Young Eliot

by Robert Crawford

  Talk of ‘fatigue’ and ‘putrescence’ was understandable. Though convalescing, Charles Haigh-Wood continued to be seriously ill. Vivien dreaded making engagements in case either she or her father needed help. She was undergoing a ‘course of treatment for her stomach’.2 Pondering her situation, she bought, she told Mary Hutchinson on 5 January, ‘a copy of Tom’s book to send to my lover of the past, anonymously’.3 Vivien, whom Tom’s ‘social English friends’ had nicknamed the ‘river girl’, kept in the flat a copy of J. Ivo Ball’s illustrated volume Down the Silver Stream of the Thames, which bore the signature of her former lover, Charles Buckle; its title is an allusion to Edmund Spenser’s wedding poem, ‘Prothalamion’ with its ‘silver streaming Thames’ and its lyrical refrain, ‘Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song, / Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long’.4

  Tom used those words in the more sordid context of the dirty, littered modern Thames in the long poem he worked on during 1921. He followed them with words from another Renaissance love poem, Andrew Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’. In an article on Marvell published on 31 March, he argued that ‘A whole civilization resides in these lines.’5 Blending a sense of an addled culture with anxieties about a mind gone wrong, Tom added Marvell’s words to his own; conscious of modern London’s face-splitting ‘smile of imbecility’, he clearly links sex with thoughts of death,

  But at my back in a cold blast I hear

  The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.6

  For Vivien to send anonymously her husband’s book to her ex-lover was spiteful. It suggests she sought to prove to Buckle, and perhaps to herself, that she had been right to marry Tom. Her championing of her husband’s genius gave her a sense of purpose, but their relationship grew more troubled. ‘I am alive and well, but very tired’, Tom told his mother in a short, mid-January note; Vivien was ‘showing signs of breaking up’.7 His early 1921 piece ‘Prose and Verse’ begins with talk of the ‘disconnected’ and ‘lifeless’, of ‘worn nerves’ and ‘arthritic limbs’.8 Painfully fatigued herself, Vivien watched Tom come home weary each dinner time, ‘more inclined for a quiet evening of reading, and early to bed, than to begin the real business of his life, and sit up late’.9

  February brought Knopf’s publication of The Sacred Wood, but the New York edition, which simply added a Knopf title page to Methuen’s first-edition pages, and comprised just 365 copies, was small. There were few reviews. In London, far, far away, Tom could feel isolated, even misunderstood. Virginia Woolf saw him in company looking ‘pale, marmoreal’. He seemed ‘like a chapped office boy on a high stool, with a cold in his head, until he warms a little, which he did. We walked back along the Strand. “The critics say I am learned & cold” he said. “The truth is I am neither.” As he said this, I think coldness at least must be a sore point with him.’10

  At home with Vivien, some evenings he wrote to his mother about arrangements for her visit; or read in its colloquial German the Jewish writer Arthur Schnitzler’s ‘brilliant’ stream-of-consciousness novella about a young man with woman trouble who contemplates suicide, Leutnant Gustl.11 As Tom knew, Schnitzler’s notorious ‘new play’, Reigen (La Ronde), dealing with ‘the most intimate problems of sexual life’, had been ‘very badly treated’ by the Berlin public.12 Vivien watched him. She had a strong sense of what was ‘the real business’ of her poet husband’s life, but was less certain what was the real business of her own.

  ‘Fearfully run down’, she seemed about to contract bronchitis. Mary Hutchinson came to visit. She talked to Tom, while Vivien remained ‘shut in her room’.13 Tom welcomed Mary’s conversation, and, sensing ‘crisis’, turned to Brigit Patmore for advice in early March.14 Ready to help, Vivien’s old friend Lucy Thayer had a flat nearby at 12 Wigmore Street. Herself sometimes unstable, Lucy understood something of the Eliots’ problems. She offered them the use of her flat if Tom’s mother, brother and sister arrived to occupy Tom and Vivien’s apartment. Given Lottie Eliot’s age and health, this seemed appropriate: at Clarence Gate Gardens the visiting Eliots could be looked after by Ellen Kellond. Yet moving out of their own home and into Lucy Thayer’s flat while their visitors were in town threatened to be stressful for Vivien and Tom.

