Young Eliot

by Robert Crawford

  More than once in this piece Tom links ‘the poet and the anthropologist’, but he also connects poet and ‘savage’.135

  He sought to develop what he admired in Pound’s new collection Quia Pauper Amavi (published by the Egoist Press that October): ‘a constant aim with a deliberate and conscious method’. Yet pursuing such a course in poetry would involve him in tapping into his own hidden convulsions and compulsions. His verse in The Waste Land would carry a lancing sense of pain that surpassed Pound’s sometimes lacquered bookishness. However, Tom saw that Pound, drawing on aspects of Browning’s oeuvre, had found a new way to write poetry.

  As the present is no more than the present existence, the present significance, of the entire past, Mr Pound proceeds by acquiring the entire past; and when the entire past is acquired, the constituents fall into place and the present is revealed. Such a method involves immense capacities of learning and of dominating one’s learning, and the peculiarity of expressing oneself through historical masks.136

  Though he associated his friend with translations and versions of older poems, including several from the Provençal, Tom was fascinated by Pound’s recreation of a two-thousand-year-old erotic voice in ‘Homage to Sextus Propertius’. In this sequence Latin poetry, rendered into English, had been spliced, concentrated, quoted in snippets and rearranged so that ancient and modern were inextricable. Here was ‘a final concentration of the entire past upon the present’.137 Tom was struck, too, by Pound’s new ‘Cantos’. Ranging from an account of a Classical rape to details of present-day sounds and sights, they brought together a ‘rag-bag’ of quotations, allusions and historical parallels in an ambitious attempt to convey universalism.138 Pound could make this function in a way ‘no other poet living’ could do.139 Preoccupied with something similar in Joyce’s recent prose, Tom would strive to better these achievements.

  A year that had begun with one family death drew to its close with others. Vivien’s Aunt Emily died in October. Accompanying her brother to the funeral, Vivien found the experience ‘terrible’.140 In November her beloved aunt Lillia Symes, the only family member present at the Eliots’ wedding, passed away suddenly in her flat in Eastbourne. Again, Vivien was deeply distressed. Reminding Tom of his father’s demise, further packages of books arrived from St Louis. With the works of Thomas Jefferson lined up in his bookcase, just as once they had been arranged at 2635 Locust Street, he worked on several essays, including his first leading article for The Times Literary Supplement.

  Determinedly, he stayed up until 3 a.m. one morning to finish it. If it was hard to find time to write such pieces, it was difficult, also, to research them. The British Museum reading room, a wonderful resource, was ‘useless’, Tom complained, to most people with day jobs since it did not open in the evenings or on Sundays. Instead, he subscribed to the London Library, ‘its terms … generous and its manners gracious’.141 Registering there first as a ‘journalist’, he would be a lifelong supporter of this institution.142 Today it boasts a wing named after him.

  In late November he read the proofs of his books that Rodker and Knopf were soon to publish. He was now a poet with a small but substantial body of work exhibiting both consistency and variety; he had, too, a clear poetic stance. The second part of ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, published in December in the final Egoist, confirmed that. ‘Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation’ were to be ‘directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry’. This ‘impersonal theory of poetry’ made clear it was not what the poet had in him to say that mattered; it was how he said it. There was a crucial difference between personal experience and poetic craftsmanship. Tom was fascinated, he made evident elsewhere at this time, by something in Donne’s work: ‘the sense of the artist as an Eye curiously, patiently watching himself as a man’.143

  For the reader, and the poetry, however, it was the crafting that mattered. ‘The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material.’ Yet revealingly, even in writing those words, Tom selected the verb ‘suffers’, rather than, say, ‘loves’, ‘exults’ or ‘experiences’; and he chose to equate poetry with a corrosive, damaging material – sulphurous acid. The verse he was authoring now was a poetry of suffering (‘Gerontion’ is a poem of human corrosion); the last thing he wanted was for this to result in painful invasions of his rigorously guarded privacy. The more, as a poetic ‘Eye’, he watched his own hurts, the more he stressed impersonality. Instead of presenting poetry as soul-baring, he set it forth as a scientific operation, likening it to the making of sulphurous acid out of two gases, oxygen and sulphur dioxide; only when platinum was present would the gases combine, yet the platinum stayed seemingly ‘unaffected’; it remained ‘inert, passive, and unchanged’.144

  Metallic, the poet’s mind was that piece of platinum. This arresting analogy fits with Tom’s later description of his having had to harden himself ‘into a machine’ so as ‘to endure’.145 Registering and combining materials in striking new ways, the poet’s intelligence seems of necessity detached. It is not, this essay explains, ‘the intensity, of the emotions’ that matters in the making of a poem, but ‘the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place’. No good poet expresses what journalists call a ‘“personality”’. Poets present a medium: poetry. There is deep, clarifying insight in this separation of ‘personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in his [the poet’s] life’ from the ‘emotion in his poetry’, and in this emphasis on ‘the emotion of art’ as ‘impersonal’. Yet, revealingly, the passages of verse Tom cites as examples often feature reactions to recent death or adultery, whether they come from Dante, Othello or Aeschylus. ‘Only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.’146

