Inventions of the March Hare

The Manuscripts

On 21 August 1922, T. S. Eliot wrote from London to John Quinn in New York. Quinn, lawyer and patron, had been generous to Eliot, who was writing to him now about giving him the manuscript of The Waste Land. (The poem was to appear in The Criterion in October 1922, in The Dial in November, and as a volume from Boni and Liveright in December.) Quinn had insisted: ‘I shall be glad to have it, but you must agree to the condition that I send you a draft for what I think it is worth’. Eliot counter-insisted:

I certainly cannot accept your proposal to purchase the manuscript at your own price, and if you will not accept it in recognition of what you have done for me lately and in the past, it will not be any pleasure to me to sell it to you. I therefore hope that you will accept it. But as I feel that perhaps you like some of my early poems best I should be glad, for example, to send you the manuscript of “Prufrock” instead, and I hope you will let me do this.

Quinn did not demur, but accepted The Waste Land manuscript as a gift on condition that he might buy the manuscript of the early poems. His letter to Eliot said:

We won’t quarrel about the MS. of The Waste Land. I’ll accept it from you, not “for what I have lately done for you and in the past”, but as a mark of friendship, but on this condition: That you will let me purchase of you the MS. of the Early Poems that you referred to. If you have the Prufrock only, then I’ll purchase that. But if you have the MS. of the whole volume of your poems, including the Prufrock, I should greatly value that, and then I’ll have two complete manuscripts of yours.

Quinn paid $140, £29.14.10. Eliot described the Notebook to Quinn on 21 September 1922:

The leather bound notebook is one which I started in 1909 and in which I entered all my work of that time as I wrote it, so that it is the only original manuscript barring of course rough scraps and notes, which were destroyed at the time, in existence. You will find a great many sets of verse which have never been printed and which I am sure you will agree never ought to be printed, and in putting them in your hands, I beg you fervently to keep them to yourself and see that they never are printed.

More than once, Eliot deprecated these early poems. There is a letter to B. L. Reid, 23 July 1963, which refers to the poems in the Notebook (its whereabouts then unknown to Eliot), as ‘unpublished and unpublishable’.3 And there is his letter to Daniel Woodward, 3 April 1964: ‘I cannot feel altogether sorry that this [typescript] and the notebook have disappeared. The unpublished poems in the notebook were not worth publishing’'.

Quinn died in 1924. When in 1965 Eliot died, he had never learned what had become of these early manuscripts.

The earliest poems in the Notebook are dated, by Eliot, Nov. 1909. There is in the Notebook only one poem—Humouresque (After J. Laforgue)—of the seven which, between 24 May 1907 and 24 June 1910, he published in the Harvard Advocate.

For all the continuity, then, with the Laforguean elements in some of the Harvard Advocate poems—strongest in the one that Eliot has in the Notebook, Humouresque (After J. Laforgue)—it is clear that the Notebook promised a fresh start, one which was to issue, in 1917, in Prufrock and Other Observations. For the Notebook, which opens with a poem which went into Prufrock and Other Observations (Conversation Galante), contains The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Portrait of a Lady, Preludes (IV being on a separate leaf laid in), and Morning at the Window. Rhapsody on a Windy Night and Mr. Apollinax are among the loose leaves now with the Notebook; so, of the poems in Prufrock and Other Observations, only five are unrepresented: The ‘Boston Evening Transcript’, Aunt Helen, Cousin Nancy, Hysteria and La Figlia Che Piange.

The Notebook has in addition twenty-seven poems (four on separate leaves laid in), plus Prufrock’s Pervigilium within The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. To these are added, first, the bawdy verses which survive on leaves (now at Yale) excised from the Notebook; and second, from loose papers with the Notebook, a further seventeen poems, two of them in French.
The whole runs from 1909 to 1917, the year of Prufrock and Other Observations.

These early unpublished poems include five sequences: Mandarins (1–4); Easter: Sensations of April (I–II); Goldfish (I–IV); Suite Clownesque (I–IV); and The Engine (I–II). Eliot was asked in 1959, ‘You seem often to have written poems in sections. Did they begin as separate poems?’ He replied: ‘That’s one way in which my mind does seem to have worked throughout the years poetically—doing things separately and then seeing the possibility of fusing them together, altering them, and making a kind of whole of them.

The Notebook of Eliot’s which contains the poems now published as Inventions of the March Hare is in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. Together with the long-lost manuscript of The Waste Land, it was bought by the Library in 1958 (the year of Eliot’s seventieth birthday), but—because of the favouring of B. L. Reid’s biography of Quinn—no announcement was made until 25 October 1968, three years after Eliot’s death.

