Young Eliot

by Robert Crawford

  No mere intellectual game, his hard thinking at Oxford revealed aspects of his deepest beliefs. He perceived a division between carefully articulated philosophical accounts of behaviour, and the necessarily more instinctive conduct of day-to-day existence. ‘In a sense, of course’, he told Norbert Wiener in January 1915, ‘all philosophising is a perversion of reality; for, in a sense, no philosophic theory makes any difference to practice.’ Tom saw how philosophical theories claiming ‘completeness’ teetered into preposterousness. They made ‘the world appear as strange as Bottom in his ass’s head’. Tellingly, just days after writing to Aiken about sexual frustrations, he used this image of one of Shakespeare’s most grotesque frustrated lovers. Admitting that ‘one cannot avoid metaphysics altogether’, he looked to a great poet to put philosophy in its place.92

  During this period, no philosopher came closer to his thinking than Norbert Wiener. Like Tom, Wiener had engaged profoundly and sceptically with Harvard intellectuals including Royce and James; also with Bergson, with Bradley and with Russell’s mathematical logic. A fellow Sheldon Fellow in philosophy and occasional poet, Wiener had come from Harvard to Cambridge via Göttingen, at the same time as Tom had reached Oxford via Marburg. There was intellectual respect between them, but also awkwardness. Sharp-tongued, Wiener was socially clumsy. For all his usually impeccable manners, Tom, too, could be viperish; perhaps his view of Wiener was conditioned by familial anti-Semitism. Yet when, days after they shared Christmas dinner, Tom described Wiener to Aiken as ‘like a great wonderful fat toad bloated with wisdom’, those mocking words ‘fat toad’ were more than countered by ‘wonderful’ and ‘wisdom’.93

  Wiener’s recent paper on ‘Relativism’ struck a chord. Tom wrote to its author with unusual enthusiasm. Clearly the two were used to exchanging philosophical ideas face to face:

  The Relativism I cordially agree with, but nearly all of the subject matter I think we had already touched upon, at one time or another, in conversation. I hope that you will have reprints taken of it, in order that the doctrine may be promulgated. Such a doctrine can however, as it seems to me, be worked out, under different hands, with an infinite variety of detail. One can, I should think, be a relative idealist or a relative realist. What it seems to me to lend itself to most naturally, is a relative materialism – or at least this is the way in which my sympathies incline.94

  Wiener’s ‘doctrine’ was that the human self was a ‘system of experiences internally relevant to one another’; ‘we must experience in relation from the very beginning everything we ever know in relation’. According to this theory of ‘Relativism’, ‘Our mind is continually stretching out tentacles to the past and the future: here we search for a memory forgotten, there for the verification of a prediction.’ Truth was relative and relational, no knowledge either ‘self-sufficient’ or ‘absolutely certain’. Acknowledging the ‘infinitely complex’ nature of the universe, ‘relativism insists that the supposed absolute rigidity of the definitions used in metaphysics is but a fiction, that no concept can mean what it does entirely independently of everything else’.95

  Restated in aesthetic-historical terms, such thinking would be crucial to Tom’s idea (expressed several years later) of a tradition in which ‘No poet, no artist of any kind, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone.’96 Wiener had argued that ‘The relativist believes that everything, in so far as it is understood adequately, is understood in relation to other things.’97 Tom would maintain that every creative artist, to be understood and evaluated, must be set ‘for contrast and comparison, among the dead’. He went beyond Wiener in contending not just that present experience was conditioned by a network of relations with previous experience, but that in art the present can rearrange the network of the past:

  The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new.98

  This way of thinking about ‘relations’ between artworks or poems was not simply derived from Wiener’s ‘Relativism’, but his was arguably the single most important philosophical paper Tom ever read. It helped him develop ideas about the fruitfulness of constantly changing systems of relations – ways of thinking that conditioned some of his sharpest critical insights, and also helped him find in poetry ways to maintain complex networks of mutually interpenetrating meanings. These he brought into place through allusion, echo and suggestion as well as more directly. Tom was incubating such insights before Christmas 1914, but Wiener’s thinking spurred him on.

