to what matters. Art and imagination are a powerful defense against any enemy. They bridge our solitude; they bolster our courage.
I saw fat lilac buds on my walk today. As Eliot noted a hundred years ago, April will soon be stirring new life despite even these dark times.
Photo: T. S. Eliot in 1923, photo by Lady Ottoline Morrell, London hostess and arts patron
