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This webpage is out of date. It has been kept because it has speculation about how Jean Verdenal might be the real-life figure behind The Waste Land's characters Phlebas the Phoenician and the hyacinth girl. For any other piece of information you should visit the updated page at http://world.std.com/~raparker/exploring/thewasteland/exjean.html |
This page will explore the relationship between T.S. Eliot and his friend
Jean Verdenal.
In 1910 T.S. Eliot
went to Paris to study for a year at the Sorbonne. He
roomed at a pension where he met and befriended another young
man, Jean Verdenal. Verdenal was killed in 1915 in a World War I
battle. Eliot's first volume of poetry,
Prufrock and other Observations, (1917) was
dedicated to Verdenal.
We will also briefly explore the possibility that
Phlebas, the drowned Phoenician Sailor, in Eliot's poem
The Waste Land (1922) is
an allusion to Verdenal.
Quick access to the contents of this page (I also have other T.S. Eliot pages.)
More to be supplied later.
In 1910 T.S. Eliot, then a graduate student studying philosophy at Harvard University, went to Paris to study a year at the Sorbonne. He took a room at a pension where he met and befriended Jean Verdenal, a French medical student who had another room there.
Eliot returned to Harvard in the autumn of 1911 to continue his work toward a doctorate.
Eliot and Verdenal carried on a correspondence at least through 1912. Seven letters from Verdenal to Eliot (written in French) are archived at Harvard University's Houghton Library. The Verdenal letters have also been published in The Letters of T.S. Eliot : 1898-1922 (Vol 1) (see "Sources" section below). Apparently no copies of Eliot's letters to Verdenal survive.
James E. Miller Jr. writes in T.S. Eliot's Personal Waste Land: Exorcism of the Demons (1977):
[ From pp. 20-21 in the chapter entitled "Faint Clews and Indirections" [sic]. Miller cites: George Watson, "Quest for a Frenchman," The Sewanee Review 84 (Summer 1976) pp. 466-475 ]In the summer of 1976, George Watson published in The Sewanee Review his "Quest for a Frenchman," presenting what he was able to discover about Jean Verdenal though French military records and talks with a younger brother (Pierre Verdenal) and with a surviving friend. The service records revealed that Jean was born not in 1889 as Eliot indicated in his dedication but in 1890 (11 May). Verdenal entered military service in March 1913, and "became a medical officer in November 1914." The record indicates that he was "killed by the enemy on the 2nd May 1915 in the Dardanelles," and contains a citation dated 30 April 1915: "Scarcely recovered from pleurisy, he did not hesitate to spend much of the night in the water up to his waist helping to evacuate the wounded by sea, thus giving a notable example of self-sacrifice." And a later entry in the record, dated 23 June 1915, says: "Verdenal, assistant medical officer, performed his duties with courage and devotion. He was killed on the 2nd May 1915 while dressing a wounded man on the field of battle" (p. 467).
In Eliot's volume of poetry Prufrock and other Observations (1917) the entire volume was dedicated with the lines:
To Jean Verdenal
1889-1915
[Correctly the dates should have been 1890-1915]
In Eliot's Ara Vos Prec (1920) the volume had no dedication but did have an epigraph (the lines 133-136 of Canto XXI from Dante's Purgatorio - translation below):
Or puoi la quantitate
Comprender dell' amor ch'a te mi scalda,
Quando dismento nostra vanitate,
Trattando l'ombre come cosa salda.
When Ara Vos Prec was republished in America (1920) (with "Hysteria" replacing the poem "Ode") there was no epigraph but it did have the dedication:
To Jean Verdenal
1889-1915
In Eliot's Poems: 1909-1925 (1925) the entire volume was dedicated to Henry Ware Eliot (Eliot's father.) However, the section containing the poems originally published in Prufrock and other Observations was dedicated to Verdenal. This time with "mort aux Dardanelles" added and with the Dante epigraph:
To Jean Verdenal
1889-1915
mort aux Dardanelles
Or puoi la quantitate
Comprender dell' amor ch'a te mi scalda,
Quando dismento nostra vanitate,
Trattando l'ombre come cosa salda.
