Young Eliot

by Robert Crawford

  On new medication, she hoped to improve, but slowly. It is tempting to speculate that this sounds like an eating disorder, but in early-twentieth-century parlance Vivien’s troubles were variously assumed to involve nerves, hysteria, colitis, neuralgia, stomach cramps, migraines and other ailments. Troubled, and never long in remission, she always felt exhausted by her illnesses. So did Tom.

  Constantly worried about her, he now spent his weekdays teaching small boys at the fee-paying Highgate Junior School. Described by him in 1921 as ‘near London’, it was a sixteenth-century foundation.68 The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who had ended his days in Highgate, was buried in the school chapel; another poet Gerard Manley Hopkins had been a pupil in the 1850s. Based in Cholmeley House, the Junior School catered for boys around the age of ten. Tom’s immediate boss was E. H. Kelly, a competent teacher with a talent for woodturning. In these war years he impressed Tom by turning ‘crutches beautifully’ on a small lathe.69 More forbidding, in mortar board and billowing silk gown, red-faced Dr J. A. H. Johnston, Highgate’s scientifically-minded headmaster, was an irate Scottish mathematician. Passing regularly through the school ‘like a tornado’, and said to be the victim of a gastric ulcer, Dr Johnston annoyed boarders (who breakfasted on ‘bread and scrape’ and lunched on ‘lentil pie’) by ostentatiously ‘necking into roast chicken’.70 A junior teacher under Mr Kelly, Tom could seem quiet and remote, but at least one boy – ten-year-old fledgling poet John Betjeman – remembered ‘The American master, Mr Eliot’ as ‘That dear good man’.71 Tom taught ‘French, Latin, lower mathematics, drawing, swimming, geography, history, and baseball’.72 Vivien and his mother thought he was wasted in the job. However, as with all his adult employments, he gave it his best, and taught at Highgate until the end of 1916. He thought hard about education that year, sympathetic to the idea that ‘Boys should be taught to respect the values of truth, beauty and goodness for their own sake … They should learn why knowledge is valuable, apart from purely practical success, the pursuit of which may fail to excite the more independent.’73

  In March the young schoolteacher and his wife dined in Soho with Bertrand Russell, and Ottoline and Philip Morrell. Russell had shown Lady Ottoline the October 1915 Poetry containing ‘The Boston Evening Transcript’, ‘Aunt Helen’ and ‘Cousin Nancy’. Thinking these ‘very remarkable’, Lady Ottoline welcomed the Eliots into her London circle, which included painters Dorothy Brett and Dora Carrington as well as the novelist Molly MacCarthy. Ottoline was struck by Vivien’s refusal to accompany Tom to America ‘as she was afraid of submarines’. In Soho, however, she recalled,

  The dinner was not a great success. T. S. Eliot was very formal and polite, and his wife seemed to me of the ‘spoilt kitten’-type, very second-rate and ultra feminine, playful and naïve, anxious to show she ‘possessed’ Bertie, when we walked away from the restaurant she headed him off and kept him to herself, walking with him arm-in-arm. I felt rather froissée at her bad manners.

  Next day I gave a tea-party at Bedford Square. One of the drawing-rooms had been turned into my bedroom. The bed was a large, very high four-poster, with Cardinal-coloured silk curtains, trimmed with silver; it was very lovely looking into that room from the Great Drawing Room. Molly MacCarthy and Dora Sanger, Brett and Carrington and Gertler and Mr. and Mrs. Eliot and Bertie came. It seemed a happy gay tea-party, at least thus I always remember it.74

  Conscious Vivien would be too ill to accompany him to America, and did not want to go, Tom aimed to submit his PhD as soon as possible. He worked hard on the new version, ‘The Nature of Objects, with reference to the philosophy of F. H. Bradley’. Drawing heavily on his Oxford work, its first chapter dealt with knowledge of immediate experience.

