Young Eliot

by Robert Crawford

  In a poem preoccupied with infertility, childlessness (touched on before in that line of ‘Petit Epître’, ‘Est-ce qu’il n’a pas d’enfants?’) is part of both text and subtext.44 The way these needling Cockney voices are interrupted repeatedly by the call of a pub landlord asking customers to drink up because the bar is closing, ‘HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME’, may hark back again to the days when the Eliots had lived close to a pub at Crawford Mansions; but, like so much else in the poem, it can point in other directions too. Tom had developed a technique which let even the simplest phrases resonate in several telling ways. ‘Splendid’ was Vivien’s verdict on the conclusion of ‘A Game of Chess’ whose last line alludes to Ophelia’s mad scene in Hamlet, ‘Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night’.45 Yet in Tom’s poem this sounds as if spoken to drinkers leaving the modern tavern. The words may have been encouraged by Laforgue and by the modern urban ‘Good-night! Good-night! Good-night!’ of Aiken’s House of Dust, but through placing and allusion Tom gets far more value from his line. Its meaning radiates out in multiple directions, heightening the unsettling intensity.

  In his poem it was as if different eras were speaking to one another, scenes being acted and re-enacted across the centuries. During 1921 he read several very different works which also traversed vast temporal domains. One was George Bernard Shaw’s Bergsonian drama of evolution, Back to Methuselah, which extended from encounters between Adam and Eve in ‘B. C. 4004’ to a scene imagined ‘As Far as Thought Can Reach: A. D. 31,920’.46 Tom never liked Shaw, but this ‘attempt to expose a panorama of human history’ interested him later in 1921, even if he denounced as too ‘clever’ its avoidance of ‘things which always have been and always will be the same’.47 Bravely and challengingly, his own poem confronted such constants. Slightly more to his taste than Shaw was Frederic Manning’s Scenes and Portraits which he read that summer; though ‘derivative’, it too voyaged through history, especially religious history, presenting significant encounters from ancient Uruk to the France of Renan: for Tom, fascinated by the history of religions, Manning was ‘one of the very best prose writers we have’.48

  Joyce’s Ulysses, which he had been devouring for years in serial form in the Little Review, was inspirational. However low-key their behaviour at the time, meeting Joyce had been a significant event for both writers. In May Joyce sent Tom manuscripts of the ‘Circe’, ‘Eumaeus’ and ‘Oxen of the Sun’ episodes of Ulysses. Pointing out a couple of instances where the novelist had mixed up English and American idioms, Tom told him the work was ‘superb’, particularly ‘the Descent into Hell, which is stupendous’. The material was so good that ‘I wish, for my sake, that I had not read it.’49 That May to Robert McAlmon, an American poet who had just moved to Paris, Tom enthused not just about that city (‘still alive’) but also about Joyce, a foreigner who could live in the midst of the metropolis yet remain ‘independent’ within it, and who had found the right ‘form’ for his art. Later in 1921 Tom described Ulysses as ‘the greatest work of the age’.50 He was struck by Joyce’s ‘marvellous parody of nearly every style in English prose from 1600 to the Daily Mail’. Into his own long poem Tom incorporated reworkings of and gestures towards English poetry from many centuries. To appreciate this fully, as he said of Joyce’s efforts, ‘One needs a considerable knowledge of English literature’; yet to feel the compelling force and reach of the language you need only read it aloud.51

  Ulysses spurred and confirmed Tom’s artistic technique. As he put it, looking back in 1923, the ‘method’ of structuring a modern work on an ancient narrative (in Joyce’s case an account of recent life in Dublin patterned on Homer’s Odyssey) was no mere ‘amusing dodge’ to provoke ‘disgust’ but a new form of ‘classicism’ that had ‘the importance of a scientific discovery’.

  In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him. They will not be imitators, any more than the scientist who uses the discoveries of an Einstein in pursuing his own, independent, further investigations. It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.

