Young Eliot

by Robert Crawford

  Building confidence in himself enhanced his critical boldness. He decided Swinburne and Kipling were immature when compared with the ‘unmistakable’ uniqueness of Joseph Conrad. To write for a large audience was misguided, though better than deliberately to tailor one’s work to a small one. Best was ‘to address the one hypothetical Intelligent Man who does not exist and who is the audience of the Artist’.29 Encouraged by Murry, Tom produced several Athenaeum reviews, having fulfilled his ‘contract’ with Vivien to take a break from writing prose. He could not choose his topics so freely as at the Egoist, but the Athenaeum enjoyed a much wider readership. As editor, Murry published Tom alongside Mansfield, Santayana, the Woolfs, English poet Walter de da Mare and many others. Writing for it brought contacts and ‘a critical notoriety’ that Tom relished.30 The Athenaeum featured and was devoured by the ‘Bloomsberries’ too; Lytton Strachey, one of its more vigilant readers, pointed out to Tom that he had mixed up two translations of the Bible, the King James and ‘a modern edition’.31 Tom admitted he had, and apologised. He liked to write more and more ex cathedra, but it was good for him – and he knew it – to be told he was not infallible.

  On paper as in life he could provoke rebuke, and be intense in his dislikes. Vivien wrote to Mary, ‘Tom would never speak to me again … would hate me’ if she fell out with the Woolfs.32 He could get ‘angry and stubborn’.33 Brigit Patmore, a strikingly beautiful thirty-seven-year-old literary friend with whom the Eliots went sometimes to the theatre, was angered by a ‘judgment’ he had made of her; he told her around this time she was ‘mentally lazy’. Tom responded to Patmore’s annoyance with an effort at flirtation, but sounded too like a drily academic philosopher: ‘I can only observe, and correct by further observation.’34 As his poetry suggests, he did observe keenly – whether paying attention to the seraglio at a Mozart opera, or listening to so-called ‘actresses’ in the flat below at Crawford Mansions who played loud gramophone music, and yelled to their ‘gentlemen friends’ in the street outside. ‘The immediate neighbourhood and some of our neighbours’, the poet of ‘Sweeney Among the Nightingales’ wrote to his brother, ‘are not what we should like’.35 Still, the flat close to the pub was affordable, and they hoped to have it redecorated soon. Henry had cabled more money.

  The Marlow house needed attention too: Bertrand Russell persistently requested his belongings back but did not seem prepared to fetch them himself. Vivien was to go to West Street and superintend their return. Despite her earlier letter breaking things off, she sent a short note, beginning ‘My dear Bertie’. She would get the job done as soon as her health allowed. Signing herself ‘Yours ever’, she encouraged him to ‘come and see us when you have a free evening’.36 But Russell’s dreams of spending time with Vivien in his Marlow bolt-hole were over and grew more distant. Whatever she might have wanted at one time from her older lover, Vivien realised all along that her home was with Tom.

  Now approaching her thirty-first birthday, when she felt well she dressed stylishly, combed her long dark hair and radiated vivacity. On other occasions, her self-esteem vanished and she seemed completely different. According to Virginia Woolf who met her for the first time on 6 April 1919, she was ‘a washed out, elderly & worn looking little woman’. After Tom’s first visit, Woolf had decided to count him as a friend. When she and Leonard had started typesetting his poems on 22 January, she had expected to ‘probably see more of’ him; but by the spring she had decided (wrongly, apparently) that Tom had turned against her. Having the Eliots to Sunday lunch with other visitors on 6 April, she noted how the atmosphere became easier when one of the guests took up Vivien’s attention with stories about the king. Warily, Woolf decided Tom had become ‘sharp, narrow, & much of a stick, since he took to disliking me’. Sometimes she felt awkward with him, which increased his own awkwardness, not least when his wife was present. Soon Woolf was aggrieved at Murry for saying ‘the orthodox masculine thing about Eliot’ and ‘belittling my solicitude to know what he said of me’.37