  A toothache, or a violent passion, is not necessarily diminished by our knowledge of its causes, its character, its importance or insignificance. To say that one part of the mind suffers and another part reflects upon the suffering is perhaps to talk in fictions. But we know that those highly-organized beings who are able to objectify their passions, and as passive spectators to contemplate their joys and torments, are also those who suffer and enjoy the most keenly.75

  If Vivien and her toothache were in his mind as he wrote, so was Thackeray’s manipulative lover Becky Sharp, as well as ideas that would nourish his own aesthetic theory. Discussing imagination and memory, he argued that ‘It is not true that the ideas of a great poet are in any sense arbitrary’; rather, ‘the apparent irrelevance is due to the fact that terms are used with more or other than their normal meaning’.76 Drawing on his earlier work, Tom stressed the importance of ‘relation’ and of ‘degrees of reality’; he confronted, too, issues of solipsism. The only poet mentioned is the French Symbolist Mallarmé (defended against being read solely in terms of ‘morbid psychological activity’), and only one poem features – revealingly misquoted. Substituting the word ‘shadows’ for ‘visions’, Tom altered the first line of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnet 26 from Sonnets from the Portuguese, that begins ‘I lived with visions for my company’; the poet thanks her beloved for coming to ‘be’ what earlier dreams only ‘seemed’.77 Though she supported his writing of the thesis, Vivien believed Tom’s real bent lay in poetic vision, not philosophical shadow-play. In this, as in other ways, she was the inspiring opposite of his mother. Lottie Eliot explained in a May 1916 letter to Russell that she had ‘absolute faith’ in Tom’s ‘Philosophy but not in the vers libres’.78 Vivien was in some regards just what her young poet husband needed: ‘Tom is wonderful’, she assured Henry.79 ‘Of course’, she added later that year, ‘he has me to shove him – I supply the motive power, and I do shove.’80

  Like his mother, Vivien saw Tom’s potential; but each woman regarded that potential differently. Vivien shoved, but held Tom back too. As the time drew near for him to sail to the States on 1 April 1916 to sit his doctoral examinations, Tom was urged by Pound to take an extra trunk filled with Vorticist paintings for a planned New York exhibition. Wyndham Lewis did not want all his pictures sunk ‘in these torpedoing times’: sending half with Tom and the rest in a different vessel should reduce the risk.81 Vivien, more anxious about her new husband than about any paintings, grew increasingly worried Tom’s ship would be vulnerable. Foul weather hardly helped. Aware on 29 March that her nerves were ‘all to pieces’, Russell contacted Tom’s father, strongly advising him to cable Tom not to make the trip unless his doctorate was worth risking his life.82 Next day Tom cabled to say he was not coming. He and Vivien had just moved flats; the strain was telling on them both.

  To give him a change of scene, in early April Russell took him on his first visit to Garsington. ‘Rather lonely, and very lovable’, Tom (Russell assured Ottoline Morrell) had ‘an intense desire to see you again’.83 Tom did not shine. A disappointed Lady Ottoline, conscious of the attraction between Russell and his former student’s wife, nicknamed the young poet ‘The Undertaker’ and described his tense, guarded demeanour in her journal, adding further reflections later.

  I never feel my best with Bertie. I cannot tell why. He always quenches my light-headedness and gaiety and puts a blight on me. T. S. Eliot, his American poet friend came with him. I was very excited that T. S. Eliot was coming with him, but I found him dull, dull, dull. He never moves his lips but speaks in an even and monotonous voice, and I felt him monotonous without and within. Where does his queer neurasthenic poetry come from, I wonder? From his New England, Puritan inheritance and upbringing? I think he has lost all spontaneity and can only break through his conventionality by stimulants or violent emotions. He is obviously very ignorant of England and imagines that it is essential to be highly polite and conventional and decorous, and meticulous. I tried to get him to talk more freely by talking French to him, as I thought he might feel freer doing so, but I don’t think it was a great success, although better than English. He speaks French very perfectly, slowly and correctly. As I remember this I feel how odd it was, but it shows how very foreign El
iot seemed to me then; but I generally found that Americans are as foreign to us as Germans are.84

  Socially, maritally and professionally, Tom was struggling, even if Russell thought Vivien ‘all right again’.85 ‘In a state of mental confusion’, Tom told Woods at Harvard that his ship’s departure had been postponed for five days at the last minute, but assured his former professor he would come ‘at the first opportunity’.86

