THE SPIRITUAL STATUS OF T. S. ELIOT’S HOLLOW MEN Author(s): Everett A. Gillis Source: Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. 2, No. 4 (Winter 1961), pp. 464-475 Published by: University of Texas Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40753695 Accessed: 05-04-2019 19:57 UTC

THE SPIRITUAL STATUS OF T. S. ELIOT’S HOLLOW MEN By Everett A. Gillis

There is a noticeable tendency in recent expositions of T. S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men to read some affirmation into a poem traditionally associated with The Waste Land as a work of sterility and desolation, and thus to offer a degree of spiritual hope to Eliot’s famous effigies. Yet the orthodox view of the poem is still very tenable, and a thorough examination of the sources and probable origin of the poem suggests that it is in many respects closer to The Waste Land in theme, method, and mood than it is to Eliot’s later, more affirmative work.

The Hollow Men opens with the familiar picture of a desert landscape in which a chorus declares their spiritual status to be that of hollow men, straw effigies, caught in a stance of frozen immobility: “Shape without form, shade without color, / Paralyzed force, gesture without motion.” Except for certain details which will be taken up later, Eliot derives his picture almost entirely from Dante’s Divine Comedy. As a matter of fact, the first section of the poem is to all effects a direct transcription of the third canto of Dante’s Inferno – of the dark, desolate plain lying between Hell’s portal and the river Acheron, which flows as a formidable barrier between the plain and Hell’s abyss. Here Dante and Virgil perceive vast hordes of souls futilely pursuing a great whirling banner. Their cries fill the air, “reverberating in the starless air”; and when Dante asks why they lament so bitterly, Virgil replies that they are those souls who on earth were neither spiritually alive nor spiritually dead, that is, neither good nor evil; and who, consequently, are altogether void of any spiritual meaning. As a result, these creatures may never pass beyond the river into the true realm of death (referred to variously in The Hollow Men as “death’s other Kingdom,” “death’s dream kingdom,” and “death’s twilight kingdom”), where punishments or rewards are meted to the evil and the good, for they have known neither. Indeed, declares Virgil: “Mercy and justice scorn them, both alike.”

Dante’s souls, like the souls in Eliot’s poem, are thus hollow too – totally empty of any real spiritual validity. The notion of spiritual hollowness, seized upon by Eliot to bring a devastating castigation of his own age, is thus enormously reinforced by its reminiscence of the Commedia’s gloomy setting. The salient features of the middle sections of The Hollow Men likewise derive from this source. The opening lines of Section II again come straight from Dante, this time from Cantos XXX and XXXI of the Purgatório. In these cantos Dante and Virgil, having climbed the Mountain of Purgatory to the Garden of Eden situated on its summit, witness the triumphal progress of the Church in the form of a chariot drawn by a griffin, whose twofold nature represents simultaneously the human and the divine natures of Christ.

In the processional Dante perceives his beloved and fixes his eyes upon hers: A myriad desires, that burned like flames, Constrained my gaze upon those gleaming eyes; But they were looking over on the gryphon. And like the sun reflected in a glass, Within her eyes that twofold creature glowed, Now with one nature’s actions, now with the other’s.1 The group now moves to the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, which, long barren, at their approach breaks into foliage to the accompaniment of hymns : Even as our trees on earth begin to swell . . . Just so that tree, which had been stripped so bare, Broke into leaf, disclosing lovely things That ranged between the violet’s and the rose’s. I could not understand – nor mortals sing – The hymn which then was sung by that assembly. But in the hollow land, as one might expect, Dante’s supernal vision is distorted and empty. Here are the opening lines of Section II: Eyes I dare not meet in dreams In death’s dream kingdom These do not appear: There, the eyes are Sunlight on a broken column There, is a tree swinging There voices are In the wind’s singing More distant and more solemn Than a fading star. The hollow-man speaker does not dare to meet the eyes of Beatrice. As a matter of fact, here in the Limbo the eyes do not even appear. They are “there” – far beyond the river-barrier and Hell’s abyss, in the Garden of Eden.

And the details of Dante’s vision, so clearly perceived by him, exist as little more than a hallucinatory glimmer. The reality of Christ in Beatrice’s eyes is mere “Sunlight on a broken column” – 1This and subsequent quotations are from Pantheon Books Edition of The Divine Comedy, translated by Lawrence Grant White (New York, 1948). The word “broken” suggesting both an inadequate grasp on the speaker’s part and the shifting of Christ’s image in Beatrice’s eyes like the sun flashing in a mirror. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (since the hollow men have never known either good or evil), rather than a significant phenomenon, is a “tree swinging” – that is, wavering like an illusion. The hymning hosts which so impressed Dante are to the hollow men as faint and incomprehensible as the voice of the wind: voices “In the wind’s singing.”

The concluding portion of Section IV of The Hollow Men is indebted to the Paradiso. In Canto XXXV Dante is carried by Beatrice into the heavens, where he observes the ranks of the redeemed “in the semblance of a snow-white rose,” and observes that they fix their attention eternally on God, the “Trinai Light, which in a single star / Gavest them all such rapture.” But in The Hollow Men the vision of the redeemed exists only as a remote, ironic possibility of hope to the dwellers of the Limbo, who remain, says the speaker – Sightless, unless The eyes reappear As the perpetual star Multifoliate rose Of death’s twilight kingdom.

Section III of The Hollow Men owes somewhat to the Commedia, since it contains a reference to the compulsive spiritual force of Beatrice’s eyes – to their absence in the hollow men’s world. But the concluding lines of the section depend more on Dante’s Vita Nuova, in which he offers an account of his first glimpse of the youthful Beatrice. The account records an experience of immediate, overwhelming love in which sexual desire and spiritual awareness awaken simultaneously and function as part of the total phenomenon of adolescent love. Leonard Unger2 has traced this experience as a persistent motif in Eliot’s poetry, the most typical manifestation of which is in the Rose Garden setting of Burnt Norton. It appears also, in distorted fashion, in the Hyacinth Girl passage of the first section of The Waste Land. In the latter passage, however, the experience is frustrated of its ultimate result and the narrator cries out: “I was neither / Living nor dead, and I knew nothing.” Although Unger does not note the occurrence of the experience in The Hollow Men, it also seems to be the source of the rather curious details of the opening lines of Section III, which reveal what seems to be a truncated worship service in which details of an 2″T. S. Eliot’s Rose Garden: A Persistent Theme,” The Southern Review, VII (Spring, 1942), 667-689. erotic nature occur.

