Young Eliot

by Robert Crawford

  As the English summer’s ‘long drought’ turned to ‘constant rain for a month’ during July, the US Navy and the sea were much in Tom’s mind.74 At Bosham there was a British naval officers’ club close to the house where he and Vivien had stayed. Sailors frequented the Anchor pub. Tom had felt again the allure of sailing. Now, with America fighting alongside Britain and her allies in the war, it seemed to him he might be of service to the US Navy. This need not mean voyaging abroad – Vivien was anxious not to be left alone again – but could involve work in England. Polylingual, Tom was, several of his referees pointed out, unusually talented in French. One of his Oxford friends, Willie King, worked for Military Intelligence in London; Tom had ‘seen him occasionally’ during a period when he was also in touch with the US Navy there, aiming to join its Intelligence Corps; another friend from Harvard days was attached to the American Embassy.75

  Gathering testimonials, Tom was aided by Osbert Sitwell who approached Lady Nancy Cunard, the wealthy, American-born London hostess, for her backing. Colonel Jacob Schick, commanding the US Navy’s London Division of Intelligence and Criminal Investigation, met and encouraged Tom. Undergoing a military medical examination, he hoped to pass but be graded ‘low’, so that he would not be sent into combat but could be enlisted nevertheless.76 Eventually, though his doctor emphasised the examinee’s poor health, he was graded by the official medical examiners more highly than he had expected. Taking his ‘hernia and tachycardia’ into account, they passed him as ‘fit for limited service’.77 In mid-August, all Americans in England were called up. Tom filled out an official US military Registration Card. Describing himself as a brown-haired, hazel-eyed ‘Clerk’ of medium build, he applied for ‘exemption from draft’, since he had a ‘dependent wife’. Approved by the London Consul, his form was sent to his ‘Local Board’ in St Louis, where it was countersigned on 14 September.78 Vivien grew terrified of the outcome. She pleaded with Mary and Jack Hutchinson to help rescue her husband: ‘If he goes to America he will not be able to come back while the war lasts. That means years. If he stays here he will be killed, or as good as. If we don’t save him he’ll never write again.’79 When it came to dealings with the military, Vivien maintained Tom could never be trusted to be ‘worldly wise’ and say the right thing at the right time. Writing out for him points she thought he should make in interviews, she was exasperated when he was thrown ‘off balance’ and did not stick to her script. She became ‘Iller and iller all summer’, intensifying both their anxieties.80 A specialist gave her detailed advice, to which she paid little heed.

  Trying to secure war work, Tom worried that if he were given the rank of private then he would struggle on a much reduced income. He described Vivien to his brother that August as ‘an invalid dependent wife’.81 Henry continued sending money. Complaining of ‘incessant strain’, Tom obtained references from the great and good including Arnold Bennett, soon Director of Propaganda at Britain’s Ministry of Information.82 Tom’s plans involved moving back to the London flat, which he and Vivien had sublet while in the country. She proposed to stay in Marlow.

  September saw him in contact with an American colonel, J. B. Mitchell, to whom Russell’s lover Constance Malleson had introduced him. Nothing came of this, but Tom spoke also to a London-based St Louisan, Major Turner of US Intelligence. Initially, the US Navy had explained that he could only qualify for Intelligence work by enlisting as a seaman, then taking a laborious examination in several subjects. Changing tack, and armed with sixteen testimonials from everyone from the Dean of Merton to Jack Hutchinson, he had been encouraged to join the Quartermaster Corps, but was approached instead by an American lieutenant aiming to start up a new political intelligence section; eventually, its establishment was vetoed from Washington.

  Next, Major Turner thought he could help get Tom a commission in US Army Intelligence, so long as he had three strong references from America to add to his English testimonials. His father helped him secure referees including Emeritus President Charles W. Eliot from Harvard: Tom had been ‘an excellent student in all respects’.83 Cables and letters criss-crossed the Atlantic. In a surprising development, he was summoned by US Navy Intelligence. Their London Commander told him he was just the man for them. If he enrolled as a chief yeoman locally, then they would try to get him a commission soon. On the strength of this, he was released from Lloyds Bank, which generously offered to rehire him when the war was over.

