The range of Eliot’s reading was wide from the start, and continued to widen and deepen throughout his childhood and adolescence. If ever there was a creative genius nourished by reading the classics of all nations, it was Eliot. In this respect he was like Milton and Browning, the best-educated—and self-educated—of English poets. At a very early age his mother put before him Macaulay’s History of England, which he read with delight. The family oscillated between St. Louis, on the enormous Mississippi River, and Gloucester, a New England fishing port where they also had a house; and Eliot devoured books on rivers and the sea—and birds. There survives his annotated copy of the Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America, given to him on his fourteenth birthday. He loved studying tiny things in great detail over long hours—a bird’s wing, small sea urchins in rock pools. At Mrs. Lockwood’s school in St. Louis he was plunged into Shakespeare, Dickens, and the romantic poets, especially Shelley and Keats. At Smith Academy, the preparatory school for the local university, Washington, funded by his grandfather, he learned Latin, Greek, French, and German and read the literatures of these languages. He loved Aeschylus and Euripides in Greek, Horace and Ovid in Latin. The “set books” on which he was examined in his final year at Smith included Molière’s Le Misanthrope, Racine’s Andromache, Virgil’s Aeneid (Books III and IV), Homer’s Iliad, Ovid’s Selected Poems, Horace’s Odes and Epodes, Shakespeare’s Othello, Burke’s Writings on America, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Macaulay’s Essays, Hill’s Principles of Rhetoric, Addison’s Cato, and La Fontaine’s Fables. He learned masses of poetry by heart—at twelve he could recite Kipling’s relentlessly tragic Danny Deaver, at thirteen Omar Khayyam. Thence he moved to Edgar Allan Poe, and on to Byron’s Childe Harold. He later said that his adolescent “drowning” in verse was akin to “daemon’s possession.” He wrote poetry himself, and as all good budding poets do, he became a master of pastiche and parody, so much so that his mature poetry is in a sense an epitome or anthology of all poetry.
At Harvard, he lived on the fashionable “Gold Coast” and belonged to good clubs, associating superficially with the rich and wellborn but in essence leading a life of study, meditation, and sheer hard work on texts and languages. His learning spread wider and wider, “like a benevolent pool of water” (to use one of his similes) “on the parched earth of his ignorance.” Eliot always worked hard at whatever he was doing, being conscientious, and consumed with guilt if he was “lazy” (a rare state), and having moreover the priceless gift of concentrating. He could set to work immediately, first thing in the morning, without any time-consuming preliminary fiddling or rituals. If interrupted, he could refocus immediately and resume work. The intensity with which he worked was almost frightening. He saw time as a precious commodity, never to be wasted. The word “time” occurs very often in his best, mature poems: the sense of time provokes a continual chronic punctuation of his verse, varying in volume and intimacy from tickings and heartbeats to the rhythmic throbbing of drums. (It was Ezra Pound who first spotted the “insistent drum-beats” that gave “unity and power” to Eliot’s work).2
This fear of time passing inexorably and permanently—“time lost”—made Eliot greedy for knowledge. If he had been English and gone to, say, Balliol College at Oxford, or King’s at Cambridge, he would have been obliged by the rigidity of the curriculum to concentrate on ancient texts and Greek history and philosophy. At Harvard, however, the multiplicity of learned courses, and the right of the student to pick and choose, was of inestimable benefit to him. He spread his net as wide as possible, and although this often leads to superficiality and shallow epicureanism, Eliot brought up a goodly harvest from the oceans of knowledge, and feasted on it, digesting and retaining much. In his first year at Harvard, 1906, he took courses in Greek literature, German language, medieval history, English literature, and the art of constitutional government. He followed these with courses in French literature, ancient and modern philosophy, comparative world literature, and forms of religion. He got himself tutored in English composition and made a special study, himself designing the parameters, of the life and work of Baudelaire—regarded as very daring in 1908. He memorized much of James Thomson’s unsettling poem The City of Dreadful Night; and he read widely in the English poets of the 1890s, especially Wilde, Dowson, and Davidson. He read not only Symonds’s poetry but also Symonds’s Symbolic Movement in Literature, and Symbolism, the first advanced movement he absorbed, became a permanent element in his work. (Indeed it can be argued that Eliot was a Symbolist, though he was also much else.) By the end of 1908, he was beginning to plunge deeply into philosophy, to the point where he thought seriously of becoming a professional student of the mind and its empire.
