So began a contest for survival. The right to save himself, that moral issue that will haunt him through the next phase of his life, turned on one question and one only: had The Waste Land proved him to be the great poet of his age who, by virtue of that, must grant priority to his gift? Because Eliot’s conscience was so scrupulous and his sense of responsibility for Vivienne so strong, the issue could not be resolved in any simple manner, but an answer came in June 1922 when he disclosed the poem to the Woolfs. They were enthralled when, over dinner, Eliot did not just read The Waste Land but performed it. ‘He sang it & chanted it rhythmed it. It has great beauty and force of phrase,’ Virginia Woolf reports in her diary. ‘What connects it together I’m not so sure … One was left however with some strong emotion.’ This assured showing, a verve unlike the austere public readings, had to do with the Woolfs’ hurrah: an audience of two who had the measure of his achievement and their immediate decision to publish the poem as a book. That very night they planned for it to come out in the autumn. It was deferred by journal publication, but this affirmation from the heart of the English intelligentsia mattered hugely. From now on Eliot was not only ‘Tom’, he was ‘great Tom’, one of the literary ‘Gods’.
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