* * *
Lawrence announced his terms for the future in the first letter he wrote in 1922, a New Year’s greeting to his friend Earl Brewster, who had by now arrived in Ceylon and was still hoping the Lawrences would join him there. He had decided he must go to Taos, Lawrence wrote, offering his manifesto for the new year. The East was not his destiny, he told his friend, invoking that favorite word that suggested he was obeying an inner call, a word he used whenever it might be necessary to quiet any disagreement his course of action might provoke. It was just as he had thought when they had first talked of Ceylon and Buddhism in the autumn. Meditation and the “inner life” were not for him. He sought “action and strenuousness and pain and frustration and struggling through,” though how this would be accomplished in the isolation of Taos was not clear. He was as dismissive of serenity as he was of common emotion and thought that a “new incarnation” awaited him in the land of the ancient sun worshippers. He must be a man in battle, struggling through toward the new writing he would do, and which would be his contribution to the larger fight.
Lawrence was restless with routine, almost allergic to his surroundings by now. In December, he had come down with a fairly mild but naggingly persistent case of the influenza that Virginia Woolf and Tom Eliot both had and which was spreading across Europe. It seemed almost a victory to have caught it, and he was relieved to be sick enough to spend Christmas in bed. “I hate Christmas anyhow,” he wrote one friend. His illness was a purification rite in the struggle toward a rebirth “through the blood and psyche.… Let nobody try to filch from me even my influenza,” he wrote.
But his flu meant he and Frieda missed the early boat he’d hoped they would be able to take. They couldn’t leave on January 15, and he would have to find another passage they could afford. He would be in Taormina at least until the first week of February. Destiny, and Mabel Sterne, would have to wait a little longer.
Lawrence’s life would probably have been a lot easier if he’d caught that first boat. The decision to go would then at least have been made for him. He had prepared for departure, and at the beginning of December he had sent off the revisions of nine stories he hoped would make for two separate volumes to be published by Seltzer. He had sent a similar package to his London agent, Curtis Brown, who was to arrange for English publication by Secker. It was his way of tying up the loose ends of what he’d written in the years during and after the war, so that he could travel light. The titles told their own story. One was called “Tickets, Please.” Another he changed to “The Last Straw.” For Lawrence, it was. He was ready for 1922.
* * *
But then, at the end of January, he changed his mind again. Brewster’s happiness in Ceylon had persuaded him that he would find “rest, peace, inside one” there. He would “postpone the evil day” and go to America later.
He wrote to Mabel about his detour. “I feel it is my destiny to go east before coming west.” He would stay only a short time there, he thought, “perhaps a year.” He invited her to join him in Ceylon, via San Francisco and China, as soon as she could. They could then go on to Taos and the “later Onslaught” together.
Six months after eloping with Lawrence in 1912, Frieda had written to a friend, “Lawrence is wear and tear.” His plans for 1922 had changed yet again, but he had not.
Chapter 5
“THE GREATEST WASTE NOW GOING ON IN LETTERS”
Tom returned to London, due back at Lloyds the week of Monday, January 16. A few days before, Vivien wrote to Mary Hutchinson that he was much better, looking forward to seeing her and “not very many others.” He had many reasons to regret the end of his three months’ leave, and not all of them had to do with Lloyds. The confined domestic life of Clarence Gate Gardens—the “wife obsession” that Wyndham Lewis deplored but that Eliot saw as his duty—was another routine he had not missed.
Tom would be back, this particularly cold January, to the unlovely London that he evoked with a sense of personal horror in the opening section of the poem he and Pound were editing together in Paris.
Unreal City I have sometimes seen and see,
Under the brown fog of your winter dawn,
A crowd flow over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Eliot had in an earlier version called London the “Terrible City,” but so great was his horror of the place, where he had thought he must make his career, but where his great work had been delayed, it was not real but unreal. The “crowd” included the morning commuters whose ranks he was about to reenter, described in a passage that evoked Dante and in doing so made arrival at Lloyds into a kind of death itself.