  This naval appointment required Washington approval. Delays ensued. Eventually he received a Navy cable: ‘Appointment received as requested – no further difficulty.’84 However, the Navy’s London office had assumed wrongly that he was not already registered for service. Tom pointed out that legally he had been required to register as an American in England, otherwise he would have been liable for British Army call-up. The US Navy consulted the US Army. No clarification came. There would have to be further exchanges of cables; the matter must be referred upwards to the provost marshal general in Washington. Angry, Tom, backed by Lady Cunard, tried to lay his case before the American admiral in London. He secured a meeting with the chief of staff, who was called away just as Tom was due to speak with him. The head of personnel stepped in at this point, explaining he could do nothing without explicit instructions from Washington. Meanwhile, official paperwork arrived from St Louis, requiring Tom to explain his situation at once with regard to military call-up.

  He lost his temper. ‘You sent for me, asked me to come as soon as possible’, he told the Navy in London.85 He had given up his job. Vivien’s health seemed even worse. He had put his elderly father to the trouble of soliciting references from people who hardly knew him. He had spent a small fortune on cables. He might end up bankrupt. ‘I feel years older than I did in July!’ he exclaimed in a November letter to his ‘dearest father’, who, not in good health, was probably feeling that way too.86 ‘Very sore’, in the second month of his thirtieth year, Tom confided to his brother that ‘Three months of trying for a job, and for a month or so expecting to get it any day, has told on my nerves; and I feel very old at present, and mentally quite exhausted.’87

  Had he been more stolidly thick-skinned, or more phlegmatically accustomed to military bureaucracy, he might have fared better; he was lucky that the bank renewed his employment, but his nerves got to him: ‘this ends my patriotic endeavours’, he declared to Jack Hutchinson in November.88 Accustomed to thinking in terms of ‘us (Americans)’, he did not cease to care about his homeland, but it did annoy him.89 ‘As an American of some years’ residence in this country’, he wrote a long public letter published in the Nation that November. It offered a critique of the politics of Republican Henry Cabot Lodge, a man with ‘the best connexions in Boston society’. Backing the ideals of Democratic President Woodrow Wilson who advocated American participation in the League of Nations, Tom argued, ‘It would mean universal disaster if the participation of America in the war does not lead to closer friendships and understanding, to freer intercourse of ideas, between America and England.’90 If in public his convictions showed him still engaged with American ideals, in private his battling with American bureaucracy had taken its toll. ‘This has been the most terribly exhausting year I have ever known, and one unfortunate event has crowded another.’91 He craved ‘Peace and peace of mind and freedom’.92

  In the midst of all this, he had written to John Quinn explaining that he had a book typescript: containing prose criticism, verse from his first collection and more recent poems, it was ready to send to Knopf in New York. Despite Quinn’s help, Knopf held off. But in London Tom received an important letter. It came from an English novelist in his thirties with a talent for satire, Leonard Woolf. With his wife Virginia, he had established the previous year a small press based at their three-storey red-brick home, Hogarth House, in Richmond, south-west London. Thin-faced and intellectually intense, the Woolfs were leaders of the Bloomsbury group of writers and artists. Leonard, a socialist of Jewish descent and a forme
r colonial administrator, was eight years older than Tom. An alumnus of Trinity College, Cambridge, he knew Bertrand Russell. The Woolfs’ friend Roger Fry had mentioned to them that Tom was seeking a publisher for some poems. Leonard and Virginia had brought out some of their own writings as well as a pamphlet by Katherine Mansfield. They had ‘very much liked’ Prufrock.93 Would Tom allow them to look at his new poems with a view to having them published by the Hogarth Press?

  Like writer and publisher John Rodker, some of whose work Tom welcomed to the Egoist, the Woolfs were part of that literary London in which he was learning to manoeuvre with a suavity that contrasted sharply with his inability to navigate the choppy waters of America’s military bureaucracy. Leonard Woolf was compulsively hard-working. Affectionate, but childless, the Woolfs’ marriage of six years was troubled by sexual difficulties. Nursed by her husband through more than one breakdown, Virginia Woolf had published a novel, The Voyage Out, in 1915. Tom had not met her, and knew little of her work. Interestingly, they shared several tastes, including a childhood fondness for Hawthorne and an admiration for Henry James. Independent-minded and brilliantly perceptive, Virginia, like Tom, came from a high-caste, markedly bookish family; socially, she seemed to have married beneath her; for a time she too had taught working-class students in evening classes. She had about as few readers as the author of Prufrock.

