Alex Little is an author and poet. ‘Decoding The Waste Land’ www.facebook.com/tseliotgay and a website www.alex-little.com
Twitter @otheralexlittle
medium.com/@Appleplex
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I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest, but I really am.
I love Denipole.
And listen for the clown.
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I love Denipole.
Welcome to the DellingPod.
And I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest, but I really am.
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You'll reach about 40,000 or more dedicated listeners and viewers and you'll have things in common with them, I assume.
Anyway, on to this week's special guest.
Alexander Little.
Alexander, this is the first time we've met each other.
The first time I've even known what you look like.
And you contacted me out of the blue.
And I think if I hadn't been who I am, I might have found you a bit mad.
Because you've got this thesis which I think a lot of people would just go yeah it's a bit esoteric but actually I'm really excited I'm really really looking forward to what you have to tell me about T.S.
Eliot and I know that lots of people Because it's always a problem with cultural issues.
Whenever you broach the arts, particularly the high arts on the podcast, it's quite a turn off for a lot of people because not everyone's read T.S.
Eliot, for example, let alone is really familiar with his work.
And a lot of people will be going, well, why should we care?
So before we move on, can we talk a bit about T.S.
Eliot and how he's been sold to us?
Yeah, okay, so… I mean, he's supposed to be the greatest poet of the 20th century, isn't he?
Sure, that's the niche he probably occupies and a real sort of intellectual heavyweight.
He's the sort of kingpin of the poetry order of the last hundred years and he's probably the most heavyweight and difficult poet that ever lived.
He sort of occupies that niche or that identity, I would say.
And so that's very exclusive.
And people sometimes ask me what drew me to T.S.
Eliot.
And I don't think anything did draw me to T.S.
Eliot.
I didn't like T.S.
Eliot, but I was led by a professor at Oxford.
I think, talked into, and maybe even tricked into studying T.S. Eliot.
And I trusted him.
And then he dropped a bombshell.
And he was probably trying to expose something without getting implicated himself.
And I'm not quite sure of his motives exactly.
It's taken me years to sort of gather maturity to be more closer to his age to understand what he was trying to do.
And so I come at it from a very different angle, the opposite angle from what most people do.
And so what I learned really was something that debunks that stuff.
Yeah, okay.
Before we go on and you tell me your story, I just want to just establish more ground with TS Eliot.
- Elliot was. - With T.S. Eliot.
So I remember when I first studied T.S. Eliot and it was in the sixth form.
It might have been even in the Oxbridge class at my my school because in those days used to stay on the next determined do and do Oxbridge but certainly when we studied TS Eliot it was like a You'd finally arrived as an English student.
You were dealing with the big boys stuff now and it was complicated and you felt like you'd finally sort of broached Everest.
Did you have that same experience?
Well I didn't study it at school but I experienced it at university and it was like that.
So this, what I have to say, will probably annoy people who are into TS Eliot.
It's the sort of like Mensa club.
If you know what I mean, you know, people who are into TS Eliot think they're very clever.
I do know what you mean.
And that's how it's introduced to people, so a lot of people are put off except those clever people in the clever parts of the clever street.
You're sounding quite faint.
That's not good.
You're sounding quite faint.
Does it sound better now?
Is there any way you can make your microphone... That's much better, yes.
Okay, so say that again, explain your point about Mensa.
Well, I think that with T.S.
Eliot, what you find is that people feel excluded and don't like it in the general public, perhaps, but the people who feel that they're clever, they find a vindication in T.S.
Eliot and they attach, associate with him.
And that's the sort of niche that Eliot occupies.
And that's how you're usually introduced to him.
For example, Studying English literature at university, you know, you're studying poetry and that's usually about emotion and creativity and then you suddenly come across T.S.
Eliot and it's like you're studying science or maths or something and there are these footnotes everywhere and there are these references to other works and people who enjoy Eliot who feel that in his work there are references, they can sort of name drop authors who he refers to with his literary allusions and quotations which are in his poetry.
So, you know, it's for people who want to show they're clever, they might identify with T.S.
Eliot and quote T.S.
Eliot.
And that's where he often comes up.
And of course, that rubs other people up the wrong way, because it seems like some people showing off their knowledge of culture and art and literature.
So that's probably how he's introduced to most people.
Let's try and be fair to him as far as we can.
He is quite quotable.
So I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
I should have been a pair of ragged ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silence sciences April is the cruelest month all this stuff which which which we do when we're younger.
When we're younger and we're excited about English literature, we've discovered this stuff and we think, well, I've now got some Eliot to quote.
Now, what's hard for me now, now that I'm much more skeptical of the world, is, is this stuff genuinely good or is it stuff that you quote in order to show how literate How educated you are?
I think it's a deep one because Eliot was definitely brilliant at coming up with catchy phrases.
He was a brilliant poet of his own right, but he went through a stage of building poetry out of plagiarized lines or speaking in the voices of other poets and writers as a voice for himself.
And creating, essentially, fashionable modern art that was authentic in itself, because it carried his voice and there was something authentic in it.
But it looks like literary, intelligent gobbledygook to the outsider.
And I think there's a strong element of fraud to it, but we'd have to go into that specifically, what that is, and how that was set up with Ezra Pound on board.
I mean, even the fraud goes over people's heads.
And I think, you know, people who like to quote and that kind of thing, they haven't even got to the start of the maze.
The start of where it gets interesting and what's going on.
I want you to take me through this stuff step by step rather than jumping the gun because I think it's really important to get the viewers and listeners on board, those who haven't done Elliot.
So, T.S.
His most famous work is The Wasteland, isn't it?
Yeah, yeah.
You want me to say something about that?
Which appeared in when?
What year?
Yeah, so The Wasteland is... 1922?
1922, so almost exactly a hundred years old and there was actually the centenary of that was last year and It has enough of a reputation that there should be a centenary of a poem and that would have a bit of coverage in the media and there was sort of Ralph Fiennes doing something from his drama and then there was a documentary called The Hyacinth Girl on the BBC at 9pm, you know, prime time spot, investigating the mystery of the wasteland.
So this hundred-year-old poem I suspect your first impression would be, well, what the hell is going on here?
Like, not for me.
It's got quotations.
It breaks into German near the beginning.
It's not really intelligible.
Although there are passages of lines which might be almost mesmerizing.
It's sort of broken up into different sections, which here's a monologue here and there's something going on here.
And it's not written to be legible in the ordinary narrative sense that you'd read a story.
You'll only be introduced to it in a classroom context, so then you'll be told something which won't necessarily make sense to you, and you'll have to perhaps pretend to sort of get it to not feel that you don't get it.
And you might be told that it's impersonal.
And is that even a word?
What is that in terms of poetry?
And it's not about any of the conventional things that poetry is supposed to be about.
But no one seems to be able to put a finger on exactly what the point of it all is, except that it's great.
You take that for granted because it's gone down as great.
It's there to be studied because it's got a lot of references to other works, perhaps, but there's no... One of the definitions of that poem is that it's somehow ambiguous, and you're not really supposed to look for an answer, or you don't get it, perhaps, or that might be taking away from its greatness, reductive somehow.
So, you're looking at this 12-page poem in five parts, which has textual notes by the author referring you to certain texts and I suppose acknowledging some of the quotations that are in it.
And then you might recognise some of the quotations, and I guess you might feel pleased with yourself if you did, but you might not if you're, you know, just studying in school.
Or even if you're quite well-read, you might not.
You'd feel very smug, wouldn't you?
You might feel smug, you know, and, you know, Maybe you're justified in that and then you might feel, oh, I understand where he's coming at from.
But the thing is, you know, it's so it's almost so limitlessly ambiguous, especially if you don't go into it in a forensic way and really figure out what that is.
There are so many levels on which you can interpret it freely, and people establish, I think, a connection with it that they feel is violated, perhaps, if it's analysed in that forensic way, because it might take away from what you've projected onto it, or what you've taken from it, what it means to you.
So it's kind of... Yeah, can I just ask you something?
I've got this theory on the wasteland.
Which is that wherever it's taught, the default assumption is this is a preeminent work of literature.
This is greatness.
And your job is not to decide whether or not it's great.
That has already been decided for you.
It is part of the pantheon.
And your job is merely to gaze on it with a mixture of awe and curiosity as you examine the richness of the sources.
The bits of Sanskrit and the references to Antony and Cleopatra, the barge she sat in, and the references to Webster, O keep the dog far hence that's friends to man, and so on and so forth.
So it's a bit like a sort of literary wank fest.
Yeah.
Where you just sort of congratulate yourself on your good taste and your good fortune in being exposed to this work.
So was this the case from the moment it came out?
Was everyone going, wow, this is the business?
No, certainly not.
I think it was a generational thing.
So the older generation despised it because it undermined everything they thought poetry was.
On purpose.
So it was very radical when it was published, you know, this new form of poetry that no one can make head or tail of.
And there's a sort of amused admiration in the early reviews by good reviewers who sort of say, well, is this a joke?
And it's quite clever.
I think the cleverest things that were ever said about it were in the first reviews.
And after that, it just all goes, you know, becomes worse and worse until it's almost a farce.
As people follow the directions in the textual notes, which were a joke, and take them seriously.
And then Eliot becomes established in the canon.
And a misunderstanding then presides and still prevails.
