Steeped in high-mindedness, Lottie Eliot’s poetry invokes a divine ‘Infinite Mind’ (a term favoured by Unitarians). Its topics range from ‘The Raising of Lazarus’ and ‘Force and God’ (1887) to biblical paraphrases and poems dealing with episodes in the lives of saints and martyrs.23 She transcribed in Latin and English Fortunatus’ medieval hymn in honour of the Holy Cross, with its details of crucified palms and ‘wound on wound’; she wrote her own verse ‘Vision of St Francis’ seen ‘Rapt in the ecstasy of his devotion’.24 Sometimes, as in ‘Raphael’s “Ste. Marguerite”’, she took inspiration from paintings. Tom’s mother hung reproductions of religious pictures in her bedroom alongside ancestral portraits and pictures of her children. Martyrdom and scenes of violent self-discipline fascinated her. Tom’s brother Henry remembered from his earliest infancy an engraving in her room of the Emperor Theodosius and St Ambrose, about which she wrote a poem. Her accompanying prose gloss explains to less learned readers that,
By the order of Theodosius, Emperor of the East, in reprisal for the murder of one of his generals, thousands of innocent people were slain at the circus in Thessalonica. On account of this cruel and unjustifiable deed the Emperor was refused admission to the Cathedral, by St Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, and not allowed to partake of the Communion until after eight months of penitence and humiliation.
Lottie’s emperor prostrates himself before Ambrose who represents the ‘Authority’ of the Church:
On the marble floor
Kneels Theodosius to implore
From heaven, mercy. Day by day
Upon the ground he prostrate lay,
Till months had passed. And many came,
With him to weep and share his shame,
Till fierce desires, and passions rude
He had within his soul subdued.25
Fascinated by ascetic figures from the sufferings of Catholicism, Mrs Eliot was also alert to the liberal theology of Friedrich Schleiermacher and the Unitarian New England-inflected writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and William Ellery Channing. She published verse in the Unitarian Christian Register, pasting her printed poems carefully into scrapbooks. Tom’s younger cousin Abigail Eliot thought his mother ‘wasn’t much interested in babies’, but she cherished her children as well as her verse, and grew to love her poet son with particular intensity.26 She went on writing throughout her life, but never published a book-length collection, and her poetry underwent almost no development. It was, however, hugely important to her; and in her husband, the St Louis businessman who had once written, into his own diary, verses with the epigraph ‘Perfect through Suffering (Saul)’, she found a staunch life’s partner.27
Tom grew up in an idealistic, bookish household where knowledge of saints and martyrdoms was readily taken for granted, even when it came to the punchlines of old jokes. He recalled being told a political anecdote by his father, who remembered the days of the debates over slavery in 1858 between the Republican Abraham Lincoln and the Democrat Stephen Douglas, famed for his political oratory. Mr Eliot enjoyed telling his son how, after Douglas had given one of his best speeches and received thunderous applause, Lincoln then stood up, took off his coat, rolled up his cuffs and said, ‘“We will now proceed to stone Stephen.”’28