  Though Leonard Woolf wrote to Tom, it was Virginia who had made sure to discover his address; she had contacted Clive Bell in September, asking him to get Mary Hutchinson to send it on since she had lost it. Tom took about a week before replying to Leonard’s letter. Virginia Woolf noted on 28 October 1918 that he was ‘asking to come & see us’.94 She encouraged him. On Monday 11 November, a cloudy, still day in London, Tom, hard at work (Lloyds Bank had taken him back, promising a pay rise), heard guns firing, announcing peace. Sirens hooted on the grey, oily Thames. The Great War had ended. Armistice Day bells rang in churches, bands paraded, crowds cheered. Working late that night, he could not celebrate with Vivien because she was in the country, but she returned to be with him two days later. Then, on Friday evening, he first met Virginia Woolf.

  She was scribbling in her diary when he arrived after work, at the imposing front door of Hogarth House. Henry James was on Woolf’s mind, but she broke off to go and join her dinner guest along with her husband. Six years Tom’s senior, Mrs Woolf found this foreign visitor ‘a strange young man’. His enthusiasm for James Joyce she could just about agree with, but not his championing of the ‘humbug’ of Pound.95 Returning to her diary soon afterwards, she set down a penetrating impression:

  Mr Eliot is well expressed by his name – a polished, cultivated, elaborate young American, talking so slow, that each word seems to have special finish allotted it. But beneath the surface, it is fairly evident that he is very intellectual, intolerant, with strong views of his own, & a poetic creed. I’m sorry to say that this sets up Ezra Pound & Wyndham Lewis as great poets, or in the current phrase ‘very interesting’ writers. He admires Mr Joyce immensely. He produced 3 or 4 poems for us to look at – the fruit of two years, since he works all day in a Bank, & in his reasonable way thinks regular work good for people of nervous constitutions. I became more or less conscious of a very intricate & highly organised framework of poetic belief; owing to his caution, & his excessive care in the use of language we did not discover much about it. I think he believes in ‘living phrases’ & their difference from dead ones; in writing with extreme care, in observing all syntax and grammar; & so making this new poetry flower on the stem of the oldest.96

  As writers – especially male ones – often do, the ‘young American’, who had just published an article on ‘dead language’ versus expression that was ‘alive’, and whose ideas derived from French Symbolist Rémy de Gourmont’s 1900 Le Problème du style, fell back in conversation on what he had just been writing about.97 He intrigued Mrs Woolf. She found herself talking about him next day to Desmond McCarthy, an Old Etonian friend as upper-class and English as she was. McCarthy, too, knew Tom. He told Virginia he had asked the poet about one of his clearly American productions, ‘The Boston Evening Transcript’. With an exclamation mark that denoted her bemusement, Woolf recorded how, when asked about that poem’s juxtaposition of La Rochefoucauld and a long street, ‘Eliot replied that they were a recollection of Dante’s Purgatorio!’98 This American poet was hard to read as a person. His poems could be equally complicated; but they impressed. Woolf thought they made readers fetch up thoughts ‘from the depths of silence’.99 Within four months she would handset some of his lines of verse for her printing press, then print and bind by hand his small pamphlet, entitled simply Poems.

  Presenting himself to the Woolfs, Tom confirmed his editorial astuteness. He had written more than four poems in the preceding two years, but, as he had done when assembling Prufrock, he suppressed all but the best. From early on he knew he would make his mark most effectively by releasing tiny amounts of utterly first-rate work to a discerning audience. The poems he gave the Woolfs were ‘Sweeney Among the Nightingales’, ‘The Hippopotamus’, ‘Mr Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service’ and ‘Whispers of Immortality’; to these he added three others in French: ‘Le Spectateur’ (later retitled ‘Le Directeur’), ‘Mélange Adultère de Tout’ and ‘Lune de Miel’. If his poems’ quality and editing were high, the proofreading of them was patchy. Two mistakes in French were corrected during the Woolfs’ small, early 1919 print run – about 250 copies; other errors slipped through. In the year of publication, Tom’s sixteen-page pamphlet gleaned very, very few reviews: the anonymous critics seem to have known the author. The Times Literary Supplement warned him he was ‘fatally handicapping himself with his own inhibitions’, and risked ‘becoming silly’.100

