Young Eliot

by Robert Crawford

  Vivien had already sent Russell what he interpreted as a ‘desperate’ letter from Eastbourne. The ‘pseudo-honeymoon’ was ‘a ghastly failure’. She seemed ‘in the lowest depths of despair & not far removed from suicide’. Russell, who had exchanged several letters with Vivien, saw himself as just the man to step in: ‘she seems to have come to rely on me more or less’. He went on, ‘I think she will fall more or less in love with me, but that can’t be helped.’ Perhaps attempting to reassure his lover Ottoline, he drafted a rather devious letter, explaining that Vivien had ‘a great deal of mental passion & no physical passion, a universal vanity, that makes her desire every man’s devotion, & a fastidiousness that makes any expression of their devotion disgusting to her’. Clearly Vivien had been telling Russell in considerable detail about her relationships: ‘She has suffered humiliation in two successive love-affairs, & that has made her vanity morbid.’ He thought her ambition ‘far beyond her powers’: she needed discipline, religious or otherwise. Treating her rather as a psychological case or a character from J. M. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World, Russell saw her as capable of destroying Tom, and (though Ottoline perceived otherwise) presented his own motives as wholly benevolent: ‘At present she is punishing my poor friend for having tricked her imagination – like the heroine of the “Playboy”. I want to give her some outlet rather than destroying him. I shan’t fall in love with her, nor give her any more show of affection than seems necessary to rehabilitate her.’36 So it was that the wily Russell encouraged Tom to contact a member of the editorial committee of the International Journal of Ethics, who gave him some philosophy books to review, while, with characteristically unethical behaviour, Russell set about seducing Tom’s young wife.

  Thanking ‘Mr Russell’ for ‘kindnesses’ which had ‘quite overwhelmed him’, Tom at Eastbourne progressed like a lamb to the slaughter, or, perhaps, like a man at his wits’ end. Still conducting transatlantic negotiations by letter, he felt ‘quite exhausted each day’. Vivien was ‘still so unwell’; they were calling a doctor. Russell asked if Tom would mind if he – Russell – slept in the London flat sometimes when Tom was teaching at High Wycombe and Vivien was alone. Increasingly dependent on Russell, Tom replied,

  As to your coming to stay the night at the flat when I am not there, it would never have occurred to me to accept it under any other conditions. Such a concession to conventions never entered my head; it seems to me not only totally unnecessary, but also would destroy for me all the pleasure we take in the informality of the arrangement.37

  Committed now to remaining in England, Tom wanted his mother to send on his clothes ‘as soon as she can’. The position at High Wycombe was ‘still open’. Assuring his ‘dear father’ that he remained ‘Always your affectionate son’, he explained that, though they were struggling financially, ‘Vivien’s resourcefulness and forethought are inexhaustible.’38 After the honeymoon debacle at Eastbourne, he set off for his lodgings at High Wycombe to teach at the Royal Grammar School.

  Term began on 21 September. Set in fourteen-acre grounds on Amersham Hill, this fee-paying boys’ school, which catered for about two hundred locals and boarders, looked not unlike Milton Academy. Yet it was both older and more modern. Founded in 1562, it had moved in mid-1915 to substantial neo-Georgian buildings. Excellent facilities included science labs and (appropriately in wartime) an ‘Armoury’.39 That summer Cumbrian George Wright Arnison, the ambitious, Cambridge-educated headmaster, recorded with pride that 88% of his school’s eligible former pupils were serving in the military. Tom’s new colleagues included ‘gay, debonair and popular’ Lieutenant Matthews, who commanded the school’s Officer Training Corps.40 Arnison was a stickler for order. Soon Tom became conscious that ‘where work really shows (in the eyes of a headmaster) is in working the boys hard, keeping discipline, and making the red tape run smoothly’.41 His headmaster kept a graph of every individual pupil’s progress, insisting each have ‘fortnightly progress reports for parents to see’.42 A demanding Classicist, Arnison was sympathetic to Tom’s erudition. He encouraged him to continue his doctorate.

