Young Eliot

by Robert Crawford

  In his penultimate year at school, though absent from the sports field, he did win respect for his academic performance. Like his brother before him, he was awarded the school’s gold medal for Latin. Tom’s medal made his parents proud. Pa gave him a reward of $25, but secretly Tom took (‘stole’ as he later put it) $2 of this to purchase a copy of Shelley’s poems.80 Reading the work of a poet who had written a notorious justification of atheism was in its way a rebellious act. It followed Tom’s authoring of those ‘atheistical’ quatrains spurred by his reading of Fitzgerald. He perused Edward Dowden’s edition of Shelley’s poems excitedly. On the first page of his introduction Dowden presented Shelley’s genius as ‘primarily lyrical’. ‘No poet ever sang more directly out of his own feelings – his joys, his sorrows, his desires, his regrets.’ A little-known, fragmentary lyric poem towards the end of Dowden’s edition, where it was entitled ‘To the Moon’, stayed with Tom all his life. He came to think it ‘the most perfect short poem that Shelley wrote’:

  Art thou pale for weariness

  Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,

  Wandering companionless

  Among the stars that have a different birth,

  And ever changing, like a joyless eye

  That finds no object worth its constancy?81

  Like ‘The Blessed Damozel’, this is a poem of longing and apartness that articulates a sense of the ‘companionless’ – just what Tom’s mother worried about when she feared Tom had been ‘deprived’ of ‘companionship’.82 If his taste in poetry was something he kept (in part at least) hidden from his parents, his attraction towards the ‘atheistical’ may have led this boy perceived by outsiders as shy to feel cut off from some aspects of his family life too. This helps explain why at least once he said his Unitarian upbringing had formed him as an ‘Atheist’.83 In some rather despondent moods, looking back twenty years later, he could intuit that his growing commitment to poetry had isolated him, feeling he had been ‘forced into poetry by my weakness in other directions … I took this direction very young, and learned very early to find my life and my realisation in this curious way, and to be obtuse and indifferent to my reality in other ways.’84

  Tom played no part in the editing of his school magazine, but he was published in it. His three short prose contributions in 1905 are undistinguished, but hint how his reading continued to guide him. ‘The Birds of Prey’, about a vulture which comes to feast on a battlefield victim, has a title reminiscent of Kipling’s ‘“Birds of Prey” March’. ‘The Man Who Was King’ (the narrative about a man shipwrecked in Polynesia) echoes Kipling’s short story ‘The Man Who Would Be King’, but also inclines towards R. L. Stevenson. ‘The Man Who Was King’ is narrated by a retired captain, ‘at present engaged in lobster-trawling and skippering summer visitors’. He sounds a bit like the skipper who taught Tom to sail at Gloucester. Terms such as ‘mizzen top-gallant shrouds’, ‘flying jib-boom’, ‘fore staysail’ and ‘holystoning the deck’ (all used in Tom’s other story ‘A Tale of a Whale’) demonstrate that the young mariner had been well taught. Moments in these narratives, as when sailors on the back of a whale eat ‘sponge-cake, made out of the sponges which grew on the bottom of the great animal’, suggest Tom’s more mischievous, Edward Lear-loving side.85 So do occasional made-up words, including Tom’s Polynesian ‘bhghons’. Veering between the comical and the serious, these prose pieces also essay themes that became lifelong preoccupations. The captain, worried about being ‘roasted for the consumption of his hosts’, ends up being made king of an island where, later, colonists convert naked pagan ‘natives’, rendering them disappointingly ‘civilised’.86 All this came from an imagination which would grow fascinated soon by anthropology, by Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and would juxtapose the supposedly primitive with the civilised in The Waste Land and ‘Sweeney Agonistes.’

  Yet the production which most impressed Tom’s family in 1905 was his lyric imitation of Ben Jonson, written on 24 January as an exercise for Mr Hatch.87 In some ways it was a sensitive pastiche. Tom’s Golden Treasury contained Shakespeare’s ‘Where the bee sups, there sup I’ as well as several Jonson lyrics, including ‘To Celia’ whose stanzaic pattern Tom followed. His poem imitates Renaissance diction, lamenting flowers ‘withered ere the wild bee flew / To suck the eglantine’; it urges lovers to ‘pluck anew’. Tom’s words impressed Mr Hatch. That teacher’s own somewhat less delicate song, ‘Smith Forever’, promising to ‘rear a kingdom wide of schools, / And set Smith on the throne’, appeared in the Smith Academy Record in February along with ‘A Fable for Feasters’, just in time for the school’s ‘sing fest’.88

