Young Eliot

by Robert Crawford

  In such company, with his intellectual acuteness masking the hurts of his private life and his fashionable garb concealing his darned underwear, Tom could shine. Intelligent, handsome, observant, and with a dash of foreign exoticism, he had the ability to quote poetry in several languages and had a taste for words like ‘pococurantism’.36 His poetry was regarded, even in the Hutchinsons’ circle, as provocatively racy. By April 1917 the jealous Clive Bell was complaining half seriously to Mary Hutchinson that she was probably kissing Tom ‘or at least squeezing his hand’. He suggested she ask the American poet to show her how (as Tom put it in ‘Aunt Helen’), ‘the footman sat upon the dining-table / Holding the second housemaid on his knees’.37

  Long afterwards, Vivien’s brother claimed Mary Hutchinson had ‘made a pass’ at Tom; there does seem to have been a close chemistry between them.38 Tom would ‘come over on the ferry’ frequently from Bosham to the Hutchinsons’ country cottage, Eleanor House at West Wittering, a few miles from Itchenor. From Bosham to the ferry was about twenty minutes’ walk and people had to call across to the ferryman to sail over; when Tom came Mary ‘would walk to meet him’, and they might stroll the four or so miles together from the ferry to Eleanor House; he read her his poetry, and discussed The Waste Land with her before it was published, but her children considered his formal manner ‘very tight in’.39 Yet they liked this American visitor who was happy to stay at Eleanor where there was no electricity and only an earth closet for sanitation. Soon, as a little boy, Mary’s son Jeremy grew to find Tom ‘friendly, and smiling’. Over the next few years Jeremy and his sister Barbara observed Tom closely. He was both likeable and ‘prim’; in particular he ‘had a prim way of speaking’. Barbara, who would be eleven when The Waste Land was published, liked to imitate ‘the Bloomsbury Voice’: ‘What have you been doing today? Well … saw the most extrAOrdinary thing!’ But when she came to imitate Tom ‘it was “prim, rather prim”’, with a certain over-emphasis on the plosive ‘p’ sound and the concluding ‘m’ at the end of that word.40

  Prim he may have seemed, but he grew very close to Mary Hutchinson, though there is no conclusive evidence that they became lovers. Indeed, Mary’s handwritten recollection of their relationship suggests that, though intimate and tinged with erotic feeling, it remained an unconsummated ‘perhaps’. She writes of how she met Tom

  on the sea-wall at Bosham, and after this we walked by the Estuary, arranged to meet for pic-nics (à quatre) and wrote letters to each other. He came to stay with us at Wittering and later took a house nearby. In London he would meet me to dance at the Hammersmith Palais de Danse with dinner afterwards at some little restaurant (often in Baker Street) … I imagined that, as I grew to know him, a subtle, poetic, sophisticated character would emerge in tune with his writing.

  He seemed ‘difficult’; a slow and painstaking dancer, often a silent tongue-tied companion. This filled me with dread for I felt I was failing in understanding and communication. I did not know then that people are often ‘not of a piece’; that there can be strange opposites in their natures. Later I realised that in personal relationships [he] was far from being subtle and sophisticated; he was simple, inexperienced and even unimaginative. Had I seen clearly I could have been bolder perhaps, stimulated his imagination perhaps, given him experience perhaps!41

  Mary at that time was ‘overwhelmed’ by reading Proust, and ‘stirred by Rousseau’s account in the Confessions of his gentle seduction by Madame de Warens, by the life and letters of Byron and Benjamin Constant, by the novels of Turgueniev [sic], Tolstoy, Mérimée and Flaubert, by Les Liaisons Dangereuses’.42 Unseen by Eliot’s earlier biographers, her handwritten account of her relationship with Tom includes several quotations from these writers, all of which signal sexual desire. She encouraged him to read Flaubert as well as Keats’s letters, while he ‘wanted me to read the poems of Ezra Pound and Hulme, and the stories of Henry James, particularly The Finer Grain and The Ambassadors. We read each other’s suggestions and quarrelled over them. He was the first to tell me about Joyce.’43 In her manuscript memoir, after citing several quotations (mostly in French and copied from her private notebook) that deal with intimate sexual liaisons and the wish for them, Mary wrote ‘These were my apéritifs for living and loving – far away surely from the tastes of Boston and Harvard?’44 Yet Tom’s tastes, too, were Francophile and open to literature that was frank about sex; in his writing he was a connoisseur of unconsummated intimacies, as The Waste Land’s ‘hyacinth girl’ episode, or those words ‘your heart would have responded’ suggest.45