  The new London flat, ‘nearly a top one’ and overlooking a courtyard, was at 18 Crawford Mansions, a newly built, five-storey red-brick neo-Georgian building on the corner of Crawford Street and Homer Lane, Marylebone.87 Five pale stone steps led to a handsome communal front door whose panels included art nouveau ironwork. Vivien liked it. Though there were pubs, ‘slums and low streets and poor shops close around us’, tantalisingly near were expensive, fashionable squares.88 Noise came from neighbours’ gramophones, but the plumbing was good – constant hot water and ‘every modern convenience’ – even if by Vivien’s standards the apartment was small. There was a hall, dining room (which doubled as Tom’s dressing room and study), drawing room, substantial bedroom, kitchen and a good bathroom. Vivien chose fashionable decor: orange wallpaper in the dining room, black-and-white stripes in the hall. For all her illnesses, she still liked to excite. Signing herself ‘the most fervent Vivien S-E’, she wrote to Scofield Thayer, who had announced he too was getting married. She urged him to ‘Try black silk sheets and pillow covers – they are extraordinarily effective – so long as you are willing to sacrifice yourself.’89 But not long afterwards she was ‘very ill in the night’, Tom told Russell anxiously. ‘She seems very overdone.’90

  At Harvard Tom’s doctoral thesis was extremely well received, even though its author was absent. Royce considered it ‘the work of an expert’, Hoernlé ‘a most valuable piece of work’. Asking Tom to confirm that his interest in philosophy was as strong as ever, Professor Woods hinted at the possibility of a Harvard appointment.91 This was just what Tom’s mother hoped for, and what Vivien sought to avoid. Tom strove to keep options open. Continuing to be solicitous, Russell had put him in touch with Philip Jourdain, a mathematician assembling a special feature on Leibniz for the October issue of Chicago’s prestigious philosophy journal the Monist. Jourdain was the magazine’s editor in England. As a result, two academic articles by Tom appeared in the issue, though one, drawing very substantially on his Oxford work, was more about Aristotle than Leibniz. Tom told Aiken that autumn ‘I am still a relativist.’92 Presenting Aristotle’s account of matter as ‘relativistic’, he continued to explore, as he had done for years, the relationship between soul and body.93

  ‘Our interest in art cannot be isolated from the other interests in life, among them interests in philosophy and religion’, he had written in late 1915, deprecating both ‘a distorted puritanism’ (which he hoped he had escaped) and ‘an orgiastic mysticism’, which he had read much about.94 Yet in 1916, though Pound helped him ‘select the poems for his first volume’ in April and urged London publisher Elkin Matthews (who had published some of Pound’s own early collections) to bring it out, Tom’s poetic output was in decline.95 Instead, in the hope he could give up schoolteaching, he was taking on reviewing. Sydney Waterlow, an editor of the International Journal of Ethics, had put him on to literary editors at the New Statesman, Manchester Guardian and Westminster Gazette. For these general-interest publications the books he reviewed were often related to America, India or France: he was, after all, a Francophile American who had studied Sanskrit. Cloaked in the confidence of anonymous reviewing – which ensured none of his Harvard teachers would identify him – he relished what he saw as an accurate picture of ‘the essential faults of American education’ and ‘some of the reasons for the insolvency of American literature’. The Canadian humourist Stephen Leacock highlighted ‘the sterility of American literature’ when compared with British work.96 Tom enjoyed reading Leacock on the life of a schoolmaster, and even more on the slog of writing a PhD. ‘Mr Leacock’, he wrote,

  draws a truthful picture of the American graduate student, the prospective Doctor of Philosophy: his specialisation in knowledge, his expansion in ignorance, his laborious dullness, his years of labour and his crowning achievement – the Thesis.

  Now it is not to be thought that this post-graduate work upon the preparation of a thesis, this so-called original scholarship, is difficult. It is pretentious, plausible, esoteric, cryptographic, occult if you will, but difficult it is not.

  This labour is fatal to the development of intellectual powers. It crushes originality, it kills style. Few, very few, of these ‘original contributions’ are well written or even readable.97

  These words hardly suggest someone eager for an academic career.