  ‘New knowledge we acquire must be internally relevant to our previous knowledge’, argued Wiener: ‘the steam-hammer of to-day is the lineal product of the first stone hammer used by primitive man’.99 Tom sought a similarly panoramic perspective, coming to think about art as the product of ‘a mind which changes’, but ‘which abandons nothing en route, which does not superannuate either Shakespeare, or Homer, or the rock drawing of the [stone-age] Magdalenian draughtsmen’.100 Wiener had a sense of scientific progress; for art, though he used the word ‘development’, Tom did not envisage straightforward ‘improvement’. Both men’s insights developed through relational thinking. Though they flowered by moving apart, their philosophical interests were strikingly contiguous. The young Wiener published on aesthetics and was fascinated by theories of reality and knowledge. His mention in his ‘Relativism’ of ‘mysticism, and all philosophical views which claim to be supported by some brand of knowledge essentially different from the sort of knowledge we recognize ourselves to possess’ signals that Wiener, like Tom, was interested in mystical experience. Wiener’s slightly later sceptical but thoroughly engaged and anthropologically informed article on ‘Ecstasy’ reveals a familiarity with authors that Tom too had been reading, including William James on religious experience, Janet on hysteria, E. D. Starbuck on the psychology of religion and Underhill on mysticism.101

  In dialogue with Wiener, Tom explained he had written a thesis about ‘Bradley’s theory of judgment’, but, unhappy with it, he planned to recast it. This would become his Harvard doctoral submission. Joachim’s input was crucial, even if Tom (as he soon told J. H. Woods) found that his own ‘fatal disposition towards scepticism’ led him constantly towards ‘criticism’ rather than ‘construction’. Tom wrestled with this tendency. However, he also made clear to Wiener that ‘I am quite ready to admit that the lesson of relativism is: to avoid philosophy and devote oneself to real art or real science.’ Conscious that Wiener like himself had studied with Santayana, he added that ‘For me, as for Santayana, philosophy is chiefly literary criticism and conversation about life.’102 These comments hint that Tom realised Wiener’s future lay in science and his own future lay in literary art. For all that he continued his philosophical studies, this was true.

  Still interested in Buddhism (he attended a Buddhist Society meeting in February), Tom maintained a Unitarian aversion to creeds, intensified by his philosophical studies. ‘I have had for several years’, he told Eleanor Hinkley, ‘a distrust of strong convictions in any theory or creed which can be formulated’. Then he added, ‘One must have theories, but one need not believe in them!’103 Back in Oxford after Christmas, he worked hard, auditing lectures by Professor J. A. Stewart on Plotinus, whom Wiener later characterised as ‘a mystic’ and ‘the last of the ancient thinkers to have added anything to the theory of aesthetics’.104 Tom made it clear to Eric Dodds, the only other student willing to keep listening to the sixty-eight-year-old Stewart’s unexcitingly delivered lectures, that he was ‘seriously interested in mystical experience’. In this t
iny class Tom opened up to his sole classmate. Like Tom, the independent-minded young Irish Classicist Dodds had been in Germany the previous summer; he had also been to Serbia, working in an army hospital. Tom and Dodds enjoyed chatting. ‘What astonished me as I came to know him better’, Dodds recalled, ‘was the wide knowledge of contemporary European literature, poetry in particular, which he gradually revealed. Then one day he confessed shyly that he had written some poems himself.’105

  Dodds told Tom he too wrote verse. He belonged to a small undergraduate poetry-reading group, the Coterie, headquartered nearby in Beaumont Street. A few members, including E. H. W. Meyerstein, had already published books or pamphlets; others were about to do so. Though their poems’ diction was often old-fashioned, nonetheless some of these people were enthusiasts for French Symbolist verse. Among them was a gangly, rather cynical, short-sighted twenty-one-year-old undergraduate from Balliol College, Aldous Huxley. Dodds invited Tom to come along. Becoming a regular member of the Coterie, characteristically he ‘said little, but that little was always pungent and to the point’. To these fellow students Tom read aloud ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. ‘We were startled’, Dodds recalled, ‘and, yes, a little puzzled, but less puzzled than excited’.106