… 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.
It was the daily death of a typical London morning “crush hour,” and on Eliot’s way to nearby Lloyds—the entrance to the bank was on King William Street, which ran from the north side of London Bridge into the city—he could hear Saint Mary’s clock toll the time by which city workers were to arrive at their offices. But it was not only the commute. London, Tom wrote, was a kind of death, too: “London, the swarming life you kill and breed, / Huddled between the concrete and the sky; / Responsive to the momentary need, / Vibrates unconscious to its formal destiny.” Pound cut these lines, and scrawled “B—ll—S” (Bullshit) alongside them. Eliot could only be weighed down by so much despair, for the poem was proof that Eliot’s destiny as a poet, and Pound’s prophecy of it, had been fulfilled at last. Pound soon had a plan that would free Eliot from the bank that trapped him between the concrete and the sky.
* * *
Tom was saved from Lloyds by influenza: he was sick for more than ten days, another casualty of the rising epidemic that was keeping Virginia confined to bed and that had also affected but been less debilitating to Lawrence. Whatever mental respite he had found in the writing he’d done at Margate and then Lausanne, and in the collaborative work he did with Pound in Paris, quickly evaporated. He was very soon “excessively depressed,” he told Pound, though in a change perhaps made possible by practicing Vittoz’s mental exercises for calm, he did not let this, or his influenza, stop him from continuing to revise the poem at top speed. The improved concentration that he had felt in Lausanne seemed to hold, helped by the unanticipated postponement of his return to Lloyds and the fact that Vivien was not a distraction.
At their dinner in Paris with Liveright, Pound and Eliot seemed to take for granted that the Dial would publish the poem, even though he had not yet sent it to Scofield Thayer. But if it were to be published in the Dial, then the length of the poem would not be Liveright’s only concern. If the entire poem were to appear in a magazine, its publication in book form might only be an afterthought. From London Liveright wrote to Pound asking for clarification. Eliot had been home only a few days when, on January 20, he wrote to Thayer that he would soon be able to send him a poem of about 450 lines, in four parts, half the length it had been when he left Lausanne. He hoped Thayer would be able to let him know quickly whether the Dial would want to publish it, and also “approximately what the Dial would offer.” A day or two after that, he sent further revisions to Pound in Paris.
Eliot told Thayer it would not be published in an English periodical, perhaps in the hope that the Dial would in that case pay more for the poem. Perhaps for the same reason, he did not inform him of Liveright’s interest in publishing the poem in book form. Tom was deferential, but not forthright, telling Thayer he would “postpone all arrangements for publication” until he heard from him. And in a further sign of deference, he left it up to Thayer to decide how the poem might appear, assuring him it could be divided to go into four issues, if he liked, “but not more.” He also wanted to assure Thayer that it would be ready soon, and that it came with an imprimatur, so that Thayer n
eed not accept Eliot’s own word for its excellence: “It will have been three times through the sieve by Pound as well as myself so should be in final form.” The poem was still in flux, however. In its final form the poem would be in five parts, not four.
Thayer acted as quickly as Eliot had hoped: at the top of Eliot’s letter is the arithmetic he did to calculate Eliot’s fee. Thayer divided the estimated 450 lines of the poem by both 35 and 40, the number of lines of poetry that usually appeared on a Dial page. It had been a founding principle of Thayer’s that the Dial would pay all writers a standard rate—$10 a page for unpublished poetry, double the rate for prose—and writers were paid upon acceptance rather than publication. The uniform fee displeased some well-known writers but gave fair pay without a long wait to less established writers in need of income. Whether Eliot’s poem would appear in one issue or in several did not affect the price. It might run to a little over 11 pages: “12pp. 120,” Thayer noted in the margin of Eliot’s letter. He revised upward and made Eliot an offer of $150, which he thought very generous.