  The young master lodged with a landlady, Mrs Toone, in Sydney Cottage, Conegra Road, near the railway station. Nestling in the scenic Chiltern Hills, and situated on a historic route between Oxford and London, High Wycombe had been mentioned in the Domesday Book. In 1915 it was a prosperous market town coming to terms with intensive army recruiting, tales from the front, casualty lists, ‘Charliechaplinitis’ at the Grand Cinema and fears of zeppelin attacks.43 The Grammar School, whose classes began at 9.30 each morning, was about a mile and a half’s uphill walk away. Tom taught French, mathematics, history, drawing and swimming to boys of various ages on a salary of £140 a year plus school evening meals – when possible he popped back to Mrs Toone’s for lunch. Tuesday and Thursday afternoons were free, but there were always lessons to plan.

  This regime required quick thinking: sometimes, directed by Mr Arnison, Tom had to superintend games or take ‘a scripture class at five minutes notice’.44 Toing and froing between High Wycombe and London, he had to cope, too, with Vivien’s doctors’ bills and with his anxious father who had been cabling the Haigh-Woods and Ezra Pound. Not keen for Pound to receive such cables, Tom tried to reassure his father while also asking for extra cash. Salvation of a sort came when Bertrand Russell, who felt that his own views about pacifism obliged him to rid himself of investments in a munitions manufacturer, made over his £3,000 holdings to Tom. Though much later (in 1927) Tom returned the debentures, in the short term they did provide a financial safety net; and intensified a sense of indebtedness to Russell.

  On Sunday 3 October, the day after the Wycombe Royal Grammar School Officer Training Corps commanded by Lieutenant Matthews had joined a torchlit parade as part of a big local recruiting rally and had heard a ‘stirring speech’ maintaining that the war could certainly be won without ‘the Americans’,45 Russell wrote to St Louis at Tom’s request, reassuring his mother about her son’s prospects in England. Praising Tom, the Cambridge don assured Lottie Eliot he had also ‘taken some pains to get to know’ Vivien ‘who seems to me thoroughly nice, really anxious for his welfare, and is very desirous of not hampering his liberty or interfering with whatever he feels to be best’. This, surely, was what Tom thought his mother should hear. Russell praised Tom’s literary talent, while mentioning that Vivien had ensured he was ‘no longer attracted by the people who call themselves “vorticists”’.46 Though not quite true, this too was designed to go down well; when Tom’s father had perused Blast his opinion had been that ‘he did not know there were enough lunatics in the world to support such a magazine’.47 Tom was keen to reassure his parents, and also anxious to move back to London. Already thinking about another job, he told his mother about his reviewing for the International Journal of Ethics, and mentioned he was joining London’s leading philosophical association, the Aristotelian Society.

  If only the St Louis Eliots had known, they would have realised that, still fraternising with the scandalous Vorticists, their son was interested, too, in another unconventional artistic coterie. Along with her husband, Liberal MP Philip Morrell, Russell’s mistress, Lady Ottoline, hosted gatherings of the avant-garde elite in the rural hamlet of Garsington, a few miles from Oxford. There, next to the Norman St Mary’s Church whose vicar Edward Hastings Horne, a graduate of Russell’s Cambridge college, was at work on his biblical commentary The Meaning of the Apocalypse, stood the picturesque, brick-chimneyed, three-storey seventeenth-century manor house which Ottoline and Philip Morrell had bought with a three-hundred-and sixty-acre estate in 1913. Enjoying views over open countryside to distinctively shaped hills, the Wittenham Clumps, the Morrells’ house was approached between stunningly high yew hedges, and some of the goings-on in its grounds were rumoured to be positively apocalyptic. Bertrand Russell had stayed in a Garsington cottage for part of summer 1915 when he, D. H. Lawrence, artist Mark Gertler and author Gilbert Cannan (recently marri
ed to Mrs J. M. Barrie after her notorious divorce) had painted one drawing room in the manor house hot Venetian red with gold highlights, and the other a contrasting sea green. Upper-class freethinkers, the Morrells had recently moved in with their young daughter Julian. They made the place a refuge for controversial pacifists like Russell, and for artists, academics, homosexuals, heterosexuals, bisexuals, lovers and mistresses.