Stone images, the hollow-man speaker declares, are raised, but only to receive the supplication of a dead man’s hand. Then he asks whether in death’s other kingdom the experience of worship is as it is here in the Limbo : Is it like this In death’s other kingdom Waking alone At the hour when we are Trembling with tenderness Lips that would kiss Form prayers to broken stone. Undoubtedly this is another instance, like that in The Waste Land, when the valid expectation from this experience fails to materialize.

Before leaving the subject of the direct influence of The Divine Comedy on Eliot’s poem we should note that the role played by the speaker in the poem is very like that of Dante himself in the earlier work. The “I” of The Hollow Men, the hollow men’s spokesman, is himself, in effect, a modern Dante. For like Dante he too presents a “dream kingdom” and is part of that kingdom in experiential terms. But unlike his medieval predecessor, who lived in a world in which religious efficacy was possible, the hollow-man spokesman does not. The author of the Commedia by means of his fervent vision of Beatrice’s eyes is able to traverse both Inferno and Purgatory and to arrive at last in Paradise; the hollow-man Dante is forever immured within his desolate Limbo, barred even from crossing the river immediately into death’s kingdom of Hell, into which “lost / Violent souls” may go; and whatever dream visions might conceivably be vouchsafed him must of necessity be meaningless or misleading because of his spiritual incapacity. “In this last of meeting places,” he suggests, speaking for himself and his fellows, “We grope together / And avoid speech / Gathered on this beach of the tumid river.” Such, Eliot suggests, is the modern Dante in the sterile landscape of contemporary civilization.

Intrinsic likenesses between The Hollow Men and The Waste Land are many, and readily apparent: the poems have the same desert landscape characterized by images of desiccation and ruin; their spiritual values are similarly distorted and perverted; even the inhabitants who dwell in these two desolate worlds are alike. For the crowds of white-collar workers enroute to their daily office routine in the “Unreal City” passage in the first section of The Waste Land are likewise hollow – wraiths going through their daily activities in a dream-like trance; this passage, too, according to Eliot’s notes to The Waste Land, being derived from Canto III of the Inferno. Equally important is the extrinsic evidence of the close link between these two famous poems.

From an exchange of letters3 between Eliot and Ezra Pound relative to Pound’s abridgment of the Waste Land manuscript to approximately half its length we learn two important facts: (1) from the rejected portions of the manuscript Eliot apparently salvaged certain lines that are closely associated with the little suite of lyrics called “Doris’s Dream Songs” – the first published version of The Hollow Men; (2) Eliot originally planned to use as an epigraph to The Waste Land a quotation from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, but was dissuaded by Pound. It is from Conrad’s story that one of the epigraphs for The Hollow Men was ultimately drawn. The three untitled lyrics in “Doris’s Dream Songs,” published in 1924, begin respectively, “This is the dead land,” “Eyes that last I saw in tears,” and “The wind sprang up at four o’clock.” Only the first was retained for the final version of The Hollow Men, the other two being relegated to the “Minor Poems” section of Eliot’s Collected Poems, where they are readily available. But since they represent an important link with The Waste Land, we shall examine them in some detail. “Eyes that last I saw in tears” pictures a dream kingdom like that in The Hollow Men. There are eyes here also, but between them and the speaker is an abyss of division, and though a golden vision of the eyes reappears, the tears are now gone and they have become “Eyes of decision.” He shall not see them again, the speaker laments, unless “At the door of death’s other kingdom,” where they remain momentarily: “The eyes outlast a little while / A little while outlast the tears / And hold us in derision.”

These, in the light of what we already know about The Hollow Men, are the eyes of Beatrice, and they are derisive here, presumably, because the speaker cannot comprehend their significance. They are in effect thus turned from symbols of hope into symbols of ridicule and recall Virgil’s descriptive line that justice (“Eyes of decision”) and mercy (“Eyes that last I saw in tears”) both alike scorn hollow men. “The wind sprang up at four o’clock” is closely connected with its companion lyric by the key image of tears, the latter portion of the poem being concerned with “a face that sweats with tears.” It opens as if marking the beginning of a dream vision comparable to Dante’s: the wind springs up at four o’clock in the morning, breaking into the sleeper’s repose with its bell-like sound: 3 The Letters of Ezra Pound 1907-1941, ed. D. D. Paige (New York, 1 Everett Gillis The wind sprang up at four o’clock The wind sprang up and broke the bells Swinging between life and death Here, in death’s dream kingdom The waking echo of confusing strife. The startled moment of half-waking, half -dreaming, suggested by the lines is vividly evoked by the word “swinging,” which intimates the wavering fantasy associated with dreams; but at the same time the moment retains a “waking echo” of reality. The poem thus opens from the standpoint of an individual in the realm of life – e.g., of a Dante, but one faced by a nightmare rather than an authentic vision – but the prevalent point of view is that of a dweller in Limbo.

For as the poem proceeds, we are facing, as in the final version of The Hollow Men, a blackened river, suffused with miasmic mists, from the other side of which comes the clamor of vigorous vandal hordes of Tartar horsemen: Is it a dream or something else When the surface of the blackened river Is a face that sweats with tears? I saw across the blackened river The campfire shake with alien spears. Here, across death’s other river The Tartar horsemen shake their spears. The Tartar horsemen are rather evident prototypes of the lost, violent souls in The Hollow Men. The lines containing the nightmarish vision of a river sweating tears seem to be the lines which Eliot had in mind when he wrote Pound concerning the excisions in the Waste Land manuscript : “Would advise working sweats with tears etc. into nerves monologue; only place where it can go?” (The “nerves monologue” occurs in the first part of Section II of The Waste Land.) Pound’s reply was: “I dare say the sweats with tears will wait.” The lines consequently never appeared in The Waste Land in its final draft, but do form part of the first version of The Hollow Men. The curious title “Doris’s Dream Songs” also throws some light on the meaning of the final draft of the poem. The use of “dream” as a designation for Doris’s songs implies that Eliot already has the Com- media in mind as background for his poem; and Doris becomes in effect the Beatrice of the speaker in the three lyrics, to whom she sends her dream visions. The visions are, however, mere distortions. Furthermore, Beatrice’s symbolism as Dante’s beloved on earth and spiritual guide beyond is totally lost; for the Beatrice of the Dream Songs has efficacy in neither, being lacking on both counts. For when speaking to Doris of life’s meaning in Sweeney Agonistes Sweeney declares that life on a cannibal island consists of birth, copulation, and death, she replies: “Id be bored” ; and, as just shown, the spiritual dreams that she sends the speaker are dreams of blackened rivers like faces sweating tears, hallucinations rather than valid insights. The speaker of “Doris’s Dream Songs” is no better off spiritually after the dreams than before.

