"April is the cruellest month," T.S. Eliot wrote at the beginning of his epic poem The Waste Land.
What he was getting at was the return of pain after a period of numbness, at how the stirring signs of spring could hurt after months of narcotizing cold: Winter kept us warm, covering/Earth in forgetful snow, feeding/A little life with dried tubers. But the thawing made life big and sore, especially when you consider Eliot's biography--the smallness of his life until then.
Like a lot of us, Eliot was a late bloomer, and his great poem, finally published in 1922, was coached into existence by Ezra Pound and the poet's first wife Vivienne who, he wrote, was possessed of "an original" and "not at all ... feminine" mind, and made him both a better poet and deeply unhappy.
She had an affair with Bertrand Russell, who rationalized his dalliance with her on the grounds that he was providing the Eliots much-needed marital therapy. Virginia Woolf described her as a "bag of ferrets" that Eliot wore around his neck. (One interpretation of the second section of The Waste Land, "A Game of Chess," is that it is about his life with Vivienne.)
She got no better from him; while he liked her writing he didn't care to sleep with her. Some suspect he didn't much like women at all (his 1919 poem "Whispers of Immortality" is as misogynistic as Jagger/Richards' "Under My Thumb"). In 1928 he took a vow of chastity and by 1933 the marriage was essentially over, though Eliot's conversion to the Church of England precluded his divorcing her.
For five years she stalked him, showing up at his office at the publishing house Faber and Faber unannounced (Eliot would slip out the back; the receptionist alerted him of her presence via a clandestine bell).
When she couldn't find out where he lived, she took to showing up to his public appearances dressed in black--in the uniform of Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists. In 1938, her brother had her involuntarily committed to an asylum after London police found her wandering the streets at 5 a.m.
When he came to fetch her from police custody she asked her brother if Eliot had been beheaded yet.
Vivienne died in 1947, possibly from a deliberate overdose of pills, a dozen years after she'd had any contact with Eliot. He carried on a couple of asexual affairs and then, in 1957 at the age of 68, married his 30-year-old secretary, Esme Valerie Fletcher. She lived until 2012, surviving her husband by some 47 years. She maintained their marriage was perfectly happy and orthodox, full of quiet evenings of Scrabble and cheese. The success of the Broadway play Cats, based on Eliot's work, made her an exceedingly wealthy widow.
. . .
But back to April, and its cruelty.
Bad things seem to happen around this time of year, with April 20 seemingly the most dangerous date. (It's also celebrated around the world by pot smokers.) It was famously the birthdate of Adolf Hitler in 1889, and 20 years ago the Columbine school shooting in Littleton, Colo. In 2011, photojournalists Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros were killed in a mortar attack by Moammar Gaddafi's forces against rebels in Misrata, Libya. In 2010, BP oil rig Deepwater Horizon exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 people and altering the biosphere.
In 1968, the Conservative British politician Enoch Powell delivered his infamous "Rivers of Blood" speech in which he quoted a constituent as saying, "In this country in 15 or 20 years' time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man."
"We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant descended population," Powell went on. "It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre."
On April 20, 1914, the Colorado National Guard was sent in to rout striking miners in a coal mine owned by John D. Rockefeller in Ludlow, Colo. The Guard, along with paid strikebreakers, attacked a tent city of about 1,200 miners and their families, killing 20 people, many of them women and children who suffocated while hiding in a pit dug beneath a tent after the tent was set afire.
In 1898, Congress declared war against Spain based on the spurious belief that Spanish agents had sunk the USS Maine while it was in Havana during the Cuban revolt against Spain. (It's now believed that the Maine was sunk when an accidentally set coal fire ignited the warship's magazines. William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer stirred up public sentiment against Spain to sell newspapers. Fake news for real!)
While there isn't a day in the calendar that isn't attached to unhappy events, April seems to be a significant month for would-be American insurgents. Timothy McVeigh's April 19, 1995, attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City was timed to coincide with the second anniversary of the government's storming of the Branch Davidians complex in Waco, Texas, following a 51-day standoff.
Abraham Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, 1865. The Titanic sunk on April 15, 1912. On April 16, 2007, a student who wanted to "repeat Columbine" killed 33 people (including himself) in a shooting spree at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg. On April 17, 2013, an ammonium nitrate explosion at the West Fertilizer Company storage and the distribution center 18 miles north of Waco exploded, killing 15 people, injuring more than 160 and damaging or destroying more than 150 buildings. (Ammonium nitrate was the key ingredient in the bombs McVeigh used to blow up the Murrah building.)
The Unabomber's last attack--and third murder--occurred on April 24, 1995.
I suspect it's like any list of amazing coincidences; no date on the calendar is immune to unhappy happenings and someone with a research assistant could probably come up with a viable alternative to the cruelest month. Maybe 11 viable alternatives.
But April makes me nervous. It's when the stupor sloughs off, when the blood begins to flow again.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
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Editorial on 04/21/2019