Young Eliot

by Robert Crawford

  As well as editing these Yeats letters, Pound, one of literature’s consummate plotters, had managed to install himself as Foreign Editor of the Little Review while also remaining Foreign Correspondent for Poetry. Nominated by him, Tom had agreed to write a booklet championing Pound’s work for New York publisher Alfred A. Knopf. ‘Few poets have undertaken the siege of London with so little backing’, Tom wrote of the fellow American who had supported him staunchly in the same enterprise. In Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry, masked by anonymity, Tom stood up for his own ideals. While separating Pound from the ‘deadness’ of ‘scholarship in American universities’, he defended this English-based American as ‘one of the most learned of poets’, his knowledge drawn not least from ‘Gautier, Laforgue and Tristan Corbière’ (Tom wrote a poem called ‘Tristan Corbière’ around this time.) But he stressed also Pound’s variety. Among the poems quoted entire in the booklet was ‘A Girl’, the piece which had so impressed Vivien just before she met her future husband. ‘Any poet, if he is to survive as a writer beyond his twenty-fifth year, must alter’, wrote Tom, interested that Pound had now embarked on a much longer work.105 Though he did not say so, he knew much of his own verse in Prufrock had been written by a poet under twenty-five.

  Stray references in the Pound booklet – to myth, Malory and Arthurian legend, for instance – show that topics which had long fascinated Tom and would resurface in The Waste Land were abiding reference points. His authoring of this pamphlet was an act of generosity, showing how close he and Pound had become. In the August Egoist, Tom wrote about Pound’s work on Japanese Noh theatre. At times the two Americans worked hand in glove. Tom’s review of Pound’s selection of Yeats letters was followed closely in the July 1917 Egoist by Pound’s piece on ‘vers libre’, which, Pound argued, ‘has become a pest’.106 Pound must have supplied Tom with many of the reviews quoted in Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry. Moreover, it was Pound who suggested French exemplars which Tom imitated, and who (along with Toulouse-born, London-based book illustrator Edmund Dulac) scribbled on poems Tom produced in French and English in 1917.

  Though not formally an ‘Imagist’, Tom approved of many Poundian and Imagist doctrines: ‘Only in something harder’, he wrote that summer, ‘can great passion be expressed; the vague is a more dangerous path for poetry than the arid’.107 American males allied in a foreign land, Tom and Pound shared enthusiasms, literary techniques, banter and attitudes. Whether rejoicing in transatlantic slang, obscenity, tones of masculinist superiority towards ‘the feminisation of modern society’ or subtle shrewdness, they went on corresponding and working in tandem.108 ‘You let me throw the bricks through the front window’, Pound reportedly quipped. ‘You go in at the back door and take the swag.’109

  If Tom was generous as well as insightful in praising his friend, then Pound did more than ensure the London debut of Prufrock; in June 1917 he also attempted, unsuccessfully, to get it published by Knopf in New York. In this Pound was seconded by John Quinn. Quinn sent Knopf a copy of the English printing in August, remarking that he relished everything about the book except its title. ‘I do not know whether it is great poetry or not’, Knopf replied, but it was ‘great fun and I like it.’ However, the publisher maintained the collection was too small to issue ‘except to give it away as advertisement’.110 The booklet on Pound was even shorter, but would supplement Knopf’s publication of Pound’s poems. Tom would have to wait several more years before a collection of his own poetry appeared in his native land.

  Until then, though he published a few poems, he hoarded more. Editing his oeuvre fiercely, he was also thrifty. From his 1917 work published in magazines he would recast and recycle material in later books. By far the best known part of ‘Dans le Restaurant’ is not the reminiscence of childhood sexual fumbling but the conclusion where, apparently in a more ancient time, ‘Phlébas, le Phénicien’, a trader concerned with profit and loss, drowns at sea under ‘les cris des mouettes et la houle de Cornouaille’ (the cries of gulls and the sea-swell of Cornwall). Tom had been to sites in Dorset sometimes associated with Phoenician tin traders, also said to have visited Cornwall; he probably associated Cornwall, too, with Tristan and Isolde. More recently, he and Vivien had had to confront their fears of death at sea in the dangerous wartime Atlantic. Typically, in ‘Dans le Restaurant’ as elsewhere, he has drawn on aspects of his own life, but has ‘othered’ them. Conceivably his imagination was guided by a novel he may have encountered in childhood, The Wonderful Adventures of Phra the Phoenician by Edwin Lester Arnold, son of Sir Edwin Arnold whose Light of Asia Tom relished as a boy. In this fantasy tale, a time-travelling Phoenician sailor falls in love with a beautiful Englishwoman and accompanies her to Britain after he has witnessed from his ship the crew of another vessel drowning, ‘swirled about’ and ‘drawn by the current’ as overhead ‘gulls were screeching’.111