Although Eliot rejected Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as a source for an epigraph for The Waste Land, as a consequence of Pound’s persuasion, he returned to the story for one of the epigraphs of The Hollow Men. The phrase “Mistah Kurtz – he dead” recalls for any reader of Conrad’s short novel the virulently evil ivory trader Kurtz. Kurtz had come to Africa to Christianize and civilize the natives, but instead had early fallen under the jungle’s sway which awakened in him “forgotten and brutal instincts,” and had remained to “snatch their ivory” and to line the poles of his stockade with their shrunken heads. The “impenetrable darkness” that possessed him was revealed even to himself in his last hour and he died breathing the desolate words, “The horror! The horror!” A moment later his death is announced by a native boy in the words of the epigraph. Kurtz exists as a vivid contrast to the degenerate world of British imperialism depicted in the tale. The sordid picture of company servants sweating their lives away in grimy jungle stations, their hearts eaten up with greed and frustrated ambitions, is reminiscent both of the deadened crowds of white-collar workers flowing across London Bridge in The Waste Land and the huddled figures on the beach of the tumid river in The Hollow Men. They too live in a sort of Dantesque dream. The environs of the company headquarters remind Captain Marlow, the narrator, of “the gloomy circle of some Inferno” in which the black shapes of Negroes ruined by slave labor “crouched, lay, sat between, the trees leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half effaced within the dim light, in all the attitudes of pain, abandonment, and despair.” The mood of this passage closely approximates that of The Hollow Men, as does also the following. Describing life in one of the up-river stations, Marlow remarks: They wandered here and there with their absurd long staves in their hands, like a lot of faithless pilgrims bewitched inside a rotten fence. The word “ivory” rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it. A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all, like a whiff from some corpse. By Jove! I’ve never seen anything so unreal in my life.

In contrast to this world Kurtz is, of course, one of the violent evil souls who have crossed beyond the river. So likewise is Guy Fawkes, whose presence in The Hollow Men is evoked by the second epigraph, “A penny for the Old Guy.” The virility of the evil of the historical Fawkes, Eliot suggests, has disappeared on the decadent modern scene, which represents him by trivial ceremonies – the cry of English street urchins begging for pennies for fireworks, the burning of straw effigies of the real Guy Fawkes, the selling of firecrackers – themselves, ironically, pale symbols of the explosive violence implicit in the barrels of gunpowder stacked beneath Parliament. Further details which Eliot owes to Heart of Darkness and Guy Fawkes5 Day activities are too numerous to list here, but we may mention one or two of the most important. The effigy of the “Old Guy” obviously furnished him with his picture of the hollow men as “stuffed men / Leaning together / Headpieces filled with straw”; and the firecrackers with an appropriate reference in the closing lines of the poem, in which the world ends not with a “bang” but a “whimper.” Direct influences of Heart of Darkness possibly include the epithet “hollow.” Kurtz is on one occasion said to be “hollow to the core,” and speaking of one of the agents of an up-river trading post, Captain Marlow remarks: “I let him run on, this papier-mâché mephistopheles, and it seemed to me that if I tried I could poke my fore-finger through him, and would find nothing inside.” For the lines “Shape without form, shade without color / Paralyzed force, gesture without emotion,” Eliot may be indebted to a sentence in which Marlow, describing an ivory- hungry trading expedition, remarks (italics mine) : “This devoted band called itself the Eldorado Exploring Expedition, and I believe they were sworn to secrecy. Their talk, however, was the talk of sordid buccaneers: it was reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity, and cruel without courage”

One further likeness between The Waste Land and The Hollow Men should be noted. This is the fact that both poems follow a musical organization. But whereas the former is based on the familiar sonata arrangement of the later Four Quartets, The Hollow Men is a musical suite, consisting of choruses and recitatives. It opens with a chorus chanted in unison by the hollow men, then continues in its three middle sections with recitative passages by the hollow-man spokesman, and ends in the last section with a combination of the two modes. Section V opens and closes with a chorus in unison by the hollow men (indicated by italics) enclosing an antiphony in which the spokesman participates as leader and the hollow-man chorus responds. The fact of the analogy n of music is further emphasized by the poem’s essentially thematic development. The basic theme of spiritual deadness is developed in its larger aspects throughout the poem, each section making its special contribution : the first picturing the nebulous hordes of souls dwelling in a spiritual desert and caught in the grip of a spiritual paralysis; the second, the state of the religious leader in such a Limbo; the third, the ineffectual nature of worship; the fourth, the decadent state of religious vision; and the fifth, the necessarily inchoate form of any worship service in which the hollow men might engage. The general effect of the thematic development is an almost unrelieved concentration on the effects of spiritual unreality. The poem likewise contains elements which are analogous to counterpoint in music: the lost violent souls of Section I who contrast with the spiritual paralysis of the hollow men; the eyes of Beatrice with their spiritual reality in the three middle sections; the vision of the perpetual star and multifoliate rose of Section IV. These faint possibilities of hope – “The hope only /Of empty men” – are shown to be merely ironic, however, by the dismal picture of worship detailed in the last section, which follows them.