John T. Mayer writes in T.S. Eliot's Silent Voices (1989):
[From pp. 201-202 in the chapter entitled "The Marriage Monologues" where Mayer discusses some of Eliot's poems written between 1915-1918]A telling indication of the force of Verdenal's impact, and a tribute to the relationship they shared, is the fact that Eliot chose to dedicate his first volume of poetry, Prufrock and other Observations (1917), to Jean Verdenal, giving only his names and dates, 1889-1915, but not the clarifier "mort aux Dardanelles" that would identify him as a victim of war, which Eliot added only in 1925. At the very time Eliot sought to impress on his parents the value of his career, he paid tribute not to them or his new wife or to Pound (who had by 1917, almost singlehandedly launched Eliot on his public career) but to Verdenal. The dedication of a first volume holds great significance for a new writer. Eliot's choice is usually read as a memorial to heroic sacrifice in war, yet without the later clarifier it is unclear that Verdenal died in the war. This dedication is Eliot's homage to the person who meant most to him in his life to this point, because he "understood" him as no one else had, and understood as well the kind of poetry represented by the Paris poems, written when he knew Verdenal. This is the kind of poetry that he feared he could not repeat but that he wanted to equal, the "accents" of the now retired "profession of the calamus."
Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" was completed in the summer of 1911, the summer he spent in Europe before leaving Verdenal to return to Harvard University to finish his studies. Prior to being published in Prufrock and other Observations in 1917 the poem was printed in Poetry in June 1915. In neither printing did the poem have a dedication but it did have the epigraph:
S'io credessi che mia risposta fosse
a persona che mai tomasse al mundo,
questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma per cio che giammai di questo fondo
non torno vivo alcun, s'i'odo il vero,
senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.
However, in the draft of the poem the epigraph was:
'sovegna vos a temps de ma dolor'.
Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina.
The line "Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina." appears as line 427 of The Waste Land.
After presenting the information about the Verdenal dedications that I have synopsized above James E. Miller Jr. writes in T.S. Eliot's Personal Waste Land: Exorcism of the Demons (1977):
[ From pp. 18-19 in the chapter entitled "Faint Clews and Indirections" [sic]. Miller cites: "A Commentary," The Criterion 13 (April 1934) p. 452 ]The only other public reference by Eliot to Jean Verdenal appeared some seventeen years after the Prufrock dedication, in the April 1934 issue of The Criterion, in the editor's column, "A Commentary." In browsing through a book (Henry Massis, Evocations, 1934) about Paris during the time that Eliot was a student at the Sorbonne there (1910-11), Eliot becomes steeped in romantic memories, and turns both autobiographical and confessional, as, in an aside, he says"
This brief comment stands out with a remarkable brilliancy in the brief "Commentary." as it is the only genuinely personal note struck in what is essentially a reminiscence of the intellectual and literary milieu of Paris during Eliot's year there a quarter of a century before. Although Jean Verdenal's name is not mentioned, there seems little doubt in view of the Prufrock dedication that he is the friend referred to."I am willing to admit that my own retrospect is touched by a sentimental sunset, the memory of a friend coming across the Luxembourg Gardens in the late afternoon, waving a branch of lilac, a friend who was later (so far as I could find out) to be mixed with the mud of Gallipoli."
------------------------------------------------------- 1 April is the cruellest month, breeding 2 Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing 3 Memory and desire, stirring 4 Dull roots with spring rain.
While there are numerous reasons Eliot may have started The Waste Land with these lines about April I will only present a possible personal reason here, that April reminds Eliot of Jean Verdenal. Doing so, I realize that I am making a drama out of the poem with perhaps too much of an autobiographical slant. I am also aware that the lines can take on more than one meaning at a time. Further, I am aware that espousing such a view will cause must Eliot scholars to deny that there could be any such meaning.
As we have seen above, Eliot had a memory of a friend with lilacs (which bloom in April.) He must also have imagined April as a time of cruel suffering for Verdenal who participated in the Allied landings at Gallipoli. It is possible that Eliot even thought that his friend died in battle in April instead of early May. We are not sure when Eliot actually first knew of his friend's death but he did write of it in a letter in January 1916. Miller speculates that Eliot knew in May or early June and that the news may have led Eliot into a hasty marriage with Vivien Haigh-Wood.
Imagine Eliot writing in May to friends of his in Paris enquiring about Verdenal. He is told that his friend performed heroically, "[standing] in the water up to his waist helping to evacuate the wounded by sea" but he was killed, just when being unknown. Eliot, who used to sail in Gloucester Harbor and would know of fisherman dying at sea, would have a hard time not picturing Verdenal's body drifting at sea in the eastern Mediterrian, even if he knew that Verdenal could have died on land or while hospitalized. Even if Eliot knew of the exact details of Verdenal's death, and more than we know now, April would still have been cruel to his friend and death at sea a poetic and symbolic ending to their friendship.