  Tom’s circle of acquaintances was expanding in quite different directions. Ezra Pound had put him in touch with musician Arnold Dolmetsch and his wife Mabel, with whose family Tom ‘passed one of the most delightful afternoons I have ever spent’. Being in a family pleased him. Aged between three and eight, the four children danced for their visitor. Always good with youngsters, he was ‘wild to see them again’.107 Also through Pound, he was in contact with Wyndham Lewis. Six years Lewis’s junior, Tom met this sometimes pugnacious painter and novelist in a tiny ‘triangular sitting-room’ – ‘the only room in the Pound flat where there was any daylight’. Decades later, and after he had painted Tom’s portrait, Lewis recalled their first encounter:

  As I entered the room I discovered an agreeable stranger parked up one of the sides of the triangle. He softly growled at me, and we shook hands. American. A graceful neck I noted, with what elsewhere I have described as ‘a Giaconda smile.’ Though not feminine – besides being physically large his personality visibly moved within the male pale – there were dimples in the warm dark skin; undoubtedly he used his eyes a little like a Leonardo. He was a very attractive fellow then; a sort of looks unusual this side of the Atlantic. I liked him, though I may say not at all connecting him with texts Ezra had shown me about some fictional character dreadfully troubled with old age, in which the lines (for it had been verse) ‘I am growing old, I am growing old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled’ – a feature, apparently, of the humiliations reserved for the superannuated – I was unable to make head or tail of.108

  Not long afterwards, and making a rather different impression, Tom sent Lewis his poem ‘The Triumph of Bullshit’.109 Ostensibly addressed to ‘Ladies, who find my attentions ridiculous’, Tom’s bullshitting included the refrain ‘For Christ’s sake stick it up your ass’. The disconcerted Lewis also received what he called ‘Ballad for Big Louise’ – presumably a version of the 1911 ‘Ballade pour la grosse Lulu’.110 Eager to be a twenty-six-year-old enfant terrible, Tom thought these suitably scandalous for Blast; the Vorticist editor, Lewis, however, turned them down, maintaining (he told Pound) that while they were ‘excellent bits of scholarly ribaldry’, he would ‘stick to my naïf determination to have no “Words ending in -Uck, -Unt and -Ugger”’. Pound tried to cajole him – ‘I dare say Eliot will consent to leaving blanks for the offending words’ – but Lewis would not be cajoled.111 He did, though, take ‘Preludes’ and ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’ for Blast number 2. Bolovian Tom told Pound he found Lewis’s response disappointingly ‘puritanical’.112

  By around springtime in his Merton College tutorials Tom was attempting to outline what he called ‘an idealism à rebours’ – his phrasing suggests a coupling of the reclusively donnish Bradley with the scandalous French Symbolist Catholic J. K. Huysmans, author of À Rebours.113 During mid-March the Oxford student spent several days in Cambridge, where his friends Wiener and Russell were of use to him. He brandished Wiener’s term ‘relativism’ when he gave a paper on ‘The Relativity of the Moral Judgment’ to the Moral Science Club in Russell’s impressive Trinity College rooms. Visiting just a few days after Russell had hosted D. H. Lawrence, on 12 March Tom ‘attempted to compromise between an absolute idealist position and a relativist view’.114 He was invited also to the Heretics, ‘the leading literary society’ whose ‘most brilliant’ members – whom perhaps he associated with Wiener – put him in mind of the intense but scattered ‘clever Jew undergraduate mind at Harvard’. Snooty about ‘serious, industrious, narrow and plebeian’ Cambridge students, Tom sat up till 1 a.m. with ‘Bertie’ Russell, and visited George Santayana ‘who was in Cambridge too’.115 Tom claimed to argue ‘As a relativist (to use my friend Dr Wiener’s word)’; but in the typescript of this paper designed for oral delivery, he scored out the words ‘my friend’, making the youthful Dr Wiener sound more impersonally authoritative.116

  For a piece of abstract argument, his Cambridge talk was rich in biblical language, jokiness (‘the more tough-minded philosopher sometimes presents the aspect of an elderly German mathematician learning to dance’) and phrases such as ‘the hysterically minded’ which reflect his reading in Janet and other psychologists.117 Such literary flourish, well judged to impress and amuse at Trinity, was just the sort of thing Joachim disparaged. Tom’s use of it hints at how his poetic and philosophical selves, though often aligned, might also war with one another. Writing about ethics, he discussed ‘the origin and development of the moral ideas’.118 On Saturday 27 February, preparing for this paper, he had borrowed from Merton’s library The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas by Edward Westermarck.119 Tom’s Cambridge discussion drew on Westermarck. Its treatment of ‘“desires” or “satisfactions”’, ‘compulsions’ and ‘needs’ may relate to topics covered in Joachim’s lectures, which dealt around 27 February with ‘normal human bodily appetites’ and even ‘diseased or abnormal bodily appetites’ in the context of the topic of pleasure in Book VII of Aristotle’s Ethics.120

