Within days, partly because this was, in essence, his first vacation in a very long time, and partly because they dined well, and too expensively for their strained finances, Tom was “getting on amazingly,” Vivien thought, already looking “younger, and fatter and nicer.”
But as he rested, he saw more clearly that rest itself was not the cure. Writing had been forbidden, as it had been frequently forbidden to Virginia at times of crisis. Yet it had a salutary effect on him when he began to write, recognizing—and seizing—his freedom from Lloyds as the first time in years he had the continuous time that had eluded him. He went daily to a wooden shelter, ornately Victorian, built only a few feet from shore, a location that by late October and early November was largely deserted and therefore even more thoroughly private than a seaside hotel in the off-season. The spot he chose was at some distance from the Albemare, and he traveled there by tram, along the Canterbury Road, as if the regimen of a daily commute, as in London, was itself restorative, a habit he enjoyed. At Margate, he was unconfined, freed not only from his office below grade at Lloyds but also from the noise of London, which he often found intolerable, and from the pressure of the confinement of their Clarence Gate Gardens flat. At the shelter, which resembled a railway station waiting room built upon the sand, he wrote some fifty lines of his long poem—the first he had added in many months. Though he usually wrote at the typewriter, these he wrote in pencil.
My feet are at Moorgate, and my heart
Under my feet. After the event
He wept. He promised “a new start.”
I made no comment. What should I resent?
Moorgate was the underground station Eliot used when working at Lloyds.
The rhythm and the brevity of the next six lines resemble the postcards he sent friends from Margate. The first line was itself a postmark, on a “postcard to himself.”
On Margate Sands.
I can connect
Nothing with nothing.
The broken fingernails of dirty hands.
My people humble people who expect
Nothing.
But at Margate he did connect things. He had not only written the first lines of poetry in a long time, but while resting—and writing—he began to wonder whether the specialist in London who had proposed the draconian regimen was, despite his celebrated reputation, “quite the best man for me.” He had not suffered the great depression at the start that the doctor had warned about. His trouble, he decided, was “not solely due to overwork and anxieties,” he explained to his brother. The cure could not be found in a kind of deprivation of stimulation, or a banker’s replenishment of his overdrawn physical energies. He had begun to see that his troubles were more than “nerves.” A “nerve man” like his London specialist saw his problem as a physical one. His suffering was, he saw, “largely due to the kink in my brain which makes life at all an unremitting strain for me.”
It was the way his mind, not his body, worked. The insight that this was not something that rest or willpower could cure offered hope and a new direction. The prescribed rest, and eating heartily, would not restore him. He wanted a specialist in “psychological troubles.”
The kink was why he could connect nothing with nothing. Traveling from Moorgate to Margate, he had made the “new start” the lines he had written suggest the doctor had promised. But it was to be in a new direction of treatment that neither the specialist nor Tom himself had envisioned.
* * *
In fact, despite the Eliot family’s inclination against it, perhaps there would be something in what Henry had condescended to see in Vivien—that it “is a relief to talk about one’s pains.” Realizing he needed a different approach, Eliot asked the advice of Ottoline Morrell, in whom both he and Vivien had confided about their illnesses, and who had discussed with them the depression that often left her feeling “utterly dead & empty & it is like being in a cold fog—or a pond.” This was one of the bonds of sympathy that drew her to both Eliots across a chasm of what she often felt, in close contact with Tom, was the inadequacy of her own intellect. Ottoline recommended the Swiss doctor Roger Vittoz, who had treated her before the war. Julian Huxley had also seen him, she said. Eliot—relieved to learn of an alternative to English doctors, who seemed only to diagnose “nerves or insanity!”—wrote to Huxley, who replied immediately with an endorsement. “I shall go to Vittoz,” Eliot told him.
To seek out Vittoz, as he did, was to see the source of his problem in the mind. To see a kink in his brain was to apprehend a condition akin to what Freud had labeled neurosis, though Eliot never subscribed to Freud’s theories. Vittoz’s approach was similarly akin to, but different from Freud’s. Vittoz was not a psychoanalyst and because of that “more useful for my purpose,” Eliot was to explain to a friend in London while in treatment in Switzerland. But aspects of Vittoz’s procedures—regular daily sessions, for example, that were, in part, a talking cure—were like Freud’s.
