
TEENAGE WASTE LAND
IN OCTOBER 1921, T. S. Eliot was in Margate, sitting on a bench, looking at the ocean. He had been worked to the point of disintegration by his relentless day job at Lloyd’s Bank in London and, citing a “nervous breakdown,” had taken three months’ leave to recover. It was a Hail Mary effort to rescue his swiftly diminishing capacity for sanity, poetry, and marriage—a trinity of dissimilar aspirations, a scalene wish. None could be sacrificed, yet each scraped against the worn edge of the others. Margate was a seaside resort town on the southern coast, the spangled hem on the skirt of England,