Why T.S. Eliot didn't write poems about buses

‘A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure.’ Margaret Thatcher was quoted in a parliamentary debate as having said this, but she probably never did. It’s an old line, more convincingly attributed to Loelia Ponsonby, who married the second Duke of Westminster in 1930 with Winston Churchill as best man, who may have borrowed it from the Old Etonian poet Brian Howard, pal of Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell. Toffs, all of them, who didn’t travel on buses much and so missed out on one of life’s great pleasures. Margaret Thatcher had many faults, but that kind of snobbery wasn’t one of them.

For getting about in London the tube is attractive because of its speed, because of the clarity of the diagrammatic map (for which we have to thank Harry Beck, the London Underground employee who designed it in 1931) and because you never have to wait for a train in a downpour. The bus, in contrast, is an acquired taste. The open platforms that until recent years let passengers jump on and off wherever they liked, dodging through traffic to and from the pavement if they were brave enough, have largely disappeared. Now we have what some call prison buses, because you’re trapped between stops even if the bus is stuck in gridlock. But catching buses remains an active sport and, at times, a health-and-safety nightmare. As for the route maps, they look like nasty accidents with spaghetti.

On the other hand, buses are half the price and reach those less favoured regions that are off the underground network. And the internet has made it easy to research the routes. Once you’ve found one going your way, the bus has two huge advantages over the tube. The stop is where it says it is – no traipsing through subterranean passages – and you can enjoy the view. At their best, buses can be magic.

Coming back from Norfolk last week, we found a magic bus, with the help of a smartphone, that took us from right outside Liverpool Street Station to the end of our road. Among other interesting sights, we passed the church of St Mary Woolnoth, designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor in the early eighteenth century. I knew of it, but wasn’t aware of having seen it before, though I must have ridden under these streets hundreds of times on the Northern Line. As we turned along King William Street it wasn’t just the church that began ringing bells. I realised we were about to cross the Thames on London Bridge, and I remembered where I’d first come across this route, though in the other direction:

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.

Sighs, short and infrequent were exhaled,

And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,

To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours

With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

By chance, I was travelling with a book by John Carey called The Intellectuals and the Masses, which had just put those lines from Eliot’s 1922 poem The Waste Land in a fresh context for me. The argument of Carey’s book is that intellectuals in the 1920s and 30s were disdainful – and, deep down, terrified – of the encroaching 'masses', particularly the kind of ‘semi-educated’ clerical workers who had been taught to read and write but were incapable, it was assumed, of a true appreciation of literature or art, and were meanwhile destroying the English countryside with their demand for suburban housing. The crowd of dead people observed by Eliot would have been crossing the Thames from South London to work in the City.

‘Largely through Eliot’s influence,’ Carey writes, ‘the assumption that most people are dead became, by the 1930s, a standard item in the repertoire of any self-respecting intellectual.’ They were mainly toffs, of course – Eliot himself, a middle-class American who was reinventing himself as an English gent, Virginia Woolf, who envisaged ‘the Man in the street’ as ‘a vast, featureless, almost shapeless jelly of human stuff’, and E.M. Forster, who, in Howard’s End, is sympathetic to the struggles of the clerk Leonard Bast to better himself by reading and trying to listen to Beethoven, but describes him, even so, as having a ‘cramped little mind’, says that he plays the piano ‘badly and vulgarly’, and has him finally crushed to death under a bookcase.

Not bus enthusiasts, most of those early twentieth century intellectuals, though an attentive reading of this passage from The Four Quartets suggests that Eliot may have lowered himself as far as the tube. He seems not to have enjoyed the experience:

Here is a place of disaffection

Time before and time after

In a dim light: neither daylight…

Nor darkness to purify the soul…

Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker

Over the strained, time-ridden faces…

Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind

That blows before and after time…