* * *
Lausanne was “a dull place” in a “carte postale colorée country,” high in the mountains of Switzerland, on the shores of Lake Geneva with an expansive view of the Alps rising across the lake. It was a quiet town, “except when the children come downhill on scooters over the cobbles,” filled with banks and chocolate shops, and his accommodations, at the Hôtel Ste. Luce, recommended to him as Vittoz was by Ottoline Morrell, were ideal—“the food is excellent, and the people make everything easy for one—ordering milk etc.” He was even staying in what he’d been told was Ottoline’s room, he wrote her shortly after his arrival in late November.
Roger Vittoz had treated Morrell and Huxley, and also William James and Joseph Conrad. His 1911 book Traitement des psychonévroses par la rééducation du contrôle cérébral had been published in an English translation in 1913 as Treatment of Neurasthenia by Means of Brain Control, a 1921 French edition of which Eliot owned, but which it seems he obtained either at Vittoz’s clinic or after his return to London. Ottoline saw Vittoz in 1913 and recalled that his method—he taught his patients a “system of mental control and concentration, and a kind of organisation of mind”—had a great effect “steadying and developing” her. A few years later, she urged Bertrand Russell to see him, telling him that one might see Vittoz for only two weeks in order to become proficient in his system. Even more in his favor was the fact that he charged only a modest fee. Vittoz, a devout Christian, was a benevolent figure of “extraordinary poise and goodness,” Morrell recalled, a quality that immediately impressed Eliot, who wrote to Morrell that from the first Vittoz inspired him with confidence. He liked him very much personally, he wrote, and “in short he is, I am sure[,] much more what I want than the man in London.”
Eliot’s description of the “kink” in his brain was an echo of Vittoz’s overarching contention that “every form of neurasthenia is due to the brain working abnormally.” It was only possible to cure the condition by accepting that, and therefore rejecting the usual diagnosis that it was either a matter of willpower or a physical ailment that required a physical cure, either through diet or rest, as the celebrated specialist of London had claimed. The cure relied on self-control, but not, as Eliot might have previously understood it, as a moral issue. It was necessary to learn new tools for clear thinking, for overcoming “imperfections of that [brain] control.” Vittoz’s was a hopeful, expansive treatment based on what would later come to be known as cognitive therapy, one designed to overcome self-judgment rather than finding a way forward in asceticism, either moral or physical.
Vittoz argued that the duality of the brain—between what he called the objective and the subjective brains—was invisible when an individual was functioning normally. It was the tragedy of the “uncurbed brain” that, without the controlling power of the objective faculty, it gave rise to a “state of anarchy” in which the suffering person was “prey to every impulse, subject to all fears, unable to reason or weigh an idea.” As the insufficiency of control increased, so did the patient�
�s symptoms; vague feelings of discomfort grew into a “painful confusion … a whirl of unconnected and uncontrolled ideas.”
Vittoz’s technique involved holding the patient’s head, in the belief that he could read the brain waves this way and work with the patient to alter them. Effective or not as a diagnostic tool, his laying on of hands worked also as a manifestation of his benevolent presence and was a method by which the patient might relax under his care. Vittoz’s touch physically encouraged the patient to recalibrate his mind through exercises that involved seizing upon images and words that brought happiness and repeating them in order to intensify focus.
Eliot would be in treatment for about a month. His plan was to leave Lausanne on Christmas Eve. Not long after arriving, he wrote to Ottoline that Vittoz’s diagnosis was a good one, though he did not say what it was. The treatment was all-involving from the start. “I seem to have no time for any continuous application to anything else,” he told her. This was a fulfilling breakthrough in itself—he had wanted, earlier in the year, to have continuous time enough to finish his long poem; now Vittoz was keeping him so busy that he had no time for anything but the treatment, focus on which was the effort of concentration he must later apply to finishing his poem or any substantial work.
From the start, he wrote Ottoline, he had felt moments of “more calm than I have for many years—since childhood.” He hoped his initial optimism would not prove illusory.
