Young Eliot

by Robert Crawford

  There’ll be girls for ev’ry body in that good, good old town,

  For dere’s Miss Consola Davis an dere’s Miss Gondolia Brown;

  And dere’s Miss Johanna Beasly she am dressed all in red,

  I just hugged her and I kissed her and to me then she said:

  Please, oh please, oh, do not let me fall,

  You’re all mine and I love you best of all,

  And you must be my man, or I’ll have no man at all,

  There’ll be a hot time in the old town tonight!45

  This was a favourite song of Mama Lou, the ‘St Louis street singer and “voodoo princess”’ who starred at the Castle Club in the zone of saloons, brothels and gambling dens west of Twelfth Street along Chestnut and Market Streets.46 Later in life Tom was heard singing ‘Frankie and Johnny’; another song popularised by Mama Lou, it was based on a famous St Louis murder widely reported when Tom was ten.47 Lottie Eliot would never have allowed her sons to go to Mama Lou’s Castle Club; but the boys surely heard music associated with it, even if this was mediated through St Louis’s ‘Hot Time Minstrels’, a group of young white men who (as was then customary) sometimes ‘blacked up’ to perform an annual concert each year, and who starred in a ‘Black Face’ show along with Tom’s school’s Mandolin Club in 1901 when he was twelve.48

  Growing up in the soundscape of St Louis meant inhabiting a city where the highbrow European music of Wagner was performed not far from sophisticated ragtime. Scott Joplin, who lived for some years less than a mile from the Eliots’ house, published his ragtime tune ‘The Entertainer’ in St Louis in 1902, dedicating it to the leader of a local mandolin club. To live at the confluence of all these musics was part of St Louis’s gift to Tom; it helped shape the lilt of his poetry, and contributed to his love of dancing. In London in 1917 in the context of ‘a dance’, someone who knew him very well wrote to a friend, saying, ‘you really must try Tom’s Negro rag-time. I know you’d love it.’49

  Tom remembered his early childhood as one of only two periods in his life when he was really happy.50 A photograph of him, aged about seven and taken in the St Louis studio of Henry Holborn at Holborn’s Dainties, 2820 Washington Avenue, shows a countenance not just mischievous, but positively scheming. Perhaps he was hoping someone might buy him candy. Yet, recalled much later, a memory of a boyhood incident implies, too, that he developed a wariness towards other lads:

  When I was a very small boy, I was given a tricycle or velocipede: a beautiful shiny japanned and nickelplated affair, with brake, bell etc., and was riding it proudly up and down the pavement under the eye of my nursemaid, when an odious small boy who lived a few doors away, who wore a kind of frilly blouse, sidled up and said ingratiatingly, ‘Mother says I may ride your velocipede if I let you blow my whistle’. That aroused my first disquiet with human nature … I would as soon have used his toothbrush as blown his whistle.51

  As well as signalling a physical fastidiousness rarely associated with small boys, this anecdote presents a child with a certain instinct for cutting himself off from other people – certainly from those whom he disliked. The unnamed, frilly-bloused near-neighbour was no playmate: ‘I didn’t blow the whistle, and he didn’t ride the velocipede. I never spoke to him again.’52

  Socially, the area around the Eliots’ large house in Locust Street was on the slide. When his grandfather and grandmother had moved into nearby Washington Avenue, the place had been irreproachably classy. Along the street a little, Lucas Place was the premier enclave of the city’s rich. Yet ever since the construction of the great Eads Bridge over the Mississippi in 1874, it had proved difficult to escape the incursions of through-traffic, boarding-house residents and poor vagrants. By the 1880s most well-to-do white folks were leaving these once exclusive inner-city neighbourhoods for newly constructed suburban mansions further from the river. The new mansions bordered some of the most salubrious streets in early-twentieth-century America. The Eliots, however, stayed put. They wanted to remain close to Tom’s elderly grandmother in Washington Avenue. Their determination cut Tom off somewhat from playmates he and his family thought suitable.