  Drawing on his fears, emotions and experience, yet transforming and distancing those by meshing them with other writings and allusions became Tom’s modus operandi. Though he had worked this way previously, now he did so in a more deliberately allusive style. Vivien quoted from at least three literary works in the sometimes self-dramatising letter she sent Scofield Thayer that July. Some of her habits of mind surely nourished Tom’s – sometimes for good, sometimes not. He seems, for instance, to have been fond enough of Joseph, his precociously money-wise Jewish office boy at Lloyds Bank; yet Vivien’s dislike of ‘Horrible Jews in plush coats by the million’ from ‘the East End of London’ reinforced a familiar prejudice that Tom did not always subvert in his poems where ‘red-eyed scavengers are creeping’ from London’s traditionally Jewish areas of ‘Kentish Town and Golder’s Green’.112

  Though her husband flitted between Bosham and London for part of August and September 1917, Vivien stayed in Bosham much of the time. When not at the bank, Tom spent his spare hours preparing two further sets of evening lectures to be given at opposite ends of London: twenty-five Friday lectures on Victorian literature for delivery at the County Secondary School in Sydenham from 28 September; and for Southall, Middlesex, on Mondays until the following Easter, a series entitled ‘Modern English Literature’. These extended from Emerson to Hardy. Limbering up for such demanding commitments, he immersed himself in nineteenth-century authors, some of whom (‘Brontë, George Eliot, Emerson’) he knew ‘very little’ about.113

  Since Mary Hutchinson and her husband often holidayed near Bosham, Vivien and Mary enjoyed being in touch. Vivien wanted Tom to read a short story Mary had shown her; it appears to draw on Mary’s own affair with Clive Bell, and its sophisticated, Mary-like protagonist, Jane, comes to doubt the ‘reality’ of relations with her lover. Jane’s Francophile friend Sabine, described as a ‘panther’ as she eats, advises her to seek out ‘Some poet … who can appreciate you’.114 Eventually Tom published Mary’s story in the Egoist after discussing with its author the handling of emotion in literature: ‘I like to feel that a writer is perfectly cool and detached, regarding other people’s feelings or his own, like a God who has got beyond them; or a person who has dived very deep and comes up holding firmly some hitherto unseen submarine creature.’115 In his letters he still called her ‘Mrs Hutchinson’, and signed himself formally ‘T. S. Eliot’.

  Though Vivien had been seeing Russell earlier that summer, now he was off vacationing in Shropshire with his lover, Lady Constance Malleson. After they returned, he suggested to Constance they have a child together, but she demurred, and her husband Miles was growing tired of feeling sidelined. The Eliots had some sense of what was going on. Tom and Russell had been talking, as had Tom and Miles Malleson. Aldous Huxley came to visit and, passing on gossip, Vivien told Mary Hutchinson on 9 October that ‘he quoted a saying of Gertler’s that rather amused us – viz. that the Mallesons might be said to keep “open bed”. It’s true, from all I hear!’116 While Tom, facing the possibility of military service and an attendant medical examination, was corresponding with his worried mo
ther about his apparently healed ‘Rupture’ – his hernia – Russell was turning his attentions to Vivien again and thought he was finding encouragement.117 Having caught influenza on returning from Bosham after spending hours shivering in the cellars of Crawford Mansions during air raids, Vivien feared further bombing. With Tom’s agreement she was searching for a place to rent outside London. On 3 October Tom told his mother the plan was that he would commute into London ‘every day’, but Vivien struggled to find anywhere suitable.118

