Lear’s genius for odd, memorable names – Quangle-Wangle, Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo, Scroobius Pip – is something Tom would develop. From ‘The Story of the Four Little Children Who Went Round the World’ he took the name ‘Slingsby’, used in one of his early mature poems, ‘Aunt Helen’. Cat-loving Lear’s self-portrait in ‘How pleasant to know Mr Lear!’ would beget, decades later, ‘How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!’, where nonsense words ‘porpentine’ and ‘wopsical’ are fit to set beside such Learisms as ‘crumpetty’ or ‘crumbobblious’.30 In early 1899, under the guise of ‘anon’, he also attempted the literary genre most often associated with Edward Lear, but Tom’s limerick about female suffering is below par in form:
There was a young lady name of Lu
Who felt so exceedingly blue
She was heard to state
That it was her fate –
And then she began to bu-hu.31
Clearly he was absorbing contemporary events, probably from reading newspapers that lay around the house. Tom’s mention in Fireside, number 4 of a Brazilian balloonist in Paris picks up on the story of the rich young Brazilian Santos-Dumont whose ‘sailing around Paris, driving his cigar-shaped balloon’ was reported in the St Louis Globe-Democrat on 8 January 1899.32 Again, Tom’s use of comic plutocratic names including ‘Mr and Mrs Bondholder Billion’ in Fireside, number 3 and ‘Miss Stockenbonds’ in Fireside, number 11 involves close relatives of the creations of a Globe-Democrat cartoonist, Mr and Mrs Stockson Bond.33
Names such as Prufrock (which graced St Louis’s Prufrock Furniture Co., a ‘manufacturer of parlor furniture’ one of whose branches in 1899 was ‘between Locust Street & St Charles Sts’) and Stetson (Mrs Stetson, a niece of Harriet Beecher Stowe, lectured to the Wednesday Club in January 1899) stayed with Tom, absorbed apparently unconsciously, before emerging years later in his mature poetry.34 Into the Fireside he also copied the picture of ‘Dr Sweany’ which regularly featured in the Globe-Democrat. This gentleman was one of several local pedlars of remedies for male ailments who advertised routinely throughout Tom’s boyhood. Asking in anxiety-inducing capital letters, ‘ARE YOU LACKING IN ENERGY, STRENGTH AND VIGOR … MEN WHO ARE WASTING AWAY?’ and using such terms as ‘Nervous Debility’, Dr Sweany’s advertisements addressed problems including nervousness and loss of manliness. Rhetoric of this sort flourished in an era when George M. Beard’s Practical Treatise on Nervous Exhaustion (Neurasthenia) and its 1881 sequel American Nervousness were often reprinted, warning Americans that ‘the relative quantity of nervousness and of nervous diseases that spring out of nervousness, are greater here than in any other nation in history’.35 Shy, truss-wearing Tom, whose later verse would deal repeatedly with anxieties about manliness and who would develop poems featuring ‘Apeneck Sweeney’, copied from newspaper advertisements the doctor’s substantial beard. In the printed ads, this hirsute appendage completely obscured Sweany’s neckline. Tom also copied a version of the doctor’s slogan – ‘When Others Fail Come to Me’ – and highlighted Sweany’s ability to deal with insomnia.36 Ironically, in Tom’s 1920s melodrama ‘Sweeney Agonistes’, Sweeney’s nightmares render him unable to sleep.
Other Fireside figures included ‘Woodbury, The Facial Contortionist’, based on John H. Woodbury who advertised ‘painless operations for correcting featural irregularities’.37 As a child Tom was acutely embarrassed by the perceived featural irregularity of his own protruberant ears. Sitting between two girls at a children’s party he overheard one whispering to the other that she ought to look at this boy’s ears. As a result, Tom bound a rope around his ears when he went to bed at night, but his mother removed it, telling him not to worry: in time the ears would fold themselves back.38 In the childhood picture taken in the studio of ‘Holborn’s Dainties, 2320 Washington Avenue’, those ears stick out like the handles on proverbial jugs.39
Conscious, too, of orthodontic problems, in the Fireside the boy drew an advert for ‘Dr Chase, dentist’ under which there is a picture of a protuberant-eared male with dog-like fangs.40 From the age of ten, Tom was made to attend the dentist twice a week to have his teeth straightened. Over many visits, as he awaited this ordeal, he read all through an entire set of Edgar Allan Poe’s Collected Works that were in the waiting room.