  Initially naïve about reviewing, he was convinced he could earn significant money by doing vast amounts: ‘I crave a new book every few days.’98 He received volumes ranging from philosophical and critical works on topics with which he was familiar (Durkheim, Bergson, theories of religion) to new poetry by Edgar Lee Masters and adventure fiction by Henry de Vere Stacpoole about hunting for gold among the New Guinea Dyaks. To his mother he explained that ‘the editress’ of the Saturday Westminster Gazette ‘told me that she could read and review six novels in an evening!’ and advised him to do the same: short appraisals of eight novels would earn £1; then the books could be sold to a second-hand shop for 2 shillings each. ‘Vivien can do some of them for me’, he added, taking care to show his mother how carefully he was calculating their household finances, and that his wife was readily supportive.99 Perhaps, even if Tom wrote it, the Westminster’s verdict that in The Reef of Stars Stacpoole’s account of a mad New Guinea gold-hunter ‘leaves us in a state of complete exhaustion’ owes something to Vivien’s predicament.100 Or maybe it was just Tom’s own sense of being ‘worried and nervous’.101

  As he discovered the longstanding nature of Vivien’s illnesses, she told him that, ‘afflicted with tuberculosis of the bones’, she had endured ‘so many operations before she was seven, that she was able to recall nothing until she reached that age’.102 Later, doctors came to describe her to him as ‘extraordinarily undeveloped’ as if she were in a state of ‘extreme youth and almost childishness’.103 Sometimes she dreamed of having children; more often she expressed a horror at passing on ‘something of yourself’.104 Not so long before, Tom had envisaged becoming a father. Vivien’s dancing, her intellectual and physical brightness, her prettiness and rushes of energy had drawn him to her. Other men, she knew, sensed these too. Yet more than thirty years after they met, reflecting that no one was ever wholly a success or a failure, he described marriage as a continuous learning: ‘married people must always regard each other as a mysterious person whom they are gradually getting to know, in a process which must go on to the end of the life of one or the other’.105 This use of ‘must’ makes the process sound somewhat gruelling. Sometimes Vivien’s quirks were simply a nuisance: back in London from the countryside for a day to work in the library of the British Museum, Tom could not access his own books in a locked bookcase in their flat because she had hung on to the key. But her constant ill-health was an ongoing ordeal for them both.

  In summer 1916, during the school holidays, he had a new photograph taken for his wartime Identity Book. This document meant he and Vivien could move freely beyond London. They spent several weeks ‘vegetating and gaining health’ in the attractive historic village of Bosham. Pronounced ‘Bozzum’ by locals, it lies on the south coast of England near Portsmouth, conveniently accessible from London by train. Bosham’s lowest street was (and still is) submerged at high tide. Its cottages, ancient church and sailors’ pub looked out on the sunlit sea. Like Gloucester, Massachusetts, Bosham offered ‘bathing, boating and bicycling’.106 Accommodated and well fed by their ‘bouncing kindly landlady’ Kate Smith, and conscious of other vacationers such as Gilbert Cannan, art critic Roger Fry and Bloomsbury-affiliated writer Mary Hutchinson, the Elio
ts went on learning about each other, relishing the seaside.107 Relaxing in shirt and flannel trousers, Tom walked with Vivien to a farmhouse where they bought mushrooms. They cherished small pleasures, but things went wrong. Their lodgings were damp: Vivien experienced prolonged neuralgia as well as rheumatism in her feet (‘nearer to gout’); Tom got mild rheumatism in his left leg.108 The two twenty-eight-year-olds tried to cheer up, yet sometimes, in pain and under the weather, they felt acutely miserable.

  At Bosham they had a familiar visitor, also unhappy. Convicted for impeding British military recruitment, Bertrand Russell had been sacked from Trinity College in June. Vigorously he supported the No-Conscription Fellowship. Though the philosopher was ordered to pay a £100 fine, Tom ‘rejoiced’ to hear accounts of his spirited courtroom defence; Russell had dined with Vivien soon after his trial, and they had ‘discussed money’.109 The sacked don had been assisting the Eliots financially with their household expenditure, as well as funding Vivien’s dancing lessons. He realised, as he put it to Lady Ottoline, that ‘it would save my pocket if her husband got better-paid work’.110

  Impressed with what he knew of Tom’s reviewing, Russell suggested to Ottoline that Tom might send her samples of his writing, so she might ask the influential critic Desmond McCarthy (a frequent Garsington guest) to help him out – maybe with regular work for the New Statesman or Guardian, for both of which, occasionally, Tom had written. Economising, Russell had rented out his London flat. He flitted now among several bolt-holes, writing public lectures for the No-Conscription Fellowship to be delivered that autumn. Among his places of refuge were Garsington, and Bosham – where Vivien more than Tom seems to have been the attraction. Lady Ottoline was fed up with her lover’s apparent infatuation with Vivien: