How T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" Structures My Memoir

In which I explain the process by which "The Waste Land" became part and parcel of my memoir

Photo by Juli Kosolapova on Unsplash

Setting out to choose a metaphor to structure a work of art is a fool’s errand. I didn’t choose The Waste Land as the metaphorical center of my memoir, of my life.

The Waste Land chose me.

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I was writing about my brother, more or less in a biographical way, performing a psychological autopsy years following his death by suicide. Somewhere along the way, because of our extreme physical resemblance and the fact I was mistaken for him through much of my life, and because our temperaments were decidedly similar (not the same), my writing veered toward what I knew about him, the 12-15 or so clear extended memories I have of him and all the ways his ghost, hidden just under my own skin, was present in my life. It became clear that I was writing memoir, not biography.

Triangulation. There were two men who reminded me greatly of my brother, both who had a strong presence in my life. The first was Louis Owens, Native American novelist/Steinbeck scholar, the professor who influenced me to become an English professor. The second was Clark Hardy, a boat broker in San Diego who I worked with to find our live aboard boat, a 1979 Hans Christan 38, Mark II. Both Owens and Hardy had wilderness background, and like my brother, were attracted to nature. I’m not sure of Clark’s age, but Lynn was slightly younger than Professor Owens. Louis also committed suicide, though the reasons were less clear cut than with my brother’s 13 year well-documented struggle with major depressive disorder. So one day, in the shadow of Yale University in New Haven, as I was writing, I stumbled upon some key phrases from The Waste Land and pulled out my tattered copy of Eliot’s Selected Poems, with the marginalia from my undergraduate days.

I had studied Eliot extensively. Owens taught a course called “Waste Land Literature,” which I took several times as an undergraduate and graduate stsudent. I also studied Modernism is great detail and Eliot always had his place. If there is one work I studied more than any other in 20 years of graduate school and 35 years in the profession, it was T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.

It had been years since I had looked at Eliot’s poem. In doing so, phrases sprang to mind and it’s as if the pieces of my writing puzzle fell together. Of course! Why hadn’t I thought of this sooner. Of course! It makes perfect sense. I was a year into writing, wondering where this piece was going when The Waste Land made its appearance and brought clarity to my project.

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My memoir covers 2004-2015, an 11 year period of my adult life, with the occasional flashback. It starts with my brother’s suicide and ends with a life-affirming ritual hookpull on New Year’s Eve, leading to my way out of the waste land.

In 2004, before my brother’s suicide, we had a family reunion. He piggy-backed a vacation upon my own summer visit with my parents, as a way to say goodbye. From that reunion, I have a picture of 15 of us. By the time my memoir ends, 7 of the people in that picture (and a couple who couldn’t make it to the reunion) would be dead, three by suicide, and I would be in touch with only two of them. To this day (2023), I have only seen one of them briefly and the only other one I’m in touch with, my niece, I haven’t seen in more than 12 years. Our family dissolution is complete.

In 2005, I moved from Kansas to San Diego, California, into one of the worst droughts in California history.

The headings to The Waste Land captured my attention first. It’s as if someone poked a pin or a needle into my skin. I awoke with a start, aware that Eliot’s poem operated on my life like a map. I printed out an oversized copy of The Waste Land and taped it to my wall and began highlighting. The pattern was clear and would provide a way for me to structure my memoir while being true to the main themes and events of my life.

I. The Burial of the Dead - Topic: Overview of the three suicides in my family. There were three family suicides. In addition, at the start of the story, my father-in-law’s death is prominent as it was around his bed we stood, watching him die, when I got the call from my father about my brother’s death. There were other deaths, too - Louis Owens’ suicide, my father, mother, and aunt’s deaths, my brother-in-law’s death. Death has undone so many. There are also references to Madame Sosostris, the fortune teller. My ex-’s mother claimed they had Romany blood and my ex collected Tarot Cards. Madame Sosotris warns, “I do not find the Hanged Man. Fear death by water.” My youthful indiscretions with a noose in the rafters of a garage and my brother’s death, a jump from the Fremont bridge in Portland (he was later found in the Willamette River) - the Eliot line popped out to me. The section ends with “mon frere,” something my sister wrote to me everytime she gave me a book as a gift.

II. A Game of Chess - Topic: Similarity to my brother. I am the pawn to my brother’s king. My brother was my best friend and we shared a room/bunk beds when I was young. When he went away to college, he taught me how to play chess and we would play by mail. In addition, in Kansas, my ex- and I had a wicked chair that we liked to call her “throne,” thus the “burnished throne” at the beginning of “A Game of Chess” is reminiscent of my life with my ex. This entire section has echoes to my relationship with my ex and her own struggles with mental illness.

III. The Fire Sermon - Topic: My long-term marriage/divorce from a woman who had borderline personality disorder. This section contains a catalogue of debauchery, of “musing upon the king my brother’s wreck,” of Tiresias, he who knows both man and woman and the river Thames daughters. This is a collection of scenes of debased sexuality, the likes of which mirror the life with my ex. In addition to living through one of the worst conflagrations in San Diego history, the fires of 2007, there were two other prominent fires in our life - one on a weekend trip to Toronto, Kansas in which we saw an entire house engulfed in flames and not a single fire truck at the scene, and an episode in which, following our divorce, I burned our bag of keepsakes collected from years and years of our travels together.

IV. Death By Water - Topic: my brother’s death and a convoluted/involuted literary allusion. This short section introduces the whirlpool. The “sucking vortex” comes to represent my time with my ex, who suffered from borderline personality disorder. A psychology professor of my later girlfriend’s claimed she would work with the lowest of the low in prison populations but would not work with those with BPD because they were the “sucking vortex” of personalities. Also, the whirlpool symbolism fits with an actual enormous whirlpool that I experienced with my brother during a canoe trip in the pacific northwest. My brother’s death is recalled here quite clearly.

This is the shortest section of my memoir - coming in at 5 words - with a riff on one of Faulkner’s most famous lines.

V. What the Thunder Said - Topic: my polyamorous relationship with a manipulative narcissist. This section introduces the Fisher King myth. The drought imagery emerges in full and mirrors the drought I experienced in San Diego later, in my relationship after my divorce. The fragmentation of my experience increases under the manipulation of a narcissist, mimicking the fragmentation of the poem and asking the big questions. Only a powerful ritual could help me escape from the clutches of the waste land. Give, Sympathize, Control - This catechism provides an answer, the way out of the waste land. A hookpull ceremony on New Year’s Eve, using physical pain to mirror the emotional pain of a difficult breakup, helped me to emerge from the waste land, ready to set my lands in order.

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In short, there were simply so many echoes to Eliot’s The Waste Land from my own life, and that fact that I had studied the poem extensively for more than 30 years, made it quite simply the dominant analogus pattern of my life’s events. What’s surprising is that it took me as long as I did to stumble upon The Waste Land as a controlling metaphor for my story. It was there all along.

It was 2019 when I discovered the connection between my memoir and The Waste Land. And I knew that the centenary celebration of The Waste Land would occur in 2022. I set that as the end point of my writing. And that’s what I did, a little too late to query and sell the book and get it to market in time for the celebration.

So that’s where I am now. With your support, I hope to find an audience and a publisher for my memoir. You can help by subscribing to this newsletter (either paid or free subscription) and spreading the word.

Thanks for reading today. I hope you have a pleasant weekend. It’s mid-February, the depths of winter. The skies are gray in the Pacific Northwest (a surprise). Soon, though, April, that cruellest month, will be upon us and spring.

Until next time, I’ll . . .

Just keep writing!