The World Broke in Two

by Bill Goldstein

  Eliot did not send the poem to Thayer, or to Knopf, who likely had the option on it, though before his dinner in Paris with Liveright they had corresponded about other terms of their 1919 contract that John Quinn had negotiated. Eliot had not realized that Knopf had the right to sell Eliot’s verse for use in anthologies in Great Britain without notifying Eliot or seeking his approval and was annoyed by this. Knopf, in his reply, was offended at Eliot’s suggestion that he had behaved badly, and in a second letter to Knopf on the subject, written on Christmas Day from Lausanne, Eliot had apologized that he’d been away from home for nearly three months and said he would look at the contract when he returned to London. Liveright’s interest, and his caveat about Knopf’s option, would have given Eliot a reason to do so promptly in January. But even if the question of the anthology slipped his mind, it seems unlikely that the question of Knopf’s option did. Yet Eliot did not write to Knopf again until March, a nearly three-month delay. He was then warmly accommodating about Knopf’s interpretation of their contract regarding anthologies—“I have no disposition to interfere with any arrangement you may have made”—but still said nothing about his new poem, even though any progress he might make with Liveright, who had now been waiting two months, was dependent on clarifying what Knopf would want to do.

  This went beyond forgetfulness. Eliot often dealt in very narrow, very selective truth. Many of those who knew Eliot well—and liked him or even loved him—did not trust him. His reserve seemed to others a form of deception, a mask, rather than a retreat into privacy. Rumors began to circulate in London that spring that Lady Rothermere had withdrawn her promised support for the literary magazine Eliot would edit under her patronage. It had seemed to be moving forward before Eliot’s breakdown. Now it seemed to be dead. Or was it? Wyndham Lewis decided to ask Eliot directly.

  “I have just got through to Eliot on the telephone,” Lewis wrote their mutual friend Violet Schiff. “The Rothermere review he says is not finished. It continues. But (greatly as I hesitate to say this of such a man as Eliot) that may be a lie.”

  * * *

  At lunch on February 14, Eliot complained to Conrad Aiken about the obstacles to getting his poem published. Aiken recommended an alternative: Maurice Firuski, a Cambridge, Massachusetts, publisher of lucrative limited editions. Firuski had paid a $100 royalty in advance to other poets, Aiken told his friend. Eliot’s eyes “glowed with a tawny light like fierce doubloons” when he outlined the arrangement. Aiken wrote to Firuski the next day, though why Eliot would be so greedily interested in a price lower than anything Liveright or Knopf would likely offer for book publication is not clear. Aiken had not read the poem—“it may not be good, or intelligible,” he wrote—but assured Firuski of what Thayer, grudgingly, knew, too, that given Eliot’s reputation a long poem by him would be “a real curiosity, even perhaps an event.”

  But once again, Eliot put off writing to Firuski for two more weeks. When he did, he asked for his terms at the publisher’s earliest convenience, he wrote, because “the other offers for it cannot be held in suspense very long,” a finessing of the truth. Firuski’s reply indicated that Aiken had outlined the terms correctly. While waiting to hear from Firuski, Eliot replied, at last, to Thayer with a telegram that confused and angered Thayer:

  CANNOT ACCEPT UNDER !8!56 POUNDS = ELIOT +

  Now it was Thayer’s turn to be offended. He was appalled at Eliot’s high-handed demand of an absurd amount of money and waited several days to reply, which he did, drily concealing his outrage by repeating the words of the telegram and adding that he assumed this was an error on the part of the telegraphic service. In fact, it was—Eliot had meant that he could not accept less than £50, or about $250—but Thayer was past the point of thinking Eliot would cooperate with him in any way, or that he could deliver anything, poetry or prose, that he promised. He outlined again the “general rule” of the Dial’s policy on rates and asked Eliot to let him know why an exception should be made in his case, in a tone that made it clear that no reason seemed possible, particularly given the personal sacrifices he and his co-owner, James Sibley Watson Jr., had made to keep the magazine running, at a large deficit but still paying “all contributors famous and unknown at the same rates,” a position with which he thought Eliot would be sympathetic. “I have had to notify The Dial”—meaning his colleagues back in New York—“that we are apparently not to receive the poem,” Thayer continued, closing with only slightly veiled contempt that whatever the fate of the poem, “I trust your review of Miss Moore and your London Letter are now arriving in New York.”