  Nevertheless, convinced they should vacate their own apartment and offer it to their visitors, Tom assured his mother on 6 March, ‘Vivien and I have absolutely the same opinion about this.’15 Perhaps; but Vivien’s health grew perilously worse. Invited to dinner on 13 March Tom came ‘alone’, Virginia Woolf noted in her diary, ‘since his wife is in a nursing home, not much to our regret’. She found her visitor, ‘Eliot’, rather remote: ‘Will he become “Tom”?’16 His cares weighed on him heavily. On 17 March he told Brigit Patmore that his wife had spent four days ‘lying in the most dreadful agony with neuritis in every nerve, increasingly – arms, hands, legs, feet, back’.17 Though her father was making a remarkable recovery, having to contemplate the arrival of her formidable mother-in-law did nothing to ease Vivien’s ordeals. ‘Neuritis’, as understood at the time, was a disease involving ‘the inflammation of one or more bundles of nerve fibres’ and, ‘in severe cases’ could ‘last for months’.18 Never having seen such a bad case, Vivien’s doctors could offer no certain hope. Tom worried his wife might die. She seemed to be losing touch with reality, and he registered her hurt. ‘Have you ever been in such incessant and extreme pain that you felt your sanity going’, he asked Brigit Patmore on 17 March, ‘and that you no longer knew reality from delusion? That’s the way she is.’19

  He had to lead a double, even a multiple, life. He tried to understand and care for Vivien as best he could, which, in turn, exhausted him. Each working day he needed to go to the bank and be professional, accurate, reliable. That he could manage. Routine was helpful, but contributed to a self-protecting aspect of him that Katherine Mansfield called during the spring of 1921 ‘the bluff’. She found Tom ‘a rare, delightful being’, even as she decided that ‘the bluff oppresses me’.20 Then there was his public literary life, much of which he found congenial. Even if there, too, he bluffed at times, it helped keep him sane, and even let him be witty, as he was with Virginia Woolf when she shared a taxi with him one March Sunday night to go to see Congreve’s Restoration comedy Love for Love. ‘Are you as full of vices as I am?’ she asked him. ‘Full. Riddled with them’, he replied. They chatted briefly about literature; she worried her work involved depending on ‘an illusion’. He told her she didn’t really mean that. She thought she did. Later, after sitting beside him at the theatre, she confided to her diary that,

  I think one could probably become very intimate with Eliot because of our damned self conscious susceptibility: but I plunge more than he does: perhaps I could learn him to be a frog. He has the advantage of me in laughing out. He laughed at Love for Love: but thinking I must write about it I was a little on the stretch.21

  Laughter released him from strain, but only temporarily. Later in March Vivien came home from the nursing home to Clarence Gate Gardens, but remained in bed. Tom explained to Sydney Schiff that on medical advice, ‘She has not been allowed to see anyone, except myself, or to write letters.’22 By the start of April she was a little better. Perhaps she might go to the country for a month. He thought it would be a year or two before she recovered.

  Outside the flat things were also a struggle. At Lloyds Bank his work on post-war German debts was challenging but usefully absorbing. In the sometimes febrile literary world, while keeping on generally good terms with the Woolfs (though Virginia worried on occasion that ‘Eliot never admired me, damn him’), Tom felt that ‘I and Murry have fallen apart completely.’ No longer could he hide his conviction that Murry was a poor writer: ‘verbose’, with too facile a love of ‘money and being a public figure’.23 Vivien’s hostility towards Katherine Mansfield, on whom Murry cheated, exacerbated this disagreement. Surveying his own troubled life, Tom brooded on the Victorian Catholic convert John Henry Newman’
s intense spiritual autobiography, Apologia pro Vita Sua, and on the extended poem he so wanted to write. When he could, he applied his mind not just to the pain of this, but, purposefully, to the technical challenge. ‘We do not like long poems’, he opined gloomily. The pained Gothic imagination of Edgar Allan Poe, familiar to him since his childhood dental ordeals, was in his thoughts at this difficult time. Poe’s theory that ‘no poem should be more than 100 lines’ haunted him; the issue was how to sustain intensity.24 In the spring of 1921 Woolf was discomfited to realise that Tom ‘does like Poe’.25