Nineteenth-century tooth-straightening could be gruesome, and Poe’s narratives of horror may have seemed an appropriate preparation. The scholar Steven Matthews points out how ‘The Assignation’, one of Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination, especially impressed Tom when he read it before his regular dental appointment. This story of doomed love, attempted murder and the suicide of a beautiful young woman in Venice twice quotes lines from the seventeenth-century poet Henry King, memorialising his wife:
Stay for me there! I shall not fail
To meet thee in that hollow vale.
Tom went searching for that poem. Steven Matthews, calling attention to details in Poe’s story, such as the hair ‘in curls like those of the young hyacinth’, makes a convincing case that not only did this reading resurface at moments in Tom’s later poetry with its ‘hyacinth girl’, but it also prepared him for encounters with the often erotic and broodingly violent aspects of Elizabethan and Jacobean literature from which Poe liked to quote.41 ’The Assignation’, for instance, cites George Chapman’s ‘vigorous words’ in the Jacobean tragedy Bussy D’Ambois. Later, Tom developed a marked taste for such plays, but his boyhood experience brought together his personal pain at the dentist’s with darker aspects of literary imagination. Poe’s work, so important to Baudelaire, underlay too the French Symbolist poetry Tom would come to love in his student years. Attracted to suffering women, Poe – recounter of mysterious crimes, morbidly erotic poet of ‘For Annie’ and provocative poetic theorist – went on mattering to him.
Whether it was his teeth, his ears or his hernia, his body was at times a source of anxiety, even before this shy boy reached puberty. The body in his mature work would be a recurrent focus for worry and pain. However casually, humiliatingly or light-heartedly, such a nexus of associations grew in Tom early, and was with him even as a ten-year-old. A good number of Fireside’s advertisements, usually copied from the newspapers, relate to ill health: Wine of Cardui was a tonic for female ailments; Munyon’s Cures ministered to a plethora of ills, including common colds; Dr Franck’s Grains of Health were good for ‘C. C. and Headache’; Carter’s Little Liver Pills, Dr Pearce’s Pleasant Pellets for Pink People and Smith’s Bile Beans spoke for themselves. Whatever else Tom Eliot was aware of, he certainly knew about illness.
‘Avez vous Fireside?’ ask that magazine’s numbers 13 and 14; numbers 2 and 3 offer readers a story about ‘duelests’ (sic) set among ‘the busy streets of Paris’ complete with ‘gamins’. Like Poe’s tales, and like the St Louis Globe-Democrat, which often ran stories about life in Paris and London, Fireside aimed to be Francophile and cosmopolitan. In December 1898 translations of Edmond Rostand’s play Cyrano de Bergerac (which, as well as featuring French duellists, deals with men who find wooing an intellectual woman difficult) were selling out in Tom’s home city.42 This was because the actor Richard Mansfield and a large theatrical entourage were in town to perform at the Olympic Theatre ‘the great play … for the first time in St. Louis’.43 Rostand’s drama juxtaposes poetic eloquence with chronic male shyness exacerbated by bodily oddity: Cyrano has a huge nose. A local fancy-goods store presented a prominent picture of Cyrano in its Globe-Democrat advertisement of 8 January and Mansfield’s ‘masterly production’ got a rave review two days later. Here was ‘a strong play, a great play, a beautiful play … perfection in a play’ that featured ‘a love song, the tenderest ever told’.44 Though he would write his own, very different ‘Love Song’ eleven years later, this production also caught the attention of young Tom. He recorded in the Fireside of 28 January that it had caused ‘a great sensation’. His chronicling that ‘Mr Mansfield had a lame leg’ suggests that either he or other family members may have seen it. Fi
reside’s ‘funny artist’ provided an illustration of Cyrano complete with sword, elaborate hat and convincingly voluminous nose.
The small boy editor was interested in other kinds of drama too. His piece on ‘The Theatre’ mentions as well as Cyrano the melodrama Over the Sea, then playing at the Music Hall, and the ragtime comic opera By the Sad Sea Waves with its lyrics by J. Sherrie Matthews and Harry Bulger. Matthews and Bulger played two wastrels taken on as instructors at a sanatorium where they wreak havoc. The show featured Gilbert and Sullivan parodies and minstrel songs which included the hit ‘coon song and chorus’ entitled ‘You Told Me You Had Money in the Bank’, published later that year.45 This song began ‘Mr Gideon Strong you’ve treated me wrong’, and here too the ragtime mix of catchy tunes and lyrics that fused vernacular idiom with cheeky use of rhyme was perhaps all the more appealing for belonging to a world so different from that of Tom’s parents.
