Young Eliot

by Robert Crawford

  Again he pondered being American in England. On the whole he loved having escaped his homeland’s ‘gregariousness’. In London he could be ‘an individual’, finding more easily the contemplative solitariness he needed as a writer, yet, when he wanted it, enjoying ready access to like-minded literary friends. If Vivien thought Peters too boyish, Tom found himself reflecting now that not just his ‘American friends’ but ‘any American I meet’ manifested ‘immaturity of feeling, childishness’. He discerned a maturity in English society, yet never quite felt part of it. As he wrote to Henry, ‘Don’t think that I find it easy to live over here. It is damned hard work to live with a foreign nation and cope with them – one is always coming up against differences of feeling that make one feel humiliated and lonely. One remains always a foreigner – only the lower classes can assimilate. It is like being always on dress parade – one can never relax. It is a great strain.’67 Yet he liked being valued for his particular talents in a literary metropolis. Being a foreigner in England was ‘never dull’.68 ‘America outstrips the world in the development of the text-book’, he wrote that summer, well aware that it was imaginative writing, not textbooks, that compelled him.69

  Hints in his poetry and prose register deeper disturbance. ‘We may not be great lovers; but if we had a genuine affair’, Tom wrote in the Egoist, ‘with a real poet of any degree we have acquired a monitor to avert us when we are not in love’. He was writing about poetry here, not about his personal life, yet his imagery and preoccupation with the ‘close analogy between the sort of experience which develops a man and the sort of experience which develops a writer’ are striking, given what was happening in his marriage. Published during July, the piece considers how literary development can become advanced in ‘a soul left immature in living’ and on how ‘difficult’ it is for a writer ‘to mature in America’; it must have been written around the time of the visit of the supposedly childish Peters.70 Perhaps the way Tom describes Peters to his mother as ‘the most lovable fellow in the world’, as ‘really devoted to me’ and ‘devoted to his mother’, reveals a shared, tacit acknowledgement that Peters may have been gay.71

  Like most people, Tom was alert to a spectrum of sexual experience. This alertness powers some of his shrewdest work. In summer 1919 he wrote, for instance, of the ‘passion’ involved in being ‘intimate’ with another writer, and of how perhaps ‘not one man in each generation is great enough to be intimate with Shakespeare’. The language of love here describes relations between male writers, and there is a shifting between procreative sexuality and the implied homoerotic. ‘Experience in living may leave the literary embryo still dormant’, Tom contends, whereas there is an important relationship that one can have with another author which is undeniably quickening. Probably uppermost in his mind was his own transformational relationship with Laforgue, or, perhaps, with John Donne, about whose ‘experience’ and ability to ‘penetrate’ he had written in his poem ‘Whispers of Immortality’. Pondering such relationships, he continued:

  This relation is a feeling of profound kinship, or rather of a peculiar personal intimacy, with another, probably a dead author. It may overcome us suddenly, on first or after long acquaintance; it is certainly a crisis; and when a young writer is seized with his first passion of this sort he may be changed, metamorphosed almost, within a few weeks even, from a bundle of second-hand sentiments into a person. The imperative intimacy arouses for the first time a real, an unshakeable confidence. That you possess this secret knowledge, this intimacy, with the dead man, that after few or many years or centuries you should have appeared, with this indubitable claim to distinction; who can penetrate at once the thick and dusty circumlocutions about his reputation, can call yourself alone his friend: it is something more than encouragement to you. It is a cause of development, like personal relations in life. Like personal intimacies in life, it may and probably will pass, but it will be ineffaceable.72

  Daringly but perceptively, Tom applies erotic language to the experience of a writer’s empowering reading of another author. Since most of the poets he read were male, and since, at the start of this piece, he presents the writer as ‘a man’, the homoerotic element in the imagery is inevitable; but his use of it seems at least partly conscious. When he goes on to talk of ‘lovers’ and ‘friendship’, he is overt and alert. To a degree he is being provocative, but he is also drawing on gay mores familiar to him in Bloomsbury, at Garsington and elsewhere. Not just Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf (who idealised androgyny in literature) enjoyed same-sex relationships and flirtations; Vivien felt a teasing attraction to the apparently bisexual Mary Hutchinson whom she called ‘little cat’ later in 1919, signing off a letter, ‘Goodnight my dear. When may I come and spend the night? I embrace you. V.’73