Our discussion of The Hollow Men may appropriately conclude with a reading of its five movements against the background provided by the preceding pages. Section I, as already suggested, is concerned chiefly with setting the Limbo scene – the desert terrain of wind in dry grass and rats’ feet over broken glass – and with establishing the spiritual status of the principals. Souls who have known neither good nor evil on earth are appropriately characterized as hollow, as straw effigies leaning upon one another, fit only to be burned in a trivial holiday celebration on Guy Fawkes’ Day. They are shape, yet without shape; shade, without shade; force, without energy; gesture halted in mid-air. In the concluding lines of the section they are sharply contrasted with those who in life did show spiritual energy – “lost / Violent souls” – whose intransigent evil has carried them over the river into death’s true kingdom of punishment and reward. Such souls as Kurtz and Fawkes – if they did deign to recognize the hollow men at all, would recognize them, suggests the chorus, for what they truly are: hollow men, stuffed men. Section II expresses the state of the modern religious leader, or religious poet, like Dante, in the Limbo of contemporary civilization. This Dante, however, is incapable of arriving at any spiritual validity. Indeed, he does not even “dare” to meet in his Commedia the eyes that for the earlier poet symbolized spiritual efficacy. As a matter of fact, the eyes do not appear here in the Limbo at all; but only “there” – over beyond in the Garden of Eden, far beyond the speaker’s power to achieve. The eyes of Beatrice that mirror the spiritual reality of Christ, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, the hymns of praise – are in the hollow land of necessity “more distant and more solemn / Than a fading star.”

Thus, unable to bear even the reality of an abortive vision, the modern Dante begs in the second portion of the section to be no nearer to it than he is now, and hastens to take upon himself the trappings of his fellow hollow men : “Let me also wear / Such deliberate disguises / Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves.” Not for him, he suggests, is “that final meeting / In the twilight kingdom” with the commanding symbol of spiritual truth, the eyes of Beatrice.

Section III explores the probable nature of worship in the hollow land. Here we find it to be an abortive phenomenon which can achieve no vestige of the spiritual power one might ordinarily expect of the worship experience. For, complains the spokesman in the opening lines, this is a dead land, a cactus land, and although stone images of worship are raised, they receive only the supplication of a dead man’s hand. And though similar stone images might in some primitive religion conceivably be invested with magic or mystery, here they are broken and impotent. The spokesman then asks if worship is like this in death’s other kingdom – perhaps in the Garden of Eden where Beatrice may be found. He provides his own answer: in the cactus land the phenomenon of the spiritual ecstasy associated with the awakening of love fails utterly to be realized. At the moment when lips are ready, trembling with tenderness, to kiss, they form prayers only to broken stone, and the hollow men can receive no actual spiritual benefit. It is no wonder, then, that they do not even “dare” to meet Beatrice’s eyes, which for Dante were symbols both of transcendent love and transcendent spiritual reality.

The fourth section of The Hollow Men presents an example of the failure of spiritual vision in the hollow land. This failure has already been implied in the opening portion of Section II, which presents the modern »Dante’s illusory vision of the ceremony in the Garden of Eden. The spokesman now repeats his statement that there are no eyes here in Limbo – “In this hollow valley / This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms.” The prayers to broken stones have brought no influx of spiritual vision comparable to Beatrice’s eyes. The total lack of spiritual reality thus implied is further stressed in the lines that follow by imagery of almost complete lack of energy : images of groping and avoidance of speech on the beach of the swollen, miasmic river: In this last of meeting places We grope together And avoid speech Gathered on the beach of the tumid river. The sense of blind groping here described introduces in turn the idea of sightlessness that is developed in the concluding lines of the passage, which state that the hollow men must remain spiritually “sightless” unless by some utterly unforeseen circumstances the eyes should “reappear.” That they should reappear – as those which drew Dante into the empyrean where dwell the saints as a “Multifoliate rose” engaged in perpetual worship of God the Trinai Star – is of such transcendent hope that it can only be taken, in a hollow land, as ironic : as, as already suggested, an element of musical counterpoint used for rhetorical purposes only. For as Virgil has observed, not only justice, but mercy also, has rejected the hollow men. Considering the absolute impotence of any form of worship in the Limbo, then, the grotesque parody of religious rituals presented in the last section of the poem comes as no surprise. Section V opens with a mordant parody of the child’s rhyme: “Here we go round the mulberry bush / So early in the morning.” If the hollow men should engage in a formal worship service, it is implied, a childish chant would be the most logical choice for their ritual since they have no more apprehension of the meaning of spiritual reality than do young children, who likewise have no experiential knowledge of good or evil. The distortion of the mulberry bush into a prickly pear is both in keeping with the desert landscape and with the prevalent warping of religious values in the poem as a whole: it represents an appropriate altar for hollow men. The ritual of going round the prickly pear likewise recalls the fruitless pursuit of the whirling banner by the souls described by Dante in Canto III of the Inferno. The central portion of this section constitutes an antiphonal passage between the hollow-man spokesman and the hollow-men chorus. The leader’s chant consists wholly of statements descriptive of incomplete realization. Its beginning – Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the Shadow- is followed by two other segments expressing similar examples of frustration: between the inception and the completion of any effort falls the shadow of impotence. The hollow men are indeed form without shape, shade without color, paralyzed force, gesture without motion. The response of the hollow men consists of broken fragments of the worship litany: “For Thine is the Kingdom,” “Life is very long.” The spokesman echoes them in a similar fashion: “For thine is / Life is / For thine is the.” The worship service of the hollow men ends with an ironic benediction, which picks up again the rhetoric of the nursery rhyme opening; but instead of repeating the opening it substitutes a perverse doxology: This L· the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper. This ending suggests that as the conventional worship service at its climax looks toward union with its source of spiritual strength at the Day of Judgment when God gathers His children to Him, the hollow-men worshipers also grope toward a similar realization. But to no avail. For the Judgment Day trump of the hollow men does not have the power even of a firecracker on Guy Fawkes’ Day. It is merely a whimper – the word “whimper” further strengthening the association with children initiated by the opening nursery-rhyme parody, and suggesting – ambivalently – both the moaning cry of young children, and hence less force even than the explosion of a firecracker, and the possible response of street children denied their pennies for fireworks and thus incapable of engaging even in the superficial activities of Guy Fawke’s Day. The conclusion of Section V thus fittingly underscores the spiritual unreality permeating both the section and the poem as a whole. And we should conclude, perhaps, that The Hollow Men, rather than embodying any affirmative note, however meager, is to be considered merely as an extension of Eliot’s earlier poem – that it is, as it were, a Waste Land in little.