  Surprisingly, since Yeats’s verse had had so little effect on his own, Tom saw the origins of Joyce’s method in Yeats’s work, and thought it helped make ‘the modern world possible for art’ – especially for writers like himself who had a keen sense of links between anthropology and literature. ‘Psychology (such as it is, and whether our reaction to it be comic or serious), ethnology, and The Golden Bough have concurred to make possible what was impossible even a few years ago. Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method.’52

  By the time he wrote that, Tom was looking back not only at Ulysses but also at his own ‘long poem’. Immersed in it, however, he was not nearly so clear about its structure. Ever since drafts and rejected passages of The Waste Land resurfaced in the late 1960s, biographers and critics have pored over them. Yet these materials are incomplete. Given the compositional processes of the poem’s final part, and what we know of Tom’s earlier ways of working, it is extremely likely that, despite the fact that some very early fragments do survive, notes towards a good deal of the poem have simply vanished. Surely the three sections now titled ‘The Burial of the Dead’, ‘A Game of Chess’ and ‘The Fire Sermon’ did not start life as extensive typescripts. The earliest extant version of part four of the poem looks very like a neatly penned fair copy of older materials now lost. Only The Waste Land’s fifth section survives in something approaching its full versions – manuscript drafts followed by typescripts. So, while linking the poem’s growth to Tom’s life in 1920 and 1921 can be illuminating, we shall never know exactly how and when it was formed from start to finish.

  Clearly it reflects a sense of crisis that was deeply personal as well as conditioned by post-war society. His reading in older and in recent literature helped give this embodiment, but his poem is frightening because it seems to imply that underneath all words and rituals may lie only arbitrary urges and nothingness. With a good deal of the poem in his mind and, it appears, some of it on paper, he oscillated in spring 1921 between deepening anxiety about life with Vivien as his family’s visit approached and a need to seal himself off from the pain of all this in order to concentrate on his work at the bank and on his poem. A sense of how devastated, yet also determined and focused he felt is evident from what begins as a simple letter of thanks to Richard Aldington on 7 April. Aldington had sent flowers to Vivien, and Tom responded to his offer to present more the following week.

  Tom encouraged Aldington to send ‘kingcups buds’ [sic] since ‘she is very fond of them’.53 Bright yellow kingcups are still common in the area around Bosham and not least in the Itchenor woods where Vivien and Tom had enjoyed picnics. The sight of the flowers meant something to him as well as to her. He went on to say he would be ‘infinitely grateful’ if Aldington could help him search for ‘a tiny country cottage’ which he hoped ‘might be just the saving of my wife’s health’.54 For all its practical tone, this letter reveals an underlying mixture of vulnerability, a certain tenderness towards Vivien, and despair and anger: Tom seems to feel another setback could be the last straw. His annoyance is manifest when he contemplates an ongoing miners’ strike that threatened to upset daily life. It could continue, he complains, ‘for god knows how long’. Potentially, the strike might disrupt communications; though he does not say so explicitly, in those days of coal-powered vessels it had the potential to play havoc with transatlantic travel, and there were fears that a general stoppage was looming. Tom tells Aldington he feels ‘contempt’ for all political parties and a ‘profound hatred for democracy’. He is in the ‘blackest gloom’. Though that mood may be in part personal, it gives rise to this shocking, very un-American outburst, then presages a sense of widespread cultural collapse.

 
Whatever happens will be another step toward the destruction of ‘Europe’. The whole of contemporary politics etc. oppresses me with a continuous physical horror like the feeling of growing madness in one’s own brain. It is rather a horror to be sane in the midst of this; it is too dreadful, too huge, for one to have the comforting feeling of superiority. It goes too far for rage.55

  This is a letter written by a man on the edge. Its author wanted to use as the epigraph for his long poem a quotation from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, detecting at the heart of so-called civilisation only ‘“The horror! The horror!”’56

  Yet he managed not to go under. A week later he outlined to his mother further arrangements for her visit, and itemised his ongoing writing and lecturing. The eleven paragraphs in this businesslike letter are uncharacteristically short. Six begin with the word ‘I’.57 His wife is mentioned only in a postscript: she would be disappointed and anxious if Tom’s mother did not occupy the Clarence Gate Gardens flat. There is no mention of Vivien’s health, though she was still bedridden. On occasion Tom let his own anxieties almost overcome him. At other times, with a determination approaching the inhuman, he sought to suppress them, becoming in his way what The Waste Land terms a ‘human engine’.58 He strove to hold on to his identity as a person not defined by illness, and, sometimes mechanically, to present to the world beyond the flat the best impression he could. Vivien, on occasion, struggled to do something similar, but knew she could not always achieve it.