But yeah, at first it was a radical change.
Okay.
And it was almost like considered by the people who wanted it to come through.
wanted the changes that Pound was promoting and the modernists were promoting at that time.
These were the The new poets of the 20s.
We'll come on to Pound in a second, because you can't just drop him in there.
Yeah, yeah.
People don't know who Pound is, I'm sure.
Hardly anyone knows who Pound is.
Yeah, agreed.
Before we come on to him, there were people who were ready for it, who were saying, oh, this is an immediate masterpiece.
Yeah, there were people who were, you know, there's a battle, it becomes a culture war, really, in the literary world, because there are people who are backing this kind of verse, and then the wasteland becomes sort of the
The cry, the war cry of that movement and people rally around that and there are people resisting it and I guess the forces of change and originality won that and there was nothing anyone could do about it but it takes a while for that to take effect so Eliot has a delayed effect where his reputation grows and grows over the decades and it's diminished now and he's forgotten but he's a popular poet you know.
Have we heard of any of the people who were against him?
Any big names that we still remember?
There might have been.
I would need to go and be sure that I get that right.
They wouldn't be huge names.
Not like names that anyone's heard of.
But literary people would have heard of some of them.
But basically, No, I mean they would have been like fusty reviewers a little bit compared with giants.
They weren't giants.
Okay, but the trenderati, the people who were looking for the neophiliacs, were a bit like the kind of people who championed Stravinsky's Rite of Spring or whatever, because the same things were happening in music and in art, weren't they?
And I would say, yeah, the poetry scene was the last.
I think there's a bit of delay.
The poetry scene were the last In the modernist revolution, I would say.
The literary scene came after music and art.
So, I mean, Eliot was walking into a space that was already being trailblazed.
So it wasn't that much resistance left, you know what I mean?
The scene was ready for it.
And Pound and Eliot, as we'll come on to Pound, they gave the scene what it was ready for.
So Elliot, famously, well famous to those who know anything about it at all, was a bank, worked in a bank, had the most boring job in the world, probably because he felt that by having a boring job, it would be a contrast, it would leave him free to let his creative side flourish, untainted by his job.
At this point in life, 1922, Was he, I mean, was he, how old was he?
Early 30s, about 33.
He, his story was he, he was from, he's American actually.
He's born in St.
Louis.
He went to Harvard.
Yeah.
And he was going to become a Harvard professor of philosophy.
He was doing a doctorate and he He moved over to Oxford to pursue that and he'd never been published.
This was in about 1914 when he moved to Oxford.
He'd never been published and there he met this poet, Ezra Pound, who was at the middle of the art scene, who took him under his wing and he started Eliot, got him published in 1917 for the first time.
with Prufrock and other observations.
You quoted, I should have been a pair of ragged claws and the other line that's famous maybe is, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.
So this first collection that he published in 1917 later became a classic, but Eliot wasn't heard of in 1922 to a wide audience, you know, just the literary set in London.
He'd written those poems quite a lot earlier that were in that 1917 volume.
So he'd waited a long time and he'd almost given up.
He was discovered by Pound.
Pound took up his career and became his promoter, and Pound was promoting a lot of poets and pushing this modern movement, and he sort of was the guy who would make Eliot into the poster boy of that movement.
So Eliot publishes in 1917.
He's not going to have a big audience at that point.
Then he publishes a second collection in 1920, and it's still, you know, bespoke modern poetry that not many people are reading.
The big breakthrough is The Wasteland and it's promoted as that.
His career is stage managed to put him on the scene by Pound, who knows the big names in literature and publishing.
And he's also working on James Joyce's Ulysses, Pound at that time.
So he takes Elliot under his wing and he promotes him as the big thing.
And he edits the Wasteland as well.
It actually was a collaboration to begin with and Pound hid his own role in that to help promote Elliot to the place where Pound thought he should be.
And just to help create this, to push through the movement and tag it to Elliot.
And so in 1922 that was launched and it actually really impressed a whole generation of younger people.
I mean, people were into poetry then, and it seemed to speak for people, and in a way that's hard to understand now, and I have difficulty fully understanding, it sort of tapped into something, some collective consciousness or something, and it became a hit, a genuine hit.
And then over time, more and more people discovered it, and Elliot became a household name, like a Picasso of poetry.
A Picasso in the literary world, you know, a big name, and a big famous guy whose name is up in lights, a household name.
Because of the Wasteland and then he followed it up with some other poems.
Well, I suppose.
I suppose the publication date of the Wasteland is indicative of something that.
We're four years after the end of the First World War, which must have messed with everyone's heads in a big way.
And so they were looking for something that would Take them away from this that make them understand the world in a different way that make would make sense of things maybe making sense of things through the senseless.
Maybe it may be that the thing about the waste and that appeal for them to them was that it was so obscure and and didn't try and sort of impose too much meaning and maybe maybe that I don't know.
I mean anything's things are possible or It could just have been a fabrication, wasn't it?
I mean, was it dedicated to Ezra Pound?
Il Miglio Fabbro?
That's what he said, wasn't it, at the beginning?
So Ezra Pound, who I never really kind of looked into very much because Elliot was bigger kind of thing, Ezra Pound sounds like the real creator of this whole scene.
He was obviously something special.
Who was he?
There's one thing you mentioned I'd just quickly cover before I talk about Pound there.
You said that it must have been doing something at the time that appealed to people and I think here's where what gets lost soon after a poem is published is that it's actually hypnotic in a way and like a work of magicianship it taps into the way people think at the time and
It's like a piece of theatre that works, like an illusion, that works in the theatre at the time.
And that's what it did to people.
Because it accused people of having the same thoughts as Eliot was, and drew them into this spell.
Right?
So that gets lost over time, and it becomes this literary fossil that we talked about, how you were introduced at school, which was nothing like the way it had an impact to begin with.
But that gets lost.
Now, as for Pound, Pound was the mover and shaker.
He was this guy from Idaho who just somehow got out of a small town in Idaho, went to Europe and decided that he was going to be at the heart of the poetry movement.
And he just was a sort of man of effect.
He just kind of got himself into the middle of the literary scene.
He just found poets who were good, thought he could see who was good, and then he just sort of sacrificed himself to sort of help their careers get going.
Now, was his own poetry good?
Not really.
Like, when you read Pound, there are isolated lines, but a lot of it's sort of like, well, later he went mad, and you can tell it's not even a healthy mad.
And it's not quality writing in large passages.
It's just, it's a lot of quotation stuff that you would recognize from Eliot, but without the hypnotic appeal.
So was, Pound never achieved the popularity of Eliot.
However, he helped, in a way, he basically gave Eliot his own crown.
So he gave Eliot the crown of the pioneering modern artist, whereas Eliot really wasn't really trying to do that until Pound got hold of him.
And then he encouraged Elliot, and Elliot, possibly in a way, was moving into that space because he was so ambitious that he wanted to be a great poet.
And Pound helped Elliot to become the poster boy of Pound's movement.
And Elliot somewhat cynically, I think, occupied that role, which he didn't even believe in.
And Pound took over, and Elliot didn't even know what the finished version of The Wasteland was going to be.
So Pound was actually… Tate took all these drafts of poetry that Elliot had written, and he chopped them up into a new form, half its length, and realized this is going to be the classic that people are going to… that's going to work, you know, within this space, in this movement we're launching.
And he found the good bits, essentially, the bits that were authentic.
cut away the experimental guff and then sort of promoted Eliot and then Eliot had to live with the result and that where that becomes, we'll maybe get into later, where that becomes difficult for Eliot is that Pound puts Eliot in a compromising situation because he puts out his his Uranian poetry or gay poetry
Cuts out the fluff and leaves the stuff and he promotes that and now Elliot has to make sure that people never actually figure out what that's all about.
Ah, so I've looked at the first drafts of the Wasteland.
I mean, it's, it's, it's, maybe garbage is too strong a word, but there's no doubt that without Pound's excisions, it would just be unreadable, wouldn't it?
The Pound kind of took a block of marble and made it into the great Yeah.
But do you think that, well you're talking about the Uranian stuff, you're saying that Pound spotted within this poem these gay motifs which Eliot had sought to bury in a massive verbiage and Pound saw through that and made it clearer than it would have been?
I don't think he made it clear because nobody else could see it but Pound, basically Pound He looked at the whole poem and he said, no, well, that's crap, crap, crap.
He got rid of all that, you know, this extraneous stuff.
And he kept the stuff that was good art, that mattered to Eliot, and the stuff was autobiographical.
And Eliot had to express himself in a suppressed way, an artistic way.
And it was Eliot's story, his struggle, that he kept.
But he wasn't, Pam wasn't keeping it for that, for any particular reason, except what was good and what was authentic.
And it was quite slapdash the way they did it.
And they were like, well, this is what's left.
And, you know, you can see from their letters that Elliot sometimes like, why are you keeping that?
Shouldn't I keep that?
I don't want to leave that out.
And Pam's like, no, do this, this, this, and Elliot sort of goes, all right.
And then they dare to do that.
And then what's most interesting is that.
It wasn't even Eliot's poem until the end.
It's not clear whether it was ever going to be just Eliot's poem.
I think they started off by working out maybe it was a joint thing and there'd be some of Pound's writing in it.
And they even had the poem Sage Homme, which gives away the key.
