Young Eliot

by Robert Crawford

  On that thoroughfare and nearby some of the best endowed student societies had their clubhouses with private dining rooms. As the 1907 Official Guide to Harvard University puts it, this area ‘between the Yard and the Charles River … has come to be the centre of those activities in which the social spirit, the college loyalty, and the literary, musical, and other interests of the student body express themselves … Along Massachusetts Avenue, facing the Yard, and in Harvard Square, southwest of the Yard, are the shops, restaurants, billiard rooms, etc., most frequented by the students.’6 Long afterwards, reminiscing to a Harvard pal with whom he had made undergraduate mischief, Tom mentioned billiard cues; it was easy on the Gold Coast to avoid one’s studies.7 From 52 Mount Auburn a short stroll took him to a café such as the Dunster at Harvard Square which offered music every evening as well as food. One could buy stationery or have one’s visiting card engraved at Aimee Brothers, fine purveyors of ‘Student Supplies’; or, just off the Square at 5 Brattle Street, could eye fashionable clothing in the emporium of Alfred R. Brown & Co., Tailors and Outfitters, ‘Sole Agents for Carlton & Co.’s English Hats’; next door, the Harvard Tailoring Co. prided itself as ‘Importers of Woolen Novelties’, offering a ‘special Discount to Harvard Men’.8

  Men they all were. Female students studied at nearby Radcliffe College, but none yet graduated from Harvard. Almost all Harvard men in Tom’s day were white, many from the crème de la crème of exclusive New England private high schools. As well as Tom, three other freshmen are listed as lodging at 52 Mount Auburn for 1906–7: Robert Haydock, a well-behaved New Englander with a self-deprecating sense of humour, later pursued a Boston business career; C. C. Perkins, though listed as a freshman, was probably Charles C. Perkins, a sophomore of the Class of 1909 who went on to become a salesman; Constant Wendell, kinsman of Harvard literary professor Barrett Wendell, left the following year and eventually experienced a nervous breakdown.9 Several further students lodged next door at number 54, none of them academic stars; whether or not one was as ‘green’ and inexperienced as the conventional ‘verdant freshman’, it was easy to be distracted on the Gold Coast.10

  Hints of well-off student life in this vicinity come from some of the creative writing in the Harvard Advocate, confirming Gold Coasters’ reputation for idleness. In a 1906 Advocate parody of an ancient Greek play the character ‘Goldkoastides’ determines ‘to elect no courses but from ten o’clock to twelve’; any course whose class hour is 9 a.m. ‘shan’t exist for me’.11 A story from the same year depicts a fashionable freshman trying to decide what pictures (presumably prints) to hang on his wall; he swithers between an image of a Cardinal or a ‘nervy and spiritual’ portrait of St John by Andrea del Sarto. Freshman bookshelves reveal what looks like ‘the inevitable set of Stevenson’, but turns out to be ‘a French edition of du Maupassant in a false binding’. Two students return from a theatre visit, bringing ‘a pail of raw oysters’. Meanwhile ‘A warm spring breeze blew the window hanging to and fro, and up from Mt. Auburn Street came the familiar evening sounds, – the tramp of feet, the slamming of club-house doors, the calls for various heads to appear at upper windows and the shrill screams of muckers, fighting and playing.’12

  Though starting university offered Tom an opportunity to reinvent himself as more outgoing, he seems not to have been particularly close to any of his immediate freshmen neighbours, and soon among classmates he acquired his customary reputation for shyness. Still, like other freshmen, he observed and sometimes participated in undergraduate pursuits. Harvard favourites ranged from consuming ‘several Coca-Colas’ or spending a morning ‘drinking rum punches’ to calling on a society hostess ‘on Beacon Hill’, the most genteel area of Boston.13 Such visits were a way to meet women, perhaps including some from Radcliffe; if undergraduates were organised enough to invite girls to a polite tea, it was expected that they would arrange a chaperone. One student advised that while ‘you might tastefully display a number of books by prominent authors in your sitting room to show that you are fond of good literature’, nonetheless ‘on general principles you had better remove all saucy pictures from the walls’; in Henry’s day fashionable prints to display had included ‘the more recherché ladies of Burne-Jones’.14 Yet for most of his undergraduate years, apart from contact with members of his family including cousin Eleanor Hinkley and his sister Ada, Tom’s shyness with girls appears to have remained inhibiting.