  By that autumn, when copies of Lawrence’s new novel The Rainbow had been confiscated by police as obscene, Tom too was ‘planning’ to rendezvous with Russell at Garsington.48 However, it appears this meeting did not take place, so he did not encounter Lady Ottoline until the following spring.49 Over the next few years, sometimes accompanied by Vivien, he would visit Garsington regularly, enjoying sitting outdoors in sunny weather, chatting and smoking with other well-dressed guests among birdsong in the sloping grounds where charismatic Ottoline developed a large rectangular pond (painted as emptily Edenic by Gertler in 1916) and an ‘Italian garden’ with copies of naked and semi-naked Classical statues of Vulcan and other deities.50 Just as Garsington juxtaposed echoes of Classical grandeur with present-day avant-garde decadence, so would several of Tom’s new poems. Flamboyantly dressed, Lady Ottoline liked unusual costumes with green, violet, yellow and turquoise silks.51 She assembled guests including Russell, Lawrence, Gertler, Lytton Strachey, Bloomsbury art critic Clive Bell, aristocratic artist Dorothy Brett (who had a crush on Lady Ottoline), Julian and Juliette Huxley, and the young Aldous Huxley. Tom knew Aldous from Oxford’s Coterie reading group; Huxley’s Crome Yellow (1921) with its phoney fortune-teller Sesostris (her name so close to that of The Waste Land’s ‘Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante’52) sent up Garsington in a novel of apocalyptic prophecies, frustrated love, philosophers, artists and poets. Even better known is D. H. Lawrence’s metamorphosis of Lady Ottoline into the character of Hermione Roddice in Women in Love, which led Ottoline to try to sue him.

  When Tom began gravitating towards this often unconventional, intellectually starry and sometimes fractious company, he was received less as an obscure, struggling schoolteacher than as Bertrand Russell’s smart young friend, the unusually promising American poet. Russell’s contacts would help secure Tom’s welcome also into the Bloomsbury set that included novelists Leonard and Virginia Woolf, though Tom was reluctant to be co-opted by any one artistic grouping. The celebrated Cambridge philosopher’s poet-protégé was welcomed into top-drawer English society. Between them, those very different mentors, Russell and Ezra Pound, gave Tom access to several English artistic elites.

  Meanwhile Russell, who had had an affair with his previous typist, hired Vivien to type up his thoughts on pacifism. ‘I would not for the world have any scandal’, he had written to Lady Ottoline when she worried about the consequences of Vivien’s falling in love with him, ‘and as for the Eliots it is the purest philanthropy’.53 Spending time with Vivien while Tom was in High Wycombe, Russell grew ‘very fond’ of her, though he assured Lady Ottoline ‘she does not attract me much physically’.54 That adverb, ‘much’, sounds weaselly. Ray Monk’s biography of Russell traces his developing relationship with Vivien in astute detail. On 10 November the childless Russell wrote to Ottoline Morrell that he had ‘come to love’ Tom ‘as if he were my son’:

  He is becoming much more of a man. He has a profound and quite unselfish devotion to his wife, and she is really very fond of him, but has impulses of cruelty to him from time to time. It is a Dostojewsky type of cruelty, not a straightforward every-day kind. I am every day getting things more right between them, but I can’t let them alone at present, and of course I myself get very much interested. She is a person who lives on a knife-edge, and will end as a criminal or a saint – I don’t know which yet. She has a perfect capacity for both.55

  By this time Vivien, corresponding with Scofield Thayer, was showing Thayer’s letters to Russell. She was proud to be ‘the wife of a poet whose fame is rapidly increasing through the length & breadth of more than one land’. However, ‘in order not to become merely “T. S. Eliot’s wife”’, Vivien was embarking on a career in ballet. She went to practise in an underground Soho room where she wore a short black skirt and ‘Bertie or Tom’ came to watch her.56 Joking, she compared herself to the theatrical dancer Jenny Pearl in Compton Mackenzie’s 1912 novel Carnival; pursued by several lovers, Jenny finds ‘The ennui of life’ sometimes ‘overwhelming’ and is eventually murdered by her husband.57 Again, jokily, she told Thayer, ‘We have more or less of a triple ménage. Bertie Russell has taken us to his bosom. I cheer him up, he says – & the flat rings with his raucous mirth.’ She then mentioned that she and Tom would be going to America in the spring, perhaps for an extended stay. He would sit his doctoral exams, and she would bring some of Russell’s ‘seditious writings’ to distribute in New York. ‘Will you help me Scofield deeear?’58

