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for Alice
Introduction
T. S. ELIOT was never young. That, at least, is the impression many readers get from his work. ‘I grow old … I grow old…’ complains the voice of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, written when the poet was at the start of his twenties. A few years later Eliot began another poem with the words ‘Here I am, an old man’. Still in his early thirties when he published The Waste Land in 1922, he argued that the ‘most important personage in the poem’ was Tiresias, who has already ‘foresuffered all’ and appears to have lived for thousands of years.1
Yet Eliot knew what it meant to be young. To follow his development from early childhood enhances alike reading of his work and understanding of his life. Presenting him as shy, sometimes naïve and vulnerable, Young Eliot aims to unsettle common assumptions about this poet’s perceived coldness. It shows how his American upbringing combined with experience of France and England to make him not only the most remarkable immigrant poet in the English language but also the most influential and resounding poetic voice of the twentieth century. His poetry embodies an almost limitless resonance.
Eliot’s youth remained vital even to his ‘aged eagle’ tone and achievement.2 Several people who knew him intimately recognised this. His widow Valerie, who died in 2012, maintained that there remained always a ‘little boy’ inside ‘Tom’.3 His nephew Graham Bruce Fletcher remembers being taken in boyhood by Uncle Tom to a London joke shop during the early 1960s to buy stink bombs, which they then let off inside the nearby Bedford Hotel, not far from Eliot’s office; with a fit of hysterical giggles, Eliot put on a marked turn of speed as he and his nephew, Macavity-like, removed themselves from the scene of the crime. ‘Tom’ sped off twirling his walking stick, ‘in the manner of Charlie Chaplin’.4 Back home, they did not tell Valerie what they had been up to. Instead, the septuagenarian business-suited Nobel Prize winner settled down to playing with his nephew’s remote-controlled toy Aston Martin James Bond car. In age, among those whom he trusted most, the poet nicknamed Old Possum retained a certain gleefulness. He remained young Eliot.
This elderly gentleman turned stink-bomber may have been making up for lost time. His own childhood had been unabashedly strict. A shy, big-eared boy whose privileged upbringing took place within earshot of one of the most seductive productions of African American culture – ragtime music – Tom Eliot in St Louis, Missouri, was not a child renowned for wild escapades. Yet just as his first book contains poems that are unsettlingly subversive – in their rhythms, images and social satire – so throughout his life, despite his po-faced, born-venerable public persona, there was an elusive, wounded and sometimes mischievous identity that remained a source of disconcerting creative energy. He once wrote of Alfred Lord Tennyson, the iconic English Victorian Poet Laureate, that he was ‘the most instinctive rebel against the society in which he was the most perfect conformist’.5 The same could be said of the author of The Waste Land.
Like most people to whom his poetry matters, I fell in love with the ineradicably insinuating music of Eliot’s verse. More than forty years after I first read it, there are still things about the poetry that puzzle me, luring me on; but I knew from the start, and writing his biography has confirmed the conviction, that Eliot’s poems work not because they are intellectual games but because they are the products of an intense emotional life fused with a preternatural mastery of the pliancy of language. Like Tennyson and a very small number of other English poets, Eliot had perfect pitch when it came to the music of words. Yet if his hearing was the source of his greatest gift, then, ironically and absurdly, from very early childhood he hated his own ears. Their large size and shape caused him acute embarrassment, deepening his boyhood shyness. What he managed to do was to turn that apparent source of affliction into his greatest artistic asset. Repeatedly, whether in the case of his shy self-consciousness, or his later sense of sexual hurt, or his experience of death, or his raw sense of having made terrible mistakes in his life, Eliot faces up to a wound, a humiliating source of pain, and, through confronting it, incorporates it into an emotionally resonant, brilliantly intelligent work of art. His poems have their sources in word-music and in such acts of moral or emotional courage as well as in sheer technical mastery. However absurd or tortured on occasion, Eliot’s life and his transformation of aspects of it into verse are the work of a great poet. Coming to terms with insistent personal damage, he was able, as few have been able, to make works at once insistently new and abiding.
T. S. Eliot did not want his biography written. Much of his most intimate correspondence, including many letters to his parents and almost all of his correspondence with his first wife, was destroyed at his own request. Having managed to make lasting poetry out of his most stinging humiliations, he wished those humiliations to be afforded the grace of oblivion. Consistent with a good deal of his criticism, which stressed poetic ‘impersonality’, his efforts to suppress his own biography were sometimes devastatingly successful. Between the summer of 1905 (when Eliot was sixteen) and the winter of 1910 (when he was twenty-two) all that survives of his correspondence is a single postcard. This is one reason why the few biographers who have attempted to write his life tend to pass over the first twenty-one years in around twenty-one pages. I owe these biographers great debts, and believe biography affords not a reductive explanation that undoes the mystery of an author’s gift, but a form of artistic narrative attention that averts caricature and illuminates both poet and poetry. Nevertheless, earlier biographies of this particular poet are misleadingly proportioned. Eliot’s formative years were exactly that. Their importance is greater than most readers have realised. Young Eliot presents this crucial period in much more detail. ‘Home is where one starts from.’6
Though Eliot wanted no biography written, he did grant Valerie Eliot permission to edit his letters. After he died in 1965, she worked for decades to build a superb archive of the poet’s correspondence, drawing not just on carbon copies (many held in the archives of the London publishing house of Faber and Faber, of which Eliot was a director), but also on original letters which Mrs Eliot acquired, often through auction houses. Along with much of Eliot’s library, this reassembled archive grew to complement the massive assemblage of Eliot materials housed now in the Houghton Library at Harvard, a collection which owes its origins to the poet’s mother and brother; it complements, too, the bequest given to King’s College, Cambridge, by Eliot’s friend John Hayward. Other substantial hoards developed at locations from Leeds to Texas and from London to New York and New Zealand. Recognised as a figure of global importance, Eliot has long attracted ambitious manuscript collectors. When, not long after his death, some typescripts and other drafts of The Waste Land were revealed among the holdings of the New York Public Library, Valerie Eliot produced an impressive scholarly edition of these. In 1988 she published the first volume of her late husband’s letters; a
much expanded second edition of this appeared in 2009 along with the long delayed second volume. By that time, Mrs Eliot was unwell and these books were co-edited by Professor Hugh Haughton. Now Professor John Haffenden continues to edit The Letters of T. S. Eliot. Several thousand pages are in print, with many thousands more yet to be published.
Pioneering Eliot biographers, including Peter Ackroyd (forbidden to quote more than a few words from Eliot’s work) and Lyndall Gordon (who often resorted to paraphrase), sometimes had little to go on when they conducted their research in the 1970s and early 1980s. Today, for long periods of Eliot’s life there is so much material available that almost no one will ever read through it. His collected letters and his other prose will fill many volumes, documenting some aspects of this writer’s activities (such as his editorial and publishing labours) in exhaustive, exhausting detail. However, many of these letters and articles reveal little about his personal and creative experience. So, half a century after this great poet died, there is more, not less, need for the narrative work of biography.
When I first wrote on Eliot in the 1980s, my doctoral supervisor, Richard Ellmann, told me that Valerie Eliot had discussed the idea of his writing her husband’s life. Eventually, Ellmann, a great biographer from a Jewish background, who had already authored a substantial account of Eliot for the Dictionary of National Biography, decided he did not want to go ahead. He told me that, though he had huge admiration for Eliot’s work, he was put off by an anti-Semitic streak he discerned there. As far as I know, Valerie Eliot, true to her husband’s wishes, blocked all would-be official biographers. Lyndall Gordon, herself of Jewish descent, wrote two insightful biographical volumes, but few others have followed. Instead, over the ensuing decades accounts as different as the 1984 play and Hollywood biopic Tom and Viv (which sees Eliot as a misogynistic persecutor), Anthony Julius’s T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form (which prosecutes relentlessly the case that the poet was anti-Semitic), and several works by James E. Miller and others that portray Eliot as a gay man in love with a French male companion, all combined to make Mrs Eliot very wary of what she regarded as exploitative biographical distortions. Resolutely, she continued to assemble an Eliot archive, and embarked on the meticulous publication of his letters, some of them both pained and painful. Latterly, she was instrumental in commissioning editors including Christopher Ricks and Ronald Schuchard to collect and reprint Eliot’s work in modern annotated editions. ‘It’s time’, Valerie Eliot is reported to have said in 2004 as her health began to fail, ‘to put Tom together now … but I’ll need some help’.7
This is not an official biography. Published fifty years after the poet’s death, Young Eliot offers an account of his life and work up to and including the first appearance of what many regard as his greatest poem. In due course I hope to publish a second volume, Eliot after ‘The Waste Land’. When I wrote The Savage and the City in the Work of T. S. Eliot (published in 1987), Valerie Eliot, with whom I corresponded, was generous and encouraging. She allowed me to quote from published and unpublished materials after she had read my typescript. In the 1980s she wrote me a few letters, telling me, for instance, about how, while she ‘darned his socks’, Eliot would read to her from Victorian poet James Thomson’s despairing masterpiece, The City of Dreadful Night.8 At that time I was nervous of Mrs Eliot. I knew that had she refused me permission to quote material, not just my book but my career might have been damaged. Some years later, once as a judge of the T. S. Eliot Prize for poetry and once as a poet shortlisted for it, I met her. She was politely friendly, and I found it easy to talk to her, not least because I wanted nothing from her. My wife had written a book about the English novelist Rose Macaulay, whose notoriously bad driving Mrs Eliot enjoyed recalling. She told me how ‘Tom’, sitting in the back seat, had urged ‘Rose’ to keep her eyes on the road. Like other people, I was always impressed by the way Valerie Eliot would speak of ‘Tom’, using his first name. It was natural for her to do so, but there was also, I think, a strategy involved. It was a way of reminding people that T. S. Eliot was a human being, rather than a remote historic monument.