As a student, Tom’s brother had a taste for Tin Pan Alley songs. Writing his own advert for a ‘great show’ called A Hot Time, Tom also pencilled a lyric about ‘Hasty Red, the Negro Hustler’, and noted ‘The coon dance’: like the Eliots’ odd-job man, Stephen, both African Americans and whites regularly used the words ‘nigger’ and ‘coon’ in the 1890s.46 St Louis was clearly a city where African Americans, while no longer slaves, were regarded as an underclass; in newspapers such as the Globe-Democrat (whose politics were, like Tom’s father’s and like his uncle Ed’s, Republican), they feature, if at all, largely in caricature drawings, in stories about crime or disease, or in entertainments such as the ‘Coon Carnival’.47 Tom grew up with a sense of a ‘colour bar’, but also with an awareness that there was valuable material in a wide spectrum of culture. His Fireside is evidence of that.
In his little magazine and in local newspaper cartoons, hoboes too were figures of fun. He showed them being given food by Mrs Rogers, apparently the Eliot family’s cook, or begging in the street, sleeping rough or spending time in a lock-up. Spread across numbers 5, 6 and 7, the longest of the Fireside’s tiny short stories is about the adventures of a hobo called Mosly Wrags. Mosly has a taste for ‘a saloon’ where he can ‘drown his sorrows’. The previous year in St Louis police raided ‘cheap saloons where the hoboes hang out’, and sixty-six hoboes had been rounded up; many found themselves jailed.48 Released from his lock-up, Mosly Wrags returns to begging. His young creator, while clearly intrigued, turns away with mock fastidiousness: ‘But we shall have no more to do with him.’49 An interest both in the tones of decorum and in what contradicts or disrupts them would be characteristic of poems Tom wrote a decade later: readiness to mix high and low life, evident in the pages of this tiny journal, would remain part of his gift.
As a mature poet, he knew that he had learned not just from the opportunities to access elite culture that his childhood environment offered, but also from growing up in Locust Street with a sense of urban decay in
A neighbourhood which had become shabby to a degree approaching slumminess, after all our friends and acquaintances had moved further west. And in my childhood, before the days of motor cars, people who lived in town stayed in town. So it was, that for nine months of the year my scenery was almost exclusively urban, and a good deal of it seedily, drably urban at that.
He came to realise that in his poetry ‘My urban imagery was that of St. Louis, upon which that of Paris and London have been superimposed.’50 He made verse that has its roots in a childhood sense of a tension between propriety and its enemies.
At ten, Tom copied out the first verse of Longfellow’s early poem ‘The Village Blacksmith’: Longfellow was a poet taught at Smith Academy. Yet Tom knew, too, of other kinds of verse. In 1898 some St Louis men had established a local Indiana Society, and had invited Indiana ‘genius’ James Whitcomb Riley to read.51 Riley had begun by imitating other poets, particularly Edgar Allan Poe, before becoming celebrated, as the Globe-Democrat explained, for his ‘Annals of the Poor’, his ‘Character Sketches’, and works such as ‘Little Orphant Annie’. Hailed as someone who would ‘one day stand at the head of American classics’, Riley read this last poem to a packed theatre in St Louis in 1898, the local audience relishing Annie’s account of the ‘little boy’ who refused to say his prayers and went ‘to bed at night, away upstairs’ only to be eaten alive:
An’ the Gobble-uns’ll git you
Ef you
Don’t
Watch
Out!52
In Fireside, number 14, Tom Eliot (who would use English and American dialect in his own, very different, mature poetry) wrote a little verse, ‘The fate of the Naughty Boy’, about ‘A Boy who went to bed one night’ only to be eaten by ‘The Goblins’, and in number 4 he included an advertisement for an invented work, ‘“The Bloomer Girl”, A Poem, By J. W. Riley’, accompanying it with a drawing of a female cyclist wearing bloomers, a piratical eye patch, and smoking a cigarette. No doubt she is one of those ‘new women’ noted by an 1896 St Louis Globe-Democrat parodist of Longfellow’s ‘Hiawatha’ as ‘Riding bikes and clad in bloomers’; Tom’s sisters had been known to cycle, and several, perhaps all, shared his mother’s commitment to extending opportunities for women.53 Though belonging to none of the twenty ‘Women’s Clubs of St Louis’ which, in 1898, discussed topics ranging from Michelangelo to the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, Tom grew up well aware of debates around culture and gender.54
The little boy who not so long before had been smitten by a girl acting the part of a cherished, dying lass in a play at a seaside hotel continued to be interested in actresses. His story ‘Pretty Belle, the Belle of the Actresses’ mentions The Belle of New York, performed in St Louis in 1898.55 This hit musical starred beautiful Edna May as a Salvation Army girl who ends up marrying a millionaire. Its Pretty Belle’s most famous song was published later in the St Louis press:
I’m sure I look demure enough, as I go ’round the city;
And do my best to hide the fact that I am young and pretty;
And I therefore cannot see, when I go out to preach,
Why men must say to me that I’m a perfect peach!