  For a time, he and Mary were intensely close, reading each other’s work in draft and taking part in what she called ‘a moving enquiry into one another’s nature, frustrated by ignorance and hesitation’.46 It was so intimate that it was probably what he had in mind when, later, he confessed to having known at least some of those ‘minor pleasures’ of ‘adultery’.47 After a while, Mary recalled, their relationship ‘drifted towards a calm loyal friendship that lasted for nearly fifty years’; but she thought wistfully about its ‘perhaps’, and seems to have regarded herself as a subtler confidante than Vivien, whom she remembered as ‘very lively, pretty, and direct, and it almost seemed that she could “bring him out”, but she was too roughly impetuous, in a sense “common” and insensitive ever to have seduced him away from his natural path. Instead she exasperated and shocked him into rage and despair.’48 If Vivien sensed Tom’s temper and his desperation, sometimes finding them as hard to cope with as he found her behaviour difficult to bear, she, too, confided in Mary on occasion, and enjoyed those picnics ‘à quatre’ when she and Tom and Mary and Jack Hutchinson lunched together in the West Sussex countryside. Sometimes, if not always, Vivien accompanied Tom to Mary’s and other avant-garde parties; but, however much she could attract Bertrand Russell, in general at such events it was her husband who exercised more fascination. Vivien, more than once, felt insecure.

  Russell had published recently Principles of Social Reconstruction, his manifesto for post-war intellectual life. Advocating ‘mental adventure’ as well as greater sexual freedom, rather windily he presented ‘thought’ as ‘anarchic and lawless’.49 Predictably, Tom disagreed. Attempting an article in response, he showed it to Russell, but neither man liked it. Tom wanted to write about ‘Authority and Reverence’, expressing his conviction that ‘there is something beneath Authority in its historical forms which needs to be asserted clearly without reasserting impossible forms of political and religious organisation which have become impossible’. Yet, as even his awkward repetition of ‘impossible’ here hints, Tom could not complete this piece satisfactorily. Complaining to Russell about lack of peace of mind, he craved ‘better nerves and more conviction in regard to my future’.50 Tom may have thought Russell’s book ‘very weak’, but where the older man had the confidence to set forth his vision and to seduce Vivien, Tom, even as he began writing poetry again and setting out his writerly credo, did not feel able to compete.51

  He had, though, found a new job. ‘Mélange Adultère de Tout’ presents its speaker as ‘A Londres, un peu banquier’ because Tom, now ‘combining the activities of journalist, lecturer, and financier’, had started work on 19 March 1917 in the Colonial and Foreign Department of the London headquarters of Lloyds Bank, one of Britain’s biggest lending institutions.52 Previous talk of a job at the Manchester Guardian had come to nothing, so a commercial career was an opportunity. Paying £120 a year, the bank position was less remunerative than schoolteaching, but provided better prospects, security of income and a regular routine, even if Tom worried about leaving Vivien (who had been complaining of laryngitis) on her own at home all day. Often on Sundays they dined with her parents in Hampstead, and Tom explained to his mother that it was a friend of Mr and Mrs Haigh-Wood, E. L. Thomas, Chief General Manager of the National Provincial Bank, who ‘gave me an introduction to Lloyds’.53 He was eager to show his parents that in business as in literature, his decisions and
commitments might pay off.