They had that as by Pound.
That was going to be part of the Wasteland.
But then Pound said, actually, don't use this with Wasteland.
It won't work.
It doesn't fit.
You can tack them onto a collected audition or publish them somewhere they'll be decently hidden and swamped by the bulk of accompanying matter.
So they were going to take these poems by Pound and publish them somewhere else, but leave the Wasteland independently.
And in that poem, Sage Homme, it's a play on the French word sage femme, which means midwife.
And so in that poem, Pound is the male midwife who performs a cesarean operation.
On TS Eliot, who's pregnant with poetry by the Uranian Muse, and that Uranian was the word for gay then.
So it's a kind of little riddle, Sajjom, and he says... Right.
You know, and then they... but it wasn't going to be completely hidden, but it shows that Pound was collaborating on The Wasteland, and then he salvaged the good stuff, which was Uranian or, you know, it was whether you want to look at whatever way you want to look at it, it was Eliot's life and the valid stuff from his life that had inspired the poetry that remained.
Right.
And a lot of other experimental stuff went out the window and this authentic stuff remained.
And then it was published and people then, well, Eliot turned that into a puzzle.
Anyway, he wrote it kind of like a puzzle and lured people in with the explanatory notes, which gave people clues and misdirection.
So, of course, people then try to figure out what The Wasteland's about.
And that's dangerous for Eliot, because as time goes on, that subject becomes even more criminalized.
And so People just get the wrong end of the stick and snap, you know, no one's ever going to figure it out.
You know, once once you pull that.
Yeah, so and until I spoke to you Alexander, I had no idea that TS Eliot was essentially gay and I don't think that many people anywhere in the world are aware of this because we know about his Two marriages?
And he was married to Valerie second time round.
Did he have a first wife before that?
He married later in life, didn't he?
Yeah, so with T.S.
Eliot, I would say it's quite possible, one funny way you might say, thing about T.S.
Eliot you might say, is that he's probably the first gay man to be out during his lifetime and then go back into the closet after his death.
Due to the mistakes of biographers and critics and teachers.
I mean, I think people sort of knew in his lifetime and the way things were dealt with then was discretion.
Or there were rumors or he was, you know, people knew around him certainly.
But now, less people know than before and it's sort of been lost.
Or, I mean, he was definitely thought that he'd be discovered.
And, you know, here you have with TSL, you really have like the LGBT landmarks that are not recognized, which acknowledge the obsession with that subject, which we have today.
It's such a big thing now, LGBT history.
But really, Elliot, his poetry comes out in that.
I haven't seen him celebrated as a gay hero.
No, it's like they, you know, you know, there's a lot of people, people feel and there's almost a backlash against.
academia, queer theory, there's a lot of that happening, there's a backlash against it as well, but they seem to have claimed people, possibly who aren't gay, and there are queer theories about, or there's a fear that there's queer theories about people who aren't gay, but yet the real gay, the ram of the flock, is not being recognized, so it's a very, very weird situation.
The bewilderment of the wasteland really comes down to having to express himself in a camouflaged way, or being driven to that.
And he was sort of mad when he wrote it, to be honest.
So, yeah, people wouldn't know.
I mean, what did people do then?
They married women.
They had beards.
I think that's the term.
And Eliot was worried about, you know, he arranged his reputation to his legacy not to be disturbed and not to be found out because he was a nun on the run, as it were.
He felt that history was right on his tail and that he would be discovered.
And so he was very careful.
In some ways it matters not a jot whether T.S.
Eliot was gay or not, but you've sort of hinted at at least one reason why it does matter, which is that it's a sort of It's a misrepresentation of history.
I mean, if you're going to study somebody, and if someone's biography affects their work, and you're denying this key biographical detail, then you're kind of missing a piece in the jigsaw, aren't you?
I mean, if, as you suggest, the Wasteland is really about gay sex, and everyone else is saying, oh no, it's about, it's just a richly elusive, fragmentary text about, I don't know, then they've got the wrong end of the stick, haven't they?
How do you know it's basically Uranian?
So you just cannot literally understand the Wasteland without understanding that it's about Eliot's life and his love for a man.
You just will never ever understand it and people are okay with that because they don't want to understand it maybe.
I mean they like it to be obscure but you just can't because You just never will.
And so it's, I guess it's important on that level, you know, if you think the wasteland's important and you want to understand it, I guess it matters that he's gay.
I mean, this is what I say.
I mean, people are willing to disagree with me.
I'm sure maybe they will, but most people won't have any idea.
So they can go, you know, but it matters on that level, I guess.
And I guess it matters as a cultural landmark or, you know, but Then I guess it's important to establish, well, why do I think that?
And, you know, am I right or am I wrong?
And, well, I think the only way to, to, I mean, first of all, as in terms of evidence, well, we have what I mentioned, Sajon, Pound and Elliot agree about what the poem is about.
Pound writes the, The poem Sajon, and he says in there that these are the poems of Eliot, by the Iranian muse, Begot.
So they're begotten by the Iranian muse, and he says that The mother of the poems is T.S.
Eliot, and the muse is their sire.
Then he writes, how did the printed infancies result from nuptials thus doubly difficult?
If you need must inquire, no diligent reader, that on each occasion Ezra performed the Caesarean operation.
So this playful poem was meant to summarize Pound's role in Eliot's career, and that was published in 1988.
In the letters of T.S.
Eliot, and it's on, I think it's page 495.
You can find it in the public record.
It's never really been read somehow properly.
It's often read as a reference to Pound's caesarean operation on the poem, which doesn't really make sense because that's not literally what Saint-Jean says.
And you can't really perform a caesarean on a poem.
You perform a caesarean on a person.
And the person was the mother.
T.S.
Eliot, he doesn't have a vagina, because men don't, so he can't give birth to the poems of the gay muse, the Iranian muse.
So, Ezra performed the Caesarian operation.
That's how they were given birth, and that's what the whole thing's about.
So, if you want to know what it's about, there it is.
Eliot writes back, wish to print Caesarian operation in italics on front.
So, Eliot wanted to publish Saj-Hom with the wasteland, somewhere prominent, As a tribute to Pound or because it was a good, fun poem.
So they weren't even actually hiding it to begin with, but Pound advised otherwise.
And Eliot dedicated The Wasteland to Pound on the front eventually.
And that was suppressed, Sajon.
So there's a smoking gun if you need a smoking gun.
But then when you go through the poem, once you get the thread, the trail, That it's a love poem for a man named Jean Verdunal, who was a French friend of Eliot's, who Eliot remained in love with after he was killed in the First World War.
He then began to realise that the poem is a kind of send-up of Eliot's life, being married to a woman, but being in love with a dead man.
And it's the story of his life in London, living a sort of pretense and finding his way to some kind of spiritual On a kind of spiritual journey towards some kind of peace or harmony with himself while having a kind of breakdown in this life and struggling with coming to terms with what he is and trying, you know, in conflict with himself.
And there are all kinds of the illusions, when you look up all of these literary illusions that are in the poem, they lead to passages where You can see why Eliot was rooting around in that chapter, and he's expressing himself using the voices of other writers, and he's constructed this poem.
And it's not even necessarily hidden sometimes.
Once you know that it's the subject, it's not that subtle.
And I mean, to get people convinced, I think I'd probably have to just show a couple of specific examples.
from the poem.
And so, you know, the famous opening line, April is the cruelest month.
Well, that could be about anything.
But it seems that Eliot sort of accidentally on purpose gave away the key in about 10 years after publishing the poem in his literary journal.
In the editorial column, he spoke of Paris before the First World War and dropped into his Dropped into the editorial column that he remembered a friend walking across a Paris park waving a branch of lilac, a friend who was later, so far as I could discover, to be mixed with the mud of Gallipoli.
It's quite a poetic way of saying, you know, something tragic.
And then when you look at the opening lines of the wasteland, one scholar actually managed to sort of come up with a credible reading of the opening lines.
April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.
And then he realized, okay, so the April 1915 Battle of Gallipoli, where this friend died and was waving lilacs, gave him the insight into the opening of the wasteland that April was cruel because it brought back memories of this friend and buried sexual gave him the insight into the opening of the wasteland that April was cruel because it Because it brought back memories of this friend and buried sexual desires which were better off hidden.
So April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire.
So his desire comes back in spring, as is the poetic tradition, and his object of desire has died in this tragic way.
And once this critic, John Peter, had picked that up, he then deciphered the wasteland, essentially, in a rudimentary way.
And it's from that that you can then... Alex, I've... We'll have to hold that.
I've got to go to the station now.
Are you going to be around later on today for us to do more?
Sure, definitely.
Or we can do it tomorrow.
Yeah, I'll be around... I've got to go now.
Let's hope that... OK.
I'll speak to you in a moment then.
OK, great.
Uh, let's have a look.
That is really getting on my tits.
It's like I'm interviewing across the Atlantic or something.
It's not a conversation, it's like an interview, which I hate.
But there we are.
We can't do anything about technology.
I could go in the church and do it.
Maybe it's got a quicker connection.
I think we'll just do it.
Yeah, but we've got, we've recorded 40 minutes of stuff.
So it's, let's not.
And it will be like, sorry, go ahead.
You were telling me, you were telling me about the, how do we know that this was, this chap who was killed in Gallipoli was Elliot's lover?