Here we come to an important feature of Eliot’s life, which was central to his achievement—the absence from it of sports (including almost every form of strenuous physical activity) and sex. As a child, he suffered from what was called a double hernia, was fitted with a truss, and wore one virtually all his life. He was thus excused from games, and later declared unfit for military service. The period 1850 to 1914 was, for young men from wealthy families, the age of games. Eliot’s inability to participate in this vital and time-consuming dimension of life left a huge hole to be filled by academic work, pursued all the more furiously because of his feelings of guilt that he was not drudging away and distinguishing himself on the playing field. His physical weakness, then, was a priceless gift of time, to be spent worthily on his books.
In the mysterious area of sex, that greedy consumer of a young man’s time and energy, less is known of Eliot’s activities or inactivity. He said he was a virgin until his marriage, and there is no reason to doubt his word. Indeed the only question is whether he remained a virgin all his life. A childhood dominated by a mother and four elder sisters can produce an adult male who is thoroughly at home with women and familiar with their ways, so that he has no difficulty in forming close attachments to the other sex at all times of his life. On the other hand, if the mother is fond but frigid, and the sisters are loving but dowdy and fearful of men, the opposite effect can be produced—and that was precisely Eliot’s misfortune as a man, and (perhaps) his creative destiny as a poet. It is doubtful that he ever achieved full sexual congress with his difficult and mentally disturbed first wife; and by the time he found happiness in the motherly arms of his second, he was in his late sixties. What is certain, however, is that as a young man Eliot found no woman to provide him with sensual gratification, and was too inhibited and fearful to turn to prostitutes, though he evidently often thought about them: the image of a beckoning woman in a lighted doorway on a dark or foggy street is a recurrent one in his poetry.3
With no sports or sex, the reading and cerebral exploration went on relentlessly. Eliot conforms perfectly to my definition of an intellectual: “a person who thinks ideas are more important than people.” It is not clear that Eliot ever thought a particular person important, though he perceived that some people were useful, at least to him. Not that he was selfish. Self-centered, of course: what intellectual isn’t? But there was no doubt about the importance—perhaps “import” would be a better word—he attached to ideas. The first major adult spinner of ideas for the maturing Eliot was Jules Laforgue (1860–1887), a Symbolist poet, now nearly forgotten, who was born in Latin America, came to Paris in 1876, starved, wrote poetry, went to Berlin, wrote more poetry, married an English governess, returned to Paris to starve, and died of tuberculosis at age twenty-seven. You have only to read his three-volume Oeuvres Complètes, which Eliot bought in 1909, to realize his importance to the poetry to come. Irony, allusion, quotation, apparent incoherence masking unity of mood, music rather than rhythms and prosody, impersonality, emotional detachment concealing (or rather emphasizing) intense pessimism—these are all there. Laforgue was a proto-Eliot, without much talent. Eliot observed him completely, digested him, then excreted and forgot about him.
Next came a host of “idea figures.” Eliot earned hi
s bachelor’s degree in 1909, then earned a master’s degree in English literature. His tutors included Irving Babbit, who took him through a course in French literary criticism. Babbit insisted on “standards” and “discipline”—attractive words (often used later) and powerfully attractive concepts to Eliot’s conservative mind. Under Babbit’s influence (it is said), Eliot took up the East—specifically Sanskrit and Buddhism, and acquired a certain knowledge of both, mainly superficial, though one can never be quite sure with Eliot. He saw them as ideas, and they did not run deep into his psyche, but he found them very useful as background noises (and rhythms).
