This April, the public will have the opportunity to reconsider such questions, perhaps to find some answers. To celebrate The Waste Land’s 100th birthday – it actually first appeared in October 1922, but a little poetic leave seems justified – a six-day festival will occupy the City of London, filling 22 churches with responses to Eliot’s poem and in his afterlife. The title, quite apt, is Fragments. “There are so many different elements in The Waste Land, so many different ways of reacting,” says co-curator Séan Doran. “It’s a kind of dream job.” Unreal City: Ruby Philogenes prepares to sing Wagner at St Vedast Church under the pseudonym Foster Church. Photo: Matthew Andrews Anyone who wants a dry textual analysis should look elsewhere: there is not a single simple reading of the poem on offer. Instead, Doran and his fellow director Liam Browne have planned a jumble of repetitive artistic fantasies, many of them music, combining – as the poem does – popular culture with the highest art. An event includes a piano transcript of Stravinsky’s Spring Rite, which Eliot heard the year before the poem was released and which deeply influenced him. Another gathers around the Messiaen Quartet for the End of the Year, written in a Nazi prisoner of war camp, and similarly collapses with a sense of precarious faith in the most grim circumstances. The festival concludes with a tribute to the star of the musical Marie Lloyd at Wilton’s, which Eliot passionately admired – perhaps unusually – as a “genius” and whose obituary was composed a week before the first release of The Waste Land. The festival will escalate into five multi-party “evening festivities” and audiences are encouraged to take in individual events, sampling, say, a new scene from Orkney-born composer Erland Cooper on their way to concerts or concerts. music. Mezzo-soprano Ruby Philogene will perform songs by Wagner, one of a host of artists and writers mentioned or referenced in Eliot’s poem. “There are suggested routes,” Doran explains. “But you can skip and accept other sites as much as you can. Or just sit for 50 minutes with Gavin Bryars ‘Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet and slowly immerse yourself in it. “ Would Eliot approve? Laughs. “I hope he said that we have built something real on the poem. We put it back in its place. “ The festival begins with a “secular sermon” delivered by Jeanette Winterson at the ancient nave of Southwark Cathedral, which will explore the examination of faith and faith by the Waste Land. Eliot was an ardent student of sermons by 17th-century preachers such as Lancelot Andrews – buried a few feet away from where Winderson would speak – and the poem shows Eliot trying to find a form for his culminating Christianity. with his conversion to Anglicanism in 1927. (Virginia Woolf’s girlfriend did not think he was serious; he was absolutely). The poem explores some of the deeper questions that exist, says Winterson: “It is a slow point in the changing world. It encourages you to remove your hand from the panic button and breathe a little deeper. “There is a real meditative quality to it, if you take the time.” Having first encountered The Waste Land as a student, Winterson refreshes her memory by listening to Alec Guinness’s famous recording of the mid-1970s, witty and surprisingly lyrical. “Each time, there would be somewhere deeper to go, somewhere unexpected,” he thinks. “It’s filmy, almost visual. “Every time you think you know where you are, you move somewhere else.” How does he approach Eliot’s unquestioned anti-Semitism? “That was real, and I do not justify it,” he replies. “But I’m not a fan of the culture of annulment.” The Church of St Mary Woolnoth, named after Eliot’s poem, came to life. Photo: Nathaniel Noir / Alamy Spread over the city’s historic churches, 15 of which were designed by Christopher Wren, the Fragments Festival highlights something not always appreciated about The Waste Land: that it is one of the greatest poems about London ever written. Southwark Cathedral is a stone’s throw from London Bridge, the site of one of the poem’s most destructive meditations on mortality. many, / I had not thought that death had been undone so much »). As a clerk at Lloyd’s Bank, Eliot worked on King William Street, just north of the bridge. will have gone through the gloomy architecture of St Mary Woolnoth church and will have heard what the poem calls the “dead sound” of her clock every working day. A later section takes us to something that sounds like a Cockney pub at closing time (“Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight …”), while one of its most evocative sequences draws the reader eastward along the Strand, to a diving bar on Lower Thames Street where the mandolin is played and “where fishermen relax at noon”. “We tried to make it specific to the site,” says Doran. “There is so much in the poem about the place, London above all.” Some of these varied sights and sounds will be refracted into a new acoustic piece devised by French sound artist and composer Pierre-Yves Macé and set in St Mary-Le-Bow at Cheapside. Played in a loop, you will try a babel of voices and characters from the text to create a kind of world sound for this noisier poems. Jeanette Winterson will give a “secular sermon”. Photo: Sam Churchill Known for pieces that combine specific sounds and musical textures, Macé drew on the polyphonic texture of Eliot’s writing, which – as well as excerpts he heard on the streets of London and the drink holes – draws deeply from a spread of European influences, from Apollinaire and Baudelaire. to Dante and Wagner. “Little by little, we had a cast of 10 voices, among them the French, the Italians and the German physicists,” explains Macé. “Then I made music from spoken words.” Although The Waste Land is considered a cornerstone of English literature, it is much more than that, he continues. “The poem is completely European, in my opinion.” Not just European, says British-Indian pianist Rekesh Chauhan, who will be hosting one of the festival’s closing events. Inspired by the last words of the poem, “Shantih shantih shantih” – a Sanskrit phrase from the ancient Hindu script, translated by Eliot as “Peace beyond understanding” – Chauhan will rely on classic Indian rags to offer a meditation for calm and rest. Eliot studied Sanskrit and was fascinated by the connections between different belief systems. Chauhan argues that despite his anxiety and turmoil, the poem shows a sense of life beyond that. “Waste Land is dark, but there is also a lot about rebirth, renewal, spring,” he says. “I really hope it comes out.” Perhaps this is a lesson to be learned from The Waste Land, a century later: created in the shadow of world war and a catastrophic world pandemic, it asks if fragments of the old order can ever be reassembled or if, to move forward, we need to start again. These issues boomeranged in 2022, somewhat strangely, Doran observes. “One hundred years later, here we are again: Covid, world war, the sense of fragility of life, even climate change. The poem could not be more relevant now. “ But on top of that, he argues, it offers a way to navigate a world where so much is nervous and uncertain. “All you need to do is listen to his power and his spirituality. “Everything is there, they are waiting.” Fragments: The Waste Land 2022 is located in various churches in the City of London, from 7 to 12 April.
