Young Eliot

by Robert Crawford

  Bottles of the fresh and bottles of decay,

  Clean bottles, milk bottles, bottles of dawn.2

  To be lampooned was distinction of a sort, and Tom was good natured. He had been spotted staggering from a drinks party or ‘punch’ held at the Lampoon’s office, probably in spring 1908. Conrad Aiken, an eagerly prolific poet who published frequently in the Advocate, clearly remembered one of their earliest encounters. Aiken was strolling along with a mutual friend when

  a singularly attractive, tall, and rather dapper young man, with a somewhat Lamian smile, reeled out of the door of the Lampoon on a spring evening, and, catching sight of me, threw his arms about me – from the open windows above came the unmistakable uproar of a punch in progress. ‘And that,’ observed my astonished companion, ‘if Tom remembers tomorrow, will cause him to suffer agonies of shyness.’ And no doubt it did: for he was shy.3

  Tom’s shyness did not inhibit his developing friendship with Aiken. The two undergraduates relished Bolovian obscenities, and became good sparring partners, even as they developed into significantly different poets. Both had grown up in the South but came from New England families, yet Aiken’s background was as shocking as Tom’s was sedate. At the age of eleven Aiken in Georgia had discovered his parents’ bodies after his father, a brain surgeon, had murdered his mother then shot himself. After a protected upbringing in his aunt’s house in Massachusetts, the clever, traumatised boy had proceeded from Middlesex School in Concord to Harvard. At university, Aiken came to be fascinated by philosophy; the stylish philosopher George Santayana became his favourite professor. However, as his poetry developed, this young writer would gravitate towards an interest in psychology, desire and action rather than bookish cogitation. Tom cogitated more deeply, even though his early Harvard grades suggested otherwise.

  Yet after two years of loafing, Tom had grown more ambitious as a poet. The next work he published, during the first semester of his third, junior year, has ‘flowers’ in it too, but is revealingly different. Greek scholar Tom contributed to the 25 November 1908 Advocate a poem with a Homeric title, ‘Circe’s Palace’. Its subject is the Odyssey’s famous seductress who turns men into beasts. Possibly owing something to Tennyson’s ‘Lotos-Eaters’ and Swinburne’s ‘Hymn to Proserpine’ and ‘The Garden of Proserpine’, its stanza form and brevity set it apart from theirs. Where Columbo and Bolo relish bestial sex, Tom’s speaker of this significantly dissimilar poem fears it, and, in language that it is tempting to read as sexual, finds around Circe’s ‘fountain which flows / With the voice of men in pain’ further ‘flowers’. These, however, are blooms that ‘no man knows’ – a phrase used several times by Swinburne. ‘Their petals are fanged and red / With hideous streak and stain’. Alarming, maybe menstrual, they are associated with a terrifying female enchantress who reduces her suitors to mindless animality. They become panthers, a ‘sluggish python’, ‘peacocks’ with the eyes of lost men.4

  This poem’s language shows originality. Though Swinburne had used the adjective ‘fanged’ of flowing water, Tom, in this lyric whose vegetation springs from the dead, seems to be the first poet to use it of flowers; towards the end of Act 3, Scene two of Macbeth ‘Light thickens’ just before mention of a ‘wood’: in Tom’s poem it is a forest which ‘thickens’. Sometimes, probably unconsciously, he takes over older wording but recontextualises it: Tom’s phrase ‘stately and slow’ occurs in Lionel Johnson’s 1890 poem, ‘The Troopship’. Yet, though sometimes one can detect where phrases come from, there are wordings in ‘Circe’s Palace’ that sound just right and are Tom’s own: ‘streak and stain’ or ‘sluggish python’, for instance. Echoic and acquisitive but also accurate and original, his verbal imagination was developing.

  As student poets jostled for position, not everyone recognised this. Before the Lampoon skewered him, Tom seems to have submitted work to the Monthly as well as to the Advocate, but the Monthly’s editors were not keen. Widely published John Hall Wheelock, then about to graduate, thought Tom’s ‘Song’ beginning ‘The moonflower opens to the moth’ might be worth using if there was room in the Monthly; Tom’s classmate John Silas Reed, later a famous journalist, agreed. Others, though, including Tom’s pushy contemporary Edward Eyre Hunt (already well known in undergraduate magazines) advised against publication. Eventually, the Monthly men passed on the ‘moonflower’ poem as a gift to their neighbours on the top floor of the Union, the Advocate editorial committee. Tinckom-Fernandez thought their gift should be rejected. Tom’s classmate Harford Powell agreed vehemently. Despite all this, the poem ended up being accepted, perhaps because another Advocate man, undergraduate poet Haniel Long, was really struck by it. For Long, Tom’s was the stand-out Advocate lyric of the year. So impressed was he that after it appeared on 26 January 1909 he went round to the printer’s to hunt for the original manuscript. He retrieved it, complete with Monthly and Advocate editorial comments scribbled on the back.5