  While both Tom and Vivien could be teasing on occasion with members of their own sex, that teasing seems to have gone no further than play. Vivien thought ‘the sex business’ made ‘a vast difference’ between her and Mary Hutchinson, even if ‘we are very much alike’.74 If what Tom writes about ‘intimacy’ between writers is conditioned by what he had sensed in Peters, or (some might argue) in Jean Verdenal, to suggest this is not to assert either that he slept with those men or even that he wanted to. The ‘affair’ he was closest to was that of his wife; when he wrote in July’s Egoist, ‘We may not be great lovers’, those words might relate to his own marital predicament. Yet what this piece (whose use of quotations drawn on in ‘Gerontion’ indicates its closeness to his poetic imaginings) does indicate is that, as with the figure of Tiresias in The Waste Land, so here Tom’s literary imagination passes readily and fearlessly across a wide sexual spectrum. This strengthened him as a writer. He composed his contribution to the Egoist when he was considering embarking on another long poem to set beside ‘Gerontion’, and when, having just read new work by Conrad Aiken, he was pondering links between writing, ‘psycho-analysis’ and the ‘borderline of the subliminal’.75 In his poetry, as in his prose, he investigated such territory with daring, but also with a subtlety that some critics belie when, lacking clear evidence, they attempt to read back too crudely from his writings into his conduct in life or to conscript, for whatever cause, his sexuality. His imagination was polymorphous; his mind did not run on one track.

  One thing that obsessed him, however, was tradition. He was coming to see the poet as a tradition bearer; in this context, not least, his imaging of poets as passionately overwhelmed by their reading should be understood. ‘We do not imitate, we are changed; and our work is the work of the changed man; we have not borrowed, we have been quickened, and we become bearers of a tradition.’76 Using rather different imagery, he would restate this perception a few months later in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’.

  From Aiken’s ‘Senlin: A Biography’, which Tom discussed briefly in print in June 1919, he filched (or stole back) some elements. Aiken had written of how ‘The city dissolves about us’; conscious of Tom’s earlier work, he had sought to fuse individual and urban consciousness in a metropolis ‘Dumbly observing the burial of its dead’. In ‘The Burial of the Dead’ and elsewhere in The Waste Land Tom would mix familiar urban with other, more dreamlike images, from a violin and horns to bells and lilacs – all present in ‘Senlin’.77 He thought Aiken in that poem ‘oversensitive and worried’.78 Tom, who had his own worries, sought not to imitate his friend, but to outdo him now in the long poem he was planning. Its gestation would be painfully slow.

  Vivien shared some of her husband’s preoccupations. They were both ‘carried away’ by Ulysses, though Tom realised that few other people in London were; sadly, by the publication of the thigh-smacking, panting and sweating Blazes Boylan episode in the Little Review, Vivien began to find Joyce ‘abominable’.79 Threats of prosecution had halted serialisation of Ulysses in both the Egoist and the Little Review. Harriet Weaver and Dora Marsden decided to suspend publication of the Egoist, but before they did so Tom prepared to publish his most significa
nt essay there. He was conceptualising ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ in early July when he wrote to Mary Hutchinson (whom more and more he had enjoyed visiting, and to whom he had recently sent Pound’s Personae) about the need for ‘civilisation which is impersonal, traditional’ and ‘which forms people unconsciously’. A transposed American, he explained that by ‘tradition’ he did not mean simply ‘stopping in the same place’; deliberately, one had to develop a ‘historical sense’.80

  Tom’s essay would appear in two parts, printed in the Egoist’s final two issues. In part one he wrote, also, of contemporary literature’s relationship with the dead, but did not deploy the imagery of lovers. When he first set out his ideas to Mary Hutchinson, however, there were hints of flirtatiousness: writing of ‘you’, Tom seems to mean Mary herself (whom Vivien admired as ‘such a “civilised” rebel’), though she may have represented, too, an English culture which remained sometimes hard for him to read.