Both The Waste Land manuscript and the Notebook were described in detail by the great bibliographer of Eliot, Donald Gallup, in the Times Literary Supplement, 7 November 1968: The ‘Lost’ Manuscripts of T. S. Eliot. This account (slightly revised) subsequently appeared in the Bulletin of the New York Public Library (lxxii, Dec. 1968, 641–52).7

In 1971 there appeared The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound, edited by Valerie Eliot. This appended, as ‘The Miscellaneous Poems’, ten poems from certain leaves which did not form part either of The Waste Land manuscript itself or of the (earlier) Notebook. These leaves had been judged by Mrs Eliot, in concurrence with Dr Gallup, to belong with, and sometimes to contain draft lines for, The Waste Land. ‘The Miscellaneous Poems’ published in 1971 are: (i) The Death of Saint Narcissus (which was ‘set up in type apparently for publication in Poetry’, Oct. 1915, Gallup reported, and was included in Poems Written in Early Youth, 1950, 1967); (ii) Song: The golden foot I may not kiss or clutch (published as Song to the Opherian, in The Tyro, April 1921); (iii) Exequy: Persistent lovers will repair; (iv) The Death of the Duchess; (v) After the turning of the inspired days; (vi) I am the Resurrection and the Life; (vii) So through the evening, through the violet air; (viii) Elegy: Our prayers dismiss the parting shade; (ix) Dirge: Full fathom five your Bleistein lies; (x) Those are pearls that were his eyes. See!

The authoritative account of the Notebook was given by Dr Gallup. It is quoted now, with his kind permission, from the Bulletin of the New York Public Library.

Bound in quarter brown leather, with marbled-paper sides, the notebook measures approximately 20.5 × 17 cm. A ticket in the upper-left corner of the inside front cover indicates that it was purchased at Procter Brothers Co., Old Corner Bookstore, Gloucester, Mass. (The Eliots used to spend their summers at a cottage on Eastern Point, Gloucester.) The price seems to have been 25¢. Originally it must have contained 72 leaves of ruled white paper, of which 12 have been excised, 10 leaving traces of stubs. Eight leaves contain manuscript on rectos only, two on versos only, 22 on both rectos and versos, and 28 are blank. The leaves or pages actually written upon (with the exception of the last two) are numbered from 1 to 52, possibly by T. S. Eliot at a later date. (Two leaves at the end of the book have been used by T. S. Eliot with the volume reversed, and the writing therefore appears on their versos, upside-down in relation to the rest of the notebook.) In addition there are five leaves laid in the first part of the notebook, four of them with blank versos, and two leaves are laid in at the end, also both with versos blank. (One of the first group of leaves laid in, that containing an untitled poem beginning “Of these ideas in his head”, was transferred from the loose leaves (miscellaneous) after The New York Public Library’s press release [in October 1968].)

The front free end paper bears the (early) signature of T. S. Eliot in blue ink, underlined, with title above, “Complete Poems of,” and dedication below (as in the Prufrock volume, but with slightly enlarged epigraph) added in black ink not before 1915. An otherwise blank flyleaf at the front has the title in black ink, cancelled, “Inventions of the March Hare.” Two blank forms for reporting “Fortnightly Marks and Order” (at the Highgate School? [where Eliot taught in early 1916]) are stuck to the inside back cover.

The notebook was apparently used by Eliot, beginning after January and before April 1910, writing at first only on the rectos but subsequently filling in most of the blanks with later poems.

Dr Gallup followed his account of the Notebook with a list of the poems, briefly described as to their titles, their being in ink or pencil, their length, and their having been published or not. The poems in the Notebook are dated by Eliot, mostly in pencil and mostly (it would seem from the hand) at about the same time. A letter from Eliot to Eudo C. Mason, 21 Feb. 1936, is informative about the dates for the related poems in Prufrock and Other Observations:

1. Alfred Prufrock was written in 1911, but parts of it date from the preceding year. Most of it was written in the summer of 1911 when I was in Munich. The text of 1917, which remains unchanged, does not differ from the original version in any way. I did at one time write a good bit more of it, but these additions I destroyed without their ever being printed. It is by no means true that all of the other poems in the 1917 volume were written after Prufrock. Conversation Gallante, for instance, was written in 1909, and all of the more important poems in the volume are earlier than Prufrock, except La Figlia che Piange, 1912, and two or three short pieces written in 1914 or ’15.8.

Excised leaves from the Notebook have come to light since 1968 among the Ezra Pound papers now in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. In the catalogue of a 1975 exhibition in honour of Pound, Dr Gallup wrote:

On various occasions, over many years, Ezra Pound expressed his admiration for a series of vigorously scatological poems that Eliot had begun while at Harvard, dealing with two redoubtable characters, King Bolo and his Queen. In 1922, when Eliot sold to John Quinn (for $140) a notebook containing manuscript copies of all his early poems, published and unpublished, he took the precaution of excising those leaves containing parts of the Bolo series. He seems to have given them, along with scraps of other versions (probably laid into the same notebook), to Pound.