  Tom had fiddled with the first line of this lyric’s second stanza. First he had written ‘Whiter the flowers which you hold’; then he had changed ‘which’ to ‘that’; then he took out the word ‘that’, and recast the line as ‘Whiter the flowers, Love, you hold’.6 As poets must, he cared about cadence: the word ‘Love’, a stressed syllable, sounded better than the unstressed ‘which’ or ‘that’. Yet his capital ‘L’ shows this love is an idealisation, offering only the most pallid kind of experience. Despite regarding with horror the ‘petals … red’ of ‘Circe’s Palace’, the poet has his speaker long for more exotic excitement. When this poem was written, the word ‘scarlet’ in an erotic context was associated with a ‘scarlet woman’ – a prostitute.

  Whiter the flowers, Love, you hold,

  Than the white mist on the sea;

  Have you no brighter tropic flowers

  With scarlet life, for me?7

  Tom might write about ‘scarlet life’, but he was not experiencing much. If he overcame his shyness sufficiently to attend dances in polite Brattle Hall and Radcliffe, that was as far as things went. For him neither his nearby cousin Eleanor Hinkley nor his sister Ada represented ‘scarlet life’.

  By the time he wrote those words Tom was living in 25 Holyoke House, just opposite the Yard. This five-storey hall of residence had been fully renovated over the summer, so fall 1908 was a good time to move in, even though rents had gone up.8 It was easy to travel into Boston by electric tramcar, get away from Cambridge village life, go to the theatre and enjoy big-city restaurants. There were also exhibitions at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, concerts and shows. Upscale theatres such as the Boston Opera House (opened in 1909) advertised regularly in Harvard’s magazines. Tom, however, liked going with his friend Aiken to the much less reputable Grand Opera House, in the city’s South End at Dover and Washington Streets.

  Two rival melodrama theatres stood at this intersection. Painted white, festooned with electric signs that blazed at night, the New Grand Theatre offered cheap seats and ‘low burlesque’. The larger Grand Opera House opposite charged more for its melodramas and vaudeville extravaganzas.9 This was a poor part of town, with a substantial Irish, African American and Jewish population. Next to the Grand Opera and about two hundred feet from Dover Street Elevated Railway Station, the run-down Hotel Caprio had lain derelict for some time.10 A decade earlier, it had been noted that ‘prostitution … is much more deeply rooted in the South End than in any other part of the city’.11 Though some zones had been cleaned up, this remained the case throughout Tom’s student days in an area partly overshadowed by overhead train tracks. Along Washington Street near the Grand Opera House were cheap restaurants and saloons familiar to hookers and petty crooks.

  After seeing a show at the Grand Opera House, Tom and Conrad Aiken would sometimes drink in a nearby bar Tom recalled as the Opera Exchange; the bartender was among the prototypes for the character of Sweeney in some of his mature poems.12 This sort of slumming on the part of Harvard students was not unusual. Indeed, litera
ture encouraged it. The Scottish poet John Davidson, recommended to Tom by ‘Tinck’, had written a whole collection called In a Music Hall, while Nineties poets like England’s Arthur Symons (whose work Tom came to know ‘pretty well’) liked to write about working-class showgirls and savour the life of popular theatres.13 Tom may have come to see ‘scarlet life’, but he enjoyed the shows too. In 1908 a fellow undergraduate wrote about popular comic operas in the Advocate, relishing the sort of show whose last act was set in ‘a street in the Big City. On the right, palatial residence of Jacob Porous Plaster – on the left, a horrid slum.’14 Some comic operas ridiculed higher learning and the genteel Bostonian milieu Tom’s cousins inhabited, or at least could be adapted to do so in ways Harvard students enjoyed:

  She learned, goodness gracious, that God is fallacious –

  A theory that Boston reveres.

