The Fortuneteller in Eliot's Waste Land

Author(s): Grover Smith

Source: American Literature, Vol. 25, No. 4 (Jan., 1954), pp. 490-492
Published by: Duke University Press
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Notes aixd Queries 49I

Crome Yellow, first published in No

time Eliot was working on the poem. In the novel a certain Mr.
Scogan-a cynical observer who occupies in Huxley's scheme the
role of mature animalistic intellectual-masquerades as a gypsy
woman to tell fortunes at a Bank Holiday fair, where he advertises
himself on a placard as "Sesostris, the Sorceress of Ecbatana." Seated
inside "a little canvas hut" and "dressed in a black skirt and a red
bodice, with a yellow-and-red bandana handkerchief tied round his
black wig," and with "pendulous brass ear-rings . . . screwed on to
his ears," Mr. Scogan reads palms and lays groundwork for the
seduction of a village girl.2
Critics of the poem have discussed the function of Madame
Sosostris as the ironically portentous, though charlatan, union of
two lines of analogy: that of the Grail quest, in which a "Grailbearer" confronts a questing knight with the talismans represented
here by the suits of the Tarot, and that of the classical quest, in
which the Sibyl reveals the entrance of the underworld to Aeneas.
Eliot's epigraph from Petronius, about the Sibyl who wants to be
dead, and his note to Miss Weston and to Frazer's Golden Bough
supply the clews to this elementary synthesis.3 The fortunetelling
episode, moreover, in which Madame Sosostris figures partly to
introduce the modern protagonist into the inferno of the waste
land-that is, deeper into the spectator Tiresias's labyrinth of memories-discloses to him the answer to an implicit petition for foresight of death, connecting the episode with the Psalm Dixi, custodiam of the Prayer Book "Burial of the Dead." But the passage
in Crome Yellow may suggest to some readers a further complication. Eliot's fortuneteller, though indeed Madame Sosostris, shares
with Tiresias, in her origins, an ambiguity of sex.4 Although The
Waste Land itself contains no indication that she could be a man
2 Crome Yellow (London, I92I), chap. xxvii. Mr. Huxley reports in a letter that
he modeled the scene after Mr. Rochester's disguise as a gypsy woman in lane Eyre
(chap. xix), and that he chose the name Sesostris for its hissing, snakelike sound and
for its suitability to a disguised man. Mr. Scogan is at various points characterized as
reptilian. If Madame Sosostris owes her name to King Sesostris at all, the legacy is a
very remote one: in The Waste Land, moreover, the name, perhaps accidentally, is misspelled.
3 See my article "T. S. Eliot's Lady of the Rocks," Notes and Queries, CXCIV, I23I25 (March I9, I949).

4 Is there not perhaps in both cases an allusion to Guillaume Apollinaire's Les

Mamelles de Tire'sias, the protagonist of which, Therese-Tiresias, engages in cartomancy?
This book, published at Paris in I9I8, was almost unquestionably known to Eliot.

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492 American Literature

in disguise, still the genetic argument carries as much weight here

as it does elsewhere in the poem, where Eliot's notes seem to invite

the reader to interpret in accordance with literary allusions and

echoes. Eliot himself has expressed the opinion that since he did
read Crome Yellow on its appearance it is "almost certain" that he

borrowed the name fromn it. Yet, as if to forestall by a genetic argument of his own an unnecessary and perhaps ungraceful reinterpretation of the fortunetelling scene, he has said also that, being

unconscious of the borrowing, he was unaware of any connection

between the name of the clairvoyante and that assumed by Mr.

Scogan.'

Mark Twain's Comments on Bret Harte's Stories

BRADFORD A. BOOTH

The University of California at Los Angeles

fl1 HE LIBRARY of the University of California at Los Angeles has

I recently purchased from Clara Clemens Samoussoud a number
of volumes formerly in the possession of Mark Twain. Most of
these are heavily annotated, and several are of more than usual

interest. Among them is a first edition of Bret Harte's The Luck

of Roaring Camp, and Other Sketches (I870) which contains approximately 435 words of manuscript marginalia by Mark Twain.
It is not possible to date precisely these jottings, but a comparison
of the handwriting with that of other Mark Twain holographs
suggests the early I870's. Since there is no hint of the bad feeling
that was to disfigure the relationship between Mark Twain and

Harte, and which is conspicuous in later references,' one must

assume a date before i877 and the disastrous collaboration on Ah
Sin. In the marginalia that follow Mark Twain still writes as an
admirer of Bret Harte. Though he is always alert to Harte's carelessness and inattention, particularly in the dialogue, he has a lively
Letter from Mr. Eliot to the present writer, March lo, 1952.

' Mark Twain's copy of The Diary of William Allingham contains a manuscript comment which is very disparaging of Bret Harte's character. This volume is now in the
hands of a private collector, and though I have seen it I have not been able to procure
permission to transcribe the passage.

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