* * *
The calm that Eliot experienced continued and deepened. He wrote at the shore, overlooking Lake Geneva, and, as he had at Margate, he wrote the moment into his poem, beginning in penciled lines drafted on the reverse of a section he had typed out long before, and which the new lines replaced. He described the flight of “City directors; / Departed, have left no addresses,” who had left London behind, as he had done, and told almost no one where they were going.
… By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept …
Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,
Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long.
Lac Leman is the name of Lake Geneva in French. And as he had traveled from Moorgate to Margate, soon he must travel from Lausanne and Lac Leman back to London and the River Thames. Tom had originally planned to leave Lausanne on Christmas Eve, a Saturday, but even at the beginning of that week he wasn’t sure whether he would go to Paris, where he would rejoin Vivien, or to take an additional few days in the South of France first. “Apparently all of Western Europe is equally expensive,” though any time on the Continent was cheaper than London. He decided to prolong his treatment and stayed on with Vittoz for an extra week.
* * *
Tom and Vivien had stopped in Paris on the way to Lausanne, staying at the Hôtel Pas de Calais, at 59 rue des Saints-Pères, only a few doors away from Ezra Pound. During his few days in Paris, Tom was able to show Pound the disorganized pages of the poem that he had at last added to at Margate. Then he was gone. Vivien was lonely in Paris by herself and, like Tom, was also anxious about the “awful expense” of the city. “I live in a high up little room,” she wrote Mary Hutchinson, one of the few in Bloomsbury, or seemingly in all London, unreservedly kind to her. A Rapunzel awaiting her prince, she felt herself shunned by the English people she knew who were also in Paris. When she saw Roger Fry in the post office, for example, he “did not seem at ease, or pleased to see me,” she thought, “and escaped hastily.” She saved money by having her meals “en pension which I loathe,” unable to afford restaurants. Hotel living, even on a modest scale, and in a city far less expensive than London, was “too incredibly dear. It costs fortunes.”
But it would be an ideal home for herself and Tom, if they could actually live there and he could write. The Pounds had a “most exquisite Studio (with two rooms),” Vivien wrote. It was only £75 a year, and they had only just moved in, after having lived themselves at the Hôtel Pas de Calais. “Now if I could secure such a thing, I would certainly take them,” Vivien wrote Mary. She would prefer Paris and seemed to think that her own income might be enough to support the two of them. “For Tom, I am convinced, Paris!” Fresh in her mind was the last night they’d spent in London before leaving for Margate in October, an evening at the Huxleys’. “What a last impression of London.… The monotony, the drivel of the whole stupid round.”
* * *
The extra week Tom devoted to treatment was also extra time that might help with his poem. He wrote to a friend that he was trying to finish a poem, “about 800 or 1000 lines. Je ne sais pas si ça tient.” I do not know if it will work. He would find out in Paris, where he was to meet Vivien, and Pound.
He had written another six pages of poetry, drafting them rapidly in pencil as if “in a trance—unconsciously,” he told Virginia Woolf, though he was usually skeptical of the automatic writing this last burst of poetry represented. As at Margate, the newest lines suggested his mood, but now a very different one, of gratitude and hope revived during his sessions with Vittoz to which the lines alluded.
The sea was calm, and your heart responded
Gaily, when invited, beating responsive
To controlling hands. I left without you
Clasping empty hands. I sat upon a shore
Fishing, with a desolate sunset behind me
Shall I at last set my kingdom in order?
Immediately after the new year, he left Lausanne for Paris with that question in mind. He also had a larger sheaf of manuscripts ready to show, again, to Pound.
In mid-October, Vivien had written to Scofield Thayer about Tom’s unfinished assignments, “Everything is now postponed until January.” Now January was here. The train from Lausanne to Paris took more than half a day, a very uncomfortable ride on an overcrowded train.