  He was also set apart by an intimate secret. He had been born with a congenital double hernia, which meant that from early on he had to wear a truss. At first he took this for granted. He seems to have assumed all boys wore one; but when he realised his condition was unusual and that his parents were concerned about it, this was another aspect of his make up conducive to shyness and an awkwardness about physical rough and tumble. He and his masculinity were watched over carefully. His mother had many demands on her time, but his nurse, Annie Dunne from County Cork, regularly took him for walks. Tom was ‘devoted to her’ and was ‘at an age when a nanny, especially to the much-the-youngest child of a large family, is more important than anybody else’. He felt intrigued when, going ‘to say her prayers’, Annie brought him with her on several occasions into the small Irish Catholic Church of the Immaculate Conception at the corner of Locust Street and Jefferson Avenue. Annie attended mass there. The priest, Father G. D. Power, well known in the local Irish community, had family connections to European theatre. For Tom, who ‘liked it very much’, this was a very different sort of religion to that practised by his Unitarian family. The Church of the Immaculate Conception had coloured statues, paper flowers, alluring lights; ‘the pews had little gates that I could swing on’.53 The Catholic, Trinitarian Annie, to whom he felt close, discussed with him the existence of God. ‘I remember’, he wrote in his thirties, a theological argument about God as First Cause being ‘put to me, at the age of six, by a devoutly Catholic Irish nursemaid’.54 Theological and philosophical arguments intrigued Tom from childhood, but his sense of mischief remained unsubdued. Henry photographed his little brother with Annie, around the time Tom started at his first school. Hand on hip, Annie looks impatient to get on. Tom grins at the camera, conspiratorially.

  Dramatic weather – Mississippi floods, spring rain, high winds – governed the rhythms of St Louis. In summer, with temperatures routinely reaching the 90s Fahrenheit (over 32°C), many wealthy families fled the heat and spent their time in resorts further north, often in New England. The St Louis press carried advertisements for hotels in resorts including Bar Harbor, Maine, and Gloucester, Massachusetts: leisured, well-off mothers would take their children there for several months, while fathers worked on in the heat and spent a shorter time holidaying with the family.55 The Eliots summered this way, migrating and returning according to the seasons. In winter, when Missouri thermometers dipped to near freezing, there might be snow. Tom, who had a fondness for Mississippi steamboats (but whose mother thought Mark Twain’s recent Huckleberry Finn unsuitable reading), delighted to hear their whistles blasting on New Year’s Eve: the St Louis levee was jampacked with vessels; tales were told of heroic steamboat races. Yet perhaps spring was the Mississippi’s most dramatic time, bringing with it regular inundations when, after rains, what Tom saw as the memorable ‘long dark river’ might burst its banks.56 In Missouri flooding could occur at almost any time of year, but most commonly around April and May. Tom recalled being taken down in flood time to the Eads Bridge just to see the power of nature. That bridge, with its massive stone pillars and monumental girder-work, still spans the river, a celebrated feat of engineering. In 1896 it was tested almost to destruction.

  During that spring, not long after the St Louis Globe-Democrat had published verses about ‘April’s laughing sheen’ and how ‘Cold and dull as memoried pain / Drips the rain’, news items began to appear about devastation caused in the Southern states by torrential rain and cyclones.57 Almost a hundred people were killed in Texas in mid-May when a cyclone hit. In St Louis itself, however, life went on untouched by such turmoil: Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show was in town, bringing a ‘free street cavalcade’ with ‘100 Indian warriors’ as well as a detachment of US Cavalry commanded by Colonel W. F. Cody – Buffalo Bill himself. Accompanied by marching bands, daily shows feature
d such attractions as that ‘peerless lady wingshot’ Miss Annie Oakley, and even an exhibition herd of buffalo.58 Tom had a taste for such things; his grandmother Eliot liked to recall how an Indian had sneaked into her kitchen and stolen a red ribbon from her hair; a treasured family possession was a photograph of a Native American, Chief Joseph, wearing a suit; Forest Park in St Louis, where there were ‘Indian Mounds’, was, Tom recalled, ‘to me, as a child, the beginning of the Wild West’.59 He went there to photograph ‘a rather mangy buffalo’ chained to a tree.60 His lifelong interest in comings together of the supposedly ‘primitive’ and the modern urban has its origins in his St Louis boyhood, but in his eighth year his city was suddenly convulsed by the most spectacular event of his boyhood.

  The cyclone which struck St Louis on the afternoon of Wednesday 27 May 1896 was one of the most devastating natural disasters ever to hit an American city. Though its havoc was overshadowed in popular memory by the spectacle of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, what happened in St Louis was also apocalyptic. Some reports refer to a ‘cyclone’, others to a ‘tornado’ or ‘hurricane’. For hours heavy dark clouds built up on the horizon. ‘Early mutterings’ gave way to damp gusts bringing a downpour of rain. Eyewitness accounts in the following day’s St Louis Globe-Democrat detail how a great rain cloud ‘came up slowly at first; from the west, beyond Forest Park. As the black rim mounted higher above the horizon, its arc embraced more territory to the north and south.’ After the thunder and lightning a ‘hurricane’ broke over the city’s western area about 5 p.m., bringing ‘a deluge of rain’ and for half an hour making even ‘the best built structures tremble’. Then a second storm struck from the south-west, destroying large parts of the city hospital, injuring patients and passers-by, capsizing boats moored at wharves on the Mississippi, and killing more than a hundred people. Some were ‘crushed beneath falling walls, hurled against the sides of buildings, struck by flying timbers, cut by the shattered glass’, or ‘shocked by the network of down wires’ as the city’s famous streetcar system was smashed. ‘Flashes of lightning’ lit up the carnage as night approached and hundreds of injured people struggled through the streets of a city plunged into premature darkness because its power and public transport systems had been knocked out. ‘A thousand electric cars stood dark and deserted on the tracks, while men and women toiled homeward through the drenching rain. There were pale faces and sinking hearts in more St Louis homes than ever known before in the city’s history.’61

