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shadow of this red rock),
    And I will show you something different from either
    Your shadow at morning striding behind you
    Or your shadow at morning rising to meet you;
    I will show you fear in a handful o f dust.
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu
Mein Irisch Kind
Wo weilest du?
’ 17
     
    The first two lines hint at Isaiah’s prophecy of a Messiah who will be ‘as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shallow of a great rock in a weary land’ (Isaiah 32.2). The German comes direct from Wagner’s opera
Tristan und Isolde:
‘Fresh blows the wind/Toward home/My Irish child/Where are you waiting?’ The imagery is dense, its aim ambitious.
The Waste Land
cannot be understood on one reading or without ‘research’ or work. It has been compared (by Stephen Coote, among others) to an Old Master painting in which we have first to learn the iconography before we can understand fully what is being said. In order to appreciate his poem, the reader has to open himself or herself to other cultures, to attempt an escape from this sterile one. The first two ‘confidential copies’ of the poem were sent to John Quinn and Ezra Pound. 18
    Eliot, incidentally, did not share the vaguely Freudian view of most people at the time (and since) that art was an expression of the personality. On the contrary, for him it was ‘an escape from personality.’ He was no expressionist pouring his ‘over-charged soul’ into his work.
The Waste Land
is, instead, the result of detailed reflection, of craftsmanship as well as art, owing as much to the rewards of a good education as the disguised urges of the unconscious. Much later in the century, Eliot would publish considerably fiercer views about the role of culture, particularly ‘high’ culture in all our lives, and in less poetic terms. In turn, he himself would be accused of snobbery and worse. He was ultimately, like so many writers and artists ofhis day, concerned with ‘degeneration’ in cultural if not in individual or biological terms.
    Frederick May, the critic and translator, has suggested that Luigi Pirandello ’s highly innovative play
Six Characters in Search of an Author
is a dramatic analogue of
The Waste Land:
‘Each is a high poetic record of the disillusionment and spiritual desolation of its time, instinct with compassion and poignant with the sense of loss … each has become in its own sphere at once the statement and the symbol of its age.’ 19
    Born in Caos, near Girgenti (the modern Agrigento) in Sicily in 1867, in the middle of a cholera epidemic, Pirandello studied literature in Palermo, Rome and Bonn. He began publishing plays in 1889, but success did not arrive fully until 1921, by which time his wife had entered a nursing home for the insane. His two plays that will be considered here,
Six Characters in Search of an Author
(1921), and
Henry IV
(1922), are united in being concerned with the impossibility of describing, or even conceiving, reality. ‘He dramatises the subconscious.’ In the earlier title, six characters invade the rehearsal of a play, a play Pirandello had himself written a few years earlier, insisting that they are not actors, nor yet people, but characters who need an ‘author’ to arrange the story that is within them. As with Wittgenstein, Einstein, and Freud, Pirandello is drawing attention to the way words break down in describing reality. What is the difference – and the overlap – between character and personality, and can we ever hope to pin them down in art? Just as Eliot was trying to produce a new form of poetry, Pirandello was creating a new form of drama, where theatre itself comes under the spotlight as a form of truth-telling. The characters in his plays know the limits to their understanding, that truth is relative, and that their problem, like ours, is to realise themselves.
    Six Characters
created a scandal when it was first performed, in Rome, but a year later received a rapturous reception in Paris.
Henry IV
had a