Here I will present a case that in The Waste Land Phlebas the Phoenician is an allusion to Jean Verdenal. Of course this allusion could not have been expected to be seen by anyone other than Eliot's closest friends and perhaps by Eliot alone. Since the publication of The Waste Land though we have learned more about Eliot's personal life than he would ever have liked anyone to know. We also have found his original drafts of the poem and have a clearer picture of what he was thinking of doing with the poem than we can collect from the heavily edited version that was published.
In making my case I will quote lines both from the published version of The Waste Land and one of the drafts (as published in The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts.) The line numbers that I use are all for the published version of the poem.
I shall start by reminding the reader of some of the lines of the published version of The Waste Land:
------------------------------------------------------- 1 April is the cruellest month, breeding 2 Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing 3 Memory and desire, stirring 4 Dull roots with spring rain. 5 Winter kept us warm, covering 6 Earth in forgetful snow, feeding 7 A little life with dried tubers. 8 Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee 9 With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade, 10 And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, 11 And drank coffee, and talked for an hour. 12 Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch. 13 And when we were children, staying at the archduke's, 14 My cousin's, he took me out on a sled, 15 And I was frightened. He said, Marie, 16 Marie, hold on tight. And down we went. 17 In the mountains, there you feel free. 18 I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter. ------------------------------------------------------- 31 Frisch weht der Wind 32 Der Heimat zu 33 Mein Irisch Kind, 34 Wo weilest du? 35 'You gave me hyacinths first a year ago; 36 'They called me the hyacinth girl.' 37 --Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden, 38 Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not 39 Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither 40 Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, 41 Looking into the heart of light, the silence. 42 Oed' und leer das Meer. ------------------------------------------------------- 43 Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante, 44 Had a bad cold, nevertheless 45 Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe, 46 With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she, 47 Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor, 48 (Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!) ------------------------------------------------------- 121 'Do 122 'You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember 123 'Nothing?' 124 I remember 125 Those are pearls that were his eyes. 126 'Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?' ------------------------------------------------------- 312 Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead, 313 Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell 314 And the profit and loss. -------------------------------------------------------
Now here are some of the lines from one of the drafts of The Waste Land (Facsimile pp. 17 and 19). These lines are from the second section of the poem (finally entitled "A Game of Chess) and correspond to published lines 115-126. I have emphasized the areas that are different from the published version:
I think we met first in rats' alley, Where the dead men lost their bones. "What is that noise?" The wind under the door. "What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?" Carrying Away the little light dead people. "Do you know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember "Nothing?" I remember The hyacinth garden. Those are pearls that were his eyes, yes! Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?"
As you see, in the draft of The Waste Land Eliot connected the hyacinth garden of line 37 to the drowned Phoenician Sailor of line 47 with the lines "I remember / The hyacinth garden. Those are pearls that were his eyes, yes!" In the published version of The Waste Land "I remember the hyacinth garden" was missing. Yet Eliot was compelled to restore the connection and he did so though his note to line 126 of the published poem which read "Cf. Part I, l. 37, 48." He wanted us to compare line 126 (and the preceding lines) with the lines numbered 37 and 48. Here again are the cited lines (as published):
124 I remember 125 Those are pearls that were his eyes. 126 'Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?' 37 --Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden, 47 Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor, 48 (Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
This makes a connection between the Hyacinth garden, the "hyacinth girl", "his eyes" and the drowned Phoenician Sailor (who reappears in line 312 as "Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead" in the section entitled "Death by Water".) Due to the combination of "his" and "girl" the line for "hyacinth girl" is probably better read with the emphasis on "girl" rather than "hyacinth" (as "They called me the hyacinth girl" instead of "They called me the hyacinth girl".)
With the connection made between the hyacinth girl and Phlebas we must make a connection between one of these and Verdenal. We shall do that by placing Verdenal in the Hyacinth garden.
Let us use lilac (which appears on line 2 of The Waste Land) as a symbol for the hyacinth which in turn is a male symbol (from the myth of Hyacinthus). I don't believe that this too much of a stretch as the lilac is similar to the hyacinth due to its form and color. Then remember that earlier we read Eliot's reminiscence of a friend waving a branch of lilac in a garden. This still does not definitely put Verdenal in the Hyacinth garden but as Miller stated: "Although Jean Verdenal's name is not mentioned, there seems little doubt in view of the Prufrock dedication that he is the friend referred to."