  But she grew pretty sour on old Schopenhauer

  And Nietsche reduced her to tears.15

  Tom didn’t just like the clever-clever stuff, though. He remembered sitting ‘entranced, in the front stalls’, watching No Mother to Guide Her, an elaborate 1905 melodrama by Lillian Mortimer involving bigamy, beatings, an escaped convict and a soubrette from New York’s Bowery called Bunco.16 Probably it was at the Grand Opera House he saw George M. Cohan’s Fifty Miles from Boston, a hit show that toured New England between 1907 and 1909. Featuring a Harvard student who fell in love with a postmistress, it centred round a bet on the Harvard baseball team. Onstage drama included a dastardly villain, a robbery and a raging post-office fire with firemen, tooting whistles and much raising and lowering of the curtain. Principally, the rickety plot was an excuse for musical numbers. One reviewer picked out a song called ‘Harrigan’ as having ‘a catchy touch and go to it that was a bit exhilarating’.17 Tom thought so too. Years later, working on what became The Waste Land, he drafted a long passage mentioning the Opera Exchange and quoting from ‘Harrigan’: ‘“I’m proud of all the Irish blood that’s in me, / “There’s not a man can say a word agin me”’.18 Tom’s lines also echo a song from Mae Anwerda Sloane’s ‘My Evaline’ from the 1901 hit The King’s Carnival (‘Meet me in the shade of the old apple tree, / Ee-vah, I-vah, Oh-vah, E-va-line!’). He runs this together with ‘Meet me pretty Lindy by the watermelon vine’, a 1904 song by Thomas S. Allan.19 Brought with him from St Louis, his taste for popular culture very different from the mores of Harvard classrooms took him repeatedly to the Grand Opera, a theatre never afraid to offer audiences pretty girls, choruses, staged knife-fighting, and even (when Tom was four years into Harvard) ‘an electrical prairie fire, and an exhibition of lasso throwing’.20

  Visits to his cousins were tamer affairs. Cousin Fred was now a Harvard undergraduate in the same year as Conrad Aiken, and had his own taste for theatricals, playing a minor part in a student production. Tom’s sister Ada worked from 1909 for the Massachusetts State Board of Charities. Her scholarly husband, ‘Shef’ Sheffield, was interested in literature; long fascinated by oriental culture, he had written fiction for the Advocate as an 1890s undergraduate, and was someone with whom Tom could talk.21 Shef was also a sounding-board for Lottie Eliot, anxious about her son’s university studies.22 Tom seemed uncertain in what direction to go. He had published a few poems, and had withstood literary rejection and mockery. But other student poets were doing more. The year before Tom started at Harvard, Van Wyck Brooks and his friend John Wheelock had published a joint collection of poems while still freshmen; in Tom’s own class Tinckom-Fernandez was a frequently praised Advocate contributor, already on the editorial board in his second year; Edward Eyre Hunt was well connected, and looked set to become a literary star; even Tom’s poet friend Aiken, praised by an English professor for his ‘most imaginative’ freshman verse, had published far more than Tom.23 Poetry is about quality, not quantity: Tom knew that. Fed up with Wheelock’s Swinburne worship, Hunt’s bluster and a milieu loud with echoes of Kipling, Andrew Lang and Yeatsian Nineties poets, he was trying to escape what he saw as a literary impasse.

  Some friends helped. When he read ‘Thirty Bob a Week’, a poem by Tinckom-Fernandez’s admired John Davidson, Tom savoured the way that as early as 1894 this Scot had caught a contemporary accent. Making use of internal rhymes as well as end rhymes, Davidson, nevertheless, sounded arrestingly ‘unpoetic’. The Celtic Twilight Yeats, whose more conventially poetic lyrics of lake isles and whispering reeds were so beguilingly plangent, seems to have meant almost nothing to Tom as he read recent poets’ work, searching for notes of modernity. Attuned to London’s streets and subway system, Davidson, however, offered an edgy presentation of a working-class urban clerk. With ‘pipe all alight’ this protagonist spends the day ‘A-scheming how to count ten bob a pound’, and finds something deeply unsettling in the state of his soul:

  I step into my heart and there I meet

  A god-almighty devil singing small,

  Who would like to shout and whistle in the street,

  And squelch the passers flat against the wall;

  If the whole world was a cake he had the power to take,

  He would take it, ask for more, and eat them all.24

  In 1908 Tom wasn’t able to write like this. He was listening for something. He wasn’t sure what. Then, at the end of that year, he found it.