  Some of the worst devastation was by the river, where a long line of steamboats and wharf boats had been overturned, crushed, sunk, or had their superstructure torn away. One boat, swept from its wharf, was blown to the foot of Locust Street; entire structures as well as vessels were pulverised along the levee; in the city streets buildings collapsed, roofs were torn off and raging fires lit up the night sky, their flames reflected in the Mississippi beyond the wreckage of steamboats. Eventually the conflagration was put out by the sheer intensity of the rain.

  Though Locust Street was some distance from the epicentre of the storm, its power was evident there as elsewhere in a large industrial city where smokestacks and church towers collapsed, and buildings on Jefferson Avenue (where Annie sometimes took Tom to her church) were destroyed. While the Eliots’ own place of worship survived, its younger St Louis sibling, the Unitarian Church of the Unity at whose dedication Tom’s grandfather had preached, was so badly damaged that it required rebuilding.62 We know Tom was at home at the time of the cyclone because on the following morning he was photographed (probably by his brother) along with his mother, two of his sisters and a cousin in front of their house. Hands clenched, his mother stares resolutely straight at the camera; cousin Henrietta looks at the photographer too; but Tom, who has climbed up on to the struts of the front gate, is looking westwards along the street. So is his sister Margaret (who was particularly sensitive to the sound of thunder); Marion Eliot can hardly be seen, but she has one hand to her head. Though the people are neatly dressed, this is not a calm, carefully composed photograph, but a record of a family conscious of themselves as survivors.63

  More than eight thousand buildings were destroyed in the cyclone, but the Eliots’ house, about a mile and a half inland from the Eads Bridge, kept even its front windows intact. No doubt the family did what they could to protect the little boy not just from the storm but also from the gruesome accounts of horror that circulated afterwards. Inside 2635 Locust Street, even if the house shook, the weather made its presence felt principally as terrific sound: thunderclaps, blasts of wind, torrential deluge. Yet no one who went outdoors in St Louis in the days that followed could fail to see the desolation. ‘Death and Destruction Everywhere’ read one of the headlines in the Globe-Democrat two days later. The newspapers were full of how, just across the river, parts of East St Louis were ‘one vast charnel house’ where famished homeless people roamed the streets among the groans of the injured in ‘a living graveyard’.64

  Accompanying these news stories a picture of the Eads shows mangled girder-work, fallen blocks of masonry, crashed rail carriages and downed wires. Across much of the city telegraph, telephone, electricity and gas supplies remained cut off for several days. Tales circulated of children buried alive, people blown out of their houses, even of corpses being driven through the streets on coaches pulled by storm-crazed horses. Safe and surely shielded from much of this, seven-year-old Tom left no surviving account. A quarter of a century later, however, nourished by the advanced study of Sanskrit texts and Classical learning, he would produce in the astonishing soundscape of ‘What the Thunder Said’ the most famous thunderstorm in world poetry, part of a work, The Waste Land, which envisages urban destruction, with the dead walking modern city streets, rain, a great river and scenes of horror. He was by no means writing the story of the 1896 St Louis cyclone, but he knew perhaps better than any other English-language poet what an apocalyptic thunderstorm sounded like.

  After the cyclonic astonishments of the natural world came the measured anticlimax of school. Annie Dunne took him to his first educational establishment, which was run by an impressive teacher. Ellen Dean Lockwood (whose name suggests her parents relished Wuthering Heights) was an American Unitarian who had spent time in Brazil with her husband Robert in the early 1880s. The couple returned to the States in 1884 with their baby son and set up at 3841 Delmar Avenue in St Louis a small co-educational primary school which catered especially for prosperous and distinguished families. Tom recalled it as being ‘beyond Vanteventer Place’, a recently built gated community that was one of the city’s most select enclaves.65 Shortly before instructing Tom and his friend Thomas McKittrick, ‘Miss Lockwood’, as Tom called her, had taught the withdrawn and intense nine-year-old Sara Teasdale, helping that fledgling poet overcome her shyness and giving her the confidence to proceed to the Mary Institute. Mrs Lockwood had also taught her own son, Dean; he was a Latinist by the age of ten, went on to study Classics at Harvard and became a distinguished scholar. This was the sort of educational trajectory that the Latin-quoting Hal and the educationalist Lottie Eliot wanted for their shy, bright youngest child.