  Educated almost exclusively among boys, and now at what was in many ways a single-sex university (Radcliffe had its own separate arrangements), Tom seems to have been assimilated into a predominantly masculine milieu where clubbableness might mask underlying insecurities. Before reaching Harvard, he would have heard from his brother about characters to look out for. While a student, Henry had written verses for an illustrated volume, Harvard Celebrities, and had sent a copy back to St Louis, inscribing it to his mother. One of the celebrities was among Tom’s lecturers in English 28, a half-course he took as a freshman, and which outlined the history and development of English literature. Sketched by Edward Revere Little of the Class of 1904, Professor Barrett Wendell, a renowned historian of American literature who venerated Hawthorne and saw New England literary tradition as having declined, stands nattily dressed in fedora and checked suit. Smoking, he carries a stylish cane and gloves. Henry’s accompanying verse suggested that Wendell’s dress sense conjured up ‘The atmosphere of London … instead of Harvard Square’: Wendell was the ‘guiding star’ of Harvard, his mission ‘To edify the vulgar, and abash the unrefined’.15

  Another edifying local celebrity was Professor LeBaron Russell Briggs, Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory. Also dandyish, this lecturer impressed Freshman Tom in English 28. Almost a quarter of a century later he remembered how ‘Professor Briggs used to read, with great persuasiveness and charm, verses of Donne to the Freshmen’, though he confessed that ‘I have now forgotten what Professor Briggs told us about the poet; but I know that whatever he said, his own words and his quotations were enough to attract to private reading at least one Freshman who had already absorbed some of the Elizabethan dramatists, but who had not yet approached the metaphysicals.’16 Donne, a poet important to Harvard literary culture during this era, would matter greatly to Tom. Probably spurred by his mother and by quotations in Poe, as well as by his schooling in literary history, he had a good knowledge of Renaissance drama before he entered Harvard College. There, as he read Donne, Professor Briggs’s enthusiasm set the tone, and in Tom’s second year one of his classmates, Clarence Dewey Britton, won a prize for writing on ‘The Temperament of John Donne’.17 Though Gold Coaster Tom was inspired to read Donne in ‘private’, he almost lost the opportunity to pursue his undergraduate course. Only months after his Harvard career began, it nearly came to an end.

  For all his wide-ranging recreational reading (and perhaps in part because of it), he was not working hard enough. His poor performance was noted by the Assistant Dean E. H. Wells. Trepidatiously, Tom wrote to his father in St Louis, letting him know that, though he was doing well in English 28 (for which, eventually, he got an A), this half-course would not count when it came to overall consideration of his progress. He warned Papa what was coming. Shortly afterwards the Assistant Dean informed Tom’s father that ‘Thomas’s November record is so unsatisfactory that the Administrative Board will place him on probation.’ His work in English appeared ‘satisfactory’, but in several courses he had received ‘unsatisfactory’ D grades.18 These included Greek B, a literature course that moved from Plato and Xenophon to Euripides’ dramas Medea and Iphigineia among the Taurians. In some ways Tom was living the life of that caricature slacker Goldkoastides, who advised in 1906 that ‘You mustn’t miss taking Greek B, / You’ll at least get a D or an E’.19 Unfortunately, freshman Eliot was also awarded a D grade for Charles Homer Haskins’s introduction to Medieval History; for the elementary course German A; and for Government 1, Constitutional Government, whose lecturers included Professo
r Abbott Lawrence Lowell, soon to succeed C. W. Eliot as Harvard’s president.20 Tom’s performance was embarrassing: even in a subject like medieval history which had interested him from the days when he read Malory’s Arthurian tales, wrote about Sir Lanfaul and created his ‘Fable for Feasters’, he was not pulling his weight. The Assistant Dean’s letter stated that unless there was marked improvement ‘Thomas’ could be sent away from Harvard without further warning. ‘Will you kindly co-operate’, Henry Ware Eliot, Sr, was asked, ‘in encouraging the boy to raise his record to a satisfactory standard?’21 The father of ‘the boy’ replied speedily, emphasising that Tom was ‘sufficiently concerned’. Pointing out that ‘College advisors’ had gone along with Tom’s choice of courses that demanded much outside reading, his father, loyal to the son he loved, tried to excuse his offspring’s waywardness. But the concluding paternal sentence was potentially more forbidding: ‘When he comes home for the holidays I will discuss it with him.’22 On the brink of failure just months into his Harvard career, Tom made the long rail journey back to St Louis in December 1906 preparing himself for awkward conversations.