With her teasing refrain that sings of young men and ‘the light of faith’, concluding that ‘they never proceed to follow that light, but always follow me!’, this Belle of New York was rather different from the ladies of 2635 Locust Street.56 But, however flippantly, Tom was interested in such a theatrical milieu. Edna May was back in St Louis in early 1899, by which time he was also mentioning, in Fireside, number 13, another, more scandalously vivacious actress, Paris-born Anna Held.
Anna Held was in St Louis acting the part of Suzette in The French Maid, a Ziegfeld extravaganza. Suzette at a seaside resort romances the entire British fleet. ‘“Brazen”, “sensual”, “bawdy” and “wanton”’, Held represented, as her modern biographer puts it, ‘everything that was glamorous about Broadway, everything that was naughty about Paris’.57 Already notorious for her 1897 ‘kissing marathon’ and for being reported as bathing, like Cleopatra, in milk, she became one of the most photographed actresses in America, featuring in the St Louis press several times during Tom’s boyhood and teens. When he mentioned her in 1899’s Fireside (and mention her is all he did), she was being billed at St Louis’s Century Theatre as ‘the Peerless Parisian Beauty’. For the Globe-Democrat’s theatre reviewer she made ‘a combined assault upon the sense of decency of every man and woman who went to that playhouse’; this was because of her tendency to ‘“skin down” closer in the matter of clothes than any other woman now before the public’.58 Again, this seems a world away from the behaviour of Tom’s mother and sisters, but the little boy, who was learning French and who noted a local performance of Othello starring Lawrence Hanley, paid just as much attention to the presence of Anna Held in The French Maid. She, too, was part of the allure of Paris, a city whose fashions, Moulin Rouge and risqué theatre life all featured in the St Louis papers. Paris was synonymous with style and sinfulness.
The ‘edito
r’ of the Fireside, whose vocabulary outpaced his spelling, liked to record ‘flirtation’ and ‘elopments’. He also dedicated two issues of his magazine ‘To My Wife’, giving those two words triple underlining and an exclamation mark in number 6.59 Who ten-year-old Tom’s wife was we may never know. The boy’s ‘inamoratae’ around this time or a little later included his freckled, athletic contemporary Margaret Lionberger, daughter of St Louis millionaire attorney, Isaac H. Lionberger, whose Henry Hobson Richardson-designed mansion at 3630 Grandel Square assuredly outclassed Tom’s Locust Street home. Where the Eliots stayed put, the Lionbergers moved several times to more and more upscale neighbourhoods.60
Other local girls Tom had his eye on included Jane Jones (readily remembered decades later); Effie Bagnall ‘whose family were considered distinctly nouveaux riches’, probably because their money came from that newfangled thing an electricity company; and ‘the reigning beauty of the dancing school: Edwine Thornburgh herself, who subsequently became Lady Peek of Peek Frean & Co Ltd.’61 Tom met these fledgling eligibles from ‘St Louis’s smart set’ at Professor Jacob Mahler’s Dancing Academy, 3545 Olive Street, today the site of St Louis’s Centene Center.62 His parents consigned him to this Dancing Academy, often to his great discomfort: ‘how I dreaded those afternoons, and my shyness’.63
Girls who danced with him in St Louis were struck by his shyness, and by his unreconfigured ears – that continuing source of embarrassment. Margaret Shapleigh, whose brother was a classmate of Tom’s at Smith Academy, whose mother belonged to the Wednesday Club and whose doctor father lectured on ‘diseases of the ear’, called him ‘Big-eared Tom’. So did her friends. Though not among his ‘inamoratae’, she recalled dancing with him at a fancy-dress party when his outfit was rather different from his usual attire:
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