Hidden anagram points to the poet himself as the bank clerk hailed in a London crowd, claims amateur fan
In a letter to his brother in 1922, TS Eliot once enigmatically wrote that he hoped to solve his “problem of living a double or triple life”. Now, 50 years after his death, an amateur British scholar is creating waves in the growing academic world of Eliot studies because he believes he has unravelled a long-running literary riddle that shows what Eliot meant: the poet was playing a drawn-out game with names that split his identity in three.
The poet’s fondness for crosswords, for Scrabble and for the puns he used in letters to his friend Groucho Marx offered the first clue. An ardent Eliot fan from Glasgow, David Liston, 59, began to look for wordplay and now thinks the answer has been there for all to see in the poem The Waste Land, perhaps the greatest English-language work of the 20th century. Eliot experts have long wondered about the name of one of the poem’s many fleeting characters. At one point an English bank clerk called Stetson appears, and his ostensibly American name has often leaped out at readers:
Continue reading...
