A Bucket of Firecrackers

A Poetry Tale about T. S. Eliot, told by Hello Doggo.

Picture T. S. Eliot. The sober suit. The rolled umbrella. A voice like evensong in an empty cathedral. The man who gave us The Waste Land.

Now picture him in a little shop that sold exploding cigars, squirting buttonholes and soapy chocolates. A loyal customer, for years. That comes, as it’s usually quoted, from Time magazine’s cover story on him in nineteen fifty.

And Time, by the same account, had a better story. Eliot was a director of the publishers Faber and Faber. Once, on the Fourth of July, this American-born gentleman, gone thoroughly British, set off a bucketful of firecrackers at a solemn board meeting. Between the chairman’s legs.

So that one was in print in his lifetime, and nobody seems to have denied it. The rest is shakier. You’ll often hear that he sat visiting authors on whoopee cushions and then offered them an exploding cigar. Lovely. But nobody ever seems to name a victim, so file it under legend.

His friends knew the mischief well. Ezra Pound called him Old Possum, the creature that plays dead while it’s very much awake. The usual reading: Eliot was the solemn one inside the British establishment, playing possum. He liked the name enough to put it on the cover of his book of cats.

So go back to Prufrock, that timid man with the bottoms of his trousers rolled, asking: Do I dare disturb the universe? His author did. With a bucket.