  Reading Tom’s lyric, Mr Hatch was admiring but sceptical; perhaps he knew Tom’s mother wrote verse. Tom recalled that his teacher ‘commended’ the poem ‘warmly’ and ‘conceived great hopes of a literary career for me’, yet also asked ‘suspiciously if I had had any help in writing it’.89 Actually, though Tom remembered his lyric as ‘the first poem he wrote to be shown to other eyes’, it was some time before his family read it. He remembered the precise moment his mother mentioned it to him: ‘she remarked (we were walking along Beaumont St. in St Louis) that she thought it better than anything in verse she had ever written. I knew what her verse meant to her. We did not discuss the matter further.’90

  This conversation between mother and son on home ground marked the moment where both seem to have acknowledged that Tom’s gift for poetry was not just something he shared with Mamma but also a talent that set him apart from her. Papa reacted with straightforward pride. Having made or got hold of a typed carbon copy of his son’s lyric, ‘If Time and Space, as sages say’, he posted it to his brother Thomas in Portland, Oregon, scribbling at the top in pencil, ‘Verses by Thomas Stearns Eliot for one of the classes in “Composition”’, adding the comment ‘good for 16 yrs!’91 He was right. The poem builds an argument uniting lyricism and the hint of a philosophical trajectory. John Donne, whose work also does this, was just a name to Tom at this stage – there was one Donne poem in his Golden Treasury, and a passing, slighting mention of him in Pancoast’s Introduction to English Literature.

  Now his contributions to the Smith Academy Record regularly appeared in or near pole position in the magazine. He won the respect of his family and Mr Hatch. Chosen to read his poem ‘To the Class of 1905’, he scanned the proud audience at the Smith Academy Fiftieth Annual Graduating Exercises on 13 June that year. His reading was preceded by the Smith Academy Glee Club, who accompanied the class heartily in singing ‘Smith Forever’ and ‘Pull for Good Old Smith’. After Tom read, his classmate Frederick Lake led the Mandolin Club in another school song.92 Tom’s poem, dutifully declaimed from the stage on behalf of his fellow students (‘We go … // We shall return … // We go … // So we are done’), was appropriately stagey. Occasional cadences suggested books he had been reading: ‘“Farewell”, / A word that echoes like a funeral bell’ calls to mind Keats’s ‘Forlorn! The very word is like a bell’ from the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. Ending with a Latinate dramatic flourish, ‘Exeunt omnes, with a last “farewell”’, Tom’s poem marked his ‘first appearance on a public platform before a large audience’. It should have worked. Destructively, however, one of his teachers remarked to him that while his ‘poem itself was excellent, as such poems go’, his ‘delivery’ had been ‘very bad indeed’.93 His classmate Lawrence Post, a more gifted public speaker, orated the ‘Farewell Address’.

  After that, Tom was off to Gloucester for the summer, then to the select Milton Academy in Massachusetts for a year’s preparatory work before progressing to Harvard. He had already passed the examinations for Harvard by the spring of 1905. However, he was still just sixteen, and in March his mother was anxious again about his health – ‘he has been growing rapidly, and for the sake of his physical well being we have felt that it might be better for him to wait a year before entering on his college career’.94 Awkwardly, he had not done nearly as well in his last year a
t Smith Academy. As his mother confessed, ‘My son’s marks were “B” in History, and “C” in everything else except Physics, in which he was conditioned, receiving an “E”.’95 Taking all this into account, she looked at the course catalogue for Milton Academy with Tom in early April.

  Housed in handsome buildings on a grassy campus, Milton, just eight miles outside Boston, was an established institution (founded in 1798) with a reputation as a gateway to Harvard. Tom’s brother was already a Harvard student, and the family knew Harvard’s procedures. Tom had been informed that he had done well in French and English when he sat the Harvard prelims; he was wondering if at Milton he might study some more science (his weakest area) and maybe some English and American history. He was rather uncertain, but, recognising he had been a ‘faithful student’ at Smith Academy, his parents were ‘willing to have him wander a little from beaten paths this year and take a somewhat miscellaneous course’, if that was what he wanted.96

