1922 saw the publication of TS Eliot’s modernist classic ‘The Waste Land,’ a long and complex poem told in 5 chapters and one which has, over the past 100 years, both invited and defied critical analysis.
Despite its brilliance and profundity, the work always seemed aloof and untouchable, and utterly academic in its citing the likes of Dante, the Bible, Shakespeare and Sanskrit, all propped up by pages and pages of footnotes and annotations. Eliot, an intensely private man, actively discouraged biographical interpretations of the poem, promoting the theory/notion that poetry is an impersonal discipline in which the life of the poet should never be considered a relevant topic for scrutiny.
Which is why scholars of the poem were both astonished and delighted when, in 2020, more than a thousand of Eliot’s private letters to his confidante and muse Emily Hale, whom Eliot knew before emigrating to the UK, were opened at Princeton University Library, 60 years after they were deposited there. What became immediately obvious was that Hale was both the beating heart of ‘The Waste Land’ and a huge source of consternation and regret for the poet. Characterised in the poem as the ‘Hyacinth Girl,’ she was somebody for whom he retained enduring feelings of love after he entered into what was to become a disastrous marriage to his first wife Vivien.
Journeying through each of the poem’s five chapters, and calling on an array of illustrious admirers of Eliot, including actors Fiona Shore and Simon Russell Beale, Susanna White’s film re-examines the text through the Hale prism, as well that of Eliot’s illness and depression, which he suffered as acutely as his wife Vivien.
White is no stranger to poets and their depiction on celluloid, having made the fiction film Love Again (2003, about Philip Larkin) and the documentary Tell Me The Truth About Love (2000, about W.H. Auden). She sees T.S. Eliot: Into The Waste Land as the third part of a trilogy.
White underlined to BDE how she had always wanted to make a film about Eliot, as did her friend (and eventual producer) Rosie Alison. “I was actually in New York filming and I got a call from [Rosie] who had an equal passion to mine. Rosie had just got a commission from the BBC to make a film, at that point, just about the Emily Hale letters. And she said, would I be interested in directing it? And it was so bizarre because I was already talking to Lyn [Lyndall Gordon, Eliot biographer and one of the first researchers to study the Hale letters],” explains the director.
“Sometimes it goes the wrong way,” she explains. “You hear someone else is getting to make the film [you] want to make. But actually this was a fantastic collaboration because there were two of us who were both really passionate about it. She wanted me to direct and it came together.” The film, shot by UK DOP Roger Chapman, was made for the leading BBC arts series Arena. 1922 also marks the centenary of the first ever broadcast on the BBC.
We are generally led to believe that Eliot was somewhat stiff and buttoned-up, the product of a restrictive upbringing that had him earmarked for inevitable trajectory towards sterile academia in the US. All of which rendered him emotionally vulnerable within the libertine world of Vivien, Bertrand Russell (Vivien’s lover) and the Bloomsbury set, thus hastening the poet towards therapy and an inevitable ascension into Anglo Catholicism (as well a reversion to high bookishness in his future editorial role at publisher Fabers).
But director White doesn’t necessarily see things that way. “I think it made me realize he was far more emotional and sensitive than I’d ever understood,” she says of the Eliot who emerges from the poem. “To me, it’s like a man trying to process his life. And what I was trying to do with the film is in some ways to show what’s going on in his subconscious mind as he’s going through analysis…it’s so autobiographical.”
What had previously seemed like impenetrable allusions and references in the poem seem now like “incidents from his life – him trying to make sense of what life is, and how to give your life meaning. Him just trying to make sense of things,” White says. “I’ve always kind of warmed more to poets… like Larkin or Auden or Heaney who are much more openly emotional. But what I realized [by] making this film is actually that this is just someone incredibly emotional [with] a very sharp mind who is expressing his emotion in a really complex way.” She refers to the process of making the film as her ‘Eliot immersion.’
The film world-premiered at Sheffield and will broadcast on BBC2 in August 2022. “I was very lucky in that I came out of a big school of arts programming at the BBC years ago when they backed me to make those two other poetry films [on Larkin and Auden],” says White. “It’s been really thrilling for me to be invited back, 20 years on, for the centenary of the BBC and the centenary of the poem to be able to make such a serious piece of work.”
While the poetry trilogy may be complete, White wouldn’t be averse to extending it to a quartet by making a documentary on US poet Sylvia Plath. “It would be lovely to tell the story of a female poet. That’s the obvious next place for me to go,” she concludes.
