For a writer, good writing alone is no guarantee of success. Good fortune — not just the one etched in the stars, but also the one acquired through inheritance — is an equally important factor. There are exceptions, of course. One such example would be Thomas Stearns Eliot — last Wednesday was his 130th birth anniversary — who, besides being a celebrated poet, worked as a banker and a publisher.
It was after the first publication of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and amid a cold reception of his first anthology that Eliot had begun working at Lloyds Bank in London. Unlike the aristocratic poets of yore — imagine the luxury of Lord Byron — Eliot had to earn both his literary status and, literally, his existence. Working a day job, though, is not uncommon among writers in the modern times. The bestselling author, John Grisham, used to wake up at five every morning in order to write his first novel, A Time to Kill, before beginning his day’s work as a lawyer. Another popular writer, Haruki Murakami, admits to have written the draft of his first book on his kitchen table after midnight, at a time when he used to run a coffee house and jazz bar for a living.
Some other authors, however, have been luckier. Harper Lee, for instance, had a little help from her friends. They wrote her a cheque to take a year off her work as a reservation clerk at an airlines company because of which her writing career was taking a back seat. But a similar proposition did not sit too well with Eliot: in spite of having been offered a fund by the Bloomsbury circle so that he could quit his bank job and dedicate all his time to poetry, he had declined the proposal. He later explained that not having to earn a living would have had “a deadening influence” on him.
Perhaps, then, finance is not the only element at play here. For Eliot, the quotidian is integral to the process of poetic creation, where experience feeds memory, and memory poetry. The drudgery in the life of Eliot the banker was therefore vital to the creativity of Eliot the poet. In fact, it was during his term at Lloyds that he composed arguably his most acclaimed work, The Waste Land, which is soaked in the minutiae of his relationship with the world. Incidents imprinted in public memory, like the exhumation of corpses at a site on King William Street, a couple of steps away from his bank, and his reflections on himself (he meets a bank clerk with an American name, Stetson, in the first section) combine to impart to his works the characteristic charm of modernism — beauty, albeit melancholy, churned out of the ordinary. For what is modernism without the mundane? And what good is poetry if it does not make life a little more bearable?