Though their home was St Louis, both Lottie, who had been raised in Massachusetts, and Hal (a confirmed Republican in politics) shared a mutual pride in their New England ancestors. ‘We tended to cling to places and associations as long as possible,’ Tom recalled.29 His parents had first met in St Louis, but had married in a historic house, the Old Reed home, in Lexington, Massachusetts, on 27 October 1868. As a present for Lottie’s thirty-ninth birthday in 1882 Hal, who had spent most of his life in Missouri, had gone to some trouble to buy and bring to St Louis an antique grandfather clock said to have been one of a batch shipped to America from Falmouth, England, in the 1760s. Nathan Reed, soon to be part of a company of Minute Men led by Captain Parker who faced the British at the Battle of Lexington on 19 April 1775, had bought the clock in 1770. One of Lottie’s distant ancestors, Samuel Dawes, had ridden at the same time as Paul Revere to warn the rebels at Lexington that the British were coming. The clock Hal presented to his wife and which was a feature of Tom’s boyhood home in St Louis had stood in the old Reed home at Lexington for many decades.30 In Tom’s childhood the hall clock told not just the present-day time but the story of the American Revolution. As a boy, Tom’s brother relished the heroism of Paul Revere; among Tom’s earliest surviving boyhood writings is a short, illustrated account of George Washington. Like most American children, Henry and Tom learned about these national heroes at school; but, thanks to their hall clock, their books, pictures and ancestral stories, such history was also part of the fabric of their home. Hal passed to his younger son an edition of Jefferson’s writings; and so it was that Tom came to feel that the early history of the United States was somehow ‘a family extension’.31
In thriving St Louis the family lived in some style. Running southwards through the grid-planned city for well over a mile past the Eliots’ house in the direction of the Mississippi, Locust Street was named, like nearby Olive, Pine and Chestnut Streets, after a familiar American tree. Inside the Eliots’ substantial four-storey, brick-built home with its heavy, dark wood furniture and elaborately patterned carpets hung treasured familial pictures. The walls of several rooms were a three-dimensional family album. A collection of portraits belonging to Tom’s parents and his grandmother Abigail Adams Eliot (née Cranch), who lived nearby, included those of President John Adams and his Secretary of State John Marshall, as well as many ancestors with the surname Eliot, Stearns, Cranch, Blood or Dawes. Above and to the right of the fireplace in his mother’s bedroom were at least fifteen pictures, including a Madonna and child, as well as head-and-shoulders photographic portraits. Photographed for the parental gallery, Tom grew up among a rich clutter of familial collectanea: a bronze Japanese vase, brass candlesticks, the gold-headed cane which had belonged to his formidable Grandfather Eliot.
Tom had never met Grandfather Eliot, who died in 1887, but the abiding memory of this man whom Emerson had termed the ‘Saint of the West’ was felt in the family home and in the city beyond.32 The little boy learned about him from his Eliot grandmother, from his Aunt Rose Smith and lawyer Uncle Ed Eliot (who lived locally) and from his own parents. Grandfather Eliot had travelled to Europe; in the American South he had bought slaves and set them free, even writing the biography of one, The Story of Alexander Archer (1885); he had given the name of his dead daughter, Mary, to the school that all Tom’s sisters had attended – the Mary Institute, situated right next door to 2635 Locust Street. Tom’s mother had once taught there for a year. Straight out of Harvard Divinity School, Grandfather Eliot had reached St Louis in 1834 and founded the first Unitarian church west of the Mississippi. Tom and his family still served and attended it. Social reformer, zealous preacher, occasional poet and part-time professor of Philosophy at Washington University, handsome stern-countenanced Grandfather Eliot was dead but unavoidable: visible in a large oil portrait painted by a Cranch, his deeds praised in a memorial tablet at his Church of the Messiah. Lottie Eliot worked on a biography during Tom’s boyhood; it was published eventually in Boston in 1904 as William Greenleaf Eliot: Minister, Educator, Philanthropist, and dedicated to Lottie’s children ‘lest they forget’.
There was little danger of that. A sense of this dead patriarch stayed with Tom from boyhood to old age:
I was brought up to be very much aware of him: so much so, that as a child I thought of him as still the head of the family – a ruler for whom in absentia my grandmother stood as viceregent. The standard of conduct was that which my grandfather had set; our moral judgments, our decisions between duty and self-indulgence, were taken as if, like Moses, he had brought down the tables of the Law, any deviation from which would be sinful.33
Almost suggesting ancestor-worship, this memory of childhood indicates, too, a sense of being
drilled in rectitude. Propriety mattered in every word and deed. ‘When I was a small boy’, he recalled, ‘I was reproved by my family for using the vulgar phrase “O.K.”’34 Tom grew up in a family in which to buy candy for oneself was considered ‘a selfish indulgence’.35 He knew from a very early age that his ancestry could be traced back to those Puritan Eliots who had been involved in New England’s seventeenth-century witch trials. For all their more recent Unitarianism, the Eliots had inherited a witch-hanging, judgemental, Calvinist streak. In later life, even when he tried hard not to, Tom could appear a ‘Puritan ascetic’.36
His upbringing was strict, but cossetted. The family was looked after by a team of servants. They depended not just on the productions of a cook but also on the labour of maids, a gardener and a nurse. When baby Tom was in his second year and his sister Charlotte was ill, Lottie felt ‘always stirred up by the wretched kitchen girls’ who seemed to cost more in wages but to skimp on their work.37 Set back just a little behind railings from the tree-lined sidewalk, and in summer almost screened by foliage, the Eliots’ house was higher than the dwelling to its right, and enjoyed some open ground towards the left, in the direction of the Mary Institute at the intersection of Locust Street and Beaumont Street. Mary Institute classes stopped in the early afternoon and the girl pupils routinely did callisthenics in the grounds, their voices and laughter drifting over the wall. When he thought they had gone, Tom might venture into the schoolyard ‘which seemed to me, as a child’, he wrote, ‘of vast extent’. Sometimes he even went inside the school itself, wandering the corridors, inhaling the smell of chalk, ink and cedar pencils: he was always alert to smells. Alone, or occasionally with a friend from a similarly privileged, prosperous background – such as ‘Tom Kick’, his playmate Thomas McKittrick, Jr – he went into the gymnasium and played on swinging rings and parallel bars, or else threw Indian clubs. Playing here was exciting, but also unnerving. He was in a space familiar to all his sisters and several of his female cousins who had studied there, yet usually off-limits to boys. Once, he went into the schoolyard before all the pupils had left, and saw girls staring at him through a window. He fled. These almost fairy-tale incursions haunted him. He also remembered early attempts in this zone at his father’s favoured game, golf.
There was at the front of our house a sort of picket fence which divided our front yard from the schoolyard. This picket fence merged a little later as it passed the wall of the house into a high brick wall which concealed our back garden from the schoolyard and also concealed the schoolyard from our back garden. There was a door in this wall and there was a key to this door. Now, when the young ladies had left the school in the afternoon and at the end of the week, I had access to the schoolyard and used it for my own purposes of play. When the girls had left in the afternoon, the schoolyard was mine for a playground, first of all under the supervision of my nurse and later for practicing approach shots with a lofter, which was sometimes dangerous for the windows. They must have been very brief approach shots, but then I was a very small boy with a very small lofter, or mashie. At any rate, then, in the schoolyard I remember a mound on which stood a huge ailanthus tree. Oh, it seemed to me very big and round on this little mound.38
St Louis was sometimes nicknamed ‘Mound City’ because of the presence of ancient Native American earthwork mounds. Tom’s own mound was a good place to play. He went with Henry to a nearby climbing frame. In sunhat and sailor suit he threw a ball. He was photographed at the age of seven or eight, standing beside the big ailanthus tree with Tom Kick: two smiling, sailor-suited boys, happy to be up to mischief.
The school grounds were Edenic, but, like the rest of St Louis, literally polluted. The exposed brick side-wall of the Eliots’ house had to be washed periodically in this big industrial city known for its smoke and dust. Coachmen wearing dark top-hats clattered by outside along dusty Locust Street, sometimes cracking their whips above their horses. St Louis was proud of its wealth and style. In a metropolis with a French name and heritage, there were external shutters to the sides of most of the windows of the Eliot home, making it look just a little French. The front steps took visitors up to an arched doorway, and afforded a glimpse of basement quarters below, familiar to the family’s servants, black as well as white. Aged three, Tom played indoors with a favourite soft toy, a little dog – probably a dachshund – with floppy ears and black, beady eyes: Toby. A few years later, sitting in his well-tailored jacket under one of the house’s many pictures, Tom learned to play the baby grand piano. There were books aplenty – from a set of Dickens novels to An Evil and Adulterous Generation by Tom’s eighteenth-century great-great-great-grandfather, the Harvard-educated Reverend Andrew Eliot of Boston. Yet Tom himself was sometimes hard to find. In a house dominated during the day by his mother and his sisters, he sometimes concealed himself from visitors. One friend of his sisters remembered him hiding away, ‘pale and thin and shy’, keeping out of the way of of his sisters’ female guests.39 Though he learned to manage it through formality and occasional bluster, his shyness never left him.
Like his siblings, the boy was posed to be photographed for family albums. In one early picture, taken around 1891, he is holding Toby and dressed for cold weather in an ankle-length, hooded coat trimmed with fur. In his dark gloves he looks happy, but a little bemused perhaps, clad in outdoor clothes for a studio picture. Photographed a year or so later, long hair combed over his large ears and with an enormous pale bow tied at his neck as well as a neat striped collar visible over his darker jacket, he looks every groomed inch the model child. In early infancy, as was not uncommon for boys in wealthy families, he was sometimes dressed in what looks like a skirt. Like his sisters, he always appears carefully neat. He was, after all, an Eliot.
While very conscious of their ancestry and the standards that went with it, the Eliots also cherished, from a safe distance, some more scandalous aspects of their family history. Lottie’s parents were Thomas Stearns of Lunenburg, Massachusetts, and Charlotte Blood. Tom, in distant Missouri, called them Grandpa and Grandma ‘Faraway’.40 Lottie liked to claim that one of her ancestors had been a Colonel Blood who had stolen the British crown jewels, and that another was English novelist Laurence Sterne. Neither story was accurate, but in Tom’s boyhood they enhanced the family’s specialness, as well as reaching back not just to New England but even to Old England beyond. What small boy, however shy, would not relish being related to a jewel thief called Colonel Blood?
Special and privileged, Tom could be teased. When he was little an African American odd-job-man, Stephen Jones, one of whose tasks was to wash down the side-wall, agitated him by pretending to fall asleep beside the fire while toasting a piece of bread held between the toes of his outstretched foot. Tom would jump in alarm as Stephen pretended to wake up and murmured, ‘Some nigger’s foot’s burnin’.’41 Polite yet mischievous, Tom was fascinated by Stephen’s family, and ready to mythologise them. Some of the land nearby had originally been ‘negro quarters’ back in the days of slavery, and stories of that era persisted. Tom’s closeness to these African Americans as a rich white boy in 1890s St Louis is a reminder that his grandfather had stood up for the African American community, and that the Joneses, in their kindness to Tom, would have known his family’s history. Tom recalled Stephen’s father, the janitor of the Mary Institute, whom he called Uncle Henry. At the school Uncle Henry
lived in a sort of basement flat under the Beaumont Street entrance. He was a romantic figure to me as a child, not only because he possessed a parrot which actually did a little talking but because he was reputed to have been a runaway slave and certainly had one mutilated ear. He is said to have been tracked by bloodhounds. But Uncle Henry Jones was a great friend of the family. In fact, his family were great friends of the family because his son Stephen, and in succession to Stephen his grandson Charlie, undertook in succession the duties of looking after the furnace, washing the sidewalk, cutting the grass, and so on – bringing in the coal
and wood.42
Conscious from an early age of being shy with most girls, and remaining so throughout his teens, Tom in boyhood was struck by a very different attitude to sexuality that Uncle Henry represented. In later years, he was uncertain if his boyhood impressions were accurate, but they stayed with him: ‘as I remember it … Uncle Henry had two wives, not in succession but apparently married to both of them at the same time, and … this was only discovered when suddenly a new Auntie was found in place of the old Auntie, and I understood that this was the first or more legitimate bride who had turned up to turn the other one out. This, at any rate, is the story which I believed, and I’m sure to me it only added to my awe and respect of Uncle Henry.’43 Whether or not he understood quite what was going on, Tom liked this man, who lived just next door but represented a very different world from that of the much primmer, strait-laced Eliots.
Little Tom was watched over by his Irish nurse, Annie Dunne, by his pious New England mother and by other family members, but he saw and heard in St Louis aspects of very different cultures. Just two blocks from his family home, at the corner of Washington and Jefferson Avenues was Uhrig’s Cave which presented ‘High-class Light and Comic Opera’.44 When ten-year-old Tom used the expression ‘A Hot Time’, he was surely referring to the song ‘There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight’, which became an 1890s national hit when taken up by East Coast music promoters but which had been introduced onstage as an original song just a couple of miles from the Eliot home by ‘Mama Lou’ (Letitia Lula Agatha Fontaine).
Young Eliot Page 3