RB: I suppose The Manager marks at least in some sense my conscious attempt to ‘answer’ The Waste Land – at least to my own satisfaction if no-one else’s. By which I mean, in part, that I wanted to make a ‘big’ poem that would ‘articulate’ the end of the 20th century in the same sort of relation and the same sort of way that The Waste Land had done for the 1920’s and surrounding decades. This also (inevitably) meant following Eliot, modelling my work on his, learning everything I possibly could from him, consciously submitting whatever individual talent I might have to his tradition, and so on – while at the same time taking issue with some of Eliot’s approaches and solutions

I first came across The Waste Land at the age of 16 in the lower 6th form at school, and it seemed a masterpiece to me then and it still seems to me to be a masterpiece today. Not all teenage appetites last, do they? But for me this one did last, has lasted. By any standards I think it’s a superb and magnificent poem. Alan Sillitoe has a line in The Rats: “The Waste Land was my library and college.” I could say the same, of Eliot’s poem, though not of course of the working-class social and historical context Alan was brought up in.

But – there’s plenty about Eliot’s work in general, and The Waste Land in particular, that I never liked and still can’t abide. There’s his atrocious class snobbery, and his élitist views on culture itself, and there are his attitudes to sexuality – all of them linked. And they link too with his anti-Semitism, which can’t quite be wiped away with the apology that this was just the typical attitude of a man of his time and class – even if one would dearly like to invoke Auden’s generous sentiment in his 'Elegy for W. B. Yeats', which I’ve mentioned elsewhere in connection with Pound.

Another of my quibbles with The Waste Land – this time strictly poetic (i.e. structural, formal, aesthetic) rather than ethical – is that it jumps right out of all the questions it poses, proposes, with its leap into mysticism and silence at the end – all that Shantih Shantih Shantih stuff. It seems to me that here the mystical chant is too convenient by far – it’s a deus ex machina and to my mind, a cop-out, however ironically and subtly it may be being controlled and contextualised at that point. Eliot jumps off into religion, meditation, eternity, silence – and out of language – as if to say, 'Enough of language. I can’t do any more with it. It isn’t good enough for me. It’s too coarse, too common, too karmic, too tortured and tied and trammelled up mah deah in those awful ten thousand things. So enough of words. Pure vision, pure silence is better – and higher – a release!'

So in The Manager (section 95) I specifically have my middle-aged protagonist saying: 'I have scarcely set out. / Have too much yet to do. Have not proved myself, or anything. And have not surrendered – nor shall abandon – History.' (In this section he is also almost poking fun at himself and his own mortality.) Well, all that is meant as a direct reply to Eliot. And in the same section, I consciously echo lines about drowning in 'The Dry Salvages', and use them to criticise such Eliotic notions as sainthood, saintliness and martyrdom.

Expert wriggler and avoider though he may be, I do believe that my ‘Manager’ insists on operating inside history, and he’s intelligent and self-critical enough to know that he can’t jump out of it simply by appropriating the trappings or opiates of an ‘other’ (‘different’) religion. And although he too can experience 'moments of timelessness in time' (who doesn’t? and who can’t? and isn’t that what the acme of sex and the pinnacle of love blah blah are all about anyway?), ‘The Maneaer’ simply isn’t into this final cop-out.

Eliot is referred to glancingly – or perhaps I should say parodied, and/or updated – elsewhere in the poem too. For example his lines 'To Carthage then I came / Burning burning burning burning / O Lord thou pluckest me out' in 'The Fire Sermon', together with his lines 'Falling towers / Jerusalem Athens Alexandria / Vienna London' in 'What the Thunder Said', are conflated and transformed, in The Manager, to become: 'To Cape Town then I came. O Lord Thou. Dresden Nagasaki Sarajevo. Burning Burning Burning.' (Section 50). Here I deliberately use Eliot’s own procedures not just to parody Eliot but to make points which, I believe, are subtly and perhaps wholly different from his. Eliot’s listings and cataloguings of cities to me suggest his lamentations for the effects of time and degeneracy on high civilisation. His is a sort of plaint about corruption and decadence. To him, the barbarians outside the gates and the untrustable Jews within them are very definitely them, not us. But the cities I list are specifically sites of senseless twentieth century cruelty – racism, bombing, destruction, war, civil war, and so on.

I’d add this: if The Waste Land and The Cantos were to be taken as paradigms of the modern / modernist poem, then The Manager might be read as a critique of both modernity and of modernism.

Finally, as far as Eliot is concerned, there’s the question of the treatment of sexuality and attitude to it, throughout all of Eliot’s poetry. Without wanting to demean the huge achievement of his work by carrying out spurious archaeological digs back into his biography, so far as I can make out, encounters with women seem to work positively in Eliot’s poems only when they’re approached on a symbolic level – ‘in the rose garden’, as it were. As for The Waste Land, all the sexual contacts and encounters are unhappy, unfulfilling or depressing. I think that Eliot viewed all women as frightening, even terrifying. In The Manager I’ve aimed to present not just the misery and suffering attendant on sexual love – of which there’s plenty around for all of us – but it’s funny side too, and its pleasures and joys – and even its revelations and transformative powers and effects.

December 8^th – 9^th 2001