  In the financial district, the City, not far from London Bridge, he shared a small office. His colleague, Mr McKnight, who liked to regale Tom with stories about his son, carefully polished his silk hat before stepping outside. Tom sat at a gleaming mahogany desk scrutinising balance sheets of foreign banks, reporting on them, then filing them. A little like his character Appleplex, he transcribed details on to large cards under headings such as ‘Cash in hand’ or ‘Correspondents’.54 Painstakingly investigative, these tasks appealed to the side of him that always enjoyed Sherlock Holmes. To Vivien’s surprise he found the work ‘fascinating’; in this, as in his sense of order, authority and (occasionally) rebellion, he was his father’s son.55

  The business was notably polylingual. Checking and cross-checking banks’ reports, evaluating their activities and solvency in wartime, Tom absorbed texts in French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian. The way The Waste Land would flit among an array of different languages is indebted, surely, to his Harvard education, but also to his London bank work. During the day Mr McKnight (on whom, decades later, Tom based the character of Eggerson in The Confidential Clerk) told his new colleague about suburban gardening; at night Tom lectured to his students on nineteenth-century literature and received from two of them (‘Both are mad’) advice about spiritualism, head colds and astrology.56 From a metamorphosed version of horticulture (‘“That corpse you planted last year in your garden, / “Has it begun to sprout?”’) to a ‘famous clairvoyante’ with ‘a bad cold’ and a ‘horoscope’, details of Tom’s Lloyds Bank days and his literary night-school teaching found their way later into The Waste Land. Its City workers crowd across London Bridge where the church bell of St Mary Woolnoth ‘kept the hours / With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine’ – ‘A phenomenon’, Tom wrote, ‘which I have often noticed’.57 Starting at 9.15 each morning, his office day ran until 5 p.m., though he enjoyed a very English cup of tea at precisely 4 o’clock.

  Most lunchtimes, sometimes with Dante’s Inferno in his pocket, he snatched ‘half an hour in Cheapside’ not far from the most famous of all Wren churches, St Paul’s Cathedral; or else he wandered closer to the river – ‘la malheureuse Tamise’ (the unlucky Thames) as he called it in one of his French poems. Here several pubs were located on or near Lower Thames Street beside the site of the old Billingsgate fish market.58 Close by, overlooking the Thames and affording panoramic views of the city, stands Wren’s Monument to the 1666 Great Fire of London, and another Wren Church, St Magnus Martyr, where each year the Fish Harvest Festival was celebrated. A section Tom marked in his London Baedeker explained that Miles Coverdale, first English translator of the Bible, was buried in St Magnus Martyr; Chaucer ‘the “father of English poetry”’ had lived just yards away.59 On the once adjacent Old London Bridge (eventually demolished in the mid-nineteenth century and replaced by a more modern structure) an ancient chapel had been dedicated to St Thomas à Becket; this chapel had been a staging post for pilgrims, including those in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, heading to Canterbury Cathedral where Thomas was murdered.60 Tom, a ‘solitary visitor at noon’ escaping ‘the dust and tumult of Lombard Street’ in an area crisscrossed by narrow alleys, had an eye for such details. He visited many of the churches in this part of London, ticking them off in his Baedeker. In 1921, when there were controversial plans to demolish City churches, he protested vehemently, praising their ‘beauty’;61 in the 1930s he would write his play about Becket, Murder in the Cathedral. Since it was almost as popular in nineteenth-century America as in England, probably he had known from childhood the rhyme and dance beginning ‘London Bridge is falling down’. That, too, became part of The Waste Land, a poem peculiarly nourished by his time in the City.

  As Tom discovered, St Magnus Martyr in Lower Thames Street had been devastated during the Great Fire. Wren rebuilt it. Inside the church’s white, columned interior can still be seen the centuries old Benefactors’ Board, recording among other things that in 1640 a ‘Mrs Susanna Chambers’ had left ‘Twenty-two Shillings and Sixpence’, so that a special ‘Sermon’ be preached there every 12 February to celebrate ‘God’s merciful preservation of the said Church of Saint Magnus from Ruin’ after an earlier ‘Terrible Fire on London Bridge’.62 The church, another memorial records, had been threatened by a further ‘dreadful Fire’ in 1760, and when Tom started work in the bank, London was again threatened with conflagration – this time started by German bombing.63 Among the details of the section of The Waste Land called ‘The Fire Sermon’ is an account of calmer details familiar to Tom:

  Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street,

  The pleasant whining of a mandoline

  And a clatter and a chatter from within

  Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls

  Of Magnus Martyr hold

  Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.64

  For a poet who had read the Buddha’s Fire Sermon in Sanskrit, and who recalled fishmen working at the fishsheds of Gorton and Pew and other businesses in Gloucester, Massachusetts, these London sites had oddly unEnglish resonances. Yet Tom was impressed, too, by their historic associations, even if the modern Thames, with its ‘Oil and tar’ was hardly unpolluted.65 Those sounds in the ‘public bar’ and that glimpse of ‘Inexplicable splendour’ in St Magnus Martyr are perhaps the most positive moments in The Waste Land – remarkable products of Tom’s snatched half-hour lunches, and of Mrs Chambers’s bequest.