  I don’t know whether I think you more complicated than you are – but I have fewer delusions about you than you think – but no doubt a great deal of ignorance. I certainly don’t recognise the portrait you hold up as painted by me. But remember that I am a metic – a foreigner, and that I want to understand you, and all the background and tradition of you. I shall try to be frank – because the attempt is so very much worthwhile with you – it is very difficult with me – both by inheritance and because of my very suspicious and cowardly disposition. But I may simply prove to be a savage.81

  Inevitably, Tom the metic thought of his father when packages arrived from St Louis in early July containing childhood treasures and the paternal bathrobe. When he saw the great ‘care’ with which his mother had packed them, he almost wept.82 He went to Garsington for the weekend of 12–13 July, but Vivien was ‘in bed with cold’ both days.83 The following weekend she and her husband travelled to Eastbourne to stay with the Schiffs. Vivien found this ‘unsatisfactory’: the Schiffs were ‘very fatigueing [sic] & irritating to me’, though ‘Tom got on allright.’84 It could be hard when her husband was lionised; she took pride in his talent, yet did not welcome being treated as his appendage. Still jobless, she took up an afternoon dressmaking class. ‘Where would I be without my dirty piece of crochet which I have been doing for five years, or my failures of dresses and underclothes?’ She went, too, to the Russian Ballet with friends, but, tired much of the time, worried she ‘looked horrible’.85

  Sometimes she felt too ill to go out at all. She took to her bed with a terrible migraine after Lady Ottoline came to tea on 23 July, leaving Tom to head off to the ballet with the Hutchinsons. Yet Tom, too, was ailing. Before visiting the Schiffs, Vivien found him ‘IMpossible – full of nerves, really not well, very bad cough, very morbid and grumpy’; she complained to Mary Hutchinson, ‘He gets angry and stubborn.’86 As soon as they returned from Eastbourne Tom went to his doctor, John Robert Whait, whose practise was at 124 Finchley Road in Hampstead and whose interests included neurology.87 More than once Whait advised Tom to rest. Conscious he needed dental work also, he was in bed ‘several times’ in July and August, ‘very much run down’.88

  His writing, however, attracted further admirers. Recently returned from active service, twenty-seven-year-old Richard Aldington, his predecessor as assistant editor at the Egoist, wrote to express ‘admiration’ and ‘envy’ of his gifts as a critic; Aldington, the dashing young officer-poet of War and Love, had been struck particularly by Tom’s incisiveness in the July Egoist article, though he felt obliged to add that he disliked Tom’s verse greatly: ‘it is over-intellectual and afraid of those essential emotions which make poetry’.89 Later, he came to realise Tom’s avoidance of sentimentality enhanced poetic power. Yet if some English men of letters praised aspects of Tom’s talent, he continued to provoke American objections for transplanting himself. Just after his father’s death he had received a letter from President Eliot, formerly of Harvard, asking him about his situation. During the summer, they corresponded further. Justifying residence in England in terms of its practical and intellectual benefits, Tom cited the example of Henry James; perhaps aware that some at Harvard were still hoping to recruit him, President Eliot found it ‘quite unintelligible’ that ‘you or any other young American scholar can forego the privilege of living in the genuine American atmosphere – a bright atmosphere of freedom and hope’. It was just such facile optimism that Tom had fled. Where he sought a cosmopolitan, international literature, President Eliot countered that ‘Literature seems to me highly climatic and national as yet; and will it not be long before it becomes independent of these local influences, and addresses itself to an international mind?’90 This senior Eliot wanted a much more junior Eliot back in his Unitarian home.

  Tom was adamant. That summer he considered several ideas of national culture, not just American. Irish literature involved ‘crudity and egoism’, though these qualities in some of Yeats’s work and in Ulysses were exploited ‘to the point of greatness’.91 Thinking about ‘the Romantic Generation in England’, Tom detected ‘decadence’ (albeit ‘decadence of genius’) in Wordsworth and ‘immaturity of genius’ in Keats and Shelley; at least the German Romanticism of Goethe showed a ‘completely awakened intelligence’.92 ‘Scotch literature’ had something akin to the book culture of the New England he had left behind: flickering in its achievement, it had become ‘provincial’. ‘Edinburgh in 1800 … is analogous to Boston in America fifty years later’; inevitably, ‘the important men turn to the metropolis’ of London. ‘The basis for one literature is one language.’ This view saw America, Scotland and Ireland as peripheries nourishing the central tradition of a language rooted in England. The expatriate American cautioned against the ‘intemperate and fanatical spirit’ of France’s Charles Maurras, who denounced undigested ‘foreign forces’ threatening French literature.93 Tom thought Britain faced no such imminent danger.

  These arguments are debatable: the assumption that ‘The basis for one literature is one language’ can seem self-evident; but it is equally apparent that the literature of England has been produced in several languages, including Latin, Old French and English, while the literature of Scotland – ranging from Gaelic and Scots to Old Norse – is even more polyglot.94 Perversely, in ‘Was There a Scottish Literature?’ Tom never mentions Robert Burns, Walter Scott or Robert Louis Stevenson. However, he was formulating confidently the thinking on which his own work depended, and England was central to his internationalised view. In his mind, too, at this time were techniques such as Tristan Tzara’s Dadaist mixing of French and alien, even on occasion Indic-sounding elements; Tom quotes ‘Bonjour sans cigarette tzantzanza / ganga’. He cites uses of rhetoric in Elizabethan drama, from ‘the furibund fluency of old Hieronymo’ to Shakespeare’s Cleopatra seen in a consciously dramatic light; he takes words from the famous speech beginning, ‘The barge she sat in…’ Unexpected patterns were generated by his panoptic examination of traditions: links, for instance, between ‘Dickens’ and Elizabethan drama.95 All these perceptions, and even particular passages that caught Tom’s ear, would be reconfigured in The Waste Land.

  Though he may have revised it after his return, he seems to have been composing at least the first part of ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ before, on 9 August 1919, he set off for a French holiday. Following his July letter to Mary Hutchinson discussing ‘tradition’ and the ‘impersonal’, a 6 August letter to her (requesting the return of a draft of ‘Gerontion’) considers relations between ‘individuals’ and ‘groups’.96 Published in the September Egoist, his essay continued to contemplate national literatures: ‘Every nation, every race, has not only its own creative, but its own critical turn of mind.’ He also cautioned against looking for those aspects of a poet’s oeuvre which least resemble the productions of other poets; instead, ‘the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously’. This is what it means to be part of a traditio
n. Yet the essay glides away from ideas of national traditions to a wider concept of what tradition might signify. Indeed, probably spurred by his reaction against his own national tradition – though not mentioning America – he asserts counter-intuitively that tradition ‘cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour’. To do so involves acquiring ‘the historical sense’ (he repeats the phrase he had used to Mary Hutchinson), which brings with it awareness ‘not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence’. This sense compels the poet to write with a deep awareness of his own time; he needs, too, a feeling that the ‘whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order’.97 The historical sense makes a writer simultaneously traditional and contemporary.

  Eurocentric, taking in England and its literature, but also internationally-minded, this essay was Tom’s greatest manifesto, his ‘programme for the métier of poetry’. No poet or artist could be appreciated alone; each must be set alongside the dead poets of many earlier generations. Only then could significance be assessed. There are some parallels between such a way of thinking and J. G. Frazer’s comparative method in anthropology – invoked, perhaps, in Tom’s later book title, The Sacred Wood. Yet if this project seemed to place a poet in conformity with the dead, it entailed, too, disruption.

  The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.