  By 22 April she had spent ‘eight weeks in bed so far’. Murry, his own wife ill, came over from France to England and managed something of a rapprochement with Tom whom he thought could appear ‘disdainful’.59 Mentioning Vivien’s illness, Tom outlined to Murry four books he wanted to write: one on Elizabethan poetry; one that would consider seventeenth- and eighteenth-century poets, including Pope; one containing ‘analyses of my favorite poets in French, German, Italian and the Classics’; and a fourth volume on ‘the present day’.60 None of these works would be written. Still, their scope helps explain why around this time the young English Literature lecturer I. A. Richards tried unsuccessfully to persuade Tom to become a Cambridge academic. Tom’s mention of these projects seems partly designed to impress the sometimes domineering Murry, who was delivering lectures for the English Literature school at Oxford University, and partly to impress himself.

  Around the start of May Vivien felt well enough to go ‘to the seaside’ to recuperate.61 Work kept Tom at the bank. Patients with nervous complaints were often advised to spend quiet periods away from home, and he had already made arrangements to take several weeks off when his mother arrived in June. Nonetheless, spending time apart from one another with the prospect of having to reunite again soon to cope with Mrs Eliot’s visit further complicated Vivien and Tom’s relationship. Around this time he wrote a long leading article on Dryden for The Times Literary Supplement, but was discontented with its ‘unconnected scraps’.62 Oddly, he compared Dryden with Baudelaire whose ‘violently joined images’ he admired. Given his own domestic situation, it is striking Tom quotes a long passage from Dryden’s play Aurungzebe about ‘unchaste wives’. Though presented as ‘purple comedy’, some of the lines have a darker edge:

  Home is the sacred refuge of our life:

  Secure from all approaches but a wife.

  If thence we fly, the cause admits no doubt:

  None but an inmate foe can force us out.

  Clamours, our privacies uneasy make;

  Birds leave their nests disturbed, and

  Beasts their haunts forsake.63

  Thinking Dryden’s ‘best play’ All for Love, a reworking of the tragic erotic drama of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, Tom, about to vacate his own home, was alert to passages about love gone wrong.64

  At Lloyds his day job demanded considerable ‘thought and strength’. Apologising to John Quinn for not having been in touch because of ‘a protracted series of private worries’ which robbed him of ‘the concentration required for turning out a poem of any length’, he explained that the bank ‘when I have private anxieties on my mind,’ was ‘too much’. His mother’s impending visit would be ‘another anxiety as well as a joy’.65

  He had hoped to nip over to Paris briefly while Vivien was at the seaside and before his mother arrived. That proved impossible. Perhaps he might go later in the year – ideally, he informed Dorothy Pound on 22 May, ‘after I have finished a little poem which I am at present engaged upon’.66 Little or not, the poem was still unfinished when his mother, brother Henry and sister Marion reached London on 10 June 1921, planning to stay for two months. Tom and Vivien were together again, presenting a united front to the visitors, and showing them how best to manage at Clarence Gate Gardens. Tom attempted to secure separate lodgings for his brother, but Henry ended up sharing Lucy Thayer’s flat with Tom and, for a time at least, with Vivien.