  ‘Bertie’, Vivien wrote to Mary Hutchinson that day, ‘now says he wants to go shares in a country cottage. That will probably mean being out of the frying pan but in the fire!’119 As during the early days of the Eliots’ marriage, so once again, while his relations with Lady Constance and Lady Ottoline were fraught, Russell now used his clout and connections to share accommodation with Vivien and his former student, Tom. He saw a manipulative opportunity. Writing on 16 October to Lady Constance, who had been growing close to a man called Maurice Elvey, Russell mentioned that

  I found accidentally that the Eliots don’t want to go on being always together, and that she was looking out for a place where she could live alone in the country and he would come for week-ends. So I suggested that, as I too wanted to live in the country, we might be less dreary if we lived in the same house. She was pleased with the idea, and no doubt it will happen. I want, for everyday, reliable companionship without any deep striving of emotion; if I don’t get it, I shan’t do any more good work. I feel this plan may hurt you, and if it does I am sorry; but if I let myself grow dependent on you, we shall have all the recent trouble over again next time, and I can’t face that, and I don’t suppose you can.120

  Very soon Vivien was installed at Senhurst Farm, surrounded by pine woods in a high hollow among the hills two miles from Abinger Common in rural Surrey. Previously, as Tom put it to his mother on 24 October, the farmer and his wife had been ‘gardeners to Lord Russell’; however ‘fairytale’, the old farmhouse was six miles from the nearest rail station. With his commitments to Lloyds Bank, lecturing and the Egoist, Tom could ‘only be there at weekends’. This, Vivien told Tom’s mother on 22 October, was ‘a great disappointment’.121 Vivien stayed at the farm for three weeks, during which time, on at least one weeknight, she slept with Russell, and, afterwards, sent him her ‘very happy letter’.122

  ‘I distrust the Feminine in literature’, Tom wrote to his father from London on 31 October. He was explaining how things were at the Egoist, though he also sniped at ‘the women’ in his bank. Mentioning how ‘beautiful’ and ‘delightful’ the farm and its food were, he explained, ‘As you know, Vivien has been in Surrey, which suits her very well, and I have been with her over weekends. This will be the last.’123 However little or much she told him about her affair with Russell, Tom knew Vivien, knew Russell and was no fool. Russell (who seems to have destroyed most of Vivien’s letters to him) told Lady Malleson he felt an ‘odour of corruption’ and a ‘nausea’ after what had happened. Protesting himself ‘tortured and miserable’, he felt he would ‘have to break Mrs. Eliot’s heart and I don’t know how to face it. It mustn’t be done all of a sudden.’124 Nonetheless, following an ecstatic making-up with Constance Malleson, he met Vivien on 6 November after her return to London, presumably while Tom was at work. Next day Russell pronounced the encounter ‘very satisfactory’. He had ‘got out of the troublesome part of the entanglement by her initiative – she behaved very generously – it is a great relief’.125 Vivien went on writing to him, and they met again a week later. Russell dreaded encountering Vivien once more, he explained to Lady Constance, with whom he was about to share a flat. However, they were due to rendezvous on 13 November. He felt that ‘the relief of having done something irrevocable persists, though I feel this is shameful.’126 On 13 November, he was delighted: ‘Mrs E. behaved like a saint from heaven’, he wrote next day. ‘She put away her own pain & set to work to make me less unhappy – & she succeeded.’127

  Probably Vivien succeeded too well. Giving Tom’s mother on 22 November a detailed ‘account of the money you sent for T.’s underclothing’, and mentioning how she and her own mother had gone ‘carefully thro’ all Tom’s winter underwear’, checking what needed replacing, she enclosed receipts to prove she had spent the cash appropriately. She noted, too, that she had bought her husband a quilted satin chest protector to wear under his shirt against the cold. Having shared these impressively wifely details and exclaimed that Tom was ‘very rough with his pyjamas and shirts – tears them unmercifully!’, Vivien then proceeded to explain that Bertrand Russell had ‘promised to go shares’ in renting a country cottage if they could find one. Though Tom had to be based in London, it would be a ‘refuge’ for them.128