  After Tom, at the Woolfs’ request, supplied a list of contacts to whom flyers about his poetry pamphlet could be mailed, none was sent out. Tom fretted. Vivien worried the pamphlet might never appear, after Tom had told people it would. Through Vanessa Bell’s husband Clive, gossip circulated that Tom had spoken ill of Virginia Woolf. Mary Hutchinson, Clive’s lover, rang Woolf on 3 April ‘in great agitation’: Tom had ‘only abused Bloomsbury in general’, not Woolf in particular.38 Vivien maintained that Tom ‘hates and loathes all sordid quarrelling and gossiping and intrigue and jealousy, so much, that I have seen him go white and be ill at any manifestation of it’.39

  In the febrile, often incestuous world of literary London, such spats were frequent. From a safe distance they sound petty and comical. Shortly afterwards Woolf heard Tom had been ‘praising me to the skies’ in conversation with Mansfield and Murry.40 As tensions flowed and ebbed, his pamphlet, Poems, with a cover designed by Roger Fry, appeared on 12 May. Publication coincided with that of two other Hogarth Press productions, one of them Woolf’s Kew Gardens. Behind Tom’s back, she explained to a friend, ‘Mr Eliot is an American of the highest culture, so that his writing is almost unintelligible.’41 Face to face, relations between poet and publisher were better, but a mutual wariness remained.

  In ‘Gerontion’ Tom wrote about a disturbed state of mind. He may have drawn on his own, but certainly he contemplated that topic in literature. Dostoevsky’s best work involved ‘the continuation of the quotidian experience of the brain into seldom explored extremities of torture’. Tom was impressed, too, by the presentation (in Stendhal’s Scarlet and Black) of Julien Sorel and Mathilde de la Mole, lovers who were passionate yet unsure of one another’s love, doubting yet still desiring. To Tom some of Stendhal’s scenes and phrases ‘read like cutting one’s own throat; they are a terrible humiliation to read, in the understanding of human feelings and the human illusions of feeling that they force upon the reader’. Such ‘exposure’ and ‘dissociation of human feeling’ fascinated him, and are essential to the pain of ‘Gerontion’. There, as in his account of several of the greatest novelists, a sense of waste is bound up with ‘the awful separation between potential passion and any actualization possible in life’. He felt acutely ‘the indestructible barriers between one human being and another’.42 This may have made him hard to understand as a person, even for Mary Hutchinson and Virginia Woolf. It accompanied, too, the strain of his marriage to Vivien and worries in the wake of his father’s death.

  Still, he did not want to write like a tired man. Essayist Robert Lynd, he observed, knew how to compose for the periodical press – a knack Tom had just about mastered – but seemed ‘a tired man like other tired men who have to make a living by literature and also have consciences; tired men who want to make a book and cannot allow themselves that luxury; and the tired men do make books – they cannot wholly deny themselves – but the books are mutilated and unfinished’.43 This was insightfully hard-hitting. The great thing about the bank was that it saved Tom from having to become an over-productive author of feeble books. Journalism could be a threat: ‘In writing for a paper one is writing for a public, and the best work, the only work that in the end counts, is written for oneself.’44 In ‘Gerontion’ and elsewhere he defeated tiredness by anatomising it; he knew only too well what it meant in life.

  Self-knowledge brought pain, but also a hardening of determination. As he wrote to J. H. Woods in late April about poetry:

  There are only two ways in which a writer can become important – to write a great deal, and have his writings appear everywhere, or to write very little. It is a question of temperament. I write very little, and I should not become more powerful by increasing my output. My reputation in London is built upon one small volume of verse, and is kept up by printing two or three more poems in a year. The only thing that matters is that these should be perfect in their kind, so that each should be an event.

  As to America: I am a much
more important person here than I should be at home. I am getting to know and be known by all the intelligent or important people in letters, and I am convinced that I am more useful in the long run by being here. Finally, one changes. I have acquired the habit of a society so different that it is difficult to find common terms to define the difference.45

  This was not what Woods wanted to hear. Still, however hard-headedly arrogant, it is a strikingly self-aware presentation of Tom’s authorial strategy. Any poet who reads his views on writing will gain a confirmatory, compelling education; but Professor Woods felt lingering regret.