  He had gone to a favourite haunt, the Union Library. There, upstairs, warmly protected from the December weather outside, he was looking through recently received books. Alert University library staff helped stock the Union’s shelves. Tom’s eye was caught by the name of Arthur Symons, and by his book’s title, The Symbolist Movement in Literature. It was a small second edition published earlier that year and just imported from London. The volume’s dedication to W. B. Yeats presented Symbolism as the pre-eminent literary movement in Europe from Ireland to Russia. ‘Without symbolism there can be no literature’, began the first chapter, but Symons’s special Symbolism had a capital ‘S’ and was, he argued, something new: ‘What distinguishes the Symbolism of our day from the Symbolism of the past is that it has now become conscious of itself.’ This Symbolist poetry fused self-conscious rebellion against tired conventions with a sense of renewed religious mission. ‘It is an attempt to spiritualize literature, to evade the old bondage of rhetoric.’ Here was a ‘revolt’ against ‘rhetoric’ and ‘materialistic tradition’; it had the power to speak ‘as only religion had hitherto spoken to us, it becomes itself a kind of religion, with all the duties and responsibilities of the sacred ritual’.25

  Symons’s book invoked ‘Mysticism’, but in a very different way from Tom’s mother.26 It was full of modern French poets whose behaviour would have horrified Lottie Eliot, and who had certainly not been part of the curriculum of Professor Wright’s French course. Probably Tom had been reading Baudelaire for some time. Years later, he recalled:

  I think that from Baudelaire I learned first, a precedent for the poetical possibilities, never developed by any poet writing in my own language, of the more sordid aspects of the modern metropolis, of the possibility of fusion between the sordidly realistic and the phantasmagoric, the possibility of the juxtaposition of the matter-of-fact and the fantastic. From him, as from Laforgue, I learned that the sort of material that I had, the sort of experience that an adolescent had had, in an industrial city in America, could be the material for poetry … It may be that I am indebted to Baudelaire chiefly for half a dozen lines out of the whole of Fleurs du Mal; and that his significance for me is summed up in the lines:

  Fourmillante Cité, cité pleine de rêves,

  Où le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant …

  [Swarming City, city full of dreams.

  Where the ghost in broad daylight accosts the passer-by…]

  I knew what that meant, because I had lived it before I knew that I wanted to turn it into verse on my own account.27

  Reading French poetry, he understood how his own childhood among the St Louis fogs could be an artistic asset. But
Symons’s book, with its account of Jules Laforgue and other poets, took him beyond Baudelaire. As he read about Gérard de Nerval (whose works he would buy – ‘two copies’ – and whom he would quote in The Waste Land), he discovered a poet haunted by his sense of isolation in the ‘crowded and more sordid streets of great cities’, a man who had found ‘his ideal in the person of an actress’ and craved ‘the fatal transfiguration of the footlights’ in a theatre where ‘reality and the artificial change places with so fantastic a regularity’ that men were drawn like ‘moths into its flame’.28 Such a process, Symons asserted, would continue ‘as long as men persist in demanding illusion of what is real, and reality in what is illusion’. To its readers Symons’s book offered heady, even bewildering stuff; but to Tom, divided between shy Harvard bookishness and slumming it in Boston’s South End, it brought clarity too: it was a ‘revelation’.29 ‘Every artist lives a double life’, wrote Symons. Though poets were ‘for the most part conscious of the illusions of the imagination’, nevertheless there were peculiarly intense writers such as Villiers de L’Isle Adam, ‘The Don Quixote of Idealism’, for whom ‘it was not only in philosophical terms that life … was the dream, and the spiritual world the reality’. Writing of ‘hallucination’ and of scandalous Paul Verlaine who had ‘realised the great secret of the Christian mystics’, or decadent Catholic novelist Huysmans or playwright Maurice ‘Maeterlinck as a Mystic’, Symons presented authors – principally poets – able to set forth vision with religious intensity, but not with vagueness: ‘the artist who is also a mystic hates the vague with a more profound hatred than any other artist’.30

  At times Symons wrote about his French poets with well nigh messianic zeal. It was ‘on the lines of that spiritualising of the word, that perfecting of form in its capacity for allusion and suggestion, that confidence in the eternal correspondences between the visible and invisible universe, which [Stéphane] Mallarmé taught, and too intermittently preached, that literature must now move, if it is in any sense to move forward’. Yet, although Tom went on to read all Symons’s Symbolists and would learn from them, one in particular obsessed him. Encountering Jules Laforgue, Tom, at the age of twenty, began reading a French poet who was also in his twenties; yet they could never meet, because Laforgue had died at the age of twenty-seven, about a year before Tom’s birth. Markedly more than the Harvard student from Missouri, Laforgue was a displaced person: born in Montevideo, he had grown up in France. A poet of ‘nerves’, Laforgue had written, according to Symons, ‘letters of an almost virginal naïveté’, yet his literary art was peculiarly knowing, daring in content and, especially, in form: