Young Eliot

by Robert Crawford

  Too much writing on Eliot over the last two decades has treated him as a thinker more than a poet. True, one of the most ‘heavily annotated’ books in his personal library was his copy of the philosopher F. H. Bradley’s Appearance and Reality; yet among his lifelong ‘most precious’ volumes were editions of Virgil and Dante – poets who, like Eliot, were nourished by philosophical thought.14 My narrative attends to Eliot’s graduate student interests in philosophy. It salutes his intellectual brilliance, detailing his work with Masaharu Anesaki on Japanese Buddhism and with Charles Lanman on Sanskrit. Yet these intellectual adventures were neither more nor less important to his creative imagination than were his death-defying youthful navigation of Mount Desert Rock and his explorations of the coast in a sailboat – dramatic and entertaining events that undergird later poems, including The Waste Land.

  Though he seems to have had crushes on girls in childhood, the young Eliot who customarily wore a truss was sexually gauche. His first serious falling in love was with Emily Hale, a Bostonian Unitarian preacher’s daughter with a mentally ill mother. Later, his disastrous marriage to the young ‘pretty vivacious’ Englishwoman Vivien Haigh-Wood helped hurt him into further poetry, especially that of The Waste Land.15 Vivien’s and his own apparently unending ill-health put them in a state of frequent personal crisis. ‘Why does Tom love me?’ Vivien wondered a few years after The Waste Land appeared. ‘I love Tom in a way that destroys us both.’16

  Young Eliot strives to strike the right balance between the outward form of living which mattered to this bankerly poet and other, sometimes wounded kinds of inner life to which readers have limited access, yet which were vital to his intimate existence and to his writing. The verse is nowhere here treated merely as a crossword puzzle or source-hunter’s labyrinth. Consciously crafted artistic work, it nonetheless transmutes personal agonies, treasured images and insights. While some of it can bristle with learning, it can also scald. However much he might have resisted the idea, knowledge of his life heightens a sense of Eliot’s finest work as fusing finessed artifice with unmistakable cri de cœur.

  I cannot claim to be in sympathy with all of Eliot’s ideas, and I do not attempt to disguise anti-Semitic moments in his work, or other elements of racism and sexism deeply ingrained in his society and never fully outgrown. This poet was the grandson of a preacher whom Ralph Waldo Emerson considered to be a true ‘Saint’.17 Yet, though preoccupied with sainthood and tainted mortification from at least such early poems as ‘The Death of Saint Narcissus’, Eliot was no saint and should not be presented as such. From boyhood onwards he had a fascination with asceticism and religious experience which became increasingly important. Still, for all he read about such experiences, he refused to fake them in himself. The young Eliot’s philosophical training led to an intense scepticism and relativism; in poems, including ‘The Hippopotamus’, he could attack Christianity with blasphemous vigour and guile. These facets of his sometimes conflicted personality make him all the more beguilingly complex. His biography is that of a very complicated, often subtle, sometimes prickly human being, but also one whom readers can come to understand to a perhaps surprising degree. Throughout this book, rather than employing paraphrase, I have taken care to give readers frequent and direct contact with Eliot’s own words, published and unpublished, and with the words of his contemporaries. The aim is to offer a close-up view and, cumulatively, through successive brushstrokes, to make a nuanced and intimate portrait.

  In some ways young Eliot knew himself well. He discerns a ‘Mélange Adultère de Tout’ that makes a man in different places and circumstances a professor, a journalist, a banker, a philosopher, a Parisian flâneur, and also something much wilder – that insight is astute in its self-perception. Articulated in his second language, French, it may be an obliquely voiced analysis of how Eliot managed to cope. He had an acute sense of himself as multiply displaced, and wrote on the day of England’s patron saint, St George’s Day, in 1928:

  Some day I want to write an essay about the point of view of an American who wasn’t an American, because his America ended in 1829; and who wasn’t a Yankee, because he was born in the South and went to school in New England as a small boy with a nigger drawl, but who wasn’t a southerner in the South because his people were northerners in a border state and looked down on all southerners and Virginians, and who so was never anything anywhere and who therefore felt himself to be more a Frenchman than an American and more an Englishman than a Frenchman and yet felt that the U.S.A. up to a hundred years ago was a family extension.18

  This is a writer who could view himself with obsessive, complexly inflected self-consciousness. Yet it is important to see him, too, through the eyes and words of others. His most perceptive observers included Vivien Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Mary Hutchinson and Conrad Aiken. While drawing on their viewpoints, however, Young Eliot presents a portrait of an individual, not a panorama of his life and times; but it shows the part Eliot played in his era, from his immersion in World War I enemy debts handled by the Colonial and Foreign Department of Lloyds Bank in London to his participation in small magazines, lectures and social gatherings. Increasingly haggard and ill, he often masked his shyness and tenacious ambition with a businessman’s demeanour. In writing, his unflinching examination of his own pain was both shielded and made possible by an aesthetic of impersonality. This is the man Virginia Woolf came very close to loving, and whom she was reported to have described as a poet in ‘a four-piece suit’.19

  Though he had written fragments of it before he left Harvard, in London around 1919 Eliot began to focus on The Waste Land. In its drama of voices fragmentation, lost or illusory love and communion with literary tradition clash jaggedly together. As Vivien made clear in her comments, the poem’s pain was also bound up with the hurt of Eliot’s most intimate relationship. This biography shows clearly links between Eliot’s circumstances and The Waste Land, but refuses to reduce that artistically crafted, strenuously edited poem to a mere offshoot of personal crisis. If for Eliot in one mood The Waste Land represented an outburst of personal ‘grumbling’, offering him ‘the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life’, then he understood too the way it came to be interpreted not just as a monument of the ‘modernist’ era but an enduring, polymorphous and profound work of art.20 In pieces, it is the poem of a man ‘going to pieces’; but it is also brilliantly pieced together by Eliot and Ezra Pound. Quickened by Joyce’s Ulysses and by Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, ultimately The Waste Land emerges as a poem of desperation. It draws on personal experiences as diverse as its author’s interrogation of anthropology and his fondness for dancing, to produce a vision of unending spiritual and physical torture. The ‘Shantih’, that peace with which the poem appears to conclude, is perceived, but not achieved. The Waste Land is a musical astonishment, one to which Woolf listened with admiration in 1922 as its maker seemed to sing it aloud.21

  Young Eliot aims to communicate a sense of the tentativeness, the shakiness of the young poet’s reputation. His work’s acceptance was no foregone conclusion. Repeatedly he felt he had dried up as a poet, and feared he had wasted his life. Not marmoreal, but wounded and sometimes wounding, young T. S. Eliot may be imposingly erudite, but is also conflictedly human.

  Where I have gone to the original publications to locate Eliot’s prose writings, and have consulted numerous original manuscripts of poetry, prose and drama, future generations will have access to electronic editions of much of this material. Yet there will never be an absolutely definitive biography of Eliot. Each age will crave its own portrait. My aim, no small one, is to offer a convincing account of a great poet whose life was impressive, dauntingly complex and, at times, a mess. Eliot’s story, like his poetry, contains deep unhappiness; but at the beginning of his life, as at its end, he was happy. To rob him of that is to distort and caricature him. To treat his life as if it was the history of a monument is wrong. In presenting a full and detailed portrait of thi
s poet, I want to circumvent assumptions about his often defensive persona, and so, in the chapters that follow, I shall call him neither by his surname nor by his famous initials but by the name used by most of the people whom he allowed to get close to him, and by those who knew him best from the start.

  1

  Tom

  BEFORE he was T. S. he was Tom. That was what his prosperous parents and his four elder sisters called him. In the summer of 1890 his only brother, Henry, wrote from Boston, Massachusetts, to hard-working Papa Eliot at home in industrial St Louis, Missouri. Henry’s holiday news was that baby ‘Tom’ (then aged two) had just been weighed: 30 pounds.1 Henry, almost a teenager, seems not to have resented the arrival of another male Eliot. He looks happy photographed beside his alert little brother. Indeed, before long Henry, a bookish boy who liked to go to the Boston Athenaeum to look at the magazines, was taking his own photographs of Tom.