Texas Technological College Lubbock, Texas

THE SPIRITUAL STATUS OF T. S. ELIOT’S HOLLOW MEN Author(s): Everett A. Gillis Source: Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. 2, No. 4 (Winter 1961), pp. 464-475 Published by: University of Texas Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40753695 Accessed: 05-04-2019 19:57 UTC

THE SPIRITUAL STATUS OF T. S. ELIOT’S HOLLOW MEN By Everett A. Gillis

There is a noticeable tendency in recent expositions of T. S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men to read some affirmation into a poem traditionally associated with The Waste Land as a work of sterility and desolation, and thus to offer a degree of spiritual hope to Eliot’s famous effigies. Yet the orthodox view of the poem is still very tenable, and a thorough examination of the sources and probable origin of the poem suggests that it is in many respects closer to The Waste Land in theme, method, and mood than it is to Eliot’s later, more affirmative work.

The Hollow Men opens with the familiar picture of a desert landscape in which a chorus declares their spiritual status to be that of hollow men, straw effigies, caught in a stance of frozen immobility: “Shape without form, shade without color, / Paralyzed force, gesture without motion.” Except for certain details which will be taken up later, Eliot derives his picture almost entirely from Dante’s Divine Comedy. As a matter of fact, the first section of the poem is to all effects a direct transcription of the third canto of Dante’s Inferno – of the dark, desolate plain lying between Hell’s portal and the river Acheron, which flows as a formidable barrier between the plain and Hell’s abyss. Here Dante and Virgil perceive vast hordes of souls futilely pursuing a great whirling banner. Their cries fill the air, “reverberating in the starless air”; and when Dante asks why they lament so bitterly, Virgil replies that they are those souls who on earth were neither spiritually alive nor spiritually dead, that is, neither good nor evil; and who, consequently, are altogether void of any spiritual meaning. As a result, these creatures may never pass beyond the river into the true realm of death (referred to variously in The Hollow Men as “death’s other Kingdom,” “death’s dream kingdom,” and “death’s twilight kingdom”), where punishments or rewards are meted to the evil and the good, for they have known neither. Indeed, declares Virgil: “Mercy and justice scorn them, both alike.”

Dante’s souls, like the souls in Eliot’s poem, are thus hollow too – totally empty of any real spiritual validity. The notion of spiritual hollowness, seized upon by Eliot to bring a devastating castigation of his own age, is thus enormously reinforced by its reminiscence of the Commedia’s gloomy setting. The salient features of the middle sections of The Hollow Men likewise derive from this source. The opening lines of Section II again come straight from Dante, this time from Cantos XXX and XXXI of the Purgatório. In these cantos Dante and Virgil, having climbed the Mountain of Purgatory to the Garden of Eden situated on its summit, witness the triumphal progress of the Church in the form of a chariot drawn by a griffin, whose twofold nature represents simultaneously the human and the divine natures of Christ.

In the processional Dante perceives his beloved and fixes his eyes upon hers: A myriad desires, that burned like flames, Constrained my gaze upon those gleaming eyes; But they were looking over on the gryphon. And like the sun reflected in a glass, Within her eyes that twofold creature glowed, Now with one nature’s actions, now with the other’s.1 The group now moves to the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, which, long barren, at their approach breaks into foliage to the accompaniment of hymns : Even as our trees on earth begin to swell . . . Just so that tree, which had been stripped so bare, Broke into leaf, disclosing lovely things That ranged between the violet’s and the rose’s. I could not understand – nor mortals sing – The hymn which then was sung by that assembly. But in the hollow land, as one might expect, Dante’s supernal vision is distorted and empty. Here are the opening lines of Section II: Eyes I dare not meet in dreams In death’s dream kingdom These do not appear: There, the eyes are Sunlight on a broken column There, is a tree swinging There voices are In the wind’s singing More distant and more solemn Than a fading star. The hollow-man speaker does not dare to meet the eyes of Beatrice. As a matter of fact, here in the Limbo the eyes do not even appear. They are “there” – far beyond the river-barrier and Hell’s abyss, in the Garden of Eden.

And the details of Dante’s vision, so clearly perceived by him, exist as little more than a hallucinatory glimmer. The reality of Christ in Beatrice’s eyes is mere “Sunlight on a broken column” – 1This and subsequent quotations are from Pantheon Books Edition of The Divine Comedy, translated by Lawrence Grant White (New York, 1948). The word “broken” suggesting both an inadequate grasp on the speaker’s part and the shifting of Christ’s image in Beatrice’s eyes like the sun flashing in a mirror. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (since the hollow men have never known either good or evil), rather than a significant phenomenon, is a “tree swinging” – that is, wavering like an illusion. The hymning hosts which so impressed Dante are to the hollow men as faint and incomprehensible as the voice of the wind: voices “In the wind’s singing.”

The concluding portion of Section IV of The Hollow Men is indebted to the Paradiso. In Canto XXXV Dante is carried by Beatrice into the heavens, where he observes the ranks of the redeemed “in the semblance of a snow-white rose,” and observes that they fix their attention eternally on God, the “Trinai Light, which in a single star / Gavest them all such rapture.” But in The Hollow Men the vision of the redeemed exists only as a remote, ironic possibility of hope to the dwellers of the Limbo, who remain, says the speaker – Sightless, unless The eyes reappear As the perpetual star Multifoliate rose Of death’s twilight kingdom.

Section III of The Hollow Men owes somewhat to the Commedia, since it contains a reference to the compulsive spiritual force of Beatrice’s eyes – to their absence in the hollow men’s world. But the concluding lines of the section depend more on Dante’s Vita Nuova, in which he offers an account of his first glimpse of the youthful Beatrice. The account records an experience of immediate, overwhelming love in which sexual desire and spiritual awareness awaken simultaneously and function as part of the total phenomenon of adolescent love. Leonard Unger2 has traced this experience as a persistent motif in Eliot’s poetry, the most typical manifestation of which is in the Rose Garden setting of Burnt Norton. It appears also, in distorted fashion, in the Hyacinth Girl passage of the first section of The Waste Land. In the latter passage, however, the experience is frustrated of its ultimate result and the narrator cries out: “I was neither / Living nor dead, and I knew nothing.” Although Unger does not note the occurrence of the experience in The Hollow Men, it also seems to be the source of the rather curious details of the opening lines of Section III, which reveal what seems to be a truncated worship service in which details of an 2″T. S. Eliot’s Rose Garden: A Persistent Theme,” The Southern Review, VII (Spring, 1942), 667-689. erotic nature occur.