To press the case a little further, the section about the Hyacinth garden is surrounded by lines in German taken from Richard Wagner's Opera Tristan und Isolde (lines 31-34 and 42). Indeed, in the draft of The Waste Land Eliot had a separator after line 30 and he had the lines 31-34 immediately followed by the "Hyacinth garden" lines without a blank line between them. In one of his letters to Eliot (July, 1911) Verdenal rhapsodizes about that very opera [v. Southam , p. 145]:
and"I went the other day to the Gotterdammerung, conducted by Nikisch; the end must be one of the highest points ever reached by man."
"Tristan and Isolde is terribly moving at first hearing, and leaves you prostrate with ecstasy and thirsting to get back to it again."
To supplement my case more, one could suppose that the "us" of "Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee" (line 8) is, in fact, Eliot and Verdenal. The Starnbergersee is a lake near Munich. Eliot visited Munich in the summer of 1911 and finished "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" there. Eliot's volume of poetry, Prufrock and other Observations, was dedicated to Jean Verdenal. It is not unreasonable to think that Eliot may have been accompanied by Verdenal on this trip and that the "summer" section of the poem is based on Eliot's real life experiences. Eliot did claim to have had an actual conversation with Austrian Countess Marie von Wallersee-Larish, the "Marie" of line 15.
(Less anyone argue that the summer with Verdenal does not fit in regarding line 5's "Winter kept us warm" let's note that the "us" of that line may not be the same "us" of line 8's "Summer surprised us" as the change in line lengths may signal a change in thought.)
At this point, the simplest case for the importance of Verdenal to The Waste Land has been made. Miller presents a more through case. Yet, still, I must admit that Eliot has so many meanings and allusions buried in The Waste Land that it is a simple matter to make an interpretation to one's liking. And one can be sure that it will not be to someone else's liking.
If you which to see other people's ideas about Verdenal and Eliot you can search for "Verdenal" at the TSE Discussion Group Archives. The search will take a little while.
In this section I will speculate about various things such as:
From some personal correspondence from James Miller:
As for what else the letters tell us, I have made my own speculations clear in my essay, "T.S. Eliot's 'Uranian Muse': The Verdenal Letters," in American Notes and Queries (ANQ), Fall, 1998, pp. 4-18.
I have used the following sources in writing this WebPage:
To give this book proper credit I will let the blurb on the book jacket describe it:
A major reinterpretation, T.S. Eliot's Personal Waste Land: Exorcism of the Demons takes Eliot at his word in his reiterated statements that The Waste Land was not a "criticism of the contemporary world" but a personal "grouse against life." It is the first critical work to investigate in depth the sources of the poem in Eliot's life, with particular attention to Eliot,s "Calamus"-like attachment to a French youth during Eliot's graduate year in Paris, his subsequent precipitate (and disasterous) marriage following the death of his young French friend in World War I, and his 1921 nervous breakdown (suffering from what he called "an aboulie and emotional derangement which has been a lifelong affliction") that led to the writing of The Waste Land. Yet the main thrust of this work is not on Eliot's life, but on his poetry, exploring ways in which the fragmentary details of his life shape and illuminate the poems.
John T. Mayer T.S. Eliot's Silent Voices
(1989) Oxford University Press, Inc., ISBN 0-19-505668-X.
Mayer cites Miller. He does not mention Verdenal nearly as much as Miller but he does have about a half dozen pages devoted to Verdenal and presents some information that Miller does not.
T.S. Eliot - The Waste Land:
A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the
Annotations of Ezra Pound
(1971) Edited and with an Introduction by
Valerie Eliot, Harcourt Brace & Company,
ISBN 0-15-694870-2).
T.S. Eliot -
Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909 - 1917
(1996) Edited and anotated by Christopher Ricks,
Harcourt Brace & Company,
ISBN 0-15-100274-6).
B. C. Southam
A Guide to the Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot
(1994) Harcourt Brace & Company, ISBN 0-15-600261-2.
Once again I'll let the publisher's blurb describe the book:
"People are rightly suspicious of notes", Southam says. "and this book is made up of little else. But my one aim has been to help the reader towards his own understanding of Eliot's poetry. Basically, this Guide is an aid, to be used like any work of reference, to be consulted and then put aside." Systematically and straightforwardly, Southam identifies the wide and often baffling quotations, allusions, and historical references that appear in the work of the man who has been called "the greatest inventive genius of twentieth-century poetry."
The following were not used directly but were cited by one or more of the above authors:
T.S. Eliot -
The Letters of T.S. Eliot : 1898-1922 (Vol 1)
(1988) Valerie Eliot (Editor)
Harcourt Brace & Company,
ISBN 0-151-50885-2
This first volume of Eliot's correspondence covers his childhood in St. Louis, Missouri, through 1922. The contents have been assembled by his widow, Valerie, from collections, libraries, and private sources worldwide.