On the envelope which accompanies these excised leaves and others with similar verses, Pound wrote in pencil: ‘T.S.E. Chançons ithyphallique’. None of these excised pages is without scatological verses, which corroborates Eliot’s motive, but the excision brought about the mutilation of poems thereby left incomplete in the Notebook, lacking lines that had been written on the recto or verso of the torn-out pages.

The present edition supplies, from Yale, verses which, not recovered at that date, could not be listed in Dr Gallup’s 1968 article but which he has kindly made known: of Goldfish IV, the closing twenty lines; of Suite Clownesque, the closing line of III and the whole of IV; and the closing lines of Portrait of a Lady I plus an epigraph from Laforgue, not adopted, for ‘III’.

The ithyphallic songs, including Columbo and Bolo verses, are to be found here in Appendix A, separated from the other poems in accordance with their excision from the Notebook. On balance, it was judged right to include the ribald verses, despite Eliot’s having excised their leaves and their therefore not having formed part of the work sent to, and seen by, Quinn. The editor is aware that such scabrous exuberances may lend themselves to either the wrong kind or the wrong amount of attention. But the case for including them is a combination of the following considerations: that the excised leaves cannot be simply set aside, since on recto or verso they supply missing lines of the poems proper, and even one whole poem; that the ribald verses constitute part of the story of the poet’s transition from the Laforguean velleities of 1917 to the Corbièresque bluntnesses, such as Sweeney Erect, of 1920; that some details in these verses furnish valuable cross-references for the poems proper; that such verses are rightly being included by Mrs Eliot, in her edition of the letters, whenever they figure within such; and finally that, as Mrs Eliot has made clear, nothing of Eliot’s is to be suppressed or censored.

With the Notebook there are loose leaves, described in 1968 by Dr Gallup:

These leaves were divided apparently by John Quinn or one of his clerks into two groups: those for poems included in Poems (1920), and miscellaneous poems mostly unpublished. The first group contained 28 leaves, the second, 29, when the manuscripts were received, but since the Library’s press release [October 1968] two leaves have been transferred from the second to the first group, and one leaf from the second group has been laid in the notebook. The poems are in various states and versions, with corrections, and are written on a variety of papers, most of them showing traces of having been folded and some much worn at the folds.

The present edition follows Dr Gallup in these respects: in its use of the terms ‘page’ and ‘leaf’ in relation to the Notebook (a leaf being numbered on the recto only—see p. xiv above for this numbering); in its division of the loose leaves into ‘published’ and ‘miscellaneous’; and in the sequence given to the poems from the loose leaves in accordance with Dr Gallup’s numbering.

The Notebook poems are here presented in the order in which they stand there. Two other possible orderings, both chronological, suggest themselves: order of the poems’ composition, and order of their being written in or copied into the Notebook. Though each of these would repay study and would usher certain aspects into the light, neither is—in the present editor’s judgement—to be preferred to the straight reproduction of the order as it stands in the Notebook.

For any chronological ordering will at some points cut across Eliot’s ordering of the poems into sequences (Mandarins 1–4, Goldfish I–IV . . . ). Moreover, the order in which the poems were written in or copied into the Notebook cannot be confidently or entirely established. The present edition follows Dr Gallup in recording that some poems are in blue ink, others in black ink, others in pencil. The blue ink antedates the black ink, and there is the evidence of changes in Eliot’s hand. Agreed, further, there are anomalies when one reproduces the Notebook order as it stands; Fourth Caprice in Montparnasse ([page] 5), which is in black ink, stands between First Caprice in North Cambridge and Second Caprice in North Cambridge, both in blue ink. But, were one to move Fourth Caprice in Montparnasse, or Interlude in London (likewise in black ink, and following Second Caprice in North Cambridge), where exactly would one move them to, and upon what principle of location?

Granted, it is not entirely satisfactory to leave them (and a few others such) where Eliot entered them, since they are not altogether orderly there, but it would be very unsatisfactory to feel obliged to exercise editorial authority in order to place them elsewhere, especially upon such insufficient evidence of authorial intentions or wishes.
Dr Gallup’s original article in the Times Literary Supplement in 1968 said:

The Notebook was apparently used by Eliot, beginning after January and before April, 1910, writing at first only on the rectos but subsequently filling in many of the blanks with later poems; no attempt can be made, however, to establish any such order for this account of the manuscripts in the time and space available.

In revising slightly this article for the Bulletin of the New York Public Library, Dr Gallup changed ‘establish any such order’ to ‘establish the probable order’. The most that could be established, then, is a probable order for Eliot’s writing in, or copying in, the poems; and even a probable order for all the poems might be thought on occasion beyond our ascertaining. Dr Gallup valuably urges that this order should be borne in mind, even if sometimes the most one can do is guess at it, but with regret he has acknowledged, in a letter to the present editor, that it is probably not possible to try to print the poems in such an order.