TS Eliot's The Waste Land remains one of the finest reflections on mental illness ever written


The Nayland Rock shelter in Margate, where TS Eliot wrote some of The Waste Land.
Connecting Nothing with Nothing … The Nayland Rock shelter in Margate, where TS Eliot wrote some of The Waste Land. Photograph: Phil Houghton


These days, the hotel is a block of flats, and while the shelter is still a shelter, it is at present fenced off. Yet Eliot’s time in Margate, a brief interlude before travelling to a Swiss sanatorium, is preserved in Part III of The Waste Land: “On Margate Sands,” he wrote, “I can connect / Nothing with Nothing. / The broken fingernails of dirty hands.” If this, among the fragmented voices of a poem designed to disorient, directly reflects the poet’s psychological state, it also reflects the enterprise: connecting “Nothing with Nothing”, and stitching together disparate parts of history and literature to make a polyphonic, modern masterpiece.

TS Eliot.
‘My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad’ … TS Eliot. Photograph: Alamy

Journeys with The Waste Land, an exhibition at Turner Contemporary in Margate, is currently displaying artworks in sync with Eliot’s poem. Contemporaneous Paul Nash paintings show the barbed wire of no man’s land, alongside Graham Sutherland’s response to Eliot’s line: “And the dead tree gives no shelter.” A Henry Moore drawing of stooped Londoners in a war shelter evokes something of what Eliot would have seen in his time in the “Unreal City”, attempting to make his way in literary London and finding it populated by men either unfit for service or physically deformed by it.

Yet the crisis at the heart of The Waste Land wasn’t only global, it was also personal. Eliot’s wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, also had poor physical and mental health and he scattered his poem with references to their life together. “I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter,” ends the poem’s first stanza, in one of the most powerful and subtle lines ever written about insomnia, of which he and Vivienne were both sufferers. She asked him to remove some lines due to their being too personal, but many others about a husband and wife living with mental illness were retained. “My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me./ Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.” Theirs was one of the worst romantic mismatches in modern letters.

When Eliot’s breakdown came in 1921, he referred to himself as a “neurasthenic”, “tired and depressed”, and was advised to take three months off work. He went to Margate, then Lausanne, where psychoanalyst Roger Vittoz taught Eliot what seem like aspects of CBT and mindfulness: rewiring neural pathways; ridding the mind of behavioural “cliches”; being “calm when there is nothing to be gained by worry”. Complementary to the tenets of Buddhism and the Hindu Upanishads he had studied at Harvard, these approaches seemed to coalesce as he recuperated. The final part of the poem, What the Thunder Said, ends with the Sanskrit: “Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. / Shantih shantih shantih”. Give. Compassion. Control. Peace. Let go, basically. Eliot later told Virginia Woolf that he wrote this part “in a trance”.

More evidence of a mind piecing itself back together after crisis was present in other drafts of The Waste Land: part IV, Death By Water, originally featured an American fisherman who, far from beaten-down urban living, “retains” something “clean and dignified”. This was excised at the suggestion of Ezra Pound, who wanted to leave it bereft of consolation.

Years later, in his essay Thoughts After Lambeth, Eliot insisted that the idea he had “expressed the ‘disillusionment of a generation’ [was] nonsense”. Yet his poem transcended art and poetry and made its way into pop culture: Anthony Blanche reciting it through a megaphone in ITV’s 1981 adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, the Pet Shop Boys’ hit West End Girls alluding to its vision. Eliot is just like the classical figures in his poem who make imperfect pacts – the sibyl who gets eternal life without eternal youth, or Tiresias, who receives visions but is blinded. Eliot’s poem is still one of the finest illustrations of general and personal inner turmoil there is.

  • Journeys with The Waste Land is showing at Turner Contemporary until 7 May 2018.