Thayer was eager to publish a poem by Eliot, who had by now not published a new poem in a periodical in two years. He had cultivated Eliot as soon as he became the owner and editor of the Dial in 1920. There was no one whose verse or prose he admired more, he told Eliot. “I only wish I could give you carte blanche.” But all of Eliot’s contributions to the Dial, beginning in November 1920, had been prose. Despite promises of poetry to come, Eliot had written no poetry to show Thayer. In February 1921, he had written Eliot, “Why no verse? I serve notice that I do not consider it seemly for the editor of The Dial ever again to repeat this question.” It was the same question Eliot had been repeatedly asking himself, eventually to the point of breakdown.
Tom finally wrote to Thayer in January, the first time Thayer had heard directly from Tom for eight months, since May 1921. It was not a matter of simply having been out of touch. Eliot had avoided Thayer, evidently concluding that it was easier to say nothing about overdue work than to continue to make excuses for habitual delinquency. In the fall of 1920, Tom had agreed to write a bimonthly London Letter, about English literary life. But he missed even his first deadline, apologizing in due course for the lateness of the “puny” result (Thayer thought it distinguished). In July 1921 Vivien had written to Thayer on her husband’s behalf, “You must excuse Tom for any dilatoriness in writing,” an umbrella apology that seemed to cover both his delay in responding to Thayer’s letters and the failure to deliver a London Letter and other promised contributions to the Dial, including a review of Marianne Moore’s poems. Despite these delinquencies, Vivien wrote, Tom would be delighted to review Joyce’s Ulysses. “That at least is definite,” she added, accepting with alacrity a new assignment as if to share in the illusion that Thayer himself promoted, that Tom would be able to complete them all soon enough.
Tom had also left it to Vivien to inform Thayer of his illness and leave and to tell him that because Tom would not be able to do his usual London Letter, he had helpfully arranged for someone else—St. John Hutchinson, Mary’s husband—to do it instead. But neither Thayer nor Gilbert Seldes, the managing editor of the Dial, liked the letter Hutchinson eventually wrote. They rejected it, and the “embarrassing situation,” as Tom discreetly called it, was a separate discord that created an undercurrent of ill will on both sides as negotiations to publish Tom’s poem began and then quickly stalled. Thayer felt he was owed something, if only for his loyalty and forbearance. And the Dial, by this point, needed no defense as a literary journal of stature and relatively large circulation, compared to the Little Review and other similar publications. Tom, on the other hand, knew he had written his best poem and, believing gossip he’d heard that in some cases Thayer had paid other writers extravagantly, wanted a high price, distrusting Thayer on what Thayer assured Eliot, against this accusation, was a point of honor.
Despite this Eliot and Pound—and Thayer—knew that the Dial was the natural place for a new poem by Eliot, even if it was not the only place in which it could be published. Rarely can there have been such a protracted negotiation to publish a poem that was never seriously offered to any other magazine—and for which, as with its publication in book form, there was only ever one bidder. Neither Thayer nor Liveright would know for eight months—until September—whether or when he might publish the poem. Or at what price.
Thayer made his offer but in his reply was clear that he thought it took some gall for Tom to ask him to do anything quickly. His last letter to Tom, written in December to explain their disappointment in Hutchinson’s piece, had betrayed another, more personal, grievance. “I was glad to hear from Pound that you looked not badly when he saw you in Paris,” he began. Having heard nothing of Tom’s condition since Vivien’s letter announcing his “serious breakdown,” Thayer now seemed to doubt whether Tom had been ill at all. Thayer closed with the fulsome New Year’s hope that “howsoever good your next London Letter may be the best thing about it will for me at least be that it will indicate you are well again.” Despite the offer of the poem, this did not seem to be the case. The poem might be nearly ready, but Eliot had also to explain a new delay in the next London Letter: his influenza meant that he was behind and his article could not appear before the April issue. That would mean a gap of seven months, which he knew was intolerable for Thayer.
Even with the prospect of the poem in view, Thayer could not conceal his contempt for Tom’s ingratiating nonchalance. He was glad to see that influenza, having kept Tom at home, had led his old friend to have “again taken up the old-fashioned custom of answering letters.” He hoped he would not have to “await another case of influenza” before receiving another. Thayer also asked Tom to send him a copy of the poem in Vienna. But Tom, whether out of pique or a more elemental procrastination, did not write another letter in reply, nor did he send the poem.
* * *
“My feet are at Moorgate, and my heart / Under my feet,” he had written at Margate. Now, as he prepared the poem for Pound’s third review, the lines had a different resonance: he was to be back at Lloyds and would be at the Moorgate tube station every day, walking past St. Mary Woolnoth and hearing its bell toll nine times every morning. Vivien was soon at home, too, and in conveying this news to Pound Eliot reported her complaint “that if she had realised how bloody England is she would not have returned,” as if to say he regretted his own return, and perhaps hers as well, not only to bloody England but to their marriage.
But no one regretted Eliot’s return to London and Lloyds more than Pound, who had wanted Eliot out of the bank from the moment he went into it during the war. “Three months off and he got that poem done,” Pound wrote Thayer, suggesting to the editor just how high a price literature was paying for Eliot’s servitude, and how necessary it was for Thayer to publish it, if he took his role as editor seriously. He was playing the diplomatic intermediary for Thayer and the Dial and for Eliot—and for literature itself. Though his formal role with the Dial, as foreign agent, had ended the previous year, he tried to salvage Thayer’s interest in the poem as a way of liberating Eliot from Lloyds. But it was to be very hard work on both counts for Eliot’s “Cher Maître,” who was that winter and spring constantly making excuses for, and begging Thayer to overlook, Eliot’s consistently “undiplomatic” behavior.
Pound knew that Thayer had little patience left, and he knew, too, that his defense of Eliot must encompass the fact that Eliot was an inveterate offender, who repented as frequently as he disappointed. Still, Pound was messianic in pushing Eliot’s case. He wrote Thayer on February 8, to echo, and verify, Eliot’s own enthusiasm about his poem—“almost enough to make everyone else shut up shop,” he wrote, though he was quick to add, “I haven’t done so,” and told Thayer he had, by the way, sent a new poem of his own to the Dial editors in New York.
But then Eliot’s penchant for what Pound had once called “incommodious delay” got in Pound’s—and Eliot’s—way again. He wa
s confident it was his best work, and Pound had ratified that to him and to those who would likely publish it. But now he seemed unable to do the easier work of actually getting it to those who were eager to read it and publish it, namely Liveright and Thayer. Thayer took Eliot’s silence as tantamount to an intemperate rejection of his blind, but good-faith, offer.
* * *
“Some minds aberrant from the natural equipose / London! your population is bound upon the wheel!” Eliot had written not long after he began working at the bank the first time. Now, after his leave, he was bound again. The “solemnly smiling transatlantic reticence” that Wyndham Lewis thought one of Tom’s most enduring masks began quickly to crack again as winter turned to spring. Vivien was confined again to bed, Eliot was again tired and depressed, and, he confided to Lewis two months after his return, “life has been horrible generally.” The Eliots were again what they had always been: “two highly nervous people shut up in grinding proximity,” as the novelist Elizabeth Bowen described them. The time with Vittoz, and his techniques, seems to have been forgotten.
Thayer’s offer of $150 (about £35) did not satisfy Eliot, but it was not only a question of money. Eliot noticed every bit of the condescension Thayer had intended him to see in his letter, and he was offended. He complained to Pound that the offer did not strike him “as good pay for a year’s work,” but he also resented that Thayer had not “offered the 150 [dollars] with more graciousness.” He would have “felt more yielding” if Thayer hadn’t made it seem he was doing Tom a great favor. And yet Thayer was doing him a favor. Because he had not read the poem, he was, in effect, giving Tom the carte blanche he had warned him he couldn’t.
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