He couldn’t find time. ‘I want a period of tranquility to do a poem that I have in mind’, he told his mother on 20 September, just as she was completing her own move to a new house in Cambridge, Massachusetts.80 ‘Am I writing much? Only signing my name to leases and agreements’, he complained to Mary Hutchinson, adding that he was ‘about to have an operation’.81 This, he later explained to Leonard Woolf, was ‘on my Nose’.82 Probably he was having it cauterised: hardly a cheering prospect. Barbara and Jeremy, Mary Hutchinson’s children, nicknamed him ‘The Eagle’ because of the size of his nose.83 Aggravations multiplied. By mid-October he complained to Lewis he was ‘in almost hourly consultation with somebody or other about the flat which I am trying to take from an insane she-hyena.’84 This woman insisted Tom pay all her ‘solicitors’ fees’ as well as his own.85 His temper was not improved by having read Aiken’s derivative new book of poems, The House of Dust, which, once again, seemed unduly indebted to ‘myself’.86 Struggling with his commitments, he asked Lewis to help with the removal.
His imagination flooded with ideas and images, including some from his past and from his reading as a student. Earlier in 1920 he had gone to see a performance of Euripides’ Medea starring Sybil Thorndyke at London’s Holborn Empire theatre. The verse translation of this play about a fearsomely strong mother was by Gilbert Murray. Though Tom thought Murray’s poetry poor, he recognised him as a major Hellenist. Thinking about Murray’s work led him to go over in his mind the way literature, anthropology and psychology had converged over the last few decades: something which his Harvard education and some of his recent reviewing had brought home to him. Having written a few years before about the interpretation of primitive ritual, Tom could treat this scholarship with a certain mockery in Art and Letters. Nonetheless he sensed in it a new intellectual dawn.
This day began, in a sense, with Tylor and a few German anthropologists; since then we have acquired sociology and social psychology, we have watched the clinics of Ribot and Janet, we have read books from Vienna and heard a discourse of Bergson; a philosophy arose at Cambridge; social emancipation crawled abroad; our historical knowledge has of course increased; and we have a curious Freudian-social-mystical-rationalistic-higher-critical interpretation of the Classics and what used to be called the Scriptures. I do not deny the very great value of all works by scientists in their own departments, the great interest also of this work in detail and in its consequences. Few books are more fascinating than those of Miss [Jane] Harrison, or Mr. [F. M.] Cornford, or Mr. Cooke, when they burrow in the origins of Greek myths and rites; M. Durkheim, with his social consciousness, and M. Lévy-Bruhl, with his Bororo Indians who convince themselves that they are parroquets, are delightful writers. A number of sciences have sprung up in an almost tropical exuberance which undoubtedly excites our imagination, and the garden, not unnaturally, has come to resemble a jungle. Such men as Tylor, and Robertson Smith, and Wilhelm Wundt, who early fertilised the soil, would hardly recognize the resulting vegetation; and indeed poor Wundt’s Völkerpsychologie was a musty relic before it was translated.87
Reviewing all this, and writing about scholarship on primitive fertility rituals as if it was itself a form of fertile ‘vegetation’, Tom concluded what was needed was to fuse this intellectual material with the poetry practised by ‘such as Mr. Pound’. Murray lacked ‘creative instinct’.88 Pound’s close friend and fellow poet did not.