Stone images, the hollow-man speaker declares, are raised, but only to receive the supplication of a dead man’s hand. Then he asks whether in death’s other kingdom the experience of worship is as it is here in the Limbo : Is it like this In death’s other kingdom Waking alone At the hour when we are Trembling with tenderness Lips that would kiss Form prayers to broken stone. Undoubtedly this is another instance, like that in The Waste Land, when the valid expectation from this experience fails to materialize.

Before leaving the subject of the direct influence of The Divine Comedy on Eliot’s poem we should note that the role played by the speaker in the poem is very like that of Dante himself in the earlier work. The “I” of The Hollow Men, the hollow men’s spokesman, is himself, in effect, a modern Dante. For like Dante he too presents a “dream kingdom” and is part of that kingdom in experiential terms. But unlike his medieval predecessor, who lived in a world in which religious efficacy was possible, the hollow-man spokesman does not. The author of the Commedia by means of his fervent vision of Beatrice’s eyes is able to traverse both Inferno and Purgatory and to arrive at last in Paradise; the hollow-man Dante is forever immured within his desolate Limbo, barred even from crossing the river immediately into death’s kingdom of Hell, into which “lost / Violent souls” may go; and whatever dream visions might conceivably be vouchsafed him must of necessity be meaningless or misleading because of his spiritual incapacity. “In this last of meeting places,” he suggests, speaking for himself and his fellows, “We grope together / And avoid speech / Gathered on this beach of the tumid river.” Such, Eliot suggests, is the modern Dante in the sterile landscape of contemporary civilization.

Intrinsic likenesses between The Hollow Men and The Waste Land are many, and readily apparent: the poems have the same desert landscape characterized by images of desiccation and ruin; their spiritual values are similarly distorted and perverted; even the inhabitants who dwell in these two desolate worlds are alike. For the crowds of white-collar workers enroute to their daily office routine in the “Unreal City” passage in the first section of The Waste Land are likewise hollow – wraiths going through their daily activities in a dream-like trance; this passage, too, according to Eliot’s notes to The Waste Land, being derived from Canto III of the Inferno. Equally important is the extrinsic evidence of the close link between these two famous poems.

From an exchange of letters3 between Eliot and Ezra Pound relative to Pound’s abridgment of the Waste Land manuscript to approximately half its length we learn two important facts: (1) from the rejected portions of the manuscript Eliot apparently salvaged certain lines that are closely associated with the little suite of lyrics called “Doris’s Dream Songs” – the first published version of The Hollow Men; (2) Eliot originally planned to use as an epigraph to The Waste Land a quotation from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, but was dissuaded by Pound. It is from Conrad’s story that one of the epigraphs for The Hollow Men was ultimately drawn. The three untitled lyrics in “Doris’s Dream Songs,” published in 1924, begin respectively, “This is the dead land,” “Eyes that last I saw in tears,” and “The wind sprang up at four o’clock.” Only the first was retained for the final version of The Hollow Men, the other two being relegated to the “Minor Poems” section of Eliot’s Collected Poems, where they are readily available. But since they represent an important link with The Waste Land, we shall examine them in some detail. “Eyes that last I saw in tears” pictures a dream kingdom like that in The Hollow Men. There are eyes here also, but between them and the speaker is an abyss of division, and though a golden vision of the eyes reappears, the tears are now gone and they have become “Eyes of decision.” He shall not see them again, the speaker laments, unless “At the door of death’s other kingdom,” where they remain momentarily: “The eyes outlast a little while / A little while outlast the tears / And hold us in derision.”

These, in the light of what we already know about The Hollow Men, are the eyes of Beatrice, and they are derisive here, presumably, because the speaker cannot comprehend their significance. They are in effect thus turned from symbols of hope into symbols of ridicule and recall Virgil’s descriptive line that justice (“Eyes of decision”) and mercy (“Eyes that last I saw in tears”) both alike scorn hollow men. “The wind sprang up at four o’clock” is closely connected with its companion lyric by the key image of tears, the latter portion of the poem being concerned with “a face that sweats with tears.” It opens as if marking the beginning of a dream vision comparable to Dante’s: the wind springs up at four o’clock in the morning, breaking into the sleeper’s repose with its bell-like sound: 3 The Letters of Ezra Pound 1907-1941, ed. D. D. Paige (New York, 1 Everett Gillis The wind sprang up at four o’clock The wind sprang up and broke the bells Swinging between life and death Here, in death’s dream kingdom The waking echo of confusing strife. The startled moment of half-waking, half -dreaming, suggested by the lines is vividly evoked by the word “swinging,” which intimates the wavering fantasy associated with dreams; but at the same time the moment retains a “waking echo” of reality. The poem thus opens from the standpoint of an individual in the realm of life – e.g., of a Dante, but one faced by a nightmare rather than an authentic vision – but the prevalent point of view is that of a dweller in Limbo.

For as the poem proceeds, we are facing, as in the final version of The Hollow Men, a blackened river, suffused with miasmic mists, from the other side of which comes the clamor of vigorous vandal hordes of Tartar horsemen: Is it a dream or something else When the surface of the blackened river Is a face that sweats with tears? I saw across the blackened river The campfire shake with alien spears. Here, across death’s other river The Tartar horsemen shake their spears. The Tartar horsemen are rather evident prototypes of the lost, violent souls in The Hollow Men. The lines containing the nightmarish vision of a river sweating tears seem to be the lines which Eliot had in mind when he wrote Pound concerning the excisions in the Waste Land manuscript : “Would advise working sweats with tears etc. into nerves monologue; only place where it can go?” (The “nerves monologue” occurs in the first part of Section II of The Waste Land.) Pound’s reply was: “I dare say the sweats with tears will wait.” The lines consequently never appeared in The Waste Land in its final draft, but do form part of the first version of The Hollow Men. The curious title “Doris’s Dream Songs” also throws some light on the meaning of the final draft of the poem. The use of “dream” as a designation for Doris’s songs implies that Eliot already has the Com- media in mind as background for his poem; and Doris becomes in effect the Beatrice of the speaker in the three lyrics, to whom she sends her dream visions. The visions are, however, mere distortions. Furthermore, Beatrice’s symbolism as Dante’s beloved on earth and spiritual guide beyond is totally lost; for the Beatrice of the Dream Songs has efficacy in neither, being lacking on both counts. For when speaking to Doris of life’s meaning in Sweeney Agonistes Sweeney declares that life on a cannibal island consists of birth, copulation, and death, she replies: “Id be bored” ; and, as just shown, the spiritual dreams that she sends the speaker are dreams of blackened rivers like faces sweating tears, hallucinations rather than valid insights. The speaker of “Doris’s Dream Songs” is no better off spiritually after the dreams than before.