The letters from Verdenal to Eliot are reprinted here in French and in English translation.
Expected to be published in 1999:
| 1888 - | Eliot born. |
| 1890 - | Verdenal born. |
| 1906 to 1909 - | Eliot is an undergraduate at Harvard (graduated in just 3 years). |
| 1909 to 1910 - | Eliot in graduate school at Harvard. |
| 1910 to 1911 - | Eliot went to Paris to study at the Sorbonne (aged 22). Stays at a pension with Jean Verdenal (aged 20). They had separate rooms. |
| 1911 - | Eliot finishes "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in Munich. |
| 1911 to 1912 - | Eliot and Verdenal correspond while Eliot is in America. |
| 1911 to 1914 - | Eliot back in graduate school at Harvard. |
| March 1913 - | Verdenal enters military service in France. |
| 1914 - | Eliot visits France on the way to study in Marburg, Germany. When war breaks out Eliot goes to England (to become his permanent home.) Did Eliot visit Verdenal while in France? |
| 1914 to 1915 - | Eliot, while still a Harvard graduate student, given a Sheldon Travelling Fellowship to study Aristotle at Oxford. |
| 25 April 1915 - | Amphibious landing at Gallipoli commences. |
| 2 May 1915 - | Jean Verdenal killed. |
| 26 June 1915 - | Eliot marries Vivien Haigh-Wood. |
| January 1916 - | A letter indicates that Eliot definitely knows of Verdenal's death by this time. The question remains though of when he first learned that his friend was killed. |
| 1917 - | Prufrock and other Observations published. Dedicated to Jean Verdenal. Contains the poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", at least partially composed during Eliot's Paris year. |
| 1922 - | Eliot's The Waste Land published. Is Phlebas an allusion to Verdenal? |
| 1934 - | Eliot publishes a reminiscence of a friend waving a branch of lilac in the Luxembourg Gardens of Paris. |
The epigraph from Dante that Eliot used with the dedication to Verdenal in Prufrock and other Observations came from Purgatorio, Canto XXI, lines 133-136:
This can be translated as:Or puoi la quantitate
Comprender dell' amor ch'a te mi scalda,
Quando dismento nostra vanitate,
Trattando l'ombre come cosa salda.
Now you are able to comprehend the quality of love that warms me to you, when I forget our emptiness, treating shades as if they were solid.
or as
Now you can understand how much love burns in me for you, when I forget our insubstantiality, treating the shades as one treats solid things.
Dante had the Roman poet Statius speak these lines to Virgil. Statius lived generations after Virgil and greatly admired his work. In purgatory, when Statius saw Virgil guiding Dante, he came up to Virgil to greet him. He was unable to touch him as both Statius and Virgil were ghosts (shades) and had no physical bodies (thus their emptiness.)
The published version of the epigraph for "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" came from Dante's Inferno:
A translation is:S'io credessi che mia risposta fosse
a persona che mai tomasse al mundo,
questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma per cio che giammai di questo fondo
non torno vivo alcun, s'i'odo il vero,
senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.
"If I thought that my reply would be to someone who would ever return to earth, this flame would remain without further movement; but as no one has ever returned alive from this gulf, if what I hear is true, I can answer you with no fear of infamy."
These lines are taken from Dante's "Inferno", and are spoken by the character of Count Guido da Montefelltro. Dante meets the punished Guido in the Eighth chasm of Hell. Guido explains that he is speaking freely to Dante only because he believes Dante is one of the dead who could never return to earth to report what he says.
The draft version of the epigraph for "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" comes from Dante's Purgatorio, Canto XXVI, lines 147-148:
More fully (lines 142-148):'sovegna vos a temps de ma dolor'.
Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina.
A translation is:'Ieu sui Arnaut, que plor e vau cantan;
consiros vei la passada folor,
e vei jausen lo jorn qu'esper, denan.
Ara vos prec, per aquella valor
que vos guida al som de l'escalina,
sovegna vos a temps de ma dolor!'.
Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina.
'I am Arnold, who weeps and goes singing. I see in thought all the past folly. And I see with joy the day for which I hope, before me. And so I pray you, by that Virtue which leads you to the topmost stair--be mindful in due time of my pain'. Then dived he back into that fire which refines them.
In case you are viewing a printed copy of this page or have a text only version of this file these are the links used in the HTML version of the page (January 1999):
Copyright © 1999 by Rickard A. Parker
Send mail to "Rick" at
raparker@theworld.com
Originally published January 1999
Last updated 30 March 2000
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