  Discussions ensued. It was time for new year resolutions. Tom returned to Mount Auburn Street in early 1907 resolved to avoid a repeat of his first-semester predicament. Released from the surveillance of his parents and Mrs Chase of Milton Academy, he had been enjoying the freedom to do as he pleased. ‘Loafing’ was Henry’s word for such behaviour, and Tom later confessed that for his first two sessions at Harvard he ‘loafed’.23 Yet returning for his second semester he did make efforts to work a mite harder. He also took part in a disciplined university activity: rowing. Even if the weather was wintry, it was just a short walk from his lodgings to the boathouse on the Charles. The daily Harvard Crimson published an editorial in its 11 February 1907 issue, hoping ‘that the call for Freshman crew candidates will meet with a prompt and hearty response’. Tom’s response was prompt enough: his name appeared in a list of aspiring freshman crew members published the following day. After many summers’ boating at Gloucester, this seemed a good idea, but Tom was not selected. He was five feet eleven inches tall, but rather skinny, and probably his physique was against him; all those years free of competitive team sports could not have helped. Later he did take up rowing in a wherry – traditionally a gentleman’s rowing boat – and finally worked up to a single scull.24 So, as he rowed, he remained alone, more disciplined and fitter, but not quite a team player.

  Though still loafing, he did at least manage to come through his first year with an overall B in Greek, followed by overall Cs for Government, History and the German Elementary Course. Some lecturers, like Professor Briggs, were inspirational; others were not. Regarded as compulsory in an era when there was much discussion at Harvard of the German university system, Tom’s course German A was, complained one of his three hundred or so classmates, a ‘Horrible routine of fairy stories and trivial sentences – “Where are the old shoes of my grandfather,” etc.’ Like so many other Harvard literati, the instructor, Assistant Professor Heinrich Conrad Bierwirth (whose Beginning German Tom had read in 1905), had an interest in Dante, but when it came to German he failed to inspire; his assistants only made things worse. ‘Instructor might as well have been a phonograph’, wrote one unimpressed listener. Undergraduates complained their teacher ‘deliberately antagonized’ students in a course variously described by Tom’s classmates as ‘useless’, ‘an absolute waste of time’ and ‘a slaughter house’.25 Tom put up with it. He chugged along at a level which at least kept him above that ‘unsatisfactory’ D grade, but he remained attracted to stylish loafing, and still stayed somewhat aloof.

  Later he made friends with an immigrant Manhattanite classmate. William George Tinckom-Fernandez had been born in India, about which he wrote occasional poems. He was one of the very few in Tom’s year not to have a permanent address listed when the Crimson published its ‘Directory of Freshmen’ in October 1906; possibly this was because the itinerant Tinckom-Fernandez was spending so much time in New York. He seems to have been the person whom Tom recalled as a ‘man whose principle of choice of courses was that the lectures should all fall on Tuesdays and Thursdays, with no lecture on Saturday: thus he was free to spend four days a week in New York. I should add that he did not follow even this course of study with sufficient application to qualify him for a degree’.26 Given that it took several hours to travel from Boston to New York by rail, this was not quite loafing of the conventional sort; but it did have style. Tinckom-Fernandez wrote considerable amounts of verse, read contemporary poetry and was already publishing in the Advocate while he and Tom were freshmen. Tom, whose avid interest in poetry was not quashed by his academic mishaps, published far less. His student friendship with ‘Tinck’ blossomed later, but literature and a sometimes cavalier attitude to academic work was something they both relished.

  When they recalled Tom, ‘shy’ is the word fellow students regularly associated with him. Some also thought him clever, despite the loafing, and even perceived that, beyond his shyness lay a capacity for companionship. An early college friend was Leon Magaw Little, who came from a New England family brimming with Harvard connections; Tom’s brother had collaborated with Edward Little on Harvard Celebrities. As a freshman Leon lived near Tom, sharing a suite of rooms with a fellow first-year at 133 Westmorly Court. A recently built Gold Coast private hall (now part of Adams House), Westmorly charged some of the highest rents, but boasted excellent plumbing, and even had its own ornate private swimming pool.27 As an old man, Leon Little remembered the impression Tom made from his first year onwards; he mentions a companionability and academic accomplishments less evident to others.