  Away from the bank, Tom continued to humour Harvard’s Professor Woods, promising him further notes on Aristotle. Occasionally on Thursday nights he attended meetings of the Omega Club, an offshoot of Roger Fry’s Omega Workshops design studio at 33 Fitzroy Square. There he sat on a mat ‘(as is the custom in such circles)’ exchanging a few words with W. B. Yeats or listening to the novelist Arnold Bennett. Yeats, in whose poetry he continued to show little interest, struck him at this time as willing to talk only about ‘psychical research’ and ‘Dublin gossip’ – neither of which Tom cared for much. The poet of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ and the poet who was then writing ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’ seem to have avoided conversing about poetry. Tom thought Bennett like ‘a successful wholesale grocer’ whose accent, very different from the tones of Anglophile Boston and the upper-class ‘Bloomsberries’, struck him as unpleasantly ‘Cockney’.66

  Most Saturday afternoons and a good part of Sundays were spent preparing for the coming week’s evening lecture. More practised now, he did not script his lectures in full, delivering them instead from notes. Keeping ahead of the class was challenging, but he came to relish his contact with the working-class students, one of whom, a thoughtful grocer, was an astute enthusiast for Ruskin. If some of his listeners amused him, Tom liked to entertain them too. In April he made his predominantly female English audience laugh by reading aloud a passage from Ruskin’s Time and Tide:

  My American friends, of whom one, Charles Eliot Norton, of Cambridge, is the dearest I have in the world, tell me I know nothing about America. It may be so, and they must do me the justice to observe that I, therefore, usually say nothing about America. But this much I have said, because the Americans, as a nation, set their trust in liberty and in equality, of which I detest the one, and deny the possibility of the other; and because, also, as a nation they are wholly undesirous of Rest, and incapable of it: irreverent of themselves, both in the present and in the future; discontented with what they are, yet having no ideal of anything which they desire to become.67

  Tom suspected Harvard’s Charles Eliot Norton was just as ‘crusty’ as Ruskin.68 His evening-class students made him think more about differences between America and England. While ‘not so petrified in snobbism and prejudice as the middle classes’, working-class English people had, he decided, a ‘fundamental conservatism’; their American equivalents were often ‘aggressive and insolent’.69 Politically he regarded himself at this time as ‘Labourite in Engl
and, though a conservative at home’.70 Even taking into account that he made this remark to a fellow American, his use of ‘at home’ is revealing. He saw it as sheer ‘snobism’ [sic] that drove England’s middle classes to buy their children private education at what are called in Britain ‘public schools’, and felt they lacked respect for true learning. ‘Some day I shall write a book on the English; it is my impression that no one in America knows anything about them. They are in fact very different from ourselves.’71 In the spring of 1917 reviewing books on American politics quickened his consideration of such differences.

  Hoping the war would end, eager to keep in touch with America and finding the world sometimes ‘a complete nightmare’, Tom felt he was living through an ‘unreal’ era.72 Though the bombing of London was far less destructive than that of the 1940s Blitz, aerial bombardment was a new, terrifying phenomenon. Geopolitics brought minor as well as major reverberations. No sooner had it been confirmed in March 1917 that Tom’s first book would be published in London than the political landscape changed. On 2 April in Washington DC, President Woodrow Wilson addressed Congress, proposing to resist Germany. America declared war four days later. As the horrors of conflict increasingly consumed public attention, it became more and more likely that Prufrock and Other Observations might not appear; yet, thanks to Pound’s help, Tom had found one of the twentieth century’s most remarkable publishers.