  Contemplating extended composition in verse, he had noted recently how Conrad Aiken’s long poem echoed his own cadences. It also lost intensity, getting far too diffuse; yet maybe it helped Tom. Aiken’s The House of Dust tried to link an individual psyche to a ‘darkened city’ of ‘towers’, bells, loves and ‘nightmare streets’ where ‘spring returns’, and ‘cards’ might ‘tell your future’. ‘Time is dissolved’ in ‘dust’ as sometimes unfaithful lovers ‘Sit and talk’ and ‘misconstrue’ each other (‘What shall we talk of?’), and people cry out ‘Good-night! Good-night! Good-night!’26 Aspects of this surely lodged in Tom’s consciousness, resurfacing in the long poem he was attempting to work on. Pound’s developing ‘Cantos’ offered another, more helpful model – one, like his own recent verse, increasingly pieced together out of quotations, allusions, snatches. If Tom could get the structure right, a lengthy poem could work: ‘No one who is willing to take some trouble about his pleasures complains of the length of the Divine Comedy’. He thought it was no bad thing for an extended poem to contain some material ‘of ephemeral interest’, but ‘it should not have been composed as a number of short poems’.27 This was a problem. For he had several shorter pieces, including ‘The Death of the Duchess’, that he had been hoarding for years, hoping perhaps they might fit into a larger structure. Like ‘The Death of the Duchess’, these older poems, allusive yet intimate, were veined with anxieties about sex and death.

  Frustratingly, the material would not gel. On 5 February 1921 he showed Lewis ‘a new long poem (in 4 parts) which’, Lewis told Sydney Schiff, ‘will be not only very good, but a new departure for him’.28 Yet Tom held this work back. For Tyro he sent instead a short ‘Song to the Opherian’. He got one of the words wrong: he seems to have meant ‘orpharion’, an instrument like a lute to which Elizabethan love songs (such as those of John Dowland) were sometimes sung. Edited down to thirteen lines, this poem is no sweet love song. With its sense of frustrated eroticism (‘I may not kiss or clutch’), its ‘blackened river’ and ‘bed’ and ‘pendulum in the head’ and ‘bleeding’ and ‘tears’, it signals physical and psychological angst transmuted into something haunting yet scarcely comprehensible – meaning that refuses to come into shape. This was Tom’s compositional problem as he struggled throughout 1921. Unusually, he published ‘Song to the Opherian’ under a pen-name, ‘Gus Krutzsch’, echoing the name of his manly footballing St Louis schoolfellow August R. Krutzsch. Doing so may have been a mischievous way of hiding the intimate hurts of ‘Wonkypenky’ from the public gaze.29 It hints too at how, as Tom looked forward to his mother’s arrival that summer, he was acutely conscious of his American background.

  ‘Gus Krutzsch’ (changed from ‘Heine Krutzsch’) also features in the long American narrative section positioned to open his long poem. As well as revisiting his past, Tom was thinking early in 1921 about writers who could create characters that convincingly incarnated ‘myth’. How might one attempt this in a modern era largely ‘barren of myths’? Epitomising Englishness, John Bull had been such a myth, but was now ‘degenerate’; in film Charlie Chaplin, ‘not English, or American, but a universal figure’, might be another. Chaplinesque or not, England’s theatres and music-hall stars allowed audiences, ‘purged of unsatisfied desire’, to ‘live the myth’.30 These ideas nourished ‘Sweeney Agonistes’, the drama of disastrous desires in London that Tom was plotting; more immediately they nurtured what became The Waste Land.

  Recently returned from Paris, he was spurred, as so often, by the French capital’s cosmopolitan culture. The new phenomenon of Dada, which was moving westwards and which that April would produce Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp’s New York Dada, intrigued him. He thought Dada in Paris ‘a diagnosis of a disease of the French mind’, even ‘a moral criticism’, but ‘whatever lesson we extract from it will not be directly applicable in London’. This holds open the possibility of indirect applications. Thoughts of Dada led him to Baudelaire, ‘a deformed Dante’ who had ‘intellect plus intensity’. Tom wanted just that combination for his extended poem. Further evidence that the work was taking shape lies not least in the quotation which ended his Tyro piece, ‘The Lesson of Baudelaire’. That quotation from Baudelaire’s preface to Les Fleurs du Mal would be positioned prominently in Tom’s long poem, mounting a disconcerting moral challenge to the reader as ally and hypocrite: ‘Vous, hypocrite lecteur…’31

  In January he composed and reworked the first of his ‘London Letters’ for the Dial. Telling Thayer it was ‘the first writing of any kind that I have done for six months’, he mentioned, ‘It will be several months before I have any verse ready for publication.’32 As he faced up to his problems, his ‘London Letter’, which did not appear until April, articulates ‘an overwhelming sense of difficulty’. Splenetically, it complains of London-published poetry as ‘dull, immature, slight, and bad’. Georgian poet John Drinkwater’s verse is ‘dull, supremely dull’. ‘I do not wish to dwell upon the dulness’, Tom writes, but dwell on it he does, lamenting a reading public that ‘knows no tradition, and loves staleness’; the ‘independent’ man is rejected in ‘a world of mass-production’ characterised by ‘Regular Hours, Regular Wages, Regular Pensions, and Regular Ideas’.33 The great English poet who made much of dullness is Alexander Pope, who ends his satire on literary life, The Dunciad, with a mock-apocalypse in which ‘Thy hand great Dullness! lets the curtain fall, / And universal Darkness covers all’.34 Tom singled out ‘the last lines of the “Dunciad”’ for praise in June.35 In his prose of early 1921 he imagined several mock apocalypses – from a ‘Second Flood’ brought on by all this dullness to a ‘Last Judgement’, supposedly imagined by modern English poets ‘who know a little French’ and featuring ‘Roman candles, Catherine wheels, and inflammable fire-balloons’. In his poetry, too, he turned to Pope.36