  All the baby’s surviving siblings were considerably older. When Tom was born, Ada was nineteen, Margaret was seventeen, Charlotte fourteen, Marion eleven and Henry nine. Ada could easily have been mistaken for his mother; she would sit beside him on the stairs at the well-appointed family home, 2635 Locust Street, St Louis, responding to him in a kind of shared vocal game. Later, she told Tom how ‘When you were a tiny boy, learning to talk, you used to sound the rhythm of sentences without shaping words – the ups and downs of the thing you were trying to say. I used to answer you in kind, saying nothing yet conversing with you.’2

  Ada left home while Tom was still little, but he always felt attuned to her. From his early years a mixture of separation and closeness characterised his sense of family. He was loved and happy. He and his mother Lottie treasured memories of his earliest infancy; in adulthood he assured her he still cherished her singing him a song, ‘The Little Tailor’, while the firelight made patterns on the ceiling of his childhood home.3 Yet, years later, Tom suggested to Henry that their parents ‘in spite of the strength of their affection’ had been ‘lonely people’.4 A sense of familial, shared fondness, tradition and values was unusually strong among the Eliots: Tom inherited it; but he also inherited, and worked hard to counter, a sense of isolation in himself.

  When he was born in St Louis in 1888, both his parents were forty-five. Lottie – Charlotte Champe Eliot – gave birth around 7.45 a.m. on Wednesday 26 September. Anxiety mingled with jubilation. Three years earlier Lottie’s daughter Theodora had been born severely deformed. Her frail physique had failed to develop. Relatives outside the immediate family worried about how Theodora had so ‘wound herself’ round her parents’ hearts during the sixteen months of her short, stricken life, that they transferred to baby Tom a morbid sense of trepidation that later conditioned his boyhood.5

  Few mothers in their mid-forties who had recently watched a baby die would not have worried at a subsequent birth, even if they were, like Lottie, of ‘unusual character’.6 The new baby’s father Hal – Henry Ware Eliot – sent a telegram immediately to relatives in Oregon: ‘Lottie and Little Thomas are well.’7 Thomas Stearns Eliot’s name was chosen with care. Stearns had been Lottie’s maiden name. Having called their first son Henry Ware Eliot Junior, after his father, the couple gave their new son the first name of Hal’s elder brother, the Oregon-based Reverend Thomas Lamb Eliot, a minister in the Unitarian Church that meant so much to all these Eliots.

  A year or so before Tom’s birth, Hal, with his customary taste for kith and kin, had subscribed to A Sketch of the Eliot Family (1887). He has a short entry in it as Eliot ‘No. 163’, and close family members feature in its ‘Index of Eliots’.8 Familiar to him and to Lottie, surnames such as Adams, Cranch, Greenleaf, Peabody, Stearns, Stetson and Thayer populate its ‘Index of Other Names’. Tom, who later spotted this book in his ‘father’s library’, grew up with a strong, sometimes constricting sense that the world, like this book’s indexes, could be divided into Eliots and non-Eliots.9 Certainly his family tree, was formidable. A distant ancestor, Andrew Eliot, had emigrated from East Coker in Somerset, England, to Beverly in Massachusetts around 1670. Through him the St Louis Eliots could claim kinship with a substantially Unitarian New England elite. The scholar Eric Sigg has pointed out that through his tangled family tree baby Tom was related, distantly, to poets John Greenleaf Whittier and James Russell Lowell; to novelists Henry Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne; to memoirist Henry Adams; and to the second and sixth presidents of the United States, John Adams and John Quincy Adams.10 Few squealing infants have had quite so much to live up to.

  Worried or not at the time of his birth, the new baby’s parents were both strong characters. They treasured their sense of familial inheritance; yet in each there was also something unfulfilled or repressed. Active in local women’s clubs and religious as well as cultural societies, Charlotte cared deeply about education and social welfare. She campaigned for the rights of children in the courts. Her passions encompassed poetry, philosophy and religion; but her own education had not included university study, and the poetry she wrote found only limited outlets, often in Unitarian journals where she had links to the editors. Educated at Washington University in St Louis, her businessman husband had been expected to follow his elder brother and their father into the Unitarian ministry. Hal’s father was the Harvard-educated Reverend William Greenleaf Eliot – Eliot ‘No. 161’ – founder of Washington University, pillar of Unitarianism, writer, ‘unflinching supporter of the temperance cause’, advocate of ‘woman suffrage’ and ‘helper of the colored race’.11 Yet Hal had not become a minister: ‘too much pudding choked the dog’ as he put it; he simply ‘gagged’.12 Nevertheless, Hal, whose cursory short entry in the Sketch of the Eliot Family was dwarfed by the Reverend W. G.’s magisterial three pages, ‘gave as a layman’ to his church ‘the kind of service that ministers rarely find’, becoming ‘a living stone of its spiritual structure and usefulness. His face bore the stamp of real spirituality.’13 Tom was shaped by his parents’ hopes and histories; what he became was guided and abraded by what they had accomplished; and, sometimes, by what they had not.

  Partially deaf by the time of Tom’s childhood, his father had once been an eager musician, artist and poet. Hal’s Pocket Diary and Almanac from 1864, when he was twenty-one, records purchases of books including Thomas Hood’s Poems. He strummed the guitar, sang, played the flute. In his diary a poem, ‘Life’, dated ‘April 27 ’64’, begins, ‘Must I suffer ere my spirit, / Shall attain the highest goal’. To his liking for spiritual verse, Hal added a taste for popular song. That same year, the second last of Abraham Lincoln’s presidency and while the Civil War still raged, he wrote down lines from ‘Lorena’, a lyric of loss and regret sung by many during a time when perhaps a million Americans were killed.

  We loved each other then Lorena

  More than we ever dared to tell

  And what we might have been Lorena

  Had but our loving prospered well …14

  Much later, Ezra Pound wrote of meeting in Venice a woman who remembered a young Hal Eliot in St Louis writing poetry and not appearing at all like a businessman.15

  Hal’s father was recalled as ‘one of the staunchest supporters of the Union in a city in which it was doubted, for a time, whether it would go with the Union or the Rebellion’.16 In the early 1860s, to his family’s alarm, Hal had followed his elder brother Thomas in volunteering to serve on the Union side in the Hallek Guard, mustered to defend St Louis against attack by Confederate forces which had earlier been driven out of Missouri. Yet by the late 1880s when his last child was born, those days were long gone. True, Hal still enjoyed drawing humorous sketches – not least of cats – and Tom remembered in adulthood ‘a wonderful set of comic animals that he drew long ago, and were kept in an album together – I think he did them for a fair’.17 By Tom’s childhood, however, Hal the clean-shaven, sometimes nervous-looking young poet had been repressed and replaced by Henry Ware Eliot, Sr, the bearded, chess-playing businessman who had moved through several
commercial jobs to become a prominent figure in the management of the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company of St Louis.

  Aspects of Hal’s well-read, older self survived. Having studied Classics in his youth, ‘Papa’, as his children called him, liked to quote Latin tags around the house, peppering his conversation, Tom observed, with occasional phrases such as ‘quam celerrime’, and retaining into old age a taste for bow ties and ancient Greek oratory, which, in his disciplined retirement, he reread in the original. He lived surrounded by books – the Bible, Latin and Greek texts, Americana from the age of Emerson and before – and retained a love of American history and political anecdotes. Tom remembered his father advising both his sons ‘not to take up his own business’.18 To the outside world, however, Hal was not a literary man but principally a sound, successful commercial manager. He helped found a local association of building material dealers. He looked after financial matters for his extended family. He rose, eventually, to become president of his firm and a director of several other brick companies.

  In Lottie Eliot the vein of poetry was not repressed. Three months pregnant with Tom, she wrote, as she often did at the advent of spring, a poem celebrating Easter. Lent and Easter were important points in the Unitarian calendar, and often involved concerts at the Eliots’ church. While Lottie’s verse advocates the eschewing of ‘wanton pleasures’, she liked to celebrate how ‘Spring returns with joy and mirth’.19 During the second year of Tom’s life she wrote ‘An Easter Song’, and in 1891 ‘An Easter Hymn’.20 Much, though not all, of her verse was religious in tenor; liking to read theology and the Bible itself before she wrote, she had a high sense of artistic mission: ‘The artist’s soul must expression find / And give of its riches to all mankind, / Their vision to complete.’21 As a girl she had studied ‘Mental Philosophy’; as an adult she ‘sometimes read Philosophy as a preparation for writing’.22