  Writers are more usually swayed by pay rather than an editor’s rectitude, and when Eliot replied to Thayer, as he did unusually promptly, he told him that he simply did not think the equivalent of £30 or £35 was enough for a poem that he said had taken him a year to write (though this was not true) and would be his “biggest” work yet (which was). He had not wanted to publish it in a journal first, in any case, Eliot added, though this, too, was not true. Thayer would of course remember Eliot having offered it to him, supposedly exclusively, in January, even though he’d withheld that he’d already talked with Liveright about publishing it.

  * * *

  Pound had not foreseen such protracted negotiations or such ill will, and as much as he did not want to play the broker, he saw that he must do what he could if the poem was to be published at all. He tried to arouse sympathy in Thayer and urged continued forbearance. Eliot “has merely gone to pieces again,” Pound wrote. It was a case of abuleia, “simply the physical impossibility of correlating his muscles sufficiently to write a letter or get up and move across the room.” This also explained Eliot’s not having sent Thayer the poem itself. “Damn him for not sending you the mss. And curse his family,” Pound added for good measure, “they are the absolute punk of punk .”

  Pound’s sense of mission meant his salesmanship was as sincere as his intervention was necessary. He had also thought, after the dinner with Liveright in Paris and his endorsement to Thayer, that his task would be done quickly and he could resume his own work. He was in league with Thayer, he seemed to say to the editor, though of course his effort was all on Eliot’s behalf. “I dare say you and I have more reasons for wanting to wring his neck than any one else has; I mean we wd. have, or wd. have had, if it were not definitely a pathological state,” he wrote, begging Thayer to think instead of Eliot’s supreme importance and assuring him Eliot’s poem—neither he nor Eliot had shared its title yet—“is as good in its way as Ulysses in its way—and there is so DAMN little genius, so DAMN little work that one can take hold of and say ‘this at any rate stands[’], and make a definite part of literature.”

  It was not only the poem but an entire career at stake, Pound suggested. Robert Frost had a sinecure as a poet in residence at the University of Michigan. Joyce had his patrons, and “two offspring, which I can’t see that he has any business to have.” But Joyce, like Pound himself, was “tougher than Thomas,” Pound added. It was nothing less than duty, Pound seemed to urge Thayer. What else was there for a forward-thinking magazine editor to do but help Eliot through: “Three months off and he got that poem done. I think he is being in that bank is [sic] the greatest waste now going on in letters, ANYWHERE.”

  Quinn, in New York, was concerned about Eliot, too, when he heard of the situation, but angry at Pound’s efforts to persuade Thayer and Liveright to publish the poem. This was too much of a distraction from his own poetry—just what Pound usually complained about. Why did Pound continue to waste his time on the Dial, even on Eliot’s behalf, now that his own contract had not been renewed and he was not being paid to do it? “Let The Dial stew in its own Simian juice,” Quinn wrote, his anti-Semitic objections to Liveright now entangling the Christian Thayer, who, among other imagined crimes and insults, published too many Jewish writers and artists in the Dial for Quinn’s taste. Quinn was personally affronted by Pound’s mediation. “Don’t be a le
gal adviser without pay, a liaison officer without commission,” he wrote.

  In the meantime, Eliot went to tea with Virginia and Leonard Woolf on Sunday, March 5. It had been nearly six months since he had last seen the Woolves, at Monk’s House in September, the weekend before he saw the specialist who had proposed a leave from Lloyds.

