I intended to be (except perhaps on very rare occasions) on merely friendly terms with Mrs Eliot. But she was very glad that I had come back, and very kind and wanting much more than friendship. I thought I could manage it – I led her to expect more if we got a cottage – at last I spent a night with her. It was utter hell. There was a quality of loathsomeness about it which I can’t describe. I concealed from her all I was feeling – had a very happy letter from her afterwards. I tried to conceal it from myself – but it has come out since in horrible nightmares which wake me up in the middle of the night and leave me stripped bare of self-deception. So far I have said not a word to her – when I do, she will be very unhappy. I should like the cottage if we were merely friends, but not on any closer footing – indeed I cannot bring myself now to face anything closer.
I want you to understand that the one and only thing that made the night loathsome was that it was not with you. There was absolutely nothing else to make me hate it.8
By the time Russell wrote that letter, Tom had published Prufrock and Other Observations. Just forty pages long, his first collection of poems was not dedicated to Vivien, whose belief in his poetry had helped sustain him. Instead, it was dedicated to Jean Verdenal, now utterly lost. The poems register a fascinated fear of women and sex, often ironically treated in a Laforguian manner. Most if not all, including ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ and ‘Portrait of a Lady’, had been written before Tom and Vivien met. The new book belonged to a time and a self now irrecoverable. Over the next few years his poems treated sex much less from the angle of fascinated, wary fear than from the standpoint of disgust. Sexual impropriety in Prufrock, whether in ‘Aunt Helen’ or ‘Mr. Apollinax’, has a liberating potential, hinting perhaps that there is no such thing as erotic propriety. Yet the poems Tom wrote after those in his first collection feature seedy seductions, shabby affairs, couplings between the monstrous and the lovely, between the sexually voracious and the pale or horrified. The word ‘adultery’ does not feature, but terms such as the French ‘Adultère’ and the English ‘adulterated’ come close.9 Darker, savage even, these poems have at times what one of them, ‘Gerontion’, terms a ‘chilled delirium’.10 However much, or however little, he knew of the details of Vivien’s adultery with Russell, Tom’s poetic perceptiveness remained stingingly acute.
He had his own infidelity to cope with. Having realised that he was still in love with Emily Hale, he was, in terms of the code in which he had been educated, unfaithful to Vivien. Though many might dismiss this idea as ridiculous, to someone as deeply grounded in Christian scripture as Tom, Christ’s words in Matthew’s gospel carried a disturbing charge: ‘whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart’.11 When, years afterwards, he wrote of remembering having experienced ‘minor pleasures of drunkenness and adultery’, this odd phrasing may refer specifically to minor rather than major indulgences of being unfaithful: flirtations, for instance, in which he several times engaged, and close, emotionally dependent friendships with women.12 But, in the absence of any clear evidence that Tom matched Vivien’s carnal betrayal, it may refer just as much to a guilty sense of inescapable ‘adultery … in his heart’.
Both the Eliots had tribulations and secrets. He appears to have attempted to numb himself in order to cope with the combined pressures of work, illnesses (his own and his wife’s) and erotic distress. A decade after his wedding, he told Bertrand Russell that Russell’s early, pessimistic verdict on the marriage had been accurate: ‘You are a great psychologist.’13 Tom wrote, too, in 1925 a shocking letter in which he stated that ‘In the last ten years – gradually, but deliberately – I have made myself into a machine. I have done it deliberately – in order to endure, in order not to feel – but it has killed V.’ He stated that he had ‘deliberately killed my senses’ and had even ‘deliberately died’ in 1915 – the year of his marriage – simply to ‘go on with the outward form of living’. Tom here reproached himself, rather than Vivien, and worried he had damaged her irreparably. Painfully aware of all that was wrong in their relationship, he recounted how he had ‘tried to kill myself’ in order to keep going. He wrote of struggling, and apparently failing, to ‘exorcise this desire for what I cannot have, for someone I cannot see’.14 This person appears to have been Emily Hale, whom by 1925 he had not even glimpsed for almost eleven years, and with whom, for nearly as long, he had had little or no communication.