  Determined, but also possessing a ‘lovable disposition’, Mrs Lockwood had struggled for some years with curvature of the spine and showed ‘unusual vitality and will power’. Lottie knew this sensitive, cosmopolitan teacher through the Church of the Messiah as weIl as through a local women’s group, the Wednesday Club. A schooling with her was likely to make Tom suitable for admission to the Mary Institute’s partner establishment, Smith Academy, where his brother Henry had been studying. At Mrs Lockwood’s school Tom seems to have done well. His friend and classmate ‘Tom Kick’ found it hard to keep up with him. The two boys were among Ellen Lockwood’s last pupils. She died young in December 1898, when Tom was in his first term at Smith Academy.66

  Before he went there, he summered as usual for about three months in Massachusetts. Since earliest childhood he had travelled outside St Louis,
sometimes considerable distances. As a baby he was taken, as he recalled, to Louisiana, though another family member recorded that his earliest travels were with his mother to Pass Christian, then a small yachting town, in Mississippi on the Gulf of Mexico. According to this account, not long after Tom’s birth his sister Charlotte was ill and their mother took her there, along with Tom and Henry, to convalesce.67 Though Tom was too young to remember, it may have been a difficult time for Lottie; she looks rather thin and tired in photographs. With a family of six, one of whom was ill in Tom’s early infancy, Lottie Eliot had to face several demands. Such circumstances, and his mother’s continuing commitment to social reforms in St Louis, brought Tom even closer to Annie Dunne.

  The earliest holidays Tom remembered were vacations in coastal New England. From his fifth year onwards the family went to summer at the fishing and resort town of Gloucester, on the Cape Ann coast ‘about forty miles north-east of Boston’.68 To start with they stayed at the recently constructed Hawthorne Inn. Built at Wonson’s Point in East Gloucester, this large establishment had a multi-storey seafront block whose verandahs and decking extended on to the rocks of the shoreline. Surrounded by a complex of other lodgings, it was strikingly literary in its nomenclature. Not only was the hotel itself named after the great early-nineteenth-century novelist of New England Puritanism, Nathaniel Hawthorne, but the surrounding buildings, such as Seven Gables and Blythedale, were named after the titles, places and people of his works.69 Hawthorne became one of Tom’s favourite novelists, an author preoccupied with ‘spiritual problems’, whose work he read from his early teens onwards and whom he related to his own New England ancestry as well as to a line in American writing which included Henry James and, by implication, himself.70 In an unusual way as a young child, he had holidayed among Hawthorne’s works.

  It was probably at this most literary of hotels that, as very small boys sometimes do, he fell in love for the first time. ‘I had my first love affair’, he recalled in 1939 in a tone at once self-mocking and embarrassedly honest, ‘at (as nearly as I can compute from confirmatory evidence) the age of five, with a young lady of three, at a seaside hotel. Her name was Dorothy; that is all I know. My feeling towards her was expressed entirely by bullying, teasing, and making her fetch and carry: yet I remember clearly that I pined for a bit after we were separated in the autumn.’71 A shy, truss-wearing, youngest child in a predominantly female household, the five-year-old boy made the most of having a little girl playmate to boss around. Yet, over four decades later and half jokingly relating this experience to Dante’s meeting with the child Beatrice in the Vita Nuova, he knew such early encounters could be important. Recalling that ‘My relations with later inamoratae(?) were more distant and respectful’, he mentions in the same letter being enamoured of ‘a young lady with ringlets (name unknown) who took the part of the angel child who died, in a performance called “The Birds’ Christmas Carol” at another seaside resort’.72 This little girl, playing the part of Carol in a dramatisation of a once popular sentimental story by the American writer Kate Douglas Wiggins, would have been acting the part of a beautiful, suffering invalid battling with long-term illness and inspiring her loving family at Christmas before succumbing to her fatal malady. The story was a popular one (there would be a reading from it at Tom’s school when he was fourteen), and dramatisations of it often involved singing and elements of dance.73 Whether or not Tom was aware of his sister Theodora’s premature death or of how in 1864 his cherished aunt Ada (after whom one of his sisters was named) had drowned aged sixteen while skating on a pond, associations between mortality, suffering and female love were part of his childhood even before (aged about eleven) he read the works of Edgar Allan Poe in which such a nexus of ideas is common.