  Tom’s thinking may have been sharpened by the discussion of ‘personnalité’ in Rémy de Gourmont’s essay on style. However, that French writer’s presentation of the Flaubert who ‘transvasait goutte à goutte’ (decanted drop by drop) his sensibility into his work – an idea that fascinated Tom – is not quite the same as this theory of impersonality.147 Transmuting personal sufferings into art might be a way of transcending them while fashioning something worthwhile out of the damage. ‘The ways in which the passions and desires of the creator may be satisfied in the work of art are complex and devious.’148 In one of the finest of all essays about poetry, Tom both concealed and revealed. He gave a superb account of how ‘The poet’s mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.’149 That is how The Waste Land would come into being. It is how most poems are made. His 1919 account in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ is hard to better, even if, with a necessary instinct for self-protection, it hides underlying pain.

  For all his consciousness and self-consciousness, Tom’s poetry came together by accident as well as strategy. On 19 November 1919, Vivien enjoyed a London concert by African American musicians of the Southern ‘Syncopated Orchestra’, whose players included Sidney Bechet; such syncopations reconnected Tom with sounds from his St Louis childhood.150 His reviewing and evening lectures brought back to him material encountered at Harvard and elsewhere – from the Buddha’s Fire Sermon to ‘Petronius’ – adding to it and keeping it fresh.151 Inevitably, over the years some phrases, images and sensations had stuck. Now, mixed up with experiences from his recent life, they were almost ready to combust.

  Here he was in another country, still receiving packages of his dead father’s belongings. Tormented in his marriage, he remained close to Vivien and valued her – as she did him; yet their divergent experiences and behaviours kept them apart. Problematically insistent, too, was his intense link to his ageing mother. At the start of Decem
ber he wrote, ‘I should love to have pyjamas made by you.’152 He was responding to her offer – sensing it as a gesture of nearness.

  He missed the dead: not only his father (to whom he would dedicate his first book of essays), and Jean Verdenal (to whom he dedicated the Knopf edition of his Poems), but also others, including Karl Culpin and dead poets to whom he felt at times a preternatural closeness. ‘Tu sei ombra ed ombra vedi’ (thou art a shade and a shade thou seest) was a fragment of a ghostly meeting from Dante’s Purgatorio that appeared unexpectedly in his first Times Literary Supplement leader – on Ben Jonson – published that November.153 Haunted by the literary and unliterary dead, when he wrote about Jonson he argued that we must put ‘ourselves into seventeenth-century London’ and find a way of ‘setting Jonson in our London’ to appreciate him not just as a respected dead poet but also as ‘a contemporary’. Tom quoted ‘the learned, but also the creative’ Jonson’s soliloquy of a ‘ghost’ on Rome, with its imagined earthquake-shaken ‘towers’, its ‘ruin’, its river and its famous topography. Eventually The Waste Land would populate London with the dead as well as the living. It would move present-day urban scenes into the past, into Dante and elsewhere, fusing them in a haunted, often hallucinatory panorama. Tom’s technical skill, hoard of learning and profound sense of loss would unite to animate his poem. ‘Every creator is also a critic’, he argued. As he articulated his thinking in commanding criticism he created a grounding for poetry to come.154

  His sense of being loss-haunted was hardly unique. Having lived in England throughout World War I, he had a profound experience of desolation unfamiliar to most American contemporaries. Almost a million British men had been killed in action; German and other losses were even higher. Richard Aldington and all former soldiers shared this oppressive sense of wasted lives, but non-combatants like Pound had it too. Pound and his wife came to dinner at Crawford Mansions on 17 November 1919, then the Eliots dined with them six days later before going to see The Duchess of Malfi. In ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’ (written in early 1920), Pound articulated how ‘There died a myriad’ among ‘wastage as never before’.155 Tom, used to seeing Pound’s poems in draft, knew the battlefield horrors of the front only at second hand but had heard distressing accounts from his brother-in-law and others. Impressed by the pessimism of his brilliant acquaintance John Maynard Keynes’s 1919 Economic Consequences of the Peace, he was struck during the aftermath of the war by the ‘destitution’ and ‘starvation in Vienna’ amid ‘the “Balkanisation” of Europe’.156

  All too aware of a Europe-wide post-war malaise, in his personal life Tom had experienced bereavement and intimate suffering. He may have been thirty-one in late 1919, but he felt like an old man. Bedridden for a time in mid-December, he was told by his physician ‘not to think of going out’ for several days more.157 Dr Whait, whom Vivien summoned, gave him a special spray for his nose, warning him again he might have ‘to have the membrane cauterized’. Telling his seventy-six-year-old mother that he always slept on his left side ‘because I breathe more easily’, he suggested that his ailment was similar to one she had suffered from. In this prematurely aged condition, he was also, he informed her, harbouring a ‘New Year’s Resolution’. It was ‘“to write a long poem I have had on my mind for a long time and to prepare a small prose book from my lecture on poetry”’.158 That poem would become The Waste Land.