If Lawrence Rainey and Lyndall Gordon are correct in dating the unwatermarked paper, then some time after September 1916 (it may have been as late as 1919) Tom typed up his poem ‘The Death of the Duchess’. It begins with a vision of ‘The inhabitants of Hampstead’, the London district Vivien came from. Trapped in constricting routines, they resemble readers of the Boston Evening Transcript. Considerably different are the poem’s couple ‘in leafy Marylebone’ (the area where Tom and Vivien lived from 1916 until 1920), but they too have their problems. The speaker is in a relationship, but unsure whether to say ‘“I love you”’ or ‘“I do not love you”’; he fears having to make conversation with the chambermaid and being left alone with his partner, playing chess while, bleakly, ‘The ivory men make company between us’.15 For all that a later partial inventory of the Eliots’ household effects includes a chessboard, this poem is deliberately distanced from contemporary life by its title, which refers to John Webster’s Jacobean tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi. Other allusions are to a scene where Webster’s Duchess, who has made a clandestine marriage, thinks she is talking privately to her husband and maid as she brushes her hair, but actually betrays her secret with terrible consequences. The ‘intensity’ of this scene haunted Tom, who saw the play performed in late 1919 but brooded on Webster some time earlier.16 Tom never published ‘The Death of the Duchess’, but elements of it found their way into The Waste Land, whose ‘Game of Chess’ alludes to another Jacobean drama.
Though we cannot be sure exactly when ‘The Death of the Duchess’ was written, factors that conditioned it – however fiercely repressed – were present from early in Tom’s marriage. Eager for Russell’s affections even as she supported her husband, Vivien maintained the appearance of a lively, respectable married woman. Both she and Tom had been enmeshed by their benefactor; just how far was hard – and perhaps too painful – to calculate. The young husband made the best of things; so did Vivien. Occasionally the pain, the exhaustion, the steely need to withstand it all, emerged, refracted and meticulously crafted, into his poems, or sparked unexpectedly, almost undetectably, in his prose. However distanced, his art is made out of damage and woundedness. A short story entitled ‘Eeldrop and Appleplex’, one of his strangest pieces, appeared in the Little Review in mid-1917. Encompassing some of Tom’s own intellectual interests, it touches too on ‘adultery’, ‘marriage’ and the murder of a mistress. As regards the man who has killed his mistress, ‘for the brief space he has to live, he is already dead. He has crossed the frontier. The important fact is that something is done which can not be undone – a possibility which none of us realize until we face it ourselves.’17
If emotional turmoil underlay the surface, there were also unignorable practicalities of finance. During February 1916, just after America broke off diplomatic relations with Germany, Tom asked his father to advance money for a year’s rent. He was worried lest transatlantic communication grew more difficult. Tom’s mother, who seems to have sent her younger son letters about once a week (his father wrote regularly too), became increasingly anxious and craved reassurance. Sometimes with Vivien’s help, Tom tried to reply to all her communications. Correspondence was his emotional lifeline to his family and to those aspects of America he loved; yet it was exhausting to keep up with. However emphatically and effusively he signed himself ‘Always your devoted son’ or ‘With very fond love’ or with ‘infinite love’, his residence in England remained a cause of strain.18 ‘I have never been so glad to get letters; the interval seemed as if it
would never end’, he wrote to his father at the start of March: wartime conditions meant that no mail from the States had reached him for a month. He concealed many difficulties, but did reveal some of Vivien’s health problems. ‘Worries over our affairs have pulled her down’, he wrote on 1 March, then changed his phrasing to ‘have held her back a great deal’. In this letter he gave a little more detail: ‘When she worries she bleeds internally, in a metaphorical sense, as well as other internal pains, like migraine and stomach trouble, in a literal sense.’19
Vivien alternated between attempts at wifely frugality – repeatedly darning Tom’s underwear or pyjamas – and pained protestations of anxiety. Never having met her, Lottie Eliot offered guidance: surely Vivien’s temperament must resemble her own, so Vivien must be sure to get lots of sleep. ‘I worry a great deal’, Vivien replied. ‘Often when I lie down to sleep I feel that a wheel is going round in my head, and although my body is dead tired my brain gets more and more excited.’ She wrote of relapsing into further sickness. She complained about Tom’s having had influenza and being ‘most gloomy and depressed and very irritable and I knew he felt that life was simply not worth going on with’. Each day, facing illness and wartime conditions, Vivien wrote excitedly, ‘the screw turned a little tighter’.20 No wonder the Eliot parents fretted.