  Woods was not alone in trying to persuade Tom to return to America. His mother, proposing to sell the St Louis and Gloucester houses, hoped he would visit. He maintained that, though he longed to see her, he could not yet ask for sufficient leave from the bank; perhaps he might arrive with Vivien the following spring. From Lottie came his father’s chessmen, and an offer, graciously accepted, of Papa’s bathrobe. The Eliots had to decline Ottoline Morrell’s invitation to Garsington in April, because Vivien was unwell. Soon afterwards, when they needed to vacate their flat while it was being decorated, she felt ‘on the verge of collapse’. Temporarily she moved to an address in Bayswater; Tom, who explained to Brigit Patmore that he ‘could not get in there’, stayed at a hotel a few streets away.46 Why they did not cohabit at the hotel is unclear, but time apart gave each some space.

  In early May they went to Garsington, relishing the visit. Lanky, bearded Lytton Strachey watched them through his small, round spectacle lenses, and dined with Tom very soon afterwards, thinking him ‘rather ill and rather American: altogether not gay enough for my taste. But by no means to be sniffed at.’47 Surviving letters suggest the brilliant, squeaky-voiced Strachey was flirtatious towards Tom, who attempted on occasion to match Strachey’s tone, but kept his distance.48 Vivien enjoyed Garsington, not least because she could talk frankly about Bertrand Russell to Lady Ottoline. Tom’s wife liked to believe Russell had been more generous to her than anyone else; yet ‘I have really suffered awfully in the complete collapse of our relationship, for I was fond of Bertie (I think I still am). But it is of course hopeless, I shall never try to see him again.’49 It seems unlikely that Vivien communicated all this to Ottoline (who could be cutting about Vivien’s ‘affair’) without Tom having any inkling of what was going on.50 Distanced, numbed and hurt, his poetry of ‘reconsidered passion’ contained this kind of awareness: ‘After such knowledge, what forgiveness?’51 Though ‘Gerontion’, whose speaker exudes despairing self-rebuke, does not ask that question of the poet’s household, it was a question that belonged in 18 Crawford Mansions.

  Bertrand Russell came back to live in a cottage in Garsington Manor’s grounds, and Lady Ottoline discussed Vivien with him around the end of July. It was then she confided to her journal that Vivien was ‘a frivolous, silly, little woman’, and Russell had been foolish to fall for her, plying her with all those presents such as ‘silk underclothes’.52 Vivien’s confiding in Lady Ottoline was naïve, but she was both unnerved and entranced by Garsington society. Tom, too, however much he might recline smoking his cigarette in a Garsington summer deckchair, could be socially awkward. Going to see Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes perform Stravinsky’s Firebird at London’s Alhambra Theatre on 13 May, he waited with Brigit Patmore until the Hutchinsons arrived, telling her nervously how cultured they were. Afterwards, he worried he had abandoned Patmore and wrote her overwrought notes. These suggest his nerves were on edge, and that, with clumsy flirtatiousness, he was trying to atone.

  It was around then he wrote about ‘humiliation’ in Stendhal between illicit lovers. He knew he could be an awkward man to be with. Yet he enjoyed the company of women other than Vivien. Protesting her love for Mary Hutchinson, Vivien wrote to her saying how pleased she was Mary would be having Tom to stay at Wittering. Tom joked to Mary about how he could be ‘seduced’.53 More wistfully, he thought about a woman who was much further distant. In June he let his cousin Eleanor know he had sent a letter to Emily Hale, anxious about how it might be received. He could not forget her. ‘I should, I think, like her to know what a keen interest I take in everything that happens to her.’54 But there is no evidence Emily was writing to him.

  Though Vivien’s affair with Russell was over, and she was back from Marlow, she and Tom continued to spend periods apart, even after returning to their redecorated flat. One reason was Tom’s work: towards the end of May the bank sent him on a tour of ‘unknown provinces’, including Manchester, Birmingham and Cardiff.55 Vivien was unsure whether to accompany him; eventually she did not. Instead, ‘ill in a sort of way’, she went into what she described to Lady Ottoline as ‘a sort of retirement which is so necessary to me at times that I should die without it’; she also invited Russell to tea in London while Tom was away, but that plan went badly. Russell seemed to flinch when he saw Vivien. Still, she asked Ottoline Morrell, ‘Isn’t it hard to put him quite out of one’s mind?’56 While Tom thought of Emily Hale, Vivien, spending a good deal of the summer at Bosham – sometimes with her husband and sometimes not – continued to dwell on her former lover. Marriage was difficult. During his travels, Tom sent letters, on occasion playfully, to Brigit Patmore and to Mary Hutchinson – who, when it suited her, used for correspondence the address of her lover, Clive Bell. Tom was toughening the shell that allowed him to cope. ‘One must develop a hard exterior’, he explained to Patmore, ‘in order to be spontaneous – one cannot be that unless nothing can touch what is inside’.57