  Writing to Richard Cobb, the recently appointed headmaster at Milton, Lottie Eliot was, as so often, anxious about her younger son. She worried he might be ‘lonely’. She assured Mr Cobb that ‘although quiet and very dignified he is a most friendly boy, of sweet nature, and every inch a gentleman, withal very modest and unassuming, yet very self-reliant too’.97 Dutifully, signing himself ‘Thomas S. Eliot’, her son transcribed a list of the recent courses he had taken and the books he had studied.98 Some of these, such as The Principles of Rhetoric by Adam Sherman Hill, Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard College, were also on the Milton curriculum. Emphasising ‘clearness’, ‘force’ and ‘ease’ in expression, Hill, though no ‘Anglomaniac’, was aware of charges of American ‘provincialism’. His book is full of quotations from great writers, illustrating stylistic merits, and sometimes demerits. ‘Browning at his best’, for instance, is presented as ‘a master of the suggestive style’ and ‘My Last Duchess’ as a model of concision. Reading such books in the wake of Curd’s New Method of English Analysis, Tom grew even more used to absorbing literature through illustrative snippets. Years later, the use of resonant quotations became part of his allusive compositional technique, but in the short term he was taught not just how to write but also that Harvard academics including ‘Professor L. B. R. Briggs’, ‘Professor G. L. Kittredge’, ‘Dr Royce’ and ‘President Eliot’ were themselves authorities on writing.99 Schools like Milton Academy were designed to get boys accustomed to sharing Harvard assumptions. Soon Tom would encounter these professors for himself.

  For a while it seemed touch and go whether he would proceed to Milton or head straight to Harvard. His parents had gone so far as to rent rooms for him ‘in a private house on Mt Auburn Street’ in Cambridge, a well-appointed location very handy for Harvard Yard, and favoured by some of the most prosperous students.100 In August 1905, however, Lottie Eliot made arrangements to visit Milton with Tom, and it was fixed that he would be admitted as a boarding pupil in the Upper School. He was to reside in Forbes House, a substantial brick building whose supervising matron was Mrs Margaret Gardner Chase. Mrs Eliot was concerned that, even in such a small matter as the way Tom stowed his belongings in his room, he should perpetrate no ‘infringement of rules to which Mrs Chase would object’. Anxious that he should not be expected to participate in ‘strenuous sports’ because of his ‘physical limitations’, his mother asked to be informed by telegraph ‘Should Tom ever be ill’. Consulting her son-in-law Alfred Sheffield (familiar with modern Harvard), she felt on the whole that Tom should not repeat subjects at Milton at which he had excelled at St Louis. This is why, among other things, he applied himself to Physics during this final schooling. Tom’s Physics notebook, signed by the Milton Physics teacher, Homer W. Lesourd, still survives at the school, but all his other records are lost, so we cannot be certain what else he studied. It is likely, however, that he was well taught. Lesourd had Harvard connections and would soon publish his Principles and Formulas of Elementary Physics. Milton Academy prided itself on its standards and attracted the children of ambitious, often rich parents eager for their sons to enter Harvard. Tom’s brother was sure Milton friendships would benefit Tom.

  Arguably, the social connections he made at Milton mattered more to Tom than the Physics or other subjects he learned there. A fellow Forbes House pupil was Scofield Thayer, scion of a wealthy Massachusetts family. This young New Englander had been schooled in his home town of Worcester, but entered Forbes House in 1905. Like Tom he was good at Latin and had literary interests. Though Thayer did not reach Harvard until later, their paths would cross afterwards in decisive ways. Another Forbes House boy was the overweight Howard Morris, whose nickname ‘Fat’ may date from his schooldays.101 Both aiming for Harvard, Tom and Morris got on well enough to share accommodation there. As was the Harvard custom, so in Milton the graduating class had, Tom’s brother recalled, a ‘class president’ – in Tom’s case a boy called John Robinson, who came from Salem and was interested in sailing.102 Tom and Robinson had at least that pastime in common, and would keep in touch at university. Others in Tom’s circle at Milton included Harrison Bird Child, who became an Episcopal priest after studying at Harvard; and Roger Amory, who became the Treasurer for Tom’s Harvard classmates.

  At Milton he found himself part of a group of privileged boys with New England backgrounds, but since he had arrived only in 1905 he was regarded as among the ‘immigrants’ to his class.103 Jayme Stayer points out that one fellow pupil (assistant business manager of the school magazine) was called Ronald A. MacAvity; his surname would become as notorious as that of Prufrock.104 Learning to fit in, Tom wrote home to St Louis regularly from the time he ‘first went to Milton’, and his mother preserved his letters all her life.105 He alarmed her in May 1906 by wanting to ‘swim in a quarry pond near the Academy’.106 Since Papa’s sister had drowned in a pond, Tom’s parents were none too keen on that.

