Astonishing Literary Find Revealed

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Eliot Scholars Discover Unpublished Revision of ‘The Waste Land,’ Speculate Changes Were Introduced after Poet Got Laid

TOOTING BEC, SOUTH LONDON, UK, APRIL 1, 2011—Researchers from the Department of Literary Forensics at Twittenham Polytechnic have today announced an astonishing discovery. Eminent scholar and department chair Sir Hugh Jarse told a standing-room-only press conference about the lucky break that brought this story to light. “I was just sitting down for a cup of tea in the Senior Common Room a fortnight ago when a rather disheveled chap burst in, somewhat the worse for drink. Before I could say a word he blurted out: ‘Guvnah, Oi was 'avin' a pint and a plate of bubble and squeak wiv me mates at the Slug and Lettuce (that’s me local), when Trevor (that’s me best mate) said ’is great-granny’d popped her clogs and left a bleedin’ great trunk of papers, including a ditty by some famous old Yank.’” Sir Hugh continued: “I learned that the deceased woman, the late Mrs. Ivy Smithers, had worked as a barmaid across the street from Lloyds Bank where the poet T.S. Eliot was working in the early 1920s. At the woman’s flat we found a beer-stained sheaf of papers with the remarkable title of 'The Wasted Land.' At first we were skeptical this was an authentic holograph work by Eliot; the doodles in the margin, which can only be described as ‘smiley faces,’ are not known in the poet’s other manuscripts. Nevertheless, handwriting analysis and DNA testing have confirmed that it is, indeed, a lost revision of Eliot’s beloved poem, written, we must imagine, after some sort of intimate encounter with Mrs. Smithers. The poem’s new opening, while it bears some resemblance to the published work, has a particular force and boldness that is unique in the annals of British High Modernism”:

April is the sexiest month, breeding
Babies out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, because
Baby baby baby you so fine....

Sir Hugh noted that several of the published poem’s most famous phrases have been changed. For example, “Unreal City” is now “Shakin’ City,” and, perhaps most surprisingly, the poem ends not with the ancient Sanskrit word Shantih (meaning “the peace which passes all understanding”) but the much more colloquial Boom shakalaka repeated three times. While scholars continue to study the manuscript, several leading literary journals, including Image, are vying for the right to publish “The Wasted Land.”