  That same evening, working late at the bank, Tom was writing to his father. He was concerned that Vivien, nervous, had had a chill. She had seemed unwell since returning from the farm. Feeling she was healthier in the country, Tom too expressed the hope that they might find a cottage, and asked his father for money. Vivien had been trying to get work in a wartime government office – a plan Tom disapproved of, since he thought her health would not stand it; she had been rejected, apparently because she was married to a foreign national. Matters were difficult, but the solution they adopted brought further complications. In early December Russell took on a five-year lease with the Eliots to share a property at 31 West Street in Marlow, a small Buckinghamshire town on the Thames. Vivien liked the idea, hoping Mary Hutchinson would come and visit her and Tom so ‘we can be just three by ourselves’. They could have a lively party: punting on the river, then dancing. Her letter suggests that, sleeping badly and suffering headaches, she dreamed of recreating something of the circumstances when she and Tom had first met.129 Russell, however, thought that he was going to be the one enjoying Vivien’s company. He wrote about his ideas for Mrs Eliot on New Year’s Day 1918 to Constance Malleson:

  I am not in love with her, & I do not care whether I have a physical relation with her or not. But I am happy in talking to her and going about with her. She has a very unselfish affection for me, and but for her I don’t know how I should have lived through the unhappiness of these last months. I am intensely grateful to her, and I expect that she will be an essential part of my life for some time to come.130

  As for Tom, whatever Vivien did or did not tell, and however much he tried to make himself ‘a machine’ in order to cope with the insistent routines of banking, lecturing, editing and writing, as well as marital difficulties, his poetry and his body signalled that things were wrong. While 1917 drew to a close, he became ill, struggling to cope. He was invited by well-connected Lalla Vandervelde, wife of a Belgian politician, to join Osbert and Edith Sitwell, Robert Graves and others in giving a poetry reading for charity at the grand house of Lady Sibyl Colefax in London’s Onslow Square on 12 December. Since it was a weekday evening, Tom hurried there straight from the bank. For his late arrival he was ‘rebuked publicly’ in front of the audience of about one hundred and fifty people by the influential man of letters Sir Edmund Gosse. Hiding his tiredness, he then caused a stir by reading ‘light satirical stuff’, including ‘The Hippopotamus’. Some ‘didn’t know what to make of it’, but Arnold Bennett thought it the best poem read all evening.131

  At mating time the hippo’s voice

  Betrays inflexions hoarse and odd,

  But every week we hear rejoice

  The Church, at being one with God.132

  Soon Tom was unwell. There had been minor signs of trouble over the last few months: he had forgotten to write to his mother on her seventy-fourth birthday on 22 October, and apologised afterwards. In one frame of mind, he confessed to his brother, he might never want ‘to see America again’.133 Yet, conflictedly, he missed his American family intensely: ‘I have parents whom I can be so convincedly proud of, who represent to me absolutely the best that America can produce’, he told his mother in November.134 Vivien, who had written to L
ottie Eliot on 22 October (though, with other things on her mind, she had forgotten it was her mother-in-law’s birthday), also apologised in November; later, when Tom’s parents, anxious about their son’s marriage, seemed concerned that she had spent a long time away from her husband, she explained it had only been a fortnight, ‘and Tom came for both weekends’.135 She said she would send Lottie for Christmas a small piece of crochet lace she had made ‘– I am afraid it is rather useless – ’.136 With ‘infinite love’ Tom, who did his best to make Vivien sound appropriately wifely to his parents, sent his mother as a Christmas gift a book on American history that he had reviewed.137 He was feeling very, very weary.

  As he often did when times were hard, Tom flexed his sense of humour. The December Egoist filled a spare half page with his spoof letters from a variety of English places real and imaginary – Hampstead, Thridlingston Grammar School, The Carlton Club – deftly parodying a variety of ever-so-English tones (‘my old Oxford tutor’; ‘our brave boys in the trenches’), and rejoicing in his genius for invented names: Helen B. Trundlett, Charles Augustus Conybeare.138 Yet in a revealing letter to his father, reflecting on life and the war, he wrote that ‘everyone’s individual lives are so swallowed up in one great tragedy, that one almost ceases to have personal experiences or emotions, and such as one has seem so unimportant!’139 If this made it sound as if he was hiding from his own emotions, he sensed, though he gave no details, that something might emerge sooner or later in his literary work: ‘I have a lot of things to write about if the time ever comes when people will attend to them.’140