  When Tom came to graduate with twenty-one classmates from Milton Academy on 21 June 1906, Roger Amory wrote the ‘Class History 1906’ in one of the school publications, The Milton Orange and Blue, published on the fourth of July. Stayer has noted that Tom’s was the very last name to be saluted by the class historian at the 1906 graduation. No mention of any misdemeanour by Tom appears in the school’s surviving disciplinary minutes, but he was hailed at graduation as ‘Big Slam Eliot, boisterous haranguer of Forbes House’.107 Perhaps this indicates that at Milton he had reinvented himself. However, given the shyness that had characterised his boyhood, and which continued to be part of his demeanour at Harvard, the act of keeping his name to the very end of the list and then describing him as a ‘boisterous haranguer’ may have been designed to give his classmates one last laugh before leaving school.

  4

  A Full-Fledged Harvard Man

  BY today’s standards, it is surprising that Thomas Stearns Eliot was admitted to Harvard. In a university run by the ageing, distinguished President Eliot, his surname and background probably did him no harm. Writing to Headmaster Cobb at Milton Academy in spring 1905, Lottie Eliot had glossed over Tom’s precise grades, preferring to emphasise his Latin prize and extensive reading. Tom stated simply that he had ‘passed’ subjects at Harvard’s ‘Elementary’ level, and was about to sit Greek, Latin, French and English at ‘Advanced’. When Mr Cobb asked about the precise level of the passes, Tom’s mother confessed they were mostly Cs.1 John Soldo, who unearthed in the 1970s the full run of entrance examination grades, lists the Elementary passes as ‘B+ in History; B in French; C in English, Greek, Latin and Algebra; D in Plane Geometry and E in Physics’. This last disaster, Mrs Eliot explained, was precipitated by a teacher who had succumbed to ‘nervous prostration’.2 In his four Advanced subjects Tom achieved a consistent row of Cs.3 He was working, but not very hard.

  That style, honed at Milton, shaped his time as a Harvard freshman in session 1906–7. Dominating small-town Cambridge, Massachusetts, just across the Charles River from Boston, ‘Unitarian Harva
rd’ (as Tom later styled it) was not just about education.4 It was also, he knew, about privileged panache. His brother, who had edited the Harvard Lampoon, is credited as the author of ‘The Freshman’s Meditation’, penned a few years before Tom arrived: ‘Whoop! Hurrah! I’ve come to Harvard!’ it begins, ‘I’m a full-fledged Harvard man.’ To his ‘dandy room’ (furnished by his mother), the freshman in this poem adds Harvard flags and crimson cushions matching the university colours, not to mention ‘an ice-chest out of sight’. With ‘So many things to do’ on the sporting front, Henry’s new arrival relishes his sense of freedom, convinced he ‘Needn’t trouble ’bout my studies’.5 No doubt alert to social cachet and guided by Henry who had graduated in 1902 before proceeding to Harvard Law School, Tom’s parents had secured him accommodation at 52 Mount Auburn Street, right at the heart of Harvard’s ‘Gold Coast’. Just minutes from Harvard Yard in the direction of the Charles, this area of privately developed halls and upscale student boarding houses was home to the most cosseted undergraduates; the ‘Silver Coast’, classy but less exclusive, was down the road. Other boys from Tom’s year at Milton, including Howard Morris, George ‘Dago’ Parker and Charles ‘Chicken’ Gilbert, were moving to the Gold Coast. It seemed right for Tom ‘Big Slam’ Eliot to be there too.

  Earlier generations of freshmen had tended to live at the heart of the Harvard campus in the Yard’s dormitories, most iconic of which was the early-eighteenth-century dark-red-brick Massachusetts Hall. However, 1906 freshmen from moneyed backgrounds enjoyed more opulent facilities if they lived outside the gated Yard with its expansive, well-kept lawns and lofty elms. Freshmen in Tom’s cohort (the ‘Class of 1910’ – named after the year in which they would graduate) strolled to Massachusetts Hall to elect class officers – a president, a secretary, a social committee – and attended receptions as well as lectures and classes in the other buildings of the Yard; then the most affluent ambled back to Mount Auburn Street.