  An unnamed reviewer in the Athenaeum, on the other hand, maintained that ‘The poetry of the dead is in his bones and at the tips of his fingers: he has the rare gift of being able to weave, delicately and delightfully, an echo or even a line of the past into the pattern of his own poem.’101 This was spot on, and might almost have been dictated by Tom; he had published a piece on Pound the previous September emphasising the need for the poet to cultivate ‘the historical sense, of perception of our position relative to the past, and in particular of the poet’s relation to poets of the past’. Effortfully relativist, here was a demanding manifesto: ‘this perception of relation involves an organized view of the whole of European poetry from Homer’. Tom would develop such ideas and phrasing during 1919 in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’. In his 1918 piece on Pound he praised the way ‘James Joyce, another very learned literary artist, uses allusions suddenly and with great speed, part of the effect being the extent of the vista opened to the imagination by the very lightest touch.’102 These techniques, on which Tom would continue to build, characterised his quatrain poems and other verse published by the Woolfs. Tom the Harvard-trained critic had praised ‘laboratory work’ and the way science was ‘internationalized’; he wanted ‘persons of equivalent capacity’ in literature.103 Yet the Athenaeum reviewer of his poems warned him against the mere jeu d’esprit; seen as a would-be ‘scientist’ of verse, he would have to work hard, this shrewd commentator warned, to remove the suspicion ‘that he is a product of a Silver Age’.104

  America was seldom far from his thoughts. He was contemplating going back there, at least to visit. With plans to apply for unpaid leave from the bank, probably that summer or autumn, he might try to visit his parents every future summer. This was part of a recurrent pattern: he longed for aspects of the United States, especially his family; yet he kept his distance. In late November he wrote to Woods, asking for news of Professor Lanman. Tom had not forgotten his years studying Sanskrit and Pali. Reviewing books on Indian ideas had brought back memories of that facet of his American education. As he pondered crossing the Atlantic, Vivien was less sure. She told Tom’s brother she felt she ‘really must … ought to, go to America’, but feared she never would.105 H
er health was dire: more dental work – ‘I scream the whole time!’ Writing up their major and minor health worries, she blamed Tom for passing on colds and influenza. He had to have his ears syringed to clear them of wax; the doctor was recommending he had one side of his nose cauterised because he seemed so prone to colds. Tom had shared her anxieties over the war and cash: ‘We were off our heads all the summer.’106

  Yet immediately the pressure seemed off as regards military service and finance, his health slumped. His bank salary was now £360 per annum – three times what it had been when he started the previous year – so, he told his mother, ‘I ought to be practically self-supporting.’ Unfortunately, he was getting splitting headaches, and had had to postpone some evening lecturing (one of his courses appears to have ended); he had been told by his physician to rest, ease up on moonlighting for the Egoist and read rather than write.107 Vivien couldn’t sleep. He fretted about her. She reciprocated: he must take cod liver oil and a daily walk. They argued. He had an attack of sciatica; she suffered from migraines – a deepening problem – whenever she felt mental or physical strain. ‘I do not understand it, and it worries me’, Tom told his mother.108

  Eventually, anxious about her husband’s mental and physical health, Vivien got Tom to sign a written agreement not to do ‘writing of any kind, except what is necessary for the one lecture a week which he has to give, and no reading, except poetry and novels and such reading as is necessary for the lectures, for three months’.109 Tom had been reading voraciously for his lectures. An overdose of verbose literary criticism had made him ratty. J. A. Symonds’s six-hundred-page Shakspere’s Predecessors in the English Drama was ‘absurdly long’; Felix E. Schelling’s seven-hundred-page Elizabethan Drama was ‘painful’.110 What he liked was criticism by practitioners – ‘the workmen’s notes on the work’ – though he added testily, ‘Very few creative writers have anything interesting to say about writing.’ Still, ‘they ought to have the sense of what is actually important in older works’.111 He had been using his compendious reading for his own ends as well as to benefit his students. He trained himself continually; but it was too much. Vivien realised that, and Tom paid heed. For about four months he published nothing. At last, emerging from this self-imposed embargo, he produced some of his most brilliant criticism.