Setting out Eliot’s formative years in fuller detail than ever before and showing how his life conditioned the writing of his best-known poems, Young Eliot tries to articulate the magnitude of Eliot’s achievement and the very substantial cost involved. In an age when the Eliot Estate is more open to quotation from the full range of Eliot’s writings, the challenge is to select details which will humanise this dauntingly canonical poet for new generations of readers, make clear why his work matters and set out the often painful drama of the life that underpinned The Waste Land. The recently published volumes of Letters and my extensive investigations in Massachusetts, St Louis, New Haven, Cambridge, Oxford, London, Bosham and elsewhere allow me to write a more accurate and intimate account of Eliot’s time in America and in England than has been possible previously. From its title onwards, this book advances a case for Eliot’s early upbringing as fascinating in itself and central to his identity.
Young Eliot presents in detail the poet’s childhood in St Louis – that French-named city of ragtime, racial tensions, ancient civilisations, riverboats and (in Eliot’s words) the real start of ‘the Wild West’.9 Using newly available or previously ignored sources ranging from digitally searchable newspapers to annotated volumes from Eliot’s personal library, and from his later letters to his father’s diary and his mother’s fugitive poetry, Young Eliot portrays an ice-cream loving and mischievous but sometimes rather priggish little boy. St Louis made Eliot. He knew that. ‘For his entire life’ he went on using a black-barrelled fountain pen believed to have been given to him by his mother when he left the American South in 1905; one of its two gold bands was engraved with the initials ‘T.S.E.’10 Indisputably, in the city of his birth he became ‘T. S. Eliot’ of ‘The T. S. Eliot Co., St. Louis’.11 Drawing on the work of local historians and on untapped archival sources, Young Eliot reveals not just Eliot’s early physical environment but also what it meant to his imagination.
With his early teens divided between education in Missouri and summering in Gloucester, Massachusetts, a constant, deepening pleasure for this boy was his love of reading. Images from books, newspapers and shows stayed with him throughout his life, and some of his earliest literary interests – from Cyrano de Bergerac to Edward Lear – subtly conditioned his poetry. Though his schooling was considerably Classical, his teenage tastes in verse reacted against this. They were markedly Romantic, even if his youthful reading was unusually gendered: no Wuthering Heights, no Jane Eyre. His protested Classicism would become a familiar credo, but the young Eliot’s enthusiasm for Romantic poetry was not just something to kick against in later years. Sometimes ironised, it was a lasting presence – from the Byronic epigraph in his first full-length prose book to, several decades later, his following Shelley in recreating Dantescan terza rima in English.
Eliot recalled himself as indecisive. Sometimes he blamed his parents. ‘It is almost impossible for any of our family to make up their minds’, he complained in 1920.12 In his student days, though far from St Louis, he wrote regularly to his mother, continuing to do so for the rest of her life. Even when in 1906 the fledgling poet went to a Harvard ruled over by President Charles William Eliot, he continued within a circle where the influence of his extended family and its code of social service prevailed. Rebelling against this, Eliot conformed to it too. He exhibited a similarly conflicted stance towards the nationality of his birth and towards American literature. Just as the avant-garde French Symbolists, whose poetry fascinated the Harvard student, had learned from the Edgar Allan Poe whose work Eliot had devoured in childhood, so Eliot’s great favourite Jules Laforgue was a French poet particularly influenced by American writing. Arrestingly, Eliot’s student imitation of the Whitman-loving Laforgue was true to the grain of nineteenth-century American poetry, even as it seemed a shocking, Eurocentric departure.
Francophile befor
e he ever set foot in France, young T. S. Eliot might have died in Cambridge, Massachusetts. During the early summer of 1910 he was hospitalised there with a life-threatening infection. Instead, recovered, he proceeded, as planned, to Paris, working hard to reinvent himself. Brilliant, yet still immature, he felt dogged by failure. Eliot’s life was no neat progress towards literary canonisation, towards a form of sainthood or simply towards a Nobel Prize. It was much rawer than that, more jagged, frayed and damaged. An often gruelling existence nourished his poetic vitality. Some of his life’s most important experiences, the ones that changed its course, were accidental. Those accidents could be disastrous.
He wrote ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, his greatest early poem of anxious masculinity, in 1910–11. Differing in length, its opening lines are conversationally over-familiar yet also weirdly estranging in imagery. The young Eliot who went to Paris has mastered Laforgue’s idiom, and then convincingly surpassed it:
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table …13
Even the tiniest verbal gestures here – not ‘an operating table’, or even ‘the table’, but the more mundanely domestic ‘a table’ – are unsettling. Yet if ‘Prufrock’ sounds out unmistakably the new note of modern poetry, then this poem was written alongside other, wilder, less polished works including ‘The Triumph of Bullshit’. Young Eliot (who introduced the word ‘bullshit’ into literature) tries hard to sound shockingly knowing. Fuelled by prejudice and laddishness, his scurrilous and obscene poems too are part of his development: student attempts at writing which struggle to cover with a fabricated voice of experience the poet’s own sexual shyness, cerebral sophistication and troubled sense of lack. Triumphantly, in ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ he manages to create a male voice which is vulnerable and sexually floundering at the same time as intellectually alert. In so doing he moves beyond effortful posturing to produce a poetic masterpiece that nonetheless draws on aspects of his own psyche.
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