Pound, in Paris, had begun a new calendar. “The Christian Era ended at midnight on Oct. 29–30 of last year,” he wrote to H. L. Mencken early in 1922. This was the night that James Joyce finished Ulysses. They were now living, and writing, “in the year 1 p.s.U,” he told Mencken, post scriptum Ulysses. Eliot arrived in Paris near the start of the month Pound called Saturnus An I—year one. Eliot had marked the start of the new era without festivities at Margate, uncertain of his prospects. His long poem would be finished, and published, before An I would end.
* * *
Tom’s arrival in Paris from Lausanne coincided with New York publisher Horace Liveright’s “furiously busy six days” there under Ezra Pound’s helpful management. Liveright had “sailed for YURUP,” as Ezra Pound put it, at the end of 1921, and, eager to sign up the best European books, planned to stay abroad for the month of January, meeting with publishers and authors. Liveright had published Pound with enthusiasm and regularly sought his advice on what and whom to publish. Pound was to be Liveright’s “guide and mentor” in Paris, “the last of the human cities,” according to Joyce, where scale and intimacy (and the cost of living, as Vivien had calculated) were still in balance. Liveright and Pound had never met, but Liveright’s hunch—that he’d enjoy his time in Paris with Pound “best of all,” he wrote his wife—was to prove correct.
Liveright, whose father-in-law was owner of International Paper, had founded his firm, Boni & Liveright, in 1917, the same year that Leonard and Virginia Woolf published their first Hogarth Press books. He saw his buying trip to Europe as a way to expand the adventuresome scope of what the company might do. And if Liveright met with no writers other than the two Pound introduced him to in the first week of the new year, it would have been a historic trip. Pound took advantage of serendipity and brought Liveright and Eliot and Joyce together for dinner. Joyce was in typically dire straits, even as the publication of Ulysses approached. In his Christmas letter to his father, Homer, Pound gave him the news that “Joyce nearly killed by motor bus last week. Caught between it an [sic] lamp post, but nothing apparently broken.”
Liveright, in Pound’s view, was “much more of a man than most publishers.” He was a man “going towa
rd the light not from it.” Pound’s father was also an admirer: “Glad Liveright is to see you,” he wrote his son. “I met him last year—seems like a ‘live wire.’”
Liveright was two years younger than the literary jack-of-all-trades Ezra Pound, poet, critic, translator, editor, publisher, matchmaker, and “a great ‘fan.’” For Liveright, and for Scofield Thayer, of the Dial, Pound acted as literary concierge and go-between to dozens of literary figures, from W. B. Yeats to Robert Frost to James Joyce, a range of writers who comprised what Lewis, a sometime member, called the “Pound circus.” Pound worked at what Lewis called “Ezra’s boyscoutery” with unrelenting diligence but resented that his own work was being undermined. “Point I can never seem to get you to take,” he wrote to one editor, “is that I have done more log rolling and attending to other people’s affairs, Joyce, Lewis, Gaudier, etc. (don’t regret it). But I am in my own small way, a writer myself, and as before stated I shd. like (and won’t in any case get) the chance of being considered as the author of my own poems rather than as a literary politician and a very active stage manager of rising talent.”
Liveright had a distinguished if not patrician bearing that marked him as different from the old-line publishers with names like Harcourt or Scribner or Harper: he “had an unforgettable look: graying hair, a beaked nose, and piercing black eyes; a face so riveting as to obscure his body, which it seems to me was lean and fairly tall,” a young employee of the firm recalled. He was “always dressed as Beau Brummel himself, a New York boulevardier,” and was “quite aware of his dandified appearance.” Walking in Bryant Park one afternoon, a friend remembered, Liveright was seen “in a well-fitted Chesterfield topcoat … a smart pearl grey fedora hat … a carnation in the lapel of his coat and he sported a cane with a silver knob.… He resembled a wedding guest in search of a wedding.”
Liveright’s habits at work were less formal than his clothes, as an employee later remembered. “Horace’s hangovers” were obvious at the office, and “discipline was about as out of place as at one of the then brand-new progressive schools.” One morning, having breakfast a little before noon at a nearby drugstore, the employee encountered Liveright, who arrived for a similarly late breakfast, and “with a well-trained smile” exclaimed, “This is a hell of a time for me to be coming to work!”
The World Broke in Two Page 6