  But Tom had, too, a sense of appetites outside the classroom. However mocking he had been in an untitled Jane-Austen-cum-Dickensian playlet which he had written and sent to Eleanor Hinkley on 27 January, its sense of what one speaker calls ‘the impetuosity of my blood’ was a reaction to the news that Tom’s earnest, churchy younger cousin Fred had become engaged. Still virginal, and acutely conscious of his own desire, Tom wrote around April 1915 an untitled poem, ‘The Death of a Saint Narcissus’, later retitled ‘The Death of Saint Narcissus’. Its speaker walks ‘between the sea and the high cliffs’, then ‘over the meadows’, then ‘in city streets’, always intensely aware of his sexuality. The poem features masturbatory imagery:

  Then he knew that he had been a fish

  With slippery white belly held tight in his own fingers,

  Writhing in his own clutch, his ancient beauty

  Caught fast in the pink tips of his new beauty.

  Seeming to partake of both male and female experience, this man is entranced yet horrified by his ecstatic eroticism. He becomes ‘a dancer to God’, his flesh, Sebastian-like, ‘in love with the burning arrows’.121

  Not long before, Tom had walked by the high cliffs near Swanage, as well as over Oxford’s meadows; he had experienced a recurrence of his ‘nervous sexual attacks’ in London. However, while perhaps spurred by his own anxieties, his poem is not confessional. Its cliffs and meadows could be anywhere; its city is named ‘Carthage’, the place where that keen student of Plotinus, St Augustine, had spent his licentious youth in sexual ‘burning’. This poem about a man ‘stifled and soothed by his own rhythm’ who seems in the city ‘to tread on faces, convulsive thighs and knees’ powerfully mixes desire and ‘horror’.122 Its nar
cissistic anxiety appears in part homoerotic, in part heterosexual. It dramatises intense, confused eroticism. On 2 February Tom sent another poem to Pound. In ‘Suppressed Complex’ a woman is seen lying still in bed; the speaker dances ‘joyously in the firelight’ and, eventually, as the woman clutches the blanket, passes ‘out through the window’.123 Sexual experience is implied rather than stated in this other poem of clutching fingers. Conscious at once of powerful desire and suppression (our word might be ‘repression’), these works articulate a sense of compulsion and control which, during that term, featured, far more tamely, in Tom’s philosophy classes.

  As winter turned to spring, he made sure to tell Eleanor Hinkley he had met several young women. At Oxford he had dined with the polite daughters of Sir John Rhys, principal of Jesus College. In London, where he spent the Easter vacation and took a keen interest in work by Jacob Epstein, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Wyndham Lewis and especially Edward Wadsworth in the Vorticist-dominated Second London Group Exhibition at the Goupil Gallery, Tom had encountered ‘delightful’ red-haired Sheila Cook from New Zealand; also ‘very pretty Miss Cobb’ with her oppressively genteel Bostonian mama, and three young sisters whose surname was Petersen, the youngest (sixteen) ‘very beautiful indeed … I shall have to take her punting next term.’ Miss Petersen confirmed his frustrated sense that ‘English girls’ were ‘completely managed by their mothers – but perhaps it is merely that the ones I have met have been rather young’.124

  Compared to Conrad Aiken, whose second son died at birth on 11 February, Tom, at twenty-six, was himself in some ways ‘rather young’. He felt frustrated and under the weather, but, as often for him, such sensations were conducive to poetry. Coping with ‘indigestion, constipation, and colds constantly’, he was gathering together some verse.125 By early April, Pound, eager to foment an American-led ‘Renaissance’ of which Tom approved, was planning to feature his work as part of a ‘small anthology in the autumn’.126 Eventually published in London in November, it would be called Catholic Anthology, would sell badly, and would mark the first appearance of Tom’s poetry in a book. As spring turned towards summer, Pound ‘was enthusiastic about my poems, and gave me such praise and encouragement as I had long since ceased to hope for’.127