We don't know that they were lovers, actually.
We know that they knew each other, and we know that from examining the poem, we can see that the poem is about Elliot's love for him.
But we don't know that there was some sort of consummated love affair.
But what we do know about them is that they lived in the same... I guess it was a bed and breakfast.
Kind of thing.
As students in Paris in 1910-11 when Eliot was a visiting student from Harvard and Werdener was studying medicine and they developed, we know the address that they lived at,
Some academic research has been done into Werdenal's life because a professor named John Peter in the 50s published an interpretation of The Wasteland which basically solved it to anyone who is objective.
You could see, well, that's so coherent and it's got to be right, you know, and so simple.
And he interpreted it as a sort of The life of someone, through the eyes of someone who's distraught and is in love with someone who's died and is unhappy in their marriage and living in London.
And, you know, John Peter blew the lid on it.
And then he sent the copy of his published literary essay to Eliot to push Eliot into acknowledging that this was the answer.
That's what Peter needed to sort of get his career confirmed, get the article confirmed.
And he was a professor in Canada who went on to some eminence and he'd been brought up under Leavis, this top critic at Cambridge.
Leavis?
Yeah, the Leavis.
So all of these critics knew.
Yes, Queenie Leavers.
Is that what they called him?
I don't know.
But Peter basically sent that essay to Eliot, and then Eliot threatened to sue him unless it was suppressed, which is a remarkable move.
And the essay was suppressed for 17 years.
And it was published again after Eliot's death and then Peter, and that was in 1969, and then Peter and his colleagues at the top of the industry just kind of like didn't mention it.
It didn't reach the public.
And Peter never tried to prove that he was right because it sort of debunked what the academic order had written about the Wasteland and it exposed everyone in a case of the Emperor's New Clothes.
Peter had deciphered the poem, but he'd never actually said that it was about Eliot's personal life.
And Eliot just sort of preemptively cancelled, suppressed the essay, which made it obvious that he had something to hide and it was about his personal life.
I mean, it's very obvious when you read that essay that it's valid and it must be about T.S.
Eliot.
Peter opened the door and then slowly over time there's been some research into who the real person who is the object of desire in the wasteland is.
Peter found the identity of Jean Verdunal because Eliot's first poetry collection, which we mentioned earlier, the 1917 poetry collection, is dedicated to Jean Verdunal, killed in the Dardanelles.
So it's the same guy who was, I mean, the Dardanelles on the site of Gallipoli.
So Peter put two and two together, but he didn't mention that in his original essay.
Actually, Peter was also an attorney, a barrister.
So maybe he was being careful not to identify Eliot with the narrator of The Wasteland for legal reasons.
But anyway, Eliot stomped on it and It was a well-known article in the literary, in the academic community, and it sort of trounces every other theory really, but it's never really got around to people, you know, the general public.
So yeah, there's been some scholarship looking into the life of of Jean Verdunal, and it's just not fully acknowledged his role in the wasteland.
Although some people in the critical community might say it is in order to dismiss that.
No one's ever really just in a comprehensive way, just line by line, gone through the wasteland and shown what it means to a student audience.
And then there are complicated reasons for that as well, probably.
We'd have to Get into that as well.
Well, this is where this is where it gets interesting, isn't it?
Okay.
So so so far as evidence that the Wasteland is a gay love poem or suppressed gay love poem.
We've got the biographical detail that you just mentioned.
How should I give people an idea?
So we mentioned that there was the Centenary of the Wasteland and there was this documentary The Hyacinth Girl and in this documentary put out by the BBC it explores Elliot's love affair with Emily Hale who is supposed to be the Hyacinth Girl according to an Elliot biographer who worked on that documentary.
The only problem with that is that there is no girl at all.
There is no Hyacinth girl.
There's just two lines in the poem in inverted commas showing that their reported speech where someone says, you gave me Hyacinths first a year ago, they called me the Hyacinth girl, end quote.
Yet when we came back late from the Hyacinth garden, your arms full and your hair wet, It's a sort of quotation followed by an internal monologue.
living nor dead, looking into the heart of life, the silence.
It's a sort of quotation followed by an internal monologue.
Now, anyone could have said, they called me the Hyacinth girl.
Doesn't actually say who that is or state their gender.
Now, you just assume that there's a girl because someone says they were called a girl.
You'd be completely be forgiven for thinking it must be a girl.
But hyacinths are actually a well-known and even risky symbol of gay love that derived from the myth of Hyacinthus and Apollo, which is from Ovid.
And, for example, Oscar Wilde.
Hyacinthus and Apollo were lovers in Greek myth, and it was sort of the go-to myth from antiquity that gay culture could have in Victorian times.
And so, for example, Oscar Wilde is probably the most famous example of that culture in late Victorian times, and the trial was a big scandal.
He was prosecuted partly on the evidence of a note comparing himself to Apollo and his lover Lord Alfred Douglas Bosie to Hyacinthus.
And it was partly on the basis of that note that the prosecution took into evidence that he was convicted of gross indecency, and that was covered in the papers.
So Byron would call his boys Hyacinths.
So Hyacinths were like a very prominent And even dangerous symbol of gay love.
So in the Wasteland you have, you gave me Hyacinth first year ago, they called me the Hyacinth Girl.
Yet when we came back late from the Hyacinth Garden, and Elliot capitalises the Hyacinth there, for no reason.
It's just to not to give away that it's about the myth.
And that's not a girl talking, that's actually him.
T.S.
Eliot is the Hyacinth Girl, but like Kaiser Soze and the Usual Suspects, he just walks off and the Usual Suspects are left there with the critics talking about him.
Emily Hale, whatever it takes that you want it to be, you know, to sell a newspaper.
But no, it's T.S.
Eliot and no one's even noticed.
Probably T.S.
Eliot.
We can't prove it, but it's the man, you know?
And we know it's about Verdun Al as well, because it's That Hyacinth Garden scene is framed by quotations from Wagner's opera Tristan and Isolde about doomed lovers.
And there are seven letters from Verdun to Eliot, which were published in 1988, along with Saint-Jean later in the volume, in which Verdun now recommends that Eliot go and see Tristan and Isolde while he's in Munich and says, it leaves you prostrate with ecstasy and thirsting to get back to it again.
They shared a passion for the opera.
They are the two people in the Hyacinth Garden.
Elliot is probably the Hyacinth Girl.
If you just read it grammatically, carefully, it's not necessarily hidden.
There's maybe a bit of sleight of hand, but there's no fraud.
It doesn't say it's a girl.
It's just a man saying, they call me the Hyacinth Girl.
And when you know that, it reads better.
This moment of ecstasy begins with this scene with a sailor singing in the mass from Tristan and Isolde and ends with Isolde's death.
Those are the two quotations.
So it's really talking about Eliot's own passion and ardour and the death of his beloved.
And it's slightly disguised.
And then Pound writes on the manuscript, which was hidden for 50 years, Marianne, which is the word for a effeminate homosexual.
And no critic has ever actually explained what that's about.
And Pound was even asked when he was 89 or 88.
What he meant.
And he either made something up or he'd forgotten because it actually says on the notes of the Manuscript of the Wasteland, which was edited by Valerie Elliott, Elliott's widow, who lived till 2012.
She says, Pound said this, but nothing has ever been found to authenticate what he said.
And it's an open question what that meant.
And it was probably him signaling his inside knowledge on the manuscript of the gender of the girl.
And Elliot often appears in the poem in non-binary form.
He's Tiresias, the transgender prophet from Greek myth.
He's the hyacinth girl.
The end lines are a coded kind of transsexual, non-binary, non-normative expression.
So this is like the gay thing that everyone's kind of obsessed with gender now.
Like it's the greatest poem in American history has got it all recorded in there.
So it's right there, but everyone's pretending it's not, which is Mad.
And it's like the whole literary order is built on that.
So that's the... It's mind-blowing.
That's the curious part, isn't it?
That's the thing that you find really shocking.
It's not that T.S.
Eliot was gay, and it's not that he became uncomfortable later in life with the idea of his gayness being exposed.
It's rather that there seems to have been a, for want of a better word, a conspiracy of silence, more than silence, among literary critics.
You must know about this.
Yeah, yeah exactly, exactly.
So what's going on?
Yeah, so two things I think.
On the one hand there's people who just have no idea and that's amazing in itself in a way.
They're pouring over the poem and they're writing about it and they're writing PhDs and they're writing books and biographies.
They're not part of any specific conspiracy or something but they still somehow just can't get onto the basic subject.
And maybe it's because, you know, for it to be simple and for the actual explanation to be found and given would embarrass and discredit the practice of literary academia itself.
Because this is, you know, T.S.
Eliot's the kingpin and this is the prime example of what literary academic criticism is all about.
And so they don't want it explained, perhaps, and it would embarrass everyone and show a fiasco.
So they're busy doing their thing and making it complicated and just with their head in the sand.
And then there's the second aspect, which is that there's been You know, I'm reluctant to do anything, say anything which could, you know, have repercussions or say the wrong things or defame someone or something like that, you know.
But I mean, there's the official kind of, well, official cover up, I would say, that's Follow his instructions that he left in a time when you couldn't be gay, it was criminalized.
And so there's a legacy there because of his position in the literary establishment, which is he's sort of the keystone or the big figure in the literary establishment even today.
And there are practical reasons why.
There's continued to be a certain narrative told about T.S.
Eliot from within the establishment.
He married his secretary in old age and gave her instructions to fulfill his wishes and she lived till 2012.
That's Valerie Eliot.
So, Valerie Eliot performed The official scholarship herself, like editing the manuscript of The Wasteland when it emerged in 1968, and she published it as a book in 1971.
She forbade people to use Eliot's copyrights except with her permission or under her watch, and she published the guidebooks through Faber and Faber where she was his secretary for decades.
And not only that, she actually owned Faber and Faber, the publishing company which Elliot helped set up.
She owned 50% of that.
And 50% of that is owned by the Elliot Estate today.
Basically, you know, cats is the answer to this.
Yes, well tell me about cats.
Tell me about the cats connection.
So maybe Elliot is best known today or most popular for his cat poems.
Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats where we there's Macavity and Skimbleshanks or people will know them from the musical Cats.
So in the early 80s Andrew Lloyd Webber adapted Elliot's cat poems into the musical Cats, which became a huge blockbuster.
In fact, by 2000, it was the most successful musical of all time and had the longest run and it was hugely lucrative.
The royalties from the lyrics went to Valerie Elliot because she was the owner of the copyrights and she had given Lloyd Webber permission to make the musical.
With this fortune, she was able to acquire 50% stake of Faber & Faber.
So now Elliot's position as a, he was a director at the company and now his legacy was sort of secured because she was in charge and she also owned 50% of the company.
So she could influence the narrative that was put out through the web of connections that come from Faber & Faber and the critics of And the poets who are Britain's literary establishment.
Faber and Faber is, you know, an establishment British company.
They've had the last four poets laureate.
Thirteen winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Ellie was the first of that.
So, the narrative has been controlled, run by Valerie.
She lived till 2012, and there's all that money, and she didn't have any children, so that's now managed.
The details have never really been public, or maybe they are public to an extent, but no one's trumpeting it.
And so her legacy is continued today by the Elliot Estate.
They're pledged, I suppose, to present Elliot the way she did, which is perfectly understandable.
So that helps to explain the narrative that we're getting from Faber and Faber and, you know, people around the critical establishment.
So no one is going to dare rock the boat.
They're implicated in some way.
Because Faber and Faber is the tastemaker.
Sorry?
They're implicated in a certain way.
Faber and Faber.
And the people it publishes and the critics who have perhaps worked with Valerie You know, they're implicated in a certain perspective that's difficult for them to challenge.
By implicated, I mean that's their point of view and they've held to that and it's very difficult to reverse that now without saying, you've been wrong before, you know?
So we need a very sudden overhaul for something like that to come out and change, you know, because this has been the view for decades.
And the narrative is coming from, you know, Eliot's the leader, you know, and his poetry and his style maybe is part of the brand even of highbrow literature that they're promoting.
They're still putting out books of explanatory notes about Elliot that are very old-fashioned, let's say, and they're just not really interested in digging up and looking in a forensic way what it's really about.
In fact, they've told me when I've asked to quote Elliot that they oppose, on Elliot's behalf, that kind of explanation of the Wasteland.
Although that was some years ago.
I don't know.
Times have changed.
Maybe they would change their opinion.
But that does explain why they're not explaining it themselves.
I think there's a misunderstanding over there.
They don't know what it's really about, and they seem to be committed in principle not to explaining the poem along those lines, which I think is a mistake.
Well, yeah, but tell me how you became personally involved in this.
Why do you care?
Tell me the story about why you... Yeah, so I may have mentioned at the beginning there was a professor at Oxford who encouraged me to study Eliot.
There was a special author's paper that was coming up, which you have to choose, you know, one of the kingpins of Big names in English literature and Eliot was on the list and then either arbitrarily or for other reasons Wordsworth, Professor Wordsworth was his name.
He was a relative of William Wordsworth and an eminent scholar.
He encouraged me to study the Wasteland Manuscript and I was very reluctant to do that but he kept telling me that it was worth pursuing and he even said things about Pound, which I now look back on and said that Pound was actually, it was a joint effort.
But Pound to me was just this crazy poet who was convicted of, or not convicted, but imprisoned in an insane asylum and was indicted for treason by the US government.
So he was an anti-Semite, you know, what did I want to do with him?
Nothing.
But Wordsworth, I trusted.
He said that that didn't really come into it.
And so I did study Eliot.
And then Wordsworth suggested I go and find John Peter's essay on the Wasteland from the 1960s, saying that there was a theory that he remembered that it was a love poem for a man.
So I had to do a double take when Wordsworth said that, because it just didn't compute at all.
How could The Wasteland, which we talked about how it was introduced, you know, as a name-dropping, clever poem.
Sorry, not a name-dropping, where you sort of feel smug about finding some quotations that you recognize.
When I knew it like that, how could it be a love poem?
And for a man, did he mean a gay love poem?
It wasn't even clear at first.
Wordsworth said, yeah, that seemed to be the point Eliot used his solicitors to have the essay suppressed.
So that was the beginning of my following the trail, and I managed to find Peter's essay.
And when I found Peter's essay, That had been written originally in 1952, suppressed by TS Eliot and reprinted in 1969.
I read it and realized, well, this is so obviously right.
I went back to Wordsworth and I said, well, how come, how come you know about this?
And it's not already proven and sort of part of history and well-known.
And he didn't really have an explanation for that.
And he, um, He sort of said no one would care, actually, what the poem's about.
He was kind of, I suppose, defeatist about that.
And perhaps he's right, but to me it seemed, as a young, as a 20-year-old or 21-year-old, it seemed incredible that this poem and everything that had been said about it could really be
a kind of pretentious nonsense and it was actually something that could make sense to everyone and was poetry and emotional and it could really in a sense encode Eliot's love for a man and a real person.
It sounded like cinema to me.
So I felt somehow obliged to prove it and The essay didn't have the evidence just as kind of paraphrase of the poem from beginning to end in a very convincing way.
So I started to look into the details because by now it had been decades since Peter's essay had been published and there was just no mention of it in the shelves and shelves of books about T.S.
Eliot at all.
So it was just a unique situation, mind-blowing situation.
I just started to, I wrote my dissertation on that subject.
So that was the beginning.
And then that dissertation got a mysteriously very average grade, even though it was better than my other papers.
So I just put it behind me.
Um, but later I came across it.
I looked at TSLA again, more mature.
Yeah.
And who knows what happened to that, but I have my ideas, but I kind of came back to it later.
I looked at it with fresh eyes and more maturity and said, this is actually a love poem for a man.
It's like some kind of movie.
Nobody knows.
And so I started to research it very thoroughly and decided to gather up all the evidence because so much evidence has been found by scholars and readers and just the members of the public over the decades.
Get all of it and just plug it into the poem and prove what it means to everyone and write a book for every man.
And so that's what I did.
It took me some time and it ended up being, I mean, it's never been published.
I don't think it's never really been put before anyone.
Yeah.
So that was years ago.
Do you think it's just been squashed?
Did they give you an advance and then just not publish it?
No, I mean, it's just never gone before.
It's amazingly hard to get a book published.
You know, people don't read your emails.
They don't take you seriously.
And we're talking about in the mid 2000s that I wrote that, 2006.
And there was just nobody wanted to know, you know, about a gay, you know, Yeah, but how long did it take you to do this stuff?
It didn't take me that long, like a year.
I mean, all of the evidence, a lot of it's been compiled in certain guidebooks, right?
But it's just overweighted with extraneous information that's like obfuscatory.
sort of all the academic information that's ever been found, and then leave out the bits that point in a gay direction, and then collect all the wrong stuff, and then publish that as a guidebook, right?
And the dedication is to Valerie Elliott for her help compiling this book.
I'm maybe misquoting that, but if you go to the Acknowledgements page, you realize, okay, so this guidebook was created by Valerie Elliott.
And there's almost like a disclaimer acknowledging her.
So the official books, which are still on sale, are actually obfuscating the answer, the simple explanation that would explain it to people, and then they're still being published.
So I just used those books and all the other stuff that I could find as I looked in directions that she wasn't looking.
And compiled it all and then said about how can I make this readable to people so they don't get bogged down in scholarship and find it really boring.
I wrote a first draft that was really long because I thought I had to debunk all of the other professors and overrule that piece of information.
I got a bit too deep into it, so it never reached that final draft stage where you send out and then It's so exciting to publishers that they want to pick it up.
And at that stage, I was in my, you know, mid-twenties.
And I just kind of like, you know, this is where it becomes more like my story.
I ended up in remote Cornwall, just trying to survive financially.
And then I took a plane to Australia and I didn't come back for 12 years.
Got caught in the pandemic after 10.
And when I came back, I realized they were making documentaries about Emily Hale being the Hyacinth Girl, that are just nonsense and just absurd.
And meanwhile, there's a gay flag flying from every Oxford College and times have changed, but I've just been in a... It was like coming back to the future from being cast away for 10 or 12 years.
And there's still no voice for me.
You're the only person who paid any attention to me.
So, it's just people just... Yeah, well, that's because in the Freaks community, it's kind of a lonely place.
I'm open to ideas.
James, I'm not wrong.
I know it very well.
No, I don't believe you're wrong.
Here's the thing.