Yet in the midst of this, and steeling himself against it in order to cope, Tom articulated a poetic credo. His work gave him a focus that let him go on when his private life was difficult; though the two could not be separated completely, he valued all the more the sense of shape, the mixture of intuition and form that dedication to verse might offer. Turning to the technique of poem-making, he discussed French poetry and vers libre with Pound, to whom Tom grew closer and whose Francophilia reinforced his own. Tom had been perusing a pamphlet published during his year in Paris, Georges Duhamel and Charles Vildrac’s Notes sur la technique poétique. It pondered through aphorisms and brief reflections the relationship between vers libre and the central metre of French classical poetry, the alexandrine. Partly reacting to this, and making clear he was talking about tradition and verse form rather than ‘imagism’, Tom maintained in a March 1917 New Statesman essay that ‘Vers libre does not exist.’ There was, he concluded, ‘only good verse, bad verse, and chaos’. Citing examples from Webster’s drama to new poetry by Hulme and Pound, his ‘Reflections on Vers Libre’ argued that while ‘Scansion tells us very little’ and ‘It is probable that there is not much to be gained by an elaborate system of prosody’, nonetheless, ‘the most interesting verse which has yet been written in our language has been done either by taking a very simple form, like the iambic pentameter, and constantly withdrawing from it, or taking no form at all, and constantly approximating to a very simple one. It is this contrast between fixity and flux, this unperceived evasion of monotony, which is the very life of verse.’21 He did not oppose rhyme, he explained, though ‘it is possible that excessive devotion to rhyme has thickened the modern ear’. If rhyme was removed, then ‘the poet is at once held up to the standards of prose’. While this may seem odd for a poet to advocate, it was a way of banishing the too predictably ‘poetic’ and replacing it with subtler sound patternings, as well as content whose truth was all the more apparent for being as robust and immediate as prose. Tom wanted the poetry not of a ‘moralist’ but of an ‘observer’.22
That last word picks up on the title ‘Observations’ which had headed the group of his poems in Poetry six months earlier. Observations is what he would call all the work in his first collection. In early 1917, he was optimistic that it would be published soon – in England, if not in America; by April the slim volume was ‘in press’; eventually it appeared in June.23 Some people found it odd that Tom ‘call[ed] his “observations” poems’; they detected a ‘notion of poetry’ that was ‘uninspired’, lacking ‘any genuine rush of feeling’.24 The title Prufrock and Other Observations does not sound conventionally ‘poetic’. Yet the poems possess the minute and telling precision of ‘observations’. Readers encountering Tom’s book title were and are struck by the name ‘Prufrock’; new to poetry, this was, though none of his English readers would have recognised it, an import from St Louis. Yet the neutral-sounding term ‘observations’ is at least as important since it sets out the poems’ approach.
Frequently used in titles of scientific, legal and other prose writings, ‘Observations’ had never before featured as part of the title of a book of English-language verse. Its deployment fits with the way often the poems are voiced with humorous detachment, even when the speaker – frequently gendered as male, never as female – is an observer observing himself and hyper-conscious of how others, not least women, may see him. Tom’s poems utilise and even flaunt the conventions of poetry – no rhyme could be truer than that between ‘I’ and ‘sky’ at the start of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. However, his writing also departs from such conventions: the lack of a rhyme with ‘table’ (easy to supply in English) in that poem’s famous third line, ‘Like a patient etherised upon a table’, adds to its memorable weirdness. This line would not sound strange in prose; but (like the ensuing, plainer phrase, ‘cheap hotels’), when taken from prose into poetry, it marks something unsettlingly new.
The form of this landmark in the history of poetry is not really vers libre. Iambic pentameter is heard in the opening verse paragraph – in ‘Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels’, for instance.25 Nevertheless, the departures from pentameter, like the resistance to poetic diction, are more striking. Simultaneously such departures and resistance both ironise and heighten those moments when (as in the famous title’s use of the term ‘Love Song’) the poetry invokes the traditionally ‘poetic’. Authoring his manifesto ‘Reflections on Vers Libre’ (proudly sent to his parents) and contemplating his first collection in the early part of 1917, Tom formulated in his prose and in that book’s title an aesthetic which he had originated years earlier in America and during his first visit to Europe.
As he did so, his sense of creativity returned. He contemplated producing an article on ‘Introspective Consciousness’.26 His interest in that topic, like his wary conviction that ‘individual psychology’ could be understood in new ways through ‘psycho-analysis’, matched his imaginative use of self-observation as well as observations of people around him.27 Such perceptions were recast, shaped through artistry, to take them far from autobiography, but the results are all the more impressive for drawing, however indirectly, on Tom’s own consciousness and reading. Some topics remained off limits: nothing parental is explored in his early verse, for instance; but there is a continuing, increasingly cutting observation of ways in which the sexes interact.