  Probably around this time, though their first composition cannot be dated precisely, he wrote around seventy lines of Popeian couplets about a lady, Fresca (first mentioned in ‘Gerontion’), who lies in bed, affectedly ‘unwell’. Awaking ‘from dreams of love and pleasant rapes’, she summons her maid, corresponds with a friend about ‘Lady Kleinwurm’s party’, uses the toilet and has a bath. Connected with prostitution and the ‘hearty female stench’, Fresca seems a poetaster in a shallow milieu. She has been ‘thrilled’ into ‘hysteric fits’ by ‘the Russians’. With a dash of misogyny, Tom typed in Popeian accents,

  Women grown intellectual grow dull,

  And lose the mother wit of natural trull.37

  This passage concluded with lines that again echo Marvell’s ‘To his Coy Mistress’, with its ‘chuckle spread from ear to ear.’

  In early 1921 Tom had written of Marvell as a poet from a ‘Puritan’ background who managed to learn from the rather different tradition of the ‘French’.38 Those words at least as accurately describe himself. As it survives, his typescript entitled ‘The Fire Sermon’ then changes its verse form. It veers away from Pope towards the sounds of a nightingale, associated in Classical mythology with Tereus’s rape of Philomela. The poem may allude to a Renaissance song but Tom’s typescript here resembles a Dadaist or other French avant-garde text. Jean Cocteau in Le Potomak (1913) had broken up Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde (a work Tom also plundered) with his

  Cor de Tristan se rappelant

  Cor

  Cor

  Cor de Tristan …39

  Tom went even further. Twi
tteringly, he disintegrated the nightingale’s call in a soundscape suspended between Dada and Elizabethan English:

  Twit twit twit twit twit twit twit

  Tereu tereu

  So rudely forc’d

  Ter40

  There then follow descriptions of seedy life in modern London, including an account of a twenty-one-year-old ‘clerk’ who ‘assaults’ a typist; her reaction to his sexual attentions is ‘indifference’.41 These several versions of sexual encounters, each mentioning or involving what is or comes close to rape, read as enactments of similar scenes from different eras, functioning rather like reincarnations of some underlying, disturbing myth. Drawn from Tom’s reading and, conceivably, from his awareness of ‘society’ London as well as the seedier goings on around Crawford Mansions, these passages are works of imagination; nor should the ‘Fresca’ be taken as Vivien. Nevertheless, the pervasive sense of tormented sexuality, the disgust and the horrified fascination with London life do seem to speak, however indirectly, from Tom’s problematic experience.

  Other poems or part-poems woven into his projected composition do this too. If ‘The Death of the Duchess’ has links to life with Vivien, then the opening of the surviving typescript of the new poem’s first part, ‘The Burial of the Dead’ (which begins, ‘First we had a couple of feelers down at Tom’s place’) presents an account of a night on the town that calls up Tom’s memories of going with Aiken to rough areas of Boston. The ‘Tom’ of the opening has a wife called ‘Jane’ (the name Mary Hutchinson had given to a version of herself in her 1917 Egoist short story), so he is not Tom Eliot; yet he shares aspects of Tom Eliot’s past.42 The work’s second part, initially called ‘In the Cage’ then retitled ‘A Game of Chess’, begins with a passage about a woman in a grand interior that alludes to Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. Further links to the rape of Philomel precede a transition to a very edgy conversation between a couple, beginning, ‘My nerves are bad tonight’. Modulating from jagged conversation into the music of ragtime, this passage seems uncomfortably close to the situation Tom and Vivien found themselves in when the poem was under construction. Vivien, who had a good ear for dialogue, read these lines in typescript and described them as ‘W O N D E R F U L’. When the passage concluded with a long, Cockney-accented conversation involving sex and an abortion, she pencilled in the line (which Tom kept, almost unaltered, in his final version), ‘What you get married for if you dont want to have children’.43