  He had another publication planned: a small edition (250 copies) that poet John Rodker’s new Ovid Press would print with artwork by Edward Wadsworth. Initially, the idea was to include Tom’s earlier published verse from Prufrock, along with the contents of the Hogarth Press pamphlet and several new poems, among them ‘Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar’, ‘Sweeney Erect’ and ‘Ode’. Tom aimed for the Egoist Press to bring out a cheap edition later, in the spring of 1920. Slyly, he did not consult the Woolfs about the Rodker scheme. They might not have welcomed it, given that his new book would appear long before they had sold out their pamphlet. Disappointed by Knopf and still attempting to find a good American publisher, Tom sought to prove he was flourishing in London. This fresh, expanded collection would help him do so. It would be a further slim volume of verse, but now other publishers’ approaches were coming: Sir Algernon Methuen (interested in a collection of essays) and Martin Secker who had been impressed by Tom’s thoughts on Stendhal and wondered if he might author a book about that novelist. Eventually the Methuen enquiry resulted in his essay collection, The Sacred Wood; the Stendhal proposal came to nothing. Secker was offering just £25.

  Tom’s evening-class teaching ended on 5 May. Grateful students gifted him The Oxford Book of English Verse, but he wrote to his mother, ‘I hope I have done with education; the pay is not bad, but it seems such a waste!’58 He made sure, however, to let her know he was about to lecture on ‘the younger poets’ on 31 May at London University.59 To his family and himself he wanted to demonstrate success. Yet, touring the provinces, he felt both ‘disdain’ for London, and that he was ‘sojourning among the termites’.60 The fit between his American loyalties and his life in England was repeatedly uneasy. Once again, in mid-June, he had to cancel a Garsington visit at short notice when his former classmate Harold Peters arrived unexpectedly: ‘the oldest and loyalest American friend I have’, though Harold shared none of Tom’s intellectual interests.61

  Demobilised from mine-sweeping in the Orkney Islands, ‘Pete’ was about to sail to the States and had come from Liverpool for a long weekend just to see his Harvard pal. Tom tried his best to behave as if little had altered. Vivien returned from Bosham on Saturday 21 June to find the flat in an ‘awful condition’, with Tom entertaining Peters. The three of them went out to dinner, but the Eliots felt worn out, Tom ‘looking very ill’.62 Nevertheless, on Sunday Tom and Peters went to Greenwich, walking for miles along the
Thames by the docks, and through London’s East End. Other trips took them to the theatre and the zoo. While Tom was at work in the bank, Peters simply sat nearby, waiting for his trusty companion to emerge. Vivien, who found Peters’s attachment to her husband rather comical, complained their visitor had ‘the development of an average boy of ten. Boring!’63 Yet Tom told his mother (who knew Pete) that his former classmate was ‘the most lovable fellow in the world, and I think really devoted to me, and time cannot alter that’.64

  Immediately after Peters sailed home for America, Tom had to settle down to a week of banking and review writing before weekending at Bosham where Vivien, delighted to be back there and free of ‘very boring’ Peters, was spending a good deal of time.65 Tom enjoyed picnicking with her and the Hutchinsons in nearby woods at Itchenor; other Bosham visitors that summer included the Schiffs, who came by car. On a fine summer’s day, with Sacheverell Sitwell and Mary Hutchinson the Eliots hired a boat and sailed down Chichester Harbour for lunch at Wittering. This voyage was less adeptly accomplished than Tom’s earlier excursions with Peters: the vessel grounded on a sandbank. Vivien, ‘splendid in a boat’, took off her stockings, jumped into the water and tried, unsuccessfully, to push.66 Attempting to sort things, Tom broke a boathook. Eventually he anchored and they all waded ashore on planks across tidal mud. Peters’s visit and this nautical fiasco meant sailing was very much in Tom’s mind around the time he finished ‘Gerontion’, with its mention of seagulls and hazardous Belle Isle.