Later in 1920, visiting them in the country for the weekend of 18–19 September, Tom told the Woolfs he wanted ‘to write a verse play in which the 4 characters of Sweeny act the parts’. It would concentrate, tellingly but revealingly, on ‘externals’.89 Drawing especially on the anthropologically-informed classical scholarship of F. M. Cornford, eventually this would become ‘Sweeney Agonistes’. Yet, quite apart from ‘Sweeney Agonistes’, producing his new, long poem was also part of Tom’s plans. That poem, too, might draw on a melange of literature and anthropological lore. Yet, frustratingly, as 1920 drew towards its close, he felt he could not quite bring this idea to fruition. Like Pound, he had grown used to incorporating into his work material lifted from earlier poems. In 1920 he foregrounded such a technique as a plus point. Writing in The Times Literary Supplement about the dark Jacobean dramas of Philip Massinger, he contended,
One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.90
Though in this piece, published in late May, Tom had gone on to mention George Chapman’s seventeenth-century borrowings from Seneca, and the way Shakespeare and Jacobean dramatist Cyril Tourneur had filched from the French of Montaigne, in effect he was setting out the method that would underlie the still embryonic Waste Land. His lecturing and his deep grounding in philosophy let him articulate theories about poetry that nourished his own verse to a degree unusual among poets. So, for instance, using a German word employed by Schopenhauer, he argued that in the best Jacobean drama could be found ‘that perpetual slight alteration of language, words perpetually juxtaposed in new and sudden combinations, meanings perpetually eingeschachtelt [encased] into meanings, which evidences a very high development of the senses, a development of the English language which we have perhaps never equalled’. Glissading between dramatic poetry and poems written for private reading, he associated this period in Jacobean drama with the verse of Donne as the culmination of an era when ‘the intellect was immediately at the tips of the senses. Sensation became word and the word was sensation.’ Again, he saw this process as akin to the formation of a ‘chemical compound’.91 His theory here can appear scientific and detached; the resulting poetry sounds at once pained and pinpoint, musical with echoes that ripple out across eras and cultures, extending the boundaries of language.
Tom had developed a sense of the making of art as arduous. Drawing on Rémy de Gourmont, and on Édouard Dujardin’s 1919 De Stéphane Mallarmé au prophète Ezéchiel: et essai d’une théorie du réalisme symbolique, he maintained that ‘the creation of a work of art is like some other forms of creation, a painful and unpleasant business: it is the sacrifice of the man to the work, it is a kind of death’.92 For his own labour-intensive poetic toil he would need time. Meanwhile, Dujardin’s linking of poetry and religion in the context of discussions about ‘la réel’ (the real), ‘la réalisme symbolique’ and ‘la bible’ (not to mention his connecting Mallarmé with Wagner) nourished Tom’s thinking about the poem he wanted to write.93 When he did compose it, reality and the unreal interpenetrated; the biblical book of Ezekiel, ancient religions and Wagnerian leitmotifs fused. Other topics he wrote about in summer 1920 – Cleopatra, Dante, sex and fertility throughout nature (Tom alludes to de Gourmont’s work on ‘physiology’, Physique de l’Amour: essai sur l’instinct sexuel which Pound was about to translate) – would resurface in his forthcoming poem. When he argued in July that ‘the critic and the creative artist’ were ‘frequently … the same person’, he defined the combination he had striven to become.94
In November he published his first article in Thayer’s Dial. ‘The Possibility of a Poetic Drama’ shows him still thinking about issues that preoccupied him while watching Murray’s Medea earlier that year. Many ‘poets hanker for the stage’. Tom was conscious the great age of English poetic drama was long past; yet it struck him that, among forms of art, ‘the drama is perhaps the most permanent, is capable of greater variation and of expressing more varied types of society, than any other’. Possibly the oddest thing he said in this essay was that ‘poetic drama’s autopsy was performed as much by Charles Lamb as by any one else’.95 What he referred to was the way Lamb in his Specim
ens of English Dramatic Poets Who Lived about the Time of Shakespeare had anthologised extracts from plays so that they could be read privately as poems.
Tom would grow increasingly interested in how one might write modern poetic drama; but the poem that he was about to produce would anthologise, in an often Poundian way, extracts from plays and older poems. Like his admired Dante and his brilliant contemporaries Pound and Joyce, Tom ‘knew’, as he put it that November, ‘how to pillage right and left’.96 Reflecting on Matthew Arnold’s contention that the Romantic poets simply ‘did not know enough’, Tom as a critic knew a vast amount; his ideal was ‘to see the best work of our time and the best work of twenty-five hundred years ago with the same eyes’.97
Yet his poem would not come. Life filled with other work: not just bank tasks, but moving house and the emotional demands of looking after Vivien, himself and visitors. He wrote very little prose in late 1920, his energies exhausted by the sheer practicalities of living. Harold Peters and several companions arrived in England in mid-October en route to the Mediterranean in an ocean-going yacht. They knew ‘no one in London’. Tom tried to entertain them: such Americans in London populate ‘Sweeney Agonistes’. All this increased his sense of ‘strain’.98 His prose hints at recurrent thoughts of mortality. He wrote not just of Lamb performing an ‘autopsy’, but with regard to poetasters advised curtly, ‘Kill them off’; his December Dial piece, ‘The Second-Order Mind’, ends with the eerily resonant phrase, ‘a monarchy of death’.99
He had just seen mortality close-up. While the Eliots were moving flats, Vivien’s father, who had helped with legal arrangements, had collapsed suddenly at home on 21 October. At first it looked like food poisoning. The next day, when Tom was called to Compayne Gardens, specialist physicians decided to carry out an emergency operation in the house. They discovered a huge abdominal abscess ‘just beginning to break’. Mr Haigh-Wood was within five minutes of death, and the surgeon feared he would not live until morning.100
Tom stayed up all night at his father-in-law’s house. Vivien was ‘on the edge of collapse’.101 Her brother helped procure medicines. Two live-in nurses assisted with the old man, who hung on with great spirit. Watching him when he lay on the edge of unconsciousness, Tom was moved by the way the elderly painter rallied and, recognising his son-in-law, asked him when The Sacred Wood would be published. The doctors stipulated a second operation was necessary. Eventually returning home to make room for the nurses, Vivien waited anxiously at Crawford Mansions. As the invalid lay ill for days, then weeks, Tom felt intense trepidation.
Mail went unposted. Meetings had to be rescheduled. Though he tried to slog on at the bank, in early November he was in bed for several days. It was mid-November before they completed the move to their new flat; but Mr Haigh-Wood’s illness dragged on for months. Eventually he regained most of his strength, but recurrent ‘fluctuations’ left Vivien ‘completely exhausted’.102 Appalled at what she saw as an ongoing ‘long losing battle against horrible illness, unimaginable pain, doctors’ mistakes – obstinacy – stupidity – delays – family’s blindness’, she told Mary Hutchinson she never went to bed without fear.103 Each morning she woke struggling to summon up the courage to pick up the telephone in their new flat and make the call to her father’s house.104
Visiting his father-in-law regularly, Tom kept going by hardening his shell. ‘There are times, I think’, he wrote to Schiff (whose wife Violet was both a talented musician and an invalid), ‘when one must try to seal one’s intellect hermetically, to prevent it from being destroyed by circumstances which it cannot mend’.105 He was impressed that Vivien managed to endure, and he emphasised to his mother that he wanted the insurance policy on his life kept up for his wife’s sake.
Forced to cut back on engagements, he did fulfil a commitment to speak at a dinner given by the Poetry Circle of the Lycaeum Club, where he encountered a woman with an interest in Tarot cards. He also dined with the Woolfs. As often, Virginia Woolf was struck by the way Tom bottled things up. She noticed, too, an intensity underlying his armature of propriety. He was ‘all caught, pressed, inhibited; but great driving power some where – & my word what concentration of the eye when he argues!’106 Others, less perceptive, were more hostile. Having been reviewed harshly by Tom, on 4 December Irish essayist Robert Lynd published an attack on The Sacred Wood which saw its author as ‘Buried Alive’. Reviews of that book were mixed. Some, including those by Murry and Aiken, came from people who knew Tom well, and discerned that his literary theory owed significant debts to Rémy de Gourmont. Other reviewers found ‘a dessication of the emotions’ and an arrogance or self-righteousness in league with a demanding intelligence.107 In New York Knopf bought 350 copies of the Methuen edition, giving it a small but effective American circulation.
The Eliots’ new flat at 9 Clarence Gate Gardens had been built shortly before the Great War, not far from 221B Baker Street, fictional home of Tom’s childhood hero, Sherlock Holmes. After Crawford Mansions, the Clarence Gate Gardens interiors were roomier, with higher ceilings. The apartment had one more room, and was in ‘a much better block’ in a superior area, a mere stroll from Regent’s Park and close to the Francis Holland Church of England School for Girls.108 On either side of the relatively narrow road were ‘very respectable looking’ six-storey red-brick blocks with basements. The street was comparatively dark, but its buildings handsome. To the rear the brickwork was grey and there was a small courtyard with a garden. The frontage was more imposing, with wrought-iron balconies and iron railings. The entrance to the Eliots’ block (numbers 1–21) sported substantial brass-handled double doors between twin sets of pillars, leading to an inner stairwell and an elevator. Their flat was ‘only one flight up’, Tom assured his mother, and ‘will do beautifully for you when you come’. Vivien liked it too – efficiently managed, ‘quiet, warm, well ventilated’.109 Here the Eliots might feel happy hosting Tom’s family or new acquaintances such as the poet Walter de la Mare. In an attempt to minimise disturbance, they had taken over the flat along with its fittings, but nothing was ever straightforward. The old lady who had lived there previously ‘insulted us’. ‘Maliciously’, Tom complained, she ‘had the electricity, gas, and telephone cut off so as to put me to the trouble of putting them on again’.110
Adjoining the Eliots’ new home was the red-brick Parish Church of St Cyprian. Built in 1903, it was dedicated to the third-century Bishop of Carthage, a Latin author who had been martyred in AD 258 for denying the pagan Roman gods and holding true to his Christian faith. The white and gold interior was beautiful, adorned with a statue of the saint and stained-glass windows showing among other things the martyrdom of St Sebastian. If it seemed odd to be living in twentieth-century London beside a site associated with ancient Carthage, then that is an oddity which The Waste Land – swirling from modern London street scenes to the St Augustine of ‘To Carthage then I came’ – would replicate.111
Tom had been ‘trying to write a little’, he confessed to Schiff on 6 December, but was finding his ‘brain quite numb’. Vivien encouraged him to take a break: he should ‘have a change’ – a brief spell in Paris. Shortly before Christmas he set off for a reinvigorating week. Maurice Haigh-Wood was with him for part of the time, and Tom met old and new French acquaintances, including Fritz Vanderpyl and several writers and painters. For Vivien he bought a small picture by ‘one of the best of the modern painters, Raoul Dufy’. Dufy’s lightness and brightness might lift her spirits. Tom was delighted to find French intellectuals whom he met knew him by reputation, even if they did not read English. He lodged at the Pension Casaubon, where he had billeted as a student a decade earlier. The Casaubons had died, but their grandson now ran the place. ‘If I had not met such a number of new people there’, he wrote to his mother, ‘Paris would be desolate for me with prewar memories of Jean Verdenal and the others.’112 His old tutor, Alain-Fournier, too, was dead; but Fournier’s brother-in law, Jacques Rivière, now edited La Nouvelle Re
vue Française.
When he got back, Tom found Vivien still worried about her father. Tom was late in sending Thayer the first of the ‘London Letters’ he was to write for the Dial; he also pondered Thayer’s confidential invitation to manage, for a substantial fee, an ‘English edition’ of that magazine, but concluded it would be ‘physically impossible’ given that he was working in ‘an office six days a week’ from ‘9.30 to 5’, and did not feel able to resign from the bank.113 Managing an English Dial would do nothing to advance the poem he wanted to write; but the notion of taking charge of a magazine had its attractions. For the moment, however, there were more pressing concerns. Mr Haigh-Wood remained ill. Christmas was difficult, though it brought the customary gifts from America. Turning their minds to Lottie Eliot’s proposed visit in the spring, the couple began to think how best to accommodate this mother-in-law whom Vivien had never met.
15
To Lausanne
IN London if Tom gave voice to his cosmopolitanism, sometimes he did so in spite of the place. Having thought recently about La Nouvelle Revue Française and a possible English edition of the American Dial, he continued to contemplate the editing of magazines, and specifically the one that his friend Wyndham Lewis was about to launch, Tyro. Like Lewis, he felt a growing disaffection with London literary reviewing. He complained to Maxwell Bodenheim in January 1921 about ‘the placid smile of imbecility which splits the face of contemporary London’ and about ‘the putrescence of English literature and journalism’. However, he also sniped at Prohibition-era America, saying he wanted to stay in England and see if the English ‘can ever be roused to anything like intellectual activity’. To Americans, when he wished, he could take that tone; to English people he usually expressed himself differently. Able to get along with – and quarrel with – writers from both countries, he had ‘got used to being a foreigner everywhere, and it would fatigue me to be expected to be anything else’.1
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