The reason I find this stuff interesting is because in the last three years I've come to the conclusion that almost everything we are told is a lie or a misdirection at best.
If there is an official narrative about something it means normally that there is a true story underneath which they are in some way trying to suppress and our entire system is like that.
It's interesting when you were talking about Ezra Pound.
I don't know whether you've thought about this, but you reminded me that Ezra Pound was involved with the other preeminent work of the modernist movement, Ulysses, Joyce's Ulysses.
So you've got the same guy pushing Ulysses and the Wasteland, basically inventing modernism and literature.
Those are the two preeminent works.
And then you start thinking, What was modernism about?
Modernism, among other things, was doing the same thing in the early 20th century that later popular music would do from the 50s onwards, which was to create a generational divide.
To annoy people and to reshape culture in a kind of awkward direction where people were discouraged from trusting things that have been accepted in the past and looking for the new, looking for the novel.
So I would ask, I would be asking myself, I don't know whether you've looked into this, who the hell was Pound?
Okay, so he did time, you know, we know he was anti-semitic, whatever that means.
We know that he was a sort of fascistic, maybe he did time, he's locked up.
But this could just be a cover story.
I mean, what do we know about Pound's origins?
I'll try and clear up.
Maybe he was put there to push modernism.
I don't know.
I mean, I don't know.
I mean, I don't know if everything is a lie.
That could be true.
I know what's a lie in the area that I know about, right?
And there's a lot of stuff that just a muddle and a mistake, right?
In this area.
And I can I can try and clear up Pound.
And yeah, it's a very interesting figure.
If you've never heard of Pound, He was like, you know, you were saying modernism is shaking things up.
I would say Pound is the guy who shook things up.
He was the guy who made sure that modernism happened and he was the kingmaker and he helped those people who had talent and put them in the position to break through like that.
Now, how did he end up in these, you know, he didn't get the credit he deserved.
For TS Eliot, or for The Wasteland.
And he set up these guys as greats.
But especially Eliot.
I mean, Eliot was his creation, if you like.
And that's not to say Eliot didn't deserve his popularity, or wasn't extremely talented.
Pound found him.
But he gave him that leg up.
Now, Pound didn't get the same recognition.
He ended up in obscurity, and to compensate for that, he moved to Italy, which became fascist in the early, mid-twenties, and he just lost the plot over there, and in seeking the kind of fame that he deserved on a literary level, on parity with Eliot, just for making Eliot,
And for helping to make Joyce, or just thinking that he deserved fame equal with Elliot.
Maybe Elliot didn't deserve that kind of status, because in fact Pound did put him there.
Pound just went for that level of recognition by declaring support for the fascists.
And he started attacking America over Rome Radio.
He managed to get himself, while seeking the fame, the literary fame that he probably deserved, he managed to come up with these crazy anti-Semitic theories and get himself into a lot of hot water.
And then what happened to him was, he was indicted for treason.
No one in the American public had really heard of Pound.
But he became infamous because he was indicted for treason and he became a kind of poster boy for the enemy during the war with the fascists.
And he was over in fascist Italy looking like he supported the fascists and he was mad.
And then they captured him in Italy.
They declared him insane.
Which meant he didn't have to face trial.
There was a huge uproar.
Then he was put in an asylum and then he was awarded America's highest poetry prize for verse written while apparently insane in the asylum.
And Elliot was on the judges who gave him that award on the judging panel.
And so that created an uproar.
No one could understand it.
And so it does really go, Pound's whole experience, his madness, goes back to him being sort of an equal partner in the creation of the wasteland and not getting that recognition.
The only way to explain what happened to him and how he ended up like that is to acknowledge that he launched a kind of a fraud, really, on Elliot's behalf.
It was the wasteland, you know, expresses Elliot's love for a man, you know, in a camouflage way.
Pound was the one who sold it as this modernist thing, which then took off.
off uh on the under false you know it was missold it was sold under false pretenses and pound got carried away and never got recognized and then tried to gain back recognition by um blaming the jews for economic things and he just he ended up a nut and he um but yeah that is in his original alex um
I don't know whether you've ever come across a podcast series by the Sheep Farm Boys, Sheep Farm Podcast, where they do deep dives into the histories of Of people like well, they did a very good one on on George Orwell, right?
Was he even real because this is a there's only about two photographs of George Orwell and it's it's very very odd and there are all sorts of anomalies.
For example, when he when he went off to Scotland and came back having written either 1984 or Animal Farm.
I think his sister or somebody commented, this sounds nothing like George would have written.
Anyway, I forget the details.
Ezra Pound Sounds to me like a classic example of a change agent.
Right.
When you said there are aspects of history that don't make sense, the stuff about being in Italy, being tried for treason, getting off because of insanity, pleading insanity, and being awarded this prize.
Modernism was not some natural organic thing that sprung out of... It had to be invented.
It had to be... You needed a tastemaker, a kingmaker, just like Faber and Faber became a kingmaker.
You need these things to push the underlying agenda.
So on the surface you've got modernism.
Oh yeah, it's a reaction to the Victorians or whatever.
But actually it's not really what it's about.
It's about something else.
These things are manufactured.
Okay, well, I would say that's true.
You may disagree, but I think it's worth looking into.
Yeah, okay.
But I feel that, you know, all I can tell you is maybe, you know, maybe it's a bit literary for many people, but I mean, there's this guy Pound.
He is the tastemaker.
He's the mover and shaker.
He manufactures T.S.
Eliot.
He never gets his recognition.
He ends up barking mad and becomes infamous.
accusing the Jews of financial conspiracy and that's why he's important and he's going to break, broker peace between Roosevelt and Japan and that's who Pound thinks he is.
He thinks he's the most important man in the world and he's given the microphone by the fascists and this madman is brought in and treated sympathetically by the By the US Army psychiatrist because they can see there's something more to this story, you know, and he's not just a fascist villain.
He's something else.
He's this eccentric poet who's well-connected and what's happened here and they can't get to the bottom of it.
But the way you get bottom to bottom is T.S.
Eliot's behind the crime.
T.S.
Eliot has gotten away with an illusion which Pound helped him He's Macavity, you're saying?
Yeah, he's a brilliant illusionist.
In a way, you could say he's just like Macavity.
Macavity is actually Professor Moriarty from Sherlock Holmes.
Elliot plagiarised... He's a fraud?
Well, Elliot plagiarised a description of Professor Moriarty from Sherlock Holmes stories and then in word-for-word to create Macavity.
So, Elliot worked in ways that people don't know.
And he, like I said, he's the Hyacinth Girl.
A hundred years later, people think it's Emily Hale, who is one of his beards.
You know, so there's way more genius going on here.
Yeah.
But it's of a different kind than people think.
And Pound collaborated in the illusion that made Elliot great.
Pound got the raw end of the prawn.
He ended up over there in Italy and he only got his fame when he got convicted or he got indicted for treason and put in an insane asylum in Washington, D.C.
for how long was it?
Twelve years or something.
Elliot led the judges who gave him the Bollingen Prize, which created an outrage.
So Pound got some recognition, but he was nuts by then.
It couldn't be undone.
Things couldn't be undone that had happened.
And Elliot escaped detection.
And he still has and he set things up.
He was powerful enough that he could Get people as his accessories.
And he laid Chinese whispers among his supporters in the critics who have sent Lyndall Gordon, even now, on a 50-year excursion in the wrong direction, to think that Emily Hale was who Elliot was in love with.
But Lyndall Gordon, who wrote The Hyacinth Girl, which is the book now out, she was brought in by one of Elliot's I don't know what you'd call Dame Helen Gardner, this critic who was close to Eliot.
She brought Lyndall Gordon into Oxford years ago, in the 70s I think it was.
Lyndall waited 50 years for Eliot's letters to Emily Hale to be unsealed, which was in the papers in 2020.
After 50 years they were unsealed and Eliot had a note at the top saying there never was a love affair between them.
So people had waited for this literary event of the decade.
And there was just nothing to be found.
So then Lyndall Gordon went and wrote a book saying there was anyway, because she probably was stuck.
She spent 50 years on her theory waiting for that.
And now that is the story pushed by the BBC.
But like, if people knew what was really going on, the BBC would have to withdraw that programme, apologise and make another one, because there would be an outrage, because it's tramping all over LGBTQ history.
And that's the real situation?
It's too big for people to latch onto.
Nobody listening to this podcast would expect anything other than the BBC to be promoting lies about everything.
I was just reminding myself while you were talking about what a great Borrower, Elliot was.
Talent borrows, genius steals.
And he was a literary thief, wasn't he?
He was.
So his famous poem about the journey of the May Guy, which is often quoted at Christmas and often read out at school Christmas carol concerts and things.
And that was lifted wholesale.
The first few lines were lifted from a sermon By Lancelot Andrews who was the main translator of the King James Bible.
So and he's yeah, I mean one way of putting this is he's richly elusive that he's just very well read and he's referencing all these these authors another another.
He's a great plagiarist.
He just just ripping off right left and center.
I mean, I'm a fan of Elliot.
I I haven't learned the Wasteland, but I learned the first of the four quartets by heart a while ago, and I enjoy it.
It's great.
It's great.
Bert Norton.
So I'm not trying to dis Elliot.
But I think what you say about the Elliot industry is, well, maybe it's esoteric for some of it, too esoteric for some of my viewers and listeners.
But I think a lot of people are going to be interested in it.
Now, I want you to take me really down the rabbit hole and tell me about your other stuff.
Tell me about Harry Potter.
You just mentioned this out of the blue before we did the podcast and I thought, well, this sounds interesting.
Well, in some ways, you know, I'm reluctant to bring it up in some ways.
Because, you know, there's one sort of empirical scientific or literary thing on one side, you know, which I think, you know, requires evidence and proof.
And, and, and I'm serious about that.
Yeah, then there's a mystical side that's, that's, that's T.S.
Eliot, and then there's me.
And when I followed Professor Wordsworth's trail down the rabbit hole, Ultimately, I ended up in a place where I had to contemplate, how did I get here?
Who is this T.S.
Eliot?
Because I thought that I was just going to show that this poem was about a love for a man.
And I ended up with this kind of nemesis who was able to pull off these illusions and this ambiguous stuff.
And I took him on in a way to try and... I thought that I was doing him a favor because he was gay and I was, you know, in a time of more justice, I was bringing this out.
And I ended up coming up against the conspiracy or cover-up that he'd left, the legacy of that that he'd set up.
And then I ended up in a tent in Australia, you know, in my late twenties, looking at what had happened to me over the previous years and how I got involved in so much confusion.
This diabolical cloud of confusion had just descended on me and everyone was confused.
Nobody could figure out what had happened to me.
And it's like I'd been wiped out.
And then, um, I sort of came to a religious, Realization.
When I was in Bali, in a remote place, I basically gave up the Elliot thing and I was surfing and just kind of like ended up where I ended up after getting some teaching work overseas.
And with a fresh perspective on it, I came to this, I will say realization, although I know people won't believe me and that doesn't really matter, but I came to the realization that My own life was tied into the Harry Potter stories, which sounds completely mad.
But I came to the realization this fable actually overlaps with real life and not just my life, but just events that have happened.
And this came about, I mean, it's hard to say exactly how you How you come to that kind of understanding, but I just recognized those stories and some of the things that I'd been through and you wouldn't really be able to see it unless you were there and it happened to you, I guess.
But I recognized intuitively something in those stories and could see that Rowling had somehow tapped into something that was really going on.
And there is, you know, basically T.S.
Eliot, in some way that's hard to explain, is Voldemort.
And there is a Voldemort.
And I realize Wordsworth is like a Dumbledore, and those things were shot at Oxford.
And I'd gone through something, including starting at boarding school, which was connected to what J.K.
Rowling was writing about.
And it's, if you like, it's a kind of a psychic thing.
She came up with these stories on a train, they just landed in her head, and she came up with the casual vacancy on a plane, she said.
Now, you wouldn't expect, you know, and it was through a religious... Well, this is the... We got a delay, it's kind of... I don't discount any of what you're saying, but you...
So, let me go on a bit more.
You probably won't have come across... Yeah, go on then, tell me.
Okay, so... And I'll tell you what I know, or rather what I've heard.
Okay, so, you know, Eliot was this Christian poet and a very spiritual man and You know, there's sort of spooky stuff.
Some critics described him as demonic and there's some spooky stuff that basically I went through, which made me associate him with Voldemort.
But not in the sense of like, you know, you might think, oh, he's like Voldemort.
I mean, he literally is somehow connected to Voldemort.
There are events that happened in, you know, around and just after the time the Harry Potter books were coming out.
That match kind of the story of Voldemort with his upper class conspiracy of followers, how he sort of, you know, denied love and sought immortality.
Well, I found a connection there, I guess, with my life.
If you want to debunk, if you want to sort of not believe it, but I also, and some people will believe it, you know, some people have open enough mind if they're told more to get that.
And I felt that it had something to do with Christianity and that anything's actually possible when you really have some kind of religious belief.
And I don't mean just believing whatever you want.
I mean, once you have a spiritual belief, and I'm sure many viewers do and can believe things.
Well, at a certain point, J.K.
Rowling came out with The Casual Vacancy.
And this is her first book after Harry Potter.
It came out in 2012.
And again, I felt like the connection to T.S.
Eliot continued beyond Harry Potter into that, because that is set in the village where T.S.
Eliot is buried.
And the plot is like the events that happened there around that time.
However, she can't have based the book on that because that only came out six months later.
And she said she came up with it years earlier on a plane.
And, you know, T.S. Eliot is buried in this village called East Coker in Somerset and near Yeovil.
And Rowling set her book in a village near Yarville, which is based on Yeovil.
And the book is about divisions between people who live in social divisions between people who live in a housing estate and the and the normal villages.
And in a few months before it came out, there was a protest that made the news in East Coker, T.S.
Eliot's village, which is in the same place, of a housing estate, just like the one in the book.
So it's sort of faint, but If you know T.S.
Eliot like I know T.S.
Eliot, and then you see that, okay, so this Voldemort, as I've come to know he is, Rowling is now writing a book set in the village where T.S.
Eliot is buried, precisely geographically, and the plot is similar.
I just feel that Whatever ghostly thing this is, it goes, it was a kind of, I would say, proof, you know, to me, that... How is it possible?
Sorry, that just that they're just this housing estate stuff, you know.
Well, so I get that it's set in the same village that TS Eliot's buried in, but beyond that, how does it refer to...
Well, she wasn't expected to write a book about village life.
Let's say for a start, that was an unexpected book, The Casual Vacancy.
It's quite pedestrian, if you will, you know, people are used to her writing about wizards and, and I mean, she's gone on to write detective stories.
She wrote, she set a book in, she wrote a book about, well, what happened in the housing estate in real life was the richer villages protested against the creation of a housing estate for You know, I don't know what's the word they use, you know, for less well-off people in East Cocoa.
And Elliot was brought into that because Elliot is buried in the village.
So Sir Andrew Motion, you know, people who are around Elliot and the supporters of Elliot from Faber and Faber were part of the protest.
Yeah.
So Elliot's, you know, the Voldemort-y followers came out against the building of this housing estate and in real life.
And then Elliot in real life is buried in East Coker because his bloodline, which is again quite Voldemort-y, goes back to 16-something when his ancestor left to America.
So Elliot is this symbol of Inherited privilege and bloodlines and he's a fake, you know, he's American.
It's not even English.
And he got himself, you know, buried there with a grave waiting for his widow who would keep up his legacy and keep things going and the truth wouldn't come out.
Then in the book, it's like the same kind of social dilemma that she's writing about, which nobody expected and probably quite bored by, even though it sold, you know, millions and millions of millions of copies.
Well, if you read that, all I can tell you is there's a real weird thing going on where there's a real kind of Voldemort for Britain.
There's the most famous poet of the 20th century, America's greatest poet.
wrote about his love for a man in a illusion camouflage contorted way which made him come across as the next kind of da Vinci genius and he kept that hidden and there's a conspiracy of people around him who keep that hidden now which is kind of like Rowling's fable and you you ask her if she knows or
gets any kind of inkling of Alex Little.
And I'm going to say that Rowling is going to come around to the fact that there is a connection between her books and real life and T.S. Elliott and me and Professor Wordsworth and everything I've told you.
I don't know if she'll ever get a chance, you know, we'll ever reach her.
I'm well, that's that's I think you've sort of put a breadcrumb trail, which people could follow, but it's not.
But the birds could easily peck away those breadcrumbs at this point.
I think it's some sort of God thing here, some kind of message from God, but it's hard to get across in a podcast.
I'm with you on this because I had a sort of similar late-ish life conversion in the last three years.
And I think that the scales do fall from your eyes when you have an experience like this and you get insights that perhaps you wouldn't otherwise have had and you do get connected to, well, to God basically.
And you realize that you understand your life and its purpose much better than you did before when you were just flailing around trying to find meaning from it.
So this is not really a literary quest, it's some sort of religious quest that I went on that's sort of beyond the literary discussion of T.S.
Eliot and the literary world there.
It's something that sort of should be going to young people and to people to show them what's possible.
You know, not just this LGBT thing that Eliot registers, And that, you know, the critics have sort of got this mistaken.
There's a love poem, a famous love poem.
Sorry, famous poem.
It's a love poem for a man.
They make movies about things like that, but this is in reality really happening.
And there's also another element where there's a mystical element and a religious element to that, where you can pull back a veil.
If you understand all of this, you pull back a veil and you can see heaven's design.
Uh, and some kind of, you know, religious, you know, if you can accept that, or you can come to see that there's, there's a connection between those books and real things that have happened, then you're really, uh, seeing something exceptional.
And I don't know if anyone else can, can follow it, but I've seen it, you know, and I believe in it totally.
So there's two sides, of course.
I don't want to muddy the water with my religious thing and people don't believe what I'm saying about the facts and evidence in Eliot's verse.
No, it's a game of two halves Alex.
There's the first part where we talk about, you know, the Elliot was the Wasteland is a gay love poem.
And but then we can move on to the really down the rabbit hole stuff where you explain that TS Eliot is actually Voldemort.
Although I do see I do see flaws in this theory in as much as Well, Eliot was a Christian.
I don't think Voldemort was a Christian, but I remember the possibility that that may have been a cover.
And it's interesting what you say about bloodlines, which is, as you say, it's a very, it's a very Death Eaters type thing.
It's also a very sort of conspiracy theory type thing.