  In sickness and in health Vivien enjoyed exercising flirtatious power. Russell, like others, felt it. Awkwardly combining paternalism with sexual attraction, he promised he would go on holiday with her in January 1916, and chose the Torbay Hotel, Torquay, in Devon. Though Vivien had been corresponding pleasantly with the Eliots in America, her planned transatlantic trip with Tom in the spring was off. Now back in London, Tom had found another teaching job at Highgate Junior School while intensively rewriting his thesis. He worried about the war, which was ruining so many lives. The shocking news had reached him that Jean Verdenal had been killed in action: that death of such a close friend would haunt him. Immediately, though, war brought other problems. Due to conscription, he might be about to lose his ‘putative publisher’ to the army. Moreover, Vivien had been ‘very ill’, triggering further anxieties – not least about medical bills.59 With all these stresses, it was a relief when Russell took her on holiday.

  Self-protectively reverting to a former self, Tom wrote to Aiken, summoning up the old Bolo spirit and rhyming ‘klassic’ with ‘ass sick’. He congratulated Aiken on his new collection of poems. Probably as a result of appearing in Poetry, Tom had entertained hopes of getting a volume of verse published by Sherman French and Company of Beacon Street, Boston. ‘They wrote asking me to send them a book, and when I wrote back asking for terms they said they hadn’t known I was an Englishman and they could only boom books by native talent.’ Disgusted, he told Aiken he had ‘written their name on bumwash’. He also said he was ‘having a wonderful life’, emphasising that he had ‘lived through material for a score of long poems, in the last six months’.60 None of these, however, had he written.

  After five days, Russell left Vivien in Torquay and Tom, at Russell’s expense, joined her there. Tom wrote to Russell expressing great gratitude: he was sure the older man had ‘handled’ Vivien ‘in the very best way – better than I’. He felt they owed Russell a huge amount, perhaps even Vivien’s life. She was still, however, sick with exhaustion, headache, faintness and stomach problems. Such ills would become central to their married life – frightening for both of them, and hardly conducive to conjugal bliss. Tom knew sex could be exciting, but could also pall; its urges might be controlled or deflected. Observing schoolboys in the classroom, he summarised, with approval and a certain chilled, schoolmasterly clarity, the arguments of A. Clutton Brock’s The Ultimate Belief:

  For the boy whose childhood has been empty of beauty, the boy who has never learned the detached curiosity for beauty, the sexual instinct when it is aroused may mean the only possible escape from a prosaic world. Hence a danger which may be followed by a still greater disaster, the passage from a period of violent excitement into a maturity of commonplace. We must learn to love always, to exercise those disinterested passions of the spirit which are inexhaustible and permanently satisfying.61

  This was ‘T. Stearns Eliot’, reviewer in the International Journal of Ethics, perfecting his magisterial tone; but around the same time in later 1916, writing to Henry about how he felt, he described his year as ‘the most awful nightmare of anxiety that the mi
nd of man could conceive’.62

  As he struggled to write up a revised version of his PhD, his worries were financial, literary and academic, but at the heart of them lay Vivien and her health. When they married he had not known her medical history in detail.63 Now he saw all her difficulties. Early in the year she exhausted herself agonising over an impending visit to the dentist. Toothache and that dentist’s mention of ‘a possibility of an abscess’ reduced her to a state of ‘shock’. Tom, who thought the dentist lacking in tact, turned to Russell; Vivien was now ‘very ill’, suffering ‘very great pain, both neuralgia and stomach’.64 Russell told Woods at Harvard in early March that Tom, when not schoolteaching at Highgate, spent his spare time looking after his wife ‘with the most amazing devotion and unselfishness’.65

  Having moved out of Bertie’s London quarters, the Eliots were now in a rented flat at 3 Culworth House in St John’s Wood, a neo-Georgian, mansion-style block about a mile from Vivien’s parents. Almost at once they sought alternative accommodation. Vivien was ‘very ill all the winter’, Tom told Aiken. No sooner did he suggest she was ‘gradually getting better’ in the summer of 1916 than there was another bout of ‘neuralgia’ and sinus trouble.66 In September a doctor told her she was not eating properly. As she put it,

  He said I was chiefly starved! The headaches are called hemicranial migraine, and they are really ‘nerve storms’ affecting one whole side of me – they make me sick and feverish and they always last 15–24 hours – and I rise up weak and white as if I had been through some long and dreadful illness. He explained that they are caused in me by starvation – I do not eat enough to nourish my nervous system – and brain.67