  As a freshman T. S. Eliot was of the type that welcomes friendships but is too reserved to seek them. However, his scholastic brilliance and his charming personality quickly brought to him a circle of friends of two quite divergent types, the intellectuals on the one hand and, on the other, many of those who were not considered in that category. His requirements seemed to be a reasonable amount of brains but above all a happy, keen sense of humor. Within the circles of these friends he was a very gay companion.28

  In late February 1907 Tom received another letter from Assistant Dean Wells: the Administrative Board was taking him off probation. This brought relief, not least to his parents. Tom had hardly become a ‘grind’ – a student devoted to his studies – but he had bought more time to come to terms with what Harvard had to offer.

  He was enrolled at America’s oldest university. In 1886, six years after the future United States President Theodore Roosevelt had graduated, Harvard had celebrated its 250th anniversary. That milestone encouraged intensive fundraising. New buildings went up across the campus. Still aligned to the older Calvinistic or Unitarian values of New England, Harvard was increasingly an academic centre of national and international renown. Its faculty were effortfully cosmopolitan. So, for instance, Tom’s Professor Wendell was not only a historian of American literature. He also authored The France of Today (1907), while Anglophilia was evident alike in his tailoring and in his knowledge of seventeenth-century English literature, on which he delivered the Clark Lectures at King’s College, Cambridge, England. Years afterwards, so did Tom.

  Leading American intellectuals such as philosopher and psychologist William James (Henry James’s brother), fellow philosopher Josiah Royce and polymathic cultural critic Irving Babbitt – another Francophile – were distinguished figures around the campus. Under the ambitious leadership of President Eliot, arguably the most widely known academic in America, Harvard had attracted outstanding tenured and visiting faculty, and it went on doing so. Tom would benefit in a later year from the presence of Bertrand Russell as a visiting philosophy professor; and during his second semester the famous young classicist Gilbert Murray, formerly professor of Greek at the University of Glasgow and soon to move to Oxford, delivered in Harvard’s capacious new Fogg Museum of art a series of lectures on ancient Greek poetry.<
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  Editor and translator of Euripides (his Medea appeared in 1907) as well as an enthusiast for Aristophanes, Murray was associated with interdisciplinary thinking that linked literature to anthropology. Admired by several Harvard faculty members, an emergent intellectual movement connected poetry and plays to more ancient rites. Murray’s History of Greek Literature had spoken up for ‘the Greek of the anthropologist’.29 Tom, fresh from studying Medea and hearing freshman lectures on Greek literary history, would study Aristophanes the following year. Not only were his teachers excited to host Murray, but Murray’s lectures were reported regularly in the Crimson. His interest in linking literature to rituals was attuned to that student imagination which, spoofingly, had so recently brought together in the Harvard Advocate rituals of the freshman life of ‘Goldkoastides’ with the forms of ancient classical drama, ‘Parodos’, ‘Choros’ and all. Later Tom criticised Murray as a translator of Greek drama, but in his own ‘Aristophanic Melodrama’ ‘Sweeney Agonistes’ and elsewhere, he would fuse modern-day life with Classical scholarship that invoked anthropology. At Harvard Murray argued that the Iliad’s ‘originality’ lay precisely in the way it took materials ‘ready-made from older books or traditions’ and so registered ‘an intensity of imagination, not merely of one great poet, but the accumulated emotion of generations’.30 Such ideas were being discussed around Tom while he studied Greek.

  ‘Abeunt Studia in Mores’ read one of the inscriptions in Harvard’s Memorial Hall: ‘Our studies breed our habits’.31 Tom’s studies were magpie-like, and the Harvard of his day, with its ‘elective system’ which allowed students to assemble their degree in piecemeal fashion, encouraged that. Though in his second year he studied Aristophanes, Aeschylus and Sophocles, he did not major in Greek or in any other single subject. Between 1906 and 1910, when he graduated Master of Arts, he took twenty-five courses (some, to be exact, were designated ‘half-courses’) in ten subjects: English, Latin, Greek, French, German, Comparative Literature, Philosophy, History, Fine Arts and Government. In modern parlance, one might say that his undergraduate work was substantially in comparative literature. The elective system let students follow their instincts, with the result that, as one of Tom’s lecturers put it in 1908, ‘Boys drift.’32 Generously bankrolling his son’s student years, that was what Tom’s father worried about.