  Tom also set in motion arrangements for his relations to be received at Garsington. He had told his mother all about Lady Ottoline. Lottie Eliot was ‘very excited’ at the thought of meeting her.67 It seems unlikely that Tom’s mother had read D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, published in London that June, whose Hermione with her ‘horse-face’ suggesting ‘unenlightened self-esteem’ was in part a version of Ottoline Morrell (‘to the life’ thought Virginia Woolf) and had caused Ottoline, as she made clear to Tom, considerable hurt.68 This was Mrs Eliot’s first trip to England, a country she had read about all her life – the home of classic English literature, and now of her gifted literary son. She was eager to encounter his titled, unusual literary friend in her country manor. Henry, tagging along, was more sceptical.

  It was six years since Tom had last met his family. Vivien had been advised by her doctor to remain outside London. Against her specialist’s ‘express command’, she had come to be with her husband. For her, for him and for the visitors, matters were tense. ‘These new and yet old relationships involve immense tact and innumerable adjustments’, he explained to Aldington. ‘One sees lots of things that one never saw before.’69 The main person Mrs Eliot Senior had never seen before was Vivien. Tom’s father had made up his mind without meeting her; Lottie, used to reading between the lines of Vivien’s letters, had come to judge for herself. Vivien spent considerable time with her mother-in-law, and one day invited her and Marion Eliot to tea with Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell. Osbert thought Vivien ‘bitterly resented’ the visiting matriarch. Vivien gave him the impression that Mrs Eliot had withheld money from Tom because she felt her late husband would not have approved of attempts to ‘ease’ Tom’s financial ‘burden’. Yet, Osbert recalled decades later, when eventually he ‘met old Mrs. Eliot it was difficult to think any ill of her. She appeared to be a strait-laced, straightforward, conventional, but kindly lady.’70 Lottie tried. Vivien tried. But by 21 June Tom saw his wife was ‘very tired again’. Two days later he was ‘very tired’ too.71

  At the end of the month Tom went to see the Ballets Russes perform Stravinsky’s daringly dissonant and provocatively danced ballet Le Sacre du printemps at the Princes Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue. He may also have attended the work’s Queen’s Hall concert performance by an augmented orchestra conducted by Eugene Goossens some days before – an ‘extraordinary concatenation of sound’.72 Certainly he noted that ‘on the first night’ the music ‘was received with wild applause’. Stravinsky was in London. Hailed as ‘the greatest success since Picasso’, he attended both concert and ballet performances, impressing Tom as he ‘took the call many times, small and correctly neat in pince-nez’. ‘To me’, Tom wrote, ‘the music seemed very remarkable’. It had a ‘modernity’ the accompanying ballet seemed to lack.73 Premiered in Paris eight years earlier, famously The Rite of Spring had caused a riot. Though the London Times critic in 1921 could find ‘no drama, no story’ but only a ‘passionless ritual’ as the ‘Chosen Virgin’ (ballerina Lydia Sokolova) danced herself to death, initially surrounded by a ‘spasmodic quiver’ of other da
ncers, nonetheless the audience ‘roared itself hoarse’ in saluting Stravinsky.74 Attending a ‘“family house”’ performance of the ballet, Tom the City gent used ‘the point of an umbrella’ to restrain the ‘mirth’ of people inclined to mock what they saw.75 This scandalous modern ballet patterned on an ancient pagan fertility ritual reminded him of Ulysses as well as of The Golden Bough. It confirmed his conviction that a powerful new work of art could draw on an ancient structure – such as that fertility rite which Jessie Weston discerned undergirding Arthurian myths.

  His American visitors had different tastes. Soon his strong-spirited mother was keen to make an excursion to the historic, castled English city of Warwick; to behold Shakespeare’s Stratford; to visit the Kenilworth made famous by Sir Walter Scott. Tom, who had never been to Warwick, readied himself to accompany her there on 9 July. ‘She is terrifyingly energetic for seventy-seven.’ Vivien, having had enough, had headed back to Bosham; Lottie Eliot’s journal shows she toured this area, too, staying near Itchenor with the Hutchinsons whose cottage had no electricity and very primitive sanitation, but found it ‘a nightmare’.76 Tom’s phrasing to Aldington – ‘I was just getting my wife away to a place in the country’ – suggests Vivien had to be evacuated from London. He hoped she might stay there until the end of July.77 That was just before his mother was due to leave.