  ‘Xmas is awful, awful’, wrote Vivien, but they had a small tree and, as usual, in a consolingly childlike way, they hung up their stockings.159 Cheques – and ‘beautifully made’ pyjamas – arrived from Tom’s mother whom Vivien hoped might come and visit them in ‘April’ which she regarded as ‘just in time for the most beautiful time of the year in England’.160 After Christmas lunch at home, she and Tom went on to Christmas dinner with her parents. Perhaps enthused by the rhythms of the Southern Syncopated Orchestra, she took along a gramophone, but felt the evening was ‘not a very nice’ one.161 All Boxing Day, it poured with rain. Vivien ventured to the Schiffs for tea; but she and Tom would spend the next few days apart: he had accepted, but she had turned down, an invitation to visit his friend Sydney Waterlow, to whom he felt obligated and who was now ‘a very important official in the Foreign Office’. Tom realised Vivien was sleeping ‘very badly’.162 She felt ‘most wretched, & fearfully tired’.163 They had the chance to rent out the Marlow house, but she was determined they should hang on to it, associating it with a dream of happiness that seemed lost, for the moment at least. On 30 December, now that Tom was back from Waterlow’s, they went together to a ‘very drunken & rowdy’ dinner party at the Hutchinsons. The sexually voracious Nancy Cunard, the beautiful young poet and model Iris Tree, Osbert Sitwell, painter Duncan Grant and others were there, but Vivien, worried she looked unwell, did not enjoy it. Her father was ill; she feared he might die: another ailing old man. ‘Glad this awful year is over’, reads her diary entry for 31 December. ‘Next probably worse’.164

  14

  Professional

  IN 1920 Tom’s annual salary was £500 – a good income for a professional in his early thirties. On 6 January, when he informed his mother he had just been given a pay rise, The Times advertised a vacancy for a fully qualified ‘clinical pathologist’ of comparable age, which paid £600.1 Including reviewing and other activities, Tom probably earned around that sum. Nevertheless, writing a cheque that day for a £14 dentist’s bill, he felt, as so often, that he was not making quite enough to be able to look after Vivien, to maintain his position in society and to buy himself time sufficient for the work – not least the poetry – that he most wanted to create.

  Generally he wrote ‘in the evenings and Sundays’.2 On weekdays in his Information Department, he collated economic data from several areas of the English-speaking world and Europe. He was expected to understand economics and as many European languages as necessary. Facts and figures impressed him: ‘England and Germany use the most sulphuric acid.’3 His limited knowledge of industrial chemistry was not great, but did make its mark on ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’. As he won the respect of his bosses at Lloyds, in the wake of the Treaty of Versailles they put him ‘in charge of settling all the pre-War Debts between the Bank and the Germans’. This, he informed his mother, was ‘an important appointment’.4 ‘Occupied’, as he recalled, ‘in a humble capacity, with the application of some of the minor financial clauses’ of the Treaty of Versailles, he read Keynes’s Economic Consequences of the Peace, which dealt with social psychology as well as economics.5 Quoting poetry as well as statistics, Keynes (whom Tom met at Garsington) set forth his view of ‘ruin’, of ‘the fearful convulsions of a dying civilization’, of ‘nightmare’ and the ‘morbid’. War debts were ‘a menace to financial stability everywhere’. The peace was flawed; the book’s conclusion quotes Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound: ‘In each human heart terror survives / The ruin it has gorged’.6 For Tom, as for the polymathic Keynes (a generous supporter of artists and writers), poetry and banking were instructively and darkly aligned.

  Lacking formal commercial or legal qualifications, though aided by assistants, Tom had to weigh up complex economic issues. He produced financial reviews; he made digests; generating substantial correspondence, he got used to having a secretary. Office personnel changed repeatedly. One of his early clerical assistants, a military officer’s wife called Mrs Lord, ‘had no knowledge of shorthand and had some difficulty in reading her own handwriting’ with the result that she ‘occasionally pied the correspondence’. Another secretary, Miss Holt, was the sister of twin boys whom Tom had taught at Highgate School: ‘She came to me to weep’, he recalled of this typist. Before long, in The Waste Land, he would present a figure who has become the most famous typist in English literature. He liked to observe his professional colleagues – whether Mr Saunders, who enjoyed a ‘matitudinal visit to Short’s Wine Rooms in Pope’s Head Alley’, or Mr Crewdon, ‘a real swell who had been to Uppingham and King’s College Cambridge’ – but the cu
stomers interested him too.7 Meeting former millhand Sir James Roberts, whose clothing business at Saltaire outside Bradford in Yorkshire had been damaged by the financial consequences of the Russian Revolution, Tom was impressed. Sir James, who had known the Brontës in Haworth, was then in his seventies and so hardly the model for the young ‘carbuncular’ clerk who forces himself on The Waste Land’s typist, but he did provide the impetus for those unsettling lines: ‘One of the low on whom assurance sits / As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire’.8 Every inch the businessman’s son, in white shirt, dark tie and three-piece suit, Tom acted the banker with aplomb, and was respected for it. Yet, eyeing some of his richer friends who enjoyed freer lifestyles, he confided to Lady Ottoline that ‘So very few of one’s acquaintance realise what it means to have sold the whole of all of one’s days, – except at most a month a year – and old age – to a huge impersonal thing like a Bank.’9