Margate is the location of one of the briefest and most enigmatic of the memory traces left by literature and Kent. T S Eliot (1888-1965) although born in Missouri in the US, had arrived to live in the UK in 1914 via Paris and a spell at Harvard, when he had taken up a scholarship at Oxford. Soon after his arrival in the UK he had married Vivien Haigh-Wood. Their marriage, which lasted at least in name till 1932, has been widely written about. It was to overshadow much of Eliot’s work and his life.
`The Waste Land’, published in 1922, is now regarded as one of the greatest modernist texts. Despite its brevity, it is dense in literary and cultural references. For a writer who famously, in his own criticism, played down the role of personality, calling literature an `escape from personality’ (In `Tradition and the Individual Talent’, 1919) even in the `Waste Land’ there are clear references to emotional and personal turmoil and mental pain. `My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad,’ a voice in the second section of the poem states. `Stay with me./Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak./ What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?/I never know what you are thinking. Think.’ (`Complete Poems and Plays of T S Eliot,’ Faber and Faber, London, 1969, 65). It is at the end of the following section, `The Fire Sermon’, that the celebrated lines `On Margate Sands. / I can connect/ Nothing with nothing.’ (Ibid, 70).
Around about the time when Eliot was composing drafts of the poem, he had suffered a major nervous collapse. In a letter from Vivien to a friend on 13th October 1921, she states that `Tom has had a rather serious breakdown and has had to stop all work and go away for three months.’ (`The Letters of T S Eliot, Volume One, 1898-1922,’ Edited Valerie Eliot, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York and London, 1988, 478). She goes on to refer in passing to Eliot being in Margate. A few days later on the 26th October, writing from the Albermarle Hotel, Cliftonville, near Margate she tells another friend that she has joined Eliot and that he is `getting on amazingly. It is not quite a fortnight yet but he looks already younger and fatter and nicer.’ Of the hotel she says that it is `nice, comfortable and inexpensive.’ On the same day, Eliot wrote to Julian Huxley enquiring after nerve specialists. Two days later, Vivien said to another friend that `this is a very nice tiny hotel, marvellously comfortable and inexpensive. Margate is rather queer and we don’t dislike it.‘ (Ibid, 481). On the 1st November, she wrote to the philosopher Bertrand Russell that Eliot was `at present in Margate, of all cheerful spots! But he seems to like it!’
Eliot himself wrote of his daily routine on 4th November. `I have done a rough draft of part III [of the `Waste Land’] but do not know whether it will do, and must wait for Vivien’s opinion as to whether it is printable. ‘ This was the part in which the reference to Margate quoted above was made. He continues `I have done this while sitting in a shelter on the front – as I am out all day except when taking rest. But I have written only some fifty lines, and have read nothing, literally – I sketch the people, after a fashion, and practise scales on the mandoline (sic).’ (Ibid, 484-485). Eliot’s last reference to Margate was on 17th November to Richard Aldington: `Your letter finds me in transit between Margate – which I was very sorry to leave! – and Lausanne.’ (Ibid 487). He was heading there for medical treatment. There is no record of him ever having returned to the town.
That the `Waste Land’ became so influential and celebrated after its publication meant the circumstances of its writing also became of interest. The earlier drafts of the poem, with input from Vivien and Ezra Pound, have been published, and show the torturous path that Eliot took to produce the final version. That Vivien’s involvement was considerable meant that this poem was tied up with their own relationship, and its disintegration in the next decade. Eliot cut off all contact with her and formally separated in 1932. From that time she resided in institutions till her death in 1947, an issue which has figured as a point of deep contention in biographies and even a play about the issue ever since (see, for instance, Peter Ackroyd, `T S Eliot’, 1984, and the play `Tom and Viv’ by Michael Hastings, first performed in 1984).
In that context, the brief stay in Margate has come to assume a deep symbolic importance. Only months before the finalisation and then publication of the `Waste Land’, and at a time in their lives when a clearly troubled Eliot and his troubled wife were both trying to work things out, it figures as a suggestive staging post. This is compounded by the fact that the hotel in which they stayed was itself demolished to be replaced first by a Butlin’s holiday complex, and then by the current retirement and apartments that stands at the Eastern Esplanade. Of the seaside shelter Eliot had referred to in his 1921 letter, however, the basic structure remains. This has been the target of preservation campaigns, and currently (2020) has a plaque on it commemorating the brief period when Eliot frequented it. Kentish author, the late David Seabrook, in his `All the Devils are Here’ (Granta, 2002) even wrote a whole chapter on the episode.
That Eliot was so resistant to the idea of an authorial personality being meaningful in understanding a particular work, literally founding a school of thought on the basis of this that was to exercise huge influence in the 20th century, ironically, or perhaps predictably, made scholars and readers afterwards look long and hard at his own autobiography. The conviction of some that there was another, darker story was only compounded by the highly controlling manner in which his second wife, and widower, Valerie Eliot, managed his literary estate from his death in 1965 to her own in 2012. She proved a formidable preserver of the Eliot myth. Only with the release of papers and letters relating to the poet’s relationship with Emily Hale in 2019 was a little more light shed on his inner life.
It is puzzling though that through the `Waste Land’ and into the `Four Quartets’ in fact there is more than enough testimony of personal anguish, and of his own very particular emotional and spiritual journey. It would be hard to read his work after `Ash Wednesday’ (1927) without knowing something of his conversion to Anglicanism. And the `Four Quartets’ (1936-1942) are powerfully and self-evidently attached to very specific places, whether these be the Burnt Norton mansion in the Cotswolds, the Little Gidding church in Cambridgeshire, or the East Coker village where he was to be eventually buried in the West country and which each figure in portions of the sequence.
Margate does not figure anywhere to the same extent as these places of pilgrimage and reflection. But it certainly did matter enough to be mentioned in amongst the other references and fragments from which the `Waste Land’ was made. And the fact that one of the very greatest of modern poets had the sort of experiences he did have, in the place he had them, means that those who go to that place today and know something of this also have a different experience to those that don’t. “+e+”\n__p