Although Eliot rejected Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as a source for an epigraph for The Waste Land, as a consequence of Pound’s persuasion, he returned to the story for one of the epigraphs of The Hollow Men. The phrase “Mistah Kurtz – he dead” recalls for any reader of Conrad’s short novel the virulently evil ivory trader Kurtz. Kurtz had come to Africa to Christianize and civilize the natives, but instead had early fallen under the jungle’s sway which awakened in him “forgotten and brutal instincts,” and had remained to “snatch their ivory” and to line the poles of his stockade with their shrunken heads. The “impenetrable darkness” that possessed him was revealed even to himself in his last hour and he died breathing the desolate words, “The horror! The horror!” A moment later his death is announced by a native boy in the words of the epigraph. Kurtz exists as a vivid contrast to the degenerate world of British imperialism depicted in the tale. The sordid picture of company servants sweating their lives away in grimy jungle stations, their hearts eaten up with greed and frustrated ambitions, is reminiscent both of the deadened crowds of white-collar workers flowing across London Bridge in The Waste Land and the huddled figures on the beach of the tumid river in The Hollow Men. They too live in a sort of Dantesque dream. The environs of the company headquarters remind Captain Marlow, the narrator, of “the gloomy circle of some Inferno” in which the black shapes of Negroes ruined by slave labor “crouched, lay, sat between, the trees leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half effaced within the dim light, in all the attitudes of pain, abandonment, and despair.” The mood of this passage closely approximates that of The Hollow Men, as does also the following. Describing life in one of the up-river stations, Marlow remarks: They wandered here and there with their absurd long staves in their hands, like a lot of faithless pilgrims bewitched inside a rotten fence. The word “ivory” rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it. A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all, like a whiff from some corpse. By Jove! I’ve never seen anything so unreal in my life.

In contrast to this world Kurtz is, of course, one of the violent evil souls who have crossed beyond the river. So likewise is Guy Fawkes, whose presence in The Hollow Men is evoked by the second epigraph, “A penny for the Old Guy.” The virility of the evil of the historical Fawkes, Eliot suggests, has disappeared on the decadent modern scene, which represents him by trivial ceremonies – the cry of English street urchins begging for pennies for fireworks, the burning of straw effigies of the real Guy Fawkes, the selling of firecrackers – themselves, ironically, pale symbols of the explosive violence implicit in the barrels of gunpowder stacked beneath Parliament. Further details which Eliot owes to Heart of Darkness and Guy Fawkes5 Day activities are too numerous to list here, but we may mention one or two of the most important. The effigy of the “Old Guy” obviously furnished him with his picture of the hollow men as “stuffed men / Leaning together / Headpieces filled with straw”; and the firecrackers with an appropriate reference in the closing lines of the poem, in which the world ends not with a “bang” but a “whimper.” Direct influences of Heart of Darkness possibly include the epithet “hollow.” Kurtz is on one occasion said to be “hollow to the core,” and speaking of one of the agents of an up-river trading post, Captain Marlow remarks: “I let him run on, this papier-mâché mephistopheles, and it seemed to me that if I tried I could poke my fore-finger through him, and would find nothing inside.” For the lines “Shape without form, shade without color / Paralyzed force, gesture without emotion,” Eliot may be indebted to a sentence in which Marlow, describing an ivory- hungry trading expedition, remarks (italics mine) : “This devoted band called itself the Eldorado Exploring Expedition, and I believe they were sworn to secrecy. Their talk, however, was the talk of sordid buccaneers: it was reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity, and cruel without courage”

One further likeness between The Waste Land and The Hollow Men should be noted. This is the fact that both poems follow a musical organization. But whereas the former is based on the familiar sonata arrangement of the later Four Quartets, The Hollow Men is a musical suite, consisting of choruses and recitatives. It opens with a chorus chanted in unison by the hollow men, then continues in its three middle sections with recitative passages by the hollow-man spokesman, and ends in the last section with a combination of the two modes. Section V opens and closes with a chorus in unison by the hollow men (indicated by italics) enclosing an antiphony in which the spokesman participates as leader and the hollow-man chorus responds. The fact of the analogy n of music is further emphasized by the poem’s essentially thematic development. The basic theme of spiritual deadness is developed in its larger aspects throughout the poem, each section making its special contribution : the first picturing the nebulous hordes of souls dwelling in a spiritual desert and caught in the grip of a spiritual paralysis; the second, the state of the religious leader in such a Limbo; the third, the ineffectual nature of worship; the fourth, the decadent state of religious vision; and the fifth, the necessarily inchoate form of any worship service in which the hollow men might engage. The general effect of the thematic development is an almost unrelieved concentration on the effects of spiritual unreality. The poem likewise contains elements which are analogous to counterpoint in music: the lost violent souls of Section I who contrast with the spiritual paralysis of the hollow men; the eyes of Beatrice with their spiritual reality in the three middle sections; the vision of the perpetual star and multifoliate rose of Section IV. These faint possibilities of hope – “The hope only /Of empty men” – are shown to be merely ironic, however, by the dismal picture of worship detailed in the last section, which follows them.