  When visitors arrived, Virginia “was much given to drawing them out,” remembered the writer Gerald Brenan, who met her in 1922. Virginia would sit in her chair, he recalled, “leaning sideways and a little stiffly” toward her companion, whom she addressed “in a bantering tone, and she liked to be answered in the same manner.” She took a “lightly ironical tone” that was “personal and took on a feminine, and one might almost say flirtatious, form.” Virginia leaning in, the more guarded Tom leaping away—it might have been almost a kind of physical distrust, one revealed also in their manner of talk. With a “little encouragement” Virginia was likely to “throw off a cascade of words like the notes of a great pianist improvising,” her voice vivacious, so that nothing she said “was ever bookish. She talked easily and naturally in a pure and idiomatic English,” her conversation seeming to “preen itself with self-confidence in its own powers” given the right interlocutor. This was the grounds of her distrust of Eliot. She could not feel always self-confident in his presence, brought up short by the profound stare of his eyes and his tendency toward oracular statements.

  Virginia, in conversation, was opinionated but not domineering. She sought, and inspired, a grand architectural effect of total engagement. If Virginia was, in Brenan’s view, a great pianist improvising, a talk over tea or dinner was not a recital but was meant to be a piece for four hands, or six, or eight—a concerto, at least, and with Virginia most at ease, most scintillating and glittering, as one instrument among many.

  Back from Paris, Tom was, Virginia recorded, more relaxed, was “yes, grown positively familiar & jocular & friendly, though retaining some shreds of authority. I mustn’t lick all the paint off my Gods,” she wrote about his visit, though there was a vestige, as always, of suspicion, in her and in him. He was “grown supple as an eel,” she thought.

  Supple and able to put on a good show (or a brave front) for the Woolves, before whom his mask was firmly in place. For he was “irritable and exhausted” at that moment, as he confided to another friend, and “overwhelmed with the labours of moving,” which had consumed him for the past two weeks, “having let my flat for two or three months.” The Woolves saw none of this.

  “What, then, did we discuss?” Virginia wrote in her diary. Nothing apparently about Margate, Lausanne, or his breakdown and treatment. He told them he was starting a magazine. This was to be the Criterion. He also had news about his own work.

  “He has written a poem of 40 pages, which we are to print in the autumn.” It was set for England. But there was no immediate money in that for the financially desperate Eliot, who knew, as Lawrence did, that the American market was more lucrative than the English, in any case.

  “This is his best work, he says. He is pleased with it; takes heart, I think from the thought of that safe in his desk,” she wrote, content for him and satisfied as his publisher, even though she had been able to do no revisions of Jacob for two months.

  But the next day was momentous for Virginia for two reasons, and Leonard recorded one triumph: “V. went for short walk,” the ten minutes that Dr. Sainsbury had allowed. Virginia recorded the other, once again writing in her diary later in the day, and not in the morning, instead of work.

  “I am back again, after 2 months this very day, sitting in my chair after tea, writing; & I wrote Jacob this morning, & though my temperature is not normal, my habits are: & that is all I care for.” The thought of what Eliot had safe in his desk seemed to spark in her the sense of rivalry with other writers that she had denied earlier in the year. She was hopeful she could continue—to walk and to write, and because she no longer felt “very trustful” of doctors’ prognostications, she felt she must ignore them and return to “my habits.”

  As for Tom, all seemed well, at least as far as Virginia could tell. In so easily settling with the Woolves about their publishing the poem, he hid from them any immediate anxieties about money. But even when Eliot seemed at ease with her, as he did at this visit, Virginia detected a pose. For that was what it most likely was, she decided. “Clive, via Mary, says he uses violet powder to make him look cadaverous,” she wrote in her diary. That spring, the writer Osbert Sitwell gossiped gleefully with Virginia about Eliot and recalled a party at Eliot’s flat that coincided with Virginia’s astonishment at the poet’s penchant for cosmetics. “I sat next to Tom.…. Noticing how tired my host looked, I regarded him more closely, and was amazed to notice on his cheeks a dusting of green powder—pale but distinctly green, the color of a forced lily-of-the-valley. I was hardly willing, any more than if I had seen a ghost, to credit the evidence of my senses.”

  When Sitwell met Virginia for tea shortly thereafter, “She asked me, rather pointedly, if I had seen Tom lately, and when I said ‘Yes’ asked me—because she too was anxious for someone to confirm or rebut what she thought she had seen—whether I had observed the green powder on his face—so there was corroboration!” Woolf and Sitwell decided that “this extraordinary and fantastical pretense” meant “the great poet wished to stress his look of strain and that this must express a craving for sympathy in his unhappiness.”

  Were his poetic and marital travails themselves another in a multiplying sequence of disguises, played for sympathy when occasion demanded it? He might wear a mask, it seemed, even to appear ill. Virginia was not able to forget the cosmetics worn by her “penniless” friend with an “invalid wife” who unfortunately had to “work all day in a Bank,” as she put it. Later in the year, she was to write in her diary about Tom, “He still remains something of the schoolmaster, but I am not sure he does not paint his lips.”

  * * *

  In not writing to Knopf about the new poem, Eliot may have been thinking of Quinn’s assurance, in 1919, that the clause in the contract guaranteeing Knopf the right of “first refusal” of his next books meant nothing and that “Knopf knows that it means nothing.” Eliot could easily fulfill his obligation to Knopf by making impossible conditions, Quinn had explained to him, demanding from his “dear publisher,” for example, a royalty of 30 or 40 percent. To Liveright, too, it would have been obvious that Knopf’s option clause was a legal nicety that could easily be circumvented. Yet Liveright’s interest in the poem would have been all the more reason for Eliot to state his impossible conditions to Knopf as quickly as possible if he wanted to free himself.

  Quinn felt about Knopf as he did about Liveright: he was an “Israelite” publisher, in business only since the war (Knopf had founded his own firm in 1915), a relative newcomer forced, for lack of old-line heritage, to take on risky writers like Pound or Joyce, as Huebsch had done in publishing A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. (Quinn did not seem to think they could simply share his taste for the modern.) When Knopf, in 1922, had, like Liveright, expressed interest in publishing Ulysses, Quinn castigated him as even more “timorous” than Liveright and as unlikely as Liveright or Huebsch to publish it “unexpurgated and undiluted,” which Knopf, of course, did not. Quinn marveled at the persistence of these “three New York Jewish publishers re: Ulysses,” and their “apparently enormous insatiable perennial appetite … for slaughter,” as he told them time and again that the book, at Joyce’s insistence, must be published unchanged. It was something unique about their race that had them cajoling him anyway. They “apparently loved to be skinned and come back again,” he told Harriet Weaver, even though it would do no good and only wasted his time.

  But Eliot still did not write Knopf. In this he was procrastinating, or playing a “game of chess”—the title he gave to the second section of the poem—against himself. He wanted the poem published as quickly as possible. But the longer he waited to let Knopf know that th
e poem existed, the less possible it would be for Knopf to publish it in the autumn of 1922, which was to be one of Eliot’s conditions. Forestalling Knopf in that way might free Eliot to go to Liveright. But the longer and longer into the spring Eliot waited, the more difficult it would become for Liveright to publish in the autumn. Eliot was also losing the chance to find out whether Knopf might offer an even higher price. Or whether Liveright, in turn, might, too.

  He still sent no one a copy of the poem. He had the version he and Pound had edited. But despite Thayer’s request, and Liveright’s, he did not type another one. Months had gone by. No one in a position to publish the poem, including those who had already made offers to do so, had read it. Eliot closed his March letter to Thayer declining the $150 offer with a reminder-cum-threat, “You have asked me several times to give you the first refusal of any new work of mine, and I gave you the first refusal of this poem.” Thayer wrote a note in the margin, “Not submitted.”

  * * *

  Eliot gave the title “Death by Water” to one section of the long poem, as if at Lloyds he experienced a kind of drowning every day. The crowd flowed over London Bridge, and many of them came to rest, as he did, underground. In the bank, his office was a room below grade—“my cave,” he called it, his heart under his feet at Moorgate and his desk under foot. A visitor remembered the distorted view, as if underwater, up through the thick squares of green glass of pavement that filtered in a watery light, and upon which “hammered all but incessantly the heels of the passers-by.” Eliot sat on a perch above the other clerks at their desks, his tall frame stooping “very like a dark bird in a feeder,” one friend remembered. His lunch hour was strictly from noon to one, and because he could not be ten minutes overtime, he did what he could to avoid lunches any distance from the bank and asked people to meet him at Lloyds so that they would have time to talk while walking to the restaurant.