Jean Verdenal
Jean
Jules Verdenal was born on the 11th May
1890 and died in World War One on the 2nd May 1915. He was a French
medical officer who met Eliot at the Sorbonne in
Verdenal
was killed while attempting to treat a wounded man on the battlefield at
Gallipoli, one of the most wretched campaigns of World War One, where a badly
planned French, British and ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps)
attempt to capture Istanbul and destroy the Ottoman Empire (now modern day
Turkey) was defeated. The troops were trapped on a small peninsula of land
facing stiff opposition and terrible weather where torrential rain occasionally
drowned men in their trenches.
Ultimately,
the Allies were forced to evacuate after 9 months of fighting and 150,000
deaths and casualties. This campaign, beginning before the ill-fated
We
know that Verdenal influenced Eliot’s poetry because
his first collection of poems, Prufrock and Other
Observations, published in 1917, was dedicated to him. As in the Wasteland,
Eliot quotes lines
from Dante which translate as ‘Now can you understand the
quantity of love that warms me towards you, so that I forget our vanity, and
treat the shadows like the solid thing.’
In
The Waste Land echoes of Verdenal can be seen in the
Hyacinth Girl from ‘Burial of the Dead’. Evidence for this can be found in an
editorial that Eliot wrote in ‘The Criterion’ in 1934. Recounting a time when
he was browsing through a book about Paris, Eliot suddenly breaks off in almost
a reverie and says “I am willing to admit that my own retrospect is touched by
a sentimental sunset, the memory of a friend coming across the Luxembourg
Gardens (a park in Paris) in the late afternoon, waving a branch of lilac, a
friend who was later (so far as I could find out) to be mixed with the mud of
Gallipoli.” This has obvious parallels with the flowers that the Hyacinth Girl
greets the persona with in the poem. A reading perhaps strengthened by the fact
that the Hyacinth can be interpreted as a male or homosexual symbol: in the
original Greek myth, Hyacinth was the (male) lover of the god Apollo whose
blood was turned into the hyacinth flower when he was killed in an accident.
Some
commentators have taken this further and read the whole poem as an elegy for
the dead Verdenal. For example in 1952 the critic
John Peter wrote in his "A New Interpretation of The Waste Land"
that: “What the poem seems to require is some preliminary statement to explain
what has gone before … At some previous time the speaker has fallen completely
(perhaps the right word is 'irretrievably') in love and the object of this love
was a young man who soon afterwards met his death, it would seem by drowning.
Enough time has now elapsed since his death for the speaker to have realized
that the focus for affection that he once provided is irreplaceable. The
monologue which, in effect, the poem presents is a meditation upon this
deprivation, upon the speaker's stunned and horrified reactions to it, and on
the picture which, as seen through its all but insupportable bleakness, the
world presents. Such an introduction is obviously inadequate and may, I fear,
even seem brutally insensitive; but if we take it simply as a rather clumsy
stage-direction, to be inserted at the beginning of the monologue, it may go
some way to justify itself on the grounds of usefulness, if not subtlety.” Eliot
reacted angrily to this interpretation of his poem and took out a court
injunction to prevent the publication of this essay.
Other
biographers believe that this is probably taking things too far and Eliot’s
biographer, T.S. Matthews, asks: “What are we to make of these facts? Not much,
beyond inferring that a friendship between young men can be warm and may stir
the blood without firing it; and that there may well have been some
exaggeration in Eliot's melancholy remembrance of this foreign friend.”
Ultimately
it seems that there is probably some role for Verdenal
when we try to come to an understanding of The Waste Land, if only in that his
death may have made World War One more tragically real for Eliot and it is
undoubtedly the case that the death, destruction and desolation of this war is
one of the principal influences on Eliot when he was writing the poem.