Our discussion of The Hollow Men may appropriately conclude with a reading of its five movements against the background provided by the preceding pages. Section I, as already suggested, is concerned chiefly with setting the Limbo scene – the desert terrain of wind in dry grass and rats’ feet over broken glass – and with establishing the spiritual status of the principals. Souls who have known neither good nor evil on earth are appropriately characterized as hollow, as straw effigies leaning upon one another, fit only to be burned in a trivial holiday celebration on Guy Fawkes’ Day. They are shape, yet without shape; shade, without shade; force, without energy; gesture halted in mid-air. In the concluding lines of the section they are sharply contrasted with those who in life did show spiritual energy – “lost / Violent souls” – whose intransigent evil has carried them over the river into death’s true kingdom of punishment and reward. Such souls as Kurtz and Fawkes – if they did deign to recognize the hollow men at all, would recognize them, suggests the chorus, for what they truly are: hollow men, stuffed men. Section II expresses the state of the modern religious leader, or religious poet, like Dante, in the Limbo of contemporary civilization. This Dante, however, is incapable of arriving at any spiritual validity. Indeed, he does not even “dare” to meet in his Commedia the eyes that for the earlier poet symbolized spiritual efficacy. As a matter of fact, the eyes do not appear here in the Limbo at all; but only “there” – over beyond in the Garden of Eden, far beyond the speaker’s power to achieve. The eyes of Beatrice that mirror the spiritual reality of Christ, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, the hymns of praise – are in the hollow land of necessity “more distant and more solemn / Than a fading star.”

Thus, unable to bear even the reality of an abortive vision, the modern Dante begs in the second portion of the section to be no nearer to it than he is now, and hastens to take upon himself the trappings of his fellow hollow men : “Let me also wear / Such deliberate disguises / Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves.” Not for him, he suggests, is “that final meeting / In the twilight kingdom” with the commanding symbol of spiritual truth, the eyes of Beatrice.

Section III explores the probable nature of worship in the hollow land. Here we find it to be an abortive phenomenon which can achieve no vestige of the spiritual power one might ordinarily expect of the worship experience. For, complains the spokesman in the opening lines, this is a dead land, a cactus land, and although stone images of worship are raised, they receive only the supplication of a dead man’s hand. And though similar stone images might in some primitive religion conceivably be invested with magic or mystery, here they are broken and impotent. The spokesman then asks if worship is like this in death’s other kingdom – perhaps in the Garden of Eden where Beatrice may be found. He provides his own answer: in the cactus land the phenomenon of the spiritual ecstasy associated with the awakening of love fails utterly to be realized. At the moment when lips are ready, trembling with tenderness, to kiss, they form prayers only to broken stone, and the hollow men can receive no actual spiritual benefit. It is no wonder, then, that they do not even “dare” to meet Beatrice’s eyes, which for Dante were symbols both of transcendent love and transcendent spiritual reality.

The fourth section of The Hollow Men presents an example of the failure of spiritual vision in the hollow land. This failure has already been implied in the opening portion of Section II, which presents the modern »Dante’s illusory vision of the ceremony in the Garden of Eden. The spokesman now repeats his statement that there are no eyes here in Limbo – “In this hollow valley / This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms.” The prayers to broken stones have brought no influx of spiritual vision comparable to Beatrice’s eyes. The total lack of spiritual reality thus implied is further stressed in the lines that follow by imagery of almost complete lack of energy : images of groping and avoidance of speech on the beach of the swollen, miasmic river: In this last of meeting places We grope together And avoid speech Gathered on the beach of the tumid river. The sense of blind groping here described introduces in turn the idea of sightlessness that is developed in the concluding lines of the passage, which state that the hollow men must remain spiritually “sightless” unless by some utterly unforeseen circumstances the eyes should “reappear.” That they should reappear – as those which drew Dante into the empyrean where dwell the saints as a “Multifoliate rose” engaged in perpetual worship of God the Trinai Star – is of such transcendent hope that it can only be taken, in a hollow land, as ironic : as, as already suggested, an element of musical counterpoint used for rhetorical purposes only. For as Virgil has observed, not only justice, but mercy also, has rejected the hollow men. Considering the absolute impotence of any form of worship in the Limbo, then, the grotesque parody of religious rituals presented in the last section of the poem comes as no surprise. Section V opens with a mordant parody of the child’s rhyme: “Here we go round the mulberry bush / So early in the morning.” If the hollow men should engage in a formal worship service, it is implied, a childish chant would be the most logical choice for their ritual since they have no more apprehension of the meaning of spiritual reality than do young children, who likewise have no experiential knowledge of good or evil. The distortion of the mulberry bush into a prickly pear is both in keeping with the desert landscape and with the prevalent warping of religious values in the poem as a whole: it represents an appropriate altar for hollow men. The ritual of going round the prickly pear likewise recalls the fruitless pursuit of the whirling banner by the souls described by Dante in Canto III of the Inferno. The central portion of this section constitutes an antiphonal passage between the hollow-man spokesman and the hollow-men chorus. The leader’s chant consists wholly of statements descriptive of incomplete realization. Its beginning – Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the Shadow- is followed by two other segments expressing similar examples of frustration: between the inception and the completion of any effort falls the shadow of impotence. The hollow men are indeed form without shape, shade without color, paralyzed force, gesture without motion. The response of the hollow men consists of broken fragments of the worship litany: “For Thine is the Kingdom,” “Life is very long.” The spokesman echoes them in a similar fashion: “For thine is / Life is / For thine is the.” The worship service of the hollow men ends with an ironic benediction, which picks up again the rhetoric of the nursery rhyme opening; but instead of repeating the opening it substitutes a perverse doxology: This L· the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper. This ending suggests that as the conventional worship service at its climax looks toward union with its source of spiritual strength at the Day of Judgment when God gathers His children to Him, the hollow-men worshipers also grope toward a similar realization. But to no avail. For the Judgment Day trump of the hollow men does not have the power even of a firecracker on Guy Fawkes’ Day. It is merely a whimper – the word “whimper” further strengthening the association with children initiated by the opening nursery-rhyme parody, and suggesting – ambivalently – both the moaning cry of young children, and hence less force even than the explosion of a firecracker, and the possible response of street children denied their pennies for fireworks and thus incapable of engaging even in the superficial activities of Guy Fawke’s Day. The conclusion of Section V thus fittingly underscores the spiritual unreality permeating both the section and the poem as a whole. And we should conclude, perhaps, that The Hollow Men, rather than embodying any affirmative note, however meager, is to be considered merely as an extension of Eliot’s earlier poem – that it is, as it were, a Waste Land in little.

Texas Technological College Lubbock, Texas