Having long discussed French poetry with Pound and others, in summer 1916 he had tried to translate more Laforgue. Along with his perusal of Vildrac and Duhamel, this led to an odd experiment that complemented Ottoline Morrell’s belief that Tom might release in French what he could not say in English. Attempting to trick his consciousness into allowing him to create poetry again, he chimed French rhymes off each other: ‘Le directeur / Conservateur / Du Spectateur’.28 The ploy worked, and one of the resulting poems was uncharacteristically autobiographical.
Its title was ‘Mélange Adultère de Tout’, and it presented a peripatetic speaker with a variety of professional identities: ‘En Amérique, professeur; / En Angleterre, journaliste’ were the first two; others included being a lecturer ‘En Yorkshire’ and, in Germany, a philosopher.29 Drawing on personal experience, Tom, who had kept up his reading in anthropology, also moved disconcertingly beyond it, incorporating a range of attributes and naming several international locations that he had never seen – from Damascus and Omaha to Mozambique. Pulled in many directions, the speaker tells of being a London banker, and of celebrating his feast day at an African oasis, dressed in a giraffe skin. Autobiographical and weirdly imagined elements meld. The poem suggests not only a protean, overstretched existence, but also a discon
certing sense of not feeling at home anywhere. Tom’s experience of being a foreigner in England could pay dividends, both in affording him easy access to other foreigners, and in quickening his ability to articulate a sense of displacement profoundly important in modern literature. ‘Mélange Adultère de Tout’, written in a foreign language, is one of the first poems in which he explores an imaginative seam whose continued investigation would help make him, in due time, the greatest immigrant poet in Anglophone verse. Meanwhile, declaring itself ‘A Magazine of the Arts, Making No Compromise with the Public Taste’, Chicago’s Little Review had just taken on that other displaced person Ezra Pound as its ‘foreign editor’, which is why, in 1917, Tom’s new Francophone poems appeared there. Not all this literature of immigrants and emigrants won plaudits. ‘Your magazine is rubbish’, complained a New York correspondent in the same issue; nonetheless, the self-exiled Irishman ‘James Joyce, Zurich, Switzerland’, had recently praised its ‘many good writers’ and hoped to send ‘something very soon’.30
However English he sounded to Americans, occasionally Tom played up his ‘outsider’ status. ‘I am very dependent on such aids’, he wrote to Mary Hutchinson at the start of 1917, after she sent him a map of part of London. He had met Mary, a writer, and her lover Clive Bell the previous year. She recalled that the first time she saw Tom was ‘in August, 1916’ when he ‘was sitting alone on a sea-wall in the estuary of Chichester Harbour’; he was wearing ‘white flannels and was looking out to sea’. Around this time ‘he used to carry in his pockets a very small Virgil and a very small Dante’ which, she believed, he read ‘by the water’s edge’. Tom, too, remembered their encounter precisely: Mary was carrying ‘an unusual flower’.31 Slightly younger than Tom, this Indian-born upper-class woman was married to a radical lawyer, St John (known as Jack) Hutchinson, who was, like Tom, a fan of music-hall stars including George Robey. Mother of two young children, Mary wore bright frocks designed by the avant-garde Omega Workshops; local working-class kids nicknamed her ‘The Queen of Sheba’.32 She was also a half-cousin of the provocatively camp biographer Lytton Strachey; her lover, the art critic Bell, was married to artist Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf’s sister. After painting Mary Hutchinson’s portrait in Matisse-like tones in 1915, making her look sly and big-lipped, Vanessa Bell pronounced the picture ‘perfectly hideous … and yet quite recognisable’.33 Partying with Mary and friends, Tom was received now into the heart of the sometimes spiteful, aesthetically daring Bloomsbury group. He mixed in ‘fast’, witty artistic circles whose sexual mores were completely different from those of the St Louis and New England Eliots. In January 1917 he and Mrs Hutchinson had parts in a play written for private performance by Strachey, whose risqué farces sometimes involved cross-dressing. Their acting seems to have involved Tom – as he had once done with Amy de Gozzaldi – giving Mary ‘a prolonged kiss’.34 Clive Bell exclaimed to her that she was ‘flirting with Eliot!’35
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