The Satyricon, Michael Heseltine, and T. S. Eliot

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Readers of The Waste Land encounter texts in four different languages before they even make it to the opening line of the poem. T. S. Eliot’s 1922 poem about post-war Europe begins with an epigraph from the Roman writer Petronius, followed by a dedication to Eliot’s fellow poet (and fellow American-in-Europe), Ezra Pound.

Pound is saluted as ‘Il miglior fabbro’, a phrase Eliot borrowed from Dante. It means ‘the better craftsman’. So, we’ve already got two languages: Italian from Dante, and English in Eliot’s dedication, ‘For Ezra Pound’.

That leaves the epigraph from Petronius’ Satyricon. Not all of this scurrilous prose work (some claim it as an early example of the novel) has survived, but the portion of the book which we still have – probably something like less than a tenth of the entire work, and perhaps far less – follows the book’s narrator, a former gladiator named Encolpius, and his lover, a teenage servant-boy called Giton. Much of this surviving fragment focuses on the lavish feast put on by Trimalchio, an obscenely wealthy former slave. ‘Trimalchio in West Egg’ was one of Fitzgerald’s discarded titles for the novel that became, at the eleventh hour, The Great Gatsby.

But the lines which Eliot chose to head his poem of 1922 were in fact a brief exchange in the colourful narrative, in which the Sibyl at Cumae is seen hanging in a cave. Asked, ‘What do you want?’ she replied, ‘I want to die.’ The Sibyl had made the mistake of asking the gods for eternal life but forgot to ask for eternal youth, so she’s destined to live on and on, growing weaker and more feeble with each passing year, longing for death as a release.

The Waste Land is, in many ways, a poem about the horrors of not dying in the war: it’s about the mental and emotional struggle of surviving, of going on. The married couple in ‘A Game of Chess’ go on, even though the husband appears to be psychologically trapped in his horrific memories of the war; Lil, the working-class woman trapped in a marriage where she is merely a breeding machine, goes on, not just living her own life but gestating, then giving birth to, the next generation of unhappy, disillusioned Londoners.

So it’s a neat choice of epigraph. But it wasn’t Eliot’s original choice: he was going to use the dying words of Mr Kurtz from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness until Pound advised him to find something more ‘weighty’. Since Pound was the ‘miglior fabbro’, Eliot listened to him and found Petronius.

But where did he find him? Eliot was widely read and it’s possible he’d read the Satyricon (or that portion of it which survives, at least). But he may not have done, and he didn’t need to have read it to find the quotation that was right for The Waste Land. As Grover Smith remarked in his article on ‘The Making of The Waste Land’, in choosing a sentence from Petronius’ book he found the one, solitary, identical sentence which the Victorian Pre-Raphaelite poet and artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti had turned into a piece of English verse.

Smith believes this to be too much of a coincidence for Eliot to have ‘plucked out’ the exact-same passage from the Satyricon as Rossetti had already salvaged. And Smith notes that there are plenty of other examples of such ‘second-hand quotation’ elsewhere in Eliot’s work. And yet it’s still possible that Eliot read Petronius’ scurrilous adventure. There was, Smith tells us, plenty of interest in it during the Edwardian era, and in 1913 there appeared a full translation of the work, undertaken a civil servant named Michael Heseltine and published in the illustrious Loeb Classical Library series.

This Michael Heseltine should not, of course, be confused with his namesake, the Conservative politician who is well-known for serving in Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet during the 1980s. No, this Michael Heseltine (1886-1952) was a British senior civil servant who later served as Registrar of the General Medical Council between 1933 and 1951.

His translation of the Satyricon was apparently criticised by Stephen Gaselee, the Pepys Librarian at Magdalene College, Cambridge for having a number of mistranslations from the original Latin, although Gaselee praised its ‘virile and attractive style’. Whether Eliot knew this translation, we can’t be sure. Eliot certainly made use of Loeb translations of classical texts, but there’s no record (that I know of) of whether he owned Heseltine’s Satyricon specifically.

But he did know Petronius’ work, if his comment in the essay ‘Euripides and Professor Murray’ (1920) can be taken at face value. There, Eliot asserts that his generation thinks ‘more highly of Petronius than our grandfathers did’. And in fact, it appears he studied Petronius at Harvard and even presented his student copy of selections from Petronius and Apuleius to his friend John Hayward. So he surely read Petronius.

Curiously, in the year The Waste Land was published, 1922, the American publishers Boni and Liveright incurred an obscenity charge for publishing a translation of the Satyricon by W. C. Firebaugh. Petronius also furnished Eliot with one of his epigraphs for The Sacred Wood, his 1920 collection of essays.

So perhaps there was a huge coincidence and Eliot reached for the same Petronius quotation as Rossetti, independently of him. Or perhaps, as Grover Smith surmises, he really did just encounter the passage via Rossetti, and then sought out the original so it could furnish The Waste Land with a suitably formidable (and thematically on-brand) opening quotation. Perhaps it’s a bit of both: Eliot might have been reminded of Petronius when he encountered Rossetti’s loose rendering of the Sibyl passage, and stored the freshly-recalled passage away for use as a substitute epigraph for The Waste Land.

It’s possible we’ll never know, but one thing we can be sure of: Eliot decided to go back to Conrad for his epigraphs when he came to write his next poem about the horrible mental and spiritual imprisonment of a living death: ‘The Hollow Men’.