In 1910 Eliot persuaded his father to let him visit Europe, and to finance the trip, and off he trundled in search of more ideas and mentors. (He ate both to fill hungers deprived of other sustenance.) I have a feeling that, in mid-Atlantic, as he watched the sea furrows of the vessel widening—another favorite image—he became aware for the first time of his statelessness. Earlier, the fact that he had been born in St. Louis, and to its vast, rolling, muddy river, but had roots in New England Puritanism and spent summers in Gloucester with its fierce, sparkling sea, made him, when he thought about it, and he often did think about it, a divided American, a hyphenated southerner or southwesterner and Yankee New Englander, or rather neither, a kind of American specter. He seemed, already, a visitor in the land of his birth. This is, or at any rate was, not uncommon among Americans, especially in the nineteenth century and in the years just before World War I, when the country was expanding and reinventing itself with every generation, almost with every decade. Dickens recalled traveling by train across the American vastness in the 1860s, in one of the new dining cars, and committing some solecism. He apologized to the waiter for his ignorance, pleading, “You see, I’m a stranger here.” The waiter replied: “Mister, in this country we are all strangers.” Eliot was a stranger at home and felt himself a stranger, or at any rate strange. But was he more at home on the other side of the Atlantic? Paris, Berlin, and London were cultural centers rather than homes. Since Eliot did not leave the United States until he was twenty-six, he might be considered entirely an American. But he was not. Indeed he gradually lost his American accent completely—something few American expatriates do. In Paris he learned to speak French, fluently and correctly though not idiomatically—he was not a man for vernaculars except in pastiche. In Paris (he said later), he knew “nobody,” adding that the best way to profit from the city was to remain isolated, since the people there he was likely to meet were “futile and time-wasting.” He was fascinated by its red-light district and brothel doorways, and by the brasseries where the buxom waitresses serving bock were to be had, but never penetrated one or the other. However, he read about such horrifying delights, especially in a novel called Bubu de Montparnasse, by Charles-Louis Philippe, describing the brothel culture of the Left Bank, which Eliot said was symbolic of Paris in 1910 to 1914 to him. In Paris, too, he went to the lectures of Henri Bergson, another man interested in time, who discoursed humorlessly on le rire; and he became fascinated by Charles Maurras, a revolutionary conservative who believed in violence, especially against Jews, atheists, and anyone who criticized national symbols such as Saint Louis and Jeanne d’Arc. Eliot enjoyed watching the riots Maurras organized with his rabid student groups.
Returning to Harvard, Eliot drifted toward philosophy, by way of F. H. Bradley’s Appearance and Reality, an attractive cul-de-sac much visited by clever young men at the time. He took a course with a visiting professor, Bertrand Russell, who described him accurately as “altogether impeccable in his tastes but has no vigour or life, or enthusiasm.”4 Harvard offered him a traveling fellowship, to complete his Bradley studies, in the form of a doctoral thesis in Europe. He traveled to England via Germany, barely getting out before he would have been trapped by the outbreak of World War I in August 1914. He settled in Bloomsbury, already a center of upper-middle-class writers and intellectuals with a touch of bohemianism (and sexual deviation)—the kind of English people with whom Eliot was to feel most at home, insofar as he felt at home with anyone.
For some time he had been writing poetry or, as he always called it, “verse.” This early work, commencing in 1909 and eventually published as Prufrock (1917) and Poems (1919), consists all together of twenty-four items, of which only “Gerontion,” in the second collection, adumbrates the power of his maturity. Some are clever, sophisticated, even witty in a dull way; the kind of things a well-educated but shy and diffident Harvard man might be expected to produce in private but would not venture to publish or even perhaps show to his friends. That there was a deft, humorous side to Eliot’s verse is clear. Friends of his youth testify to his capacity to make sly, ironic jokes, often surprisingly funny. This talent, under the warming nourishment of fame, eventually blossomed into his remarkable collection Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, published in 1939; it eventually formed the libretto to an astoundingly successful musical, Cats. However, it is fair to say that if Eliot had never written and published The Waste Land and Four Quartets, this early work would by now have been forgotten; as it is, “Gerontion” and “Mr. Appolinax,” for instance, are studied and anthologized entirely because of their supposed relationship to Eliot’s two masterpieces, and are parasitical on them. His instinct not to publish was in a sense sound. In fact many verses he wrote remained unpublished, not least of them a comic epic, “King Bolo and His Great Black Queen,” on which he worked, spasmodically, for some years. This work has been described by Peter Ackroyd in his biography of Eliot as “consistently pornographic in content, with allusions to buggery, penises, sphincters and other less delicate matters.”5 It is likely that Eliot wrote pornography on and off all his life, as a form of sexual satisfaction, to compensate for his virginal existence (and his horror of masturbation, which he believed might make him insane), and later destroyed most of it. Then and later, Eliot was obsessed by the futility and pointlessness of human affairs, especially his own. Life was empty of significance. How was it to be filled? Religion was one way, but Eliot was not yet ready for that. Philosophy, in particular Bradley’s so-called idealism, was another; but Eliot quickly discovered this to be a stony path leading nowhere, as others have found since. A third way was sexual excess, but Eliot was much too puritanical and fastidious—and nervous—to travel that road; creating pornographic verses was a substitute, albeit a dispiriting one.
Then, in September 1914, Eliot’s rather feeble and purposeless existence was transformed, forever, by a meeting. Such meetings, the human equivalent of the transformation effected by blending chemicals, are of tremendous importance in the history of creation. An outstanding example is the meeting of Coleridge and Wordsworth at Bristol in August 1795, an encounter which inflamed both and led directly to their collaboration in 1797 in the creation of Lyrical Ballads, its publication the following year, and the birth of romantic poetry. The meeting of Eliot and Ezra Pound was of comparable importance, since, again, it led eventually to a poetic revolution, the birth of modern poetry, with the publication of Eliot’s The Waste Land in 1922.6
Pound was three years older than Eliot and a much more positive character, a man of enthusiasms, sometimes violent ones, and huge ambitions. He also had, in some ways, a grand generosity of spirit. Whereas Eliot was diffident about poetry, Pound was a crusader, a fierce pioneer and propagandist, to the point of bombast. Like Eliot, he had an academic side and considerable scholarship. He had taught at Wabash College, from which, characteristically, he was dismissed for his impatience and exasperation with academic methods. He then roamed Europe, living in London from 1908 to 1920. Between 1908 and 1912 he published several volumes of poetry including translations from Chinese, Provençal, and Italian, and made subtle and sometimes esoteric experiments in meter and language. Pound came from Idaho, so, like Eliot, he was technically a midwesterner, and their scholarly leanings also gave them common ground. In temperament, however, they were opposites—Eliot bloodless, Pound ebullient and bursting w
ith ferocious energy.7
When, at Pound’s request, Eliot showed him “Prufrock” and “Portrait of a Lady,” there was an explosion of enthusiasm: “This is as good as anything I have ever seen.” Pound at once wrote to Harriet Monroe, editor of the magazine Poetry in Chicago, and told her that he had found a new master. He also introduced Eliot to Wyndham Lewis, a writer and painter who soon produced by far the best portrait of Eliot (now in the National Gallery of South Africa, Durban) and who described him at the time as a “sleek, tall, attractive, transatlantic apparition, with a sort of Gioconda smile, moqueur to the marrow [with] a ponderous, exactly articulated drawl.” Pound introduced Eliot to many other literary figures, American and English, and Eliot soon found himself treated not as an academic philosopher but as a “young poet,” a member of the avant-garde. This brought about a faint stirring of the blood. He found himself being bullied into publication, both in magazines and in books. Pound brought pressure on him to make up his mind about other things as well: to settle in Europe, preferably England (Pound argued strongly that this was the place most congenial to a literary life); to give up sterile academic philosophy in favor of literature; to empower this process of settling down and concentration by marrying. The decisions were connected, since they involved cutting himself off from his family. Indeed, from this point on Eliot saw very little of his parents (though his mother visited him) and received little financial support from them, despite his father’s wealth. He also began to assimilate to Europe—not, like Henry James (who became British in 1915), for social reasons but because Pound persuaded him that America was culturally conservative, and that Europe was the place where the future of art and literature was being shaped.
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