Yeah, I think it's more about me.
Hearing you say it back.
Yeah, sorry.
Hearing you, excuse me, say it back.
It's quite interesting, you know, for me to hear you say TS Eliot is Voldemort, it sounds preposterous.
So I hear how I will sound, in a sense.
But, you know, and perhaps, you know, it's more about the two different sides, as you say, Game of Two Halves, that stuff is more about the journey I went on and what that can offer people and what people might learn from that.
Or it's interesting in itself.
And then there's another side is all about T.S.
Eliot, which is, you know, what the evidence in the poem are.
Yeah.
Well, I think what I'm trying to do more is to encourage you to have the courage of your convictions.
You see, unlike most people who would talk to you, you're talking to somebody who actually is completely open to this kind of crazy stuff.
I mean, you know, I want to sort of subject it to a certain amount of critical rigour insofar as it's possible to apply critical rigour to something so esoteric and possibly spiritual.
Yeah, I mean there could be parallels.
I mean there's all sorts of stuff you may not be aware of about the whole the Harry Potter thing.
I mean, there are those who say that no literary, well, I don't know if literary is the right word, no book series would ever have achieved such prominence no book series would ever have achieved such prominence if it did not have a perspective.
A purpose beyond its ostensible function, which is to entertain kiddies, that actually there are those who say that really it is to implant, to corrupt our culture, particularly children, with notions about black magic and wizards and warlocks and stuff, and to take them away from the Christian message, which would be very much my view, and perhaps could be yours as a Christian too.
I've thought of it.
Well, it's undoubtedly had a deleterious influence on our children's culture, and the fact that it's become this phenomenon, I think is very suspicious.
Now, there's a person, an alleged person, he's probably a collection of people, who blogs under the name of Miles Mathis.
Miles Mathis is probably not a person, but probably, I've heard it suggested that it's actually a kind of CIA disinformation operation and that one of the things that these disinformations do is that they're called limited hangout where they give you a certain amount of true information and muddy the waters with false information so that the
People like me, and possibly you, can look at this stuff and go, hey, this is really interesting, that makes sense.
But they put in enough disinformation for you not to be sure what the truth is and what not.
But the Mathis person, collective, whatever it is, has posited that That J.K.
Rowling, Joanne Rowling was just a front, that she actually comes from one of the the Bloodlines families and she was chosen to put this stuff together, which had been, and the story about it coming to her on a train, according to Mathis, it was dictated to her by One of the Mitford sisters.
It had all been plotted out.
Now, I can't vouch for this.
How could one possibly?
Maybe she really did write it in a cafe in Edinburgh or whatever.
But there is definitely something about the whole Harry Potter series.
A phenomenon.
Which doesn't make sense.
I agree.
I mean, the reception, the critical reception.
Yeah.
Do you mean the critical reception or just the huge popularity of it?
I mean, the critics are not, we're not... Everything!
Right.
Everything about it.
So I'm going to, I mean, I don't know about what you're saying, but I can say what, you know, the way I formulated it from putting myself in the middle of it, some people would just say, like, you know, I would, you know, the way I looked at it was that, It took off, I think it was written by J.K.
Rowling.
I don't know why do things take off like that.
It's definitely not something that, as an author, she can have tried to accomplish or expected to accomplish.
Obviously, she faced a lot of criticism for writing about black magic.
You know, I don't know if I... Oh, she didn't though, Alexander.
Come on, that's nonsense.
She's had very little.
Very little.
I think in the beginning, but now not.
She's established part of culture.
Very little.
I think, you know, the Christian right, originally.
I mean, I don't... Look... There could be a Christian purpose in it.
Oh, what Christian right?
In the success of those books.
No way.
No?
What if they do have a resemblance with real life, which is more important than books about wizards and witches?
There is a real life thing in the fabric of life that is tied.
If people could see that there's real events and our real world is represented in those books, then people would be able to see a supernatural dimension.
That we're part of some other consciousness that's around, that's watching us.
And when you know that, and if they are connected to real events, and the purpose behind it is a Christian one, You know, that's there for people to see.
Well, it's obviously, it's purposely, I mean, I... I think it goes without saying that the purpose is a Christian one.
I mean, I think that's, for me, that's a given.
I would say that if I were your, if I were your tutor at what college would you be at?
St.
Catharines.
What was your college?
St.
Catharines.
Okay, so if I were your tutor at St.
Cat's, I would be saying, Alexander, you've done some really, really interesting stuff, way above your, way above undergraduate level, and I want you to come back and do a, do a post-grad.
But that you really need to firm up some of your ideas because at the moment you're you're kind of expressing them too cautiously and also that there's a whole heap of crazy stuff that you haven't yet grasped.
Right.
You've just kind of you're at the beginning of your journey or yeah, because Because I don't think that what you're saying sounds crazy, but I just don't think you've really grasped the implications of a lot of what you're saying.
I mean, whether it's on pound or on other stuff.
I mean, I think that you've kind of...
You've intuited it, but you haven't, you haven't sort of properly said it yet, because I don't think you realise just, just how, um, sorry to be patronising, but I've just, but this, this is, this is where I've been for the last three years, and it's a crazy place, but it's also, it's the only way you can understand the world, that it is a fabrication.
I mean, it's ironic, isn't it, that, um, That it was dedicated to Emilio Fabro, that Eliot was acknowledging that Ezra Pound was a fabricator, that the whole modernist phenomenon was the creation of this guy, that there is There are more things in heaven and earth than I dreamt of, Horatio, than I dreamt of in your philosophy.
I think that's what it comes down to.
And that was, of course, written by the Earl of Oxford and his scriptorium.
The literary figures, whether they be high culture things like T.S.
Eliot or popular culture things like J.K.
Rowling, they're fabrications to a degree.
And that's kind of, wow.
Yeah, all I can offer is what I know about Elliot and Pound and how wrong this famous poem has been read and how that exposes, you know, when you see that, it's sort of amazing all I can offer is what I know about Elliot and Pound and how wrong this famous poem has
And, you know, the critics have sort of got that wrong and they've looked at it the wrong way.
And it's very accessible, really.
I can do that, and then I can offer an absolutely potty-sounding claim that there's an access into something divine.
On the journey to try and exposing this, that I uncovered this mystery, which is way outside the investigation that swept me up.
And it was more about my story, and I was the hero of some quest or legend almost, that had Christian.
It was like I'd become The knight in the wasteland who has to go for the grail.
It was living through, in real life, a legend just like those legends in myth.
Things would happen which would allow me to get to the next stage and I'd be reminded of my purpose.
I was on this journey and then I came to the revelation, hang on a second, I'm this unsupposing ordinary person.
But now I think that this has reached the stage where it only makes sense when these Harry Potter books are connected to this guy that I've been tangled up with and it's like I'm going through what Harry Potter goes through with Voldemort and these things are kind of real and I somehow need to get in touch with J.K.
Rowling and reveal a Christian revelation that's Maybe the end of it all is not black magic and doing things wrong, but maybe there is a Christian purpose working through it that's going to justify that.
These are innocent books for children, perhaps, but without the Christian revelation, they're not that innocent.
But with the Christian revelation added in, it all makes sense.
And that's all I can offer.
I mean, I don't know what kind of proof people need for such extraordinary claims, or if they'll even take an interest.
But that's all I can... I don't know about these other things.
I've been limited to this thing that I've been focused on and just trying to not even get that stuff out.
I've forgotten about that.
I'm trying to dig that up out of my memory.
Where was I 10 years ago in my tent in Australia?
Feeling like there's something magical going on around me and how am I ever going to get out of this?
And will anyone believe me?
It's more when you get back to Britain and put on some headphones and talk on a podcast that things become incredible when you're actually out there in the third world or in the midst of life.
Things are very credible, all kinds of things, you know, spiritual things.
Well, I'm sure you'll have prompted a few.
Yeah.
Well, thank you, Alexander.
By the way, just before we go, I'm curious, what do you do now?
I am a trainee English teacher.
I've been surviving on the seat, flying by the seat of my pants and surviving for years.
And I decided to get a respectable A qualification.
So I am a trainee English teacher who has not yet... How do you train to be an English teacher?
You do a PGCE, Postgraduate Certificate of Education.
Oh, that's awful!
Well, well... Yeah, nightmare!
They're not real, are they?
It just has to fill your head with bullshit so that you can... It's not about learning how to teach, it's learning how to not teach.
Well, I need the piece of paper.
I need to pee.
I'm actually half Australian.
Yeah, I know.
Poor sod.
Yeah, well, that's what I'm doing next year.
That's what I'm doing next year.
And we'll see how it goes, you know?
Like, I mean, who knows?
No, I'd like to be an English teacher.
I mean, apart from the fact that you'd have to kind of be doing everything but teaching English.
But yeah, well, good luck.
Yeah, that's an issue.
I think probably We'll have frightened off a few people with this podcast, with its length and stuff, but other people will have sold it on to the end and sort of been... I hope there's some seeds.
Did some of the things you say actually, are they true?
Yeah.
And like, you know, is this, is Elliot the highest... I mean, is what he says actually right?
Well, how can that be, you know?
I'm sure you're right about that.
It's where the people care, actually, perhaps.
Is that what you're going to say?
Well, so you didn't get the book published, but at least you've got this podcast for posterity.
