Young Eliot (12 page)

 

3

Schoolings

L
IKE
most people, Tom had not so much a schooling as schoolings. He learned from vacations as well as from classrooms. His home reading was as important as any set texts. Decades afterwards, when he thought back to his fellow Smith Academy pupils, he called them simply ‘acquaintances'. Apparently he had lost track of them. Half jocularly he remembered disliking ‘my only contemporary in St. Louis who has become famous: Gerard Lambert, whose family flourished by the manufacture of “Listerine”. He was rich, he was good at mathematics (which I was not) and he was an athlete and won cups.'
1
When Tom was nearing sixteen, not just the World's Fair but also the Olympic Games came to St Louis. On 14 May 1904 Lambert won the pole vaulting competition, as well as coming second in ‘running broad jump' and ‘running high jump' during the Olympic Interscholastic Meet (State of Missouri) in which Smith Academy finished second overall.
2
Tom played no part in such success, though he did have a ticket for the World's Fair, one of whose principal displays covered ‘Anthropology and Ethnology, including the Philippine Islanders'. As well as displaying live ‘Aborigines' from America, Africa and Japan, there was a vast ‘Philippine Encampment' featuring ‘the most remarkable display of a people held at an exposition'. Here in lake encampments were ‘Savage Moros' and ‘Head Hunters' (described as ‘all savage') and Viscayans (‘civilized and devout Catholics') – who had come from ‘Luzon and the surrounding archipelago'.
3
If all this seemed a world away from Smith Academy, Tom did publish the following year a story in his school magazine about a sea captain shipwrecked among Polynesian tribesmen – some ‘beating bhghons (a sort of cross between a tin pan and gong) and chanting monotonously', but others converted by French missionaries and therefore ‘quite civilized and uninteresting'.
4
His interest in juxtaposed cultures and religions interpreted through anthropology is rooted in the world of his schooldays.

To an English friend he wrote in 1939, ‘As for other of my childhood acquaintances, they were more mixed in origin than any of your playmates, I am sure. Butch Wagner, Pat Sullivan, Snowball Wolfert, Elephant-mouth Hellman, Gander Giesecke: what has become of them?'
5
Tom's schoolfellows were boys from ‘good families' who did well and often went on to good universities; Milton ‘Elephant-mouth Hellman' progressed to Yale.
6
Yet such ‘acquaintances' were not trusted confidants. During his last years at Smith, Tom was part of a small group of five boys distinguishing themselves in the Classical Course. Standing in their midst for his formal class yearbook photograph, he looks hunched and a little uneasy. He seems not to have been very close to any of them: his fellow Classicist Lawrence Tyler Post, who had some talent for verse, penned the ‘Class Song' for Tom's year, before going to Yale. As for the other boys on the Classical Course, Charles Hills Ryan proceeded to Longfellow's alma mater, Bowdoin College; wealthy banker's son Walker Moore Van Riper chose Yale, and later hymned the St Louis Mortgage Bond Co. in
What Every Investor Should Know
(1913); Frederick Clinton Lake, Jr, too headed for Yale, returning afterwards to the St Louis dry goods business.
7
These classmates were among the twenty-five chosen to participate in the school's preliminary speaking contest in February 1905. The organiser was Tom's admired English teacher, Mr Hatch; but Tom was not selected for the finals.
8
At times his best friends were his books.

Principal Curd's
New Method of English Analysis
was a set text. It offered tiny extracts from famous writers as examples of common English constructions. The chosen authors included Shakespeare, Pope, Poe and Byron – all important to Tom – but Curd also cited stylists including La Rochefoucauld and Seneca. Tom would mention La Rochefoucauld in his first book of poems, and would later write about Seneca, but more generally the bookish habit of deploying tiny quotations from other writers became second nature to him. Tom himself (then, much later, John Soldo and Jayme Stayer) identified his schoolbooks.
9
In its choice of such texts for study as
The Vicar of Wakefield
,
The Merchant of Venice
,
Silas Marner
, Carlyle's
Essay on Burns
, Tennyson's
Princess
, James Russell Lowell's
Vision of Sir Launfal
and Burke's
Speech on Conciliation with America
, Smith Academy's literature curriculum used works commonly set for admission to leading colleges.

Tom's curriculum was also tied to the contents of
Composition and Rhetoric for Schools
by Chicago educators Robert Herrick and Lindsay Todd Damon. Working through this text, he found mention of
The House of the Seven Gables
(which became a favourite novel),
Captains Courageous
, and frequent references to Kipling and Stevenson. He imitated these last two authors in stories for the
Smith Academy Record
. Herrick and Damon also cited J. M. Barrie, that fashionable chronicler of hesitant masculinity whose
Sentimental Tommy
Tom later joked about. Tom encountered, too, the writerly advice of G. H. Palmer (afterwards one of his Harvard teachers) to look to ‘speech' and ‘conversation' in seeking ‘the development of literary power'. Herrick and Damon argued that ‘good writing does not differ essentially from good talking' and encouraged a productive relationship with modern spoken idiom. Their suggestion that a fine topic for writers was ‘The Legend of the Holy Grail' was one Tom would take up later.
10

Reading this book on composition, he was pointed towards Tennyson's
Idylls of the King
and Sir Thomas Malory's
Morte d'Arthur
. He recalled in 1934 that a children's edition of Malory (probably produced by Sidney Lanier, with illustrations of ‘Eliot the Harper' and the castle of the Holy Grail) had been ‘in my hands when I was a child of eleven or twelve. It was then, and perhaps has always been, my favourite book.'
11
Tom's inclinations were encouraged by his education. Throughout his boyhood Tennyson's
Idylls of the King
was still widely admired on both sides of the Atlantic. Edward Austin Abbey had recently painted
The Quest and Achievement of the Holy Grail
around the walls of Boston Public Library, its narrative written up by Henry James in 1895. Playing his part in such American Arthurianism, Tom was selected to read out his essay, ‘“A Vision of Sir Launfal”, A Christmas Study', as part of Smith Academy's Christmas exercises in 1904. Though the essay has not survived, it was based on his reading of Lowell's Grail quest poem,
A Vision of Sir Launfal
, a staple of the Smith Academy curriculum and one of Tom's fifth-year texts that session. The standard school edition presented the poem as ‘fraught with' a ‘deeply religious element'.
12

Lowell's 1848
Vision
links its protagonists to nature and the seasons; it contrasts the ‘leaves' and ‘sap' of summer and youth ‘lightsome as a locust-leaf' with the senescence of ‘An old, bent man, worn out and frail', imaged as a wintry ‘sapless and old' tree.
13
Beginning in the everyday, Lowell soon plunges into the visionary. Regarded as a classic in Tom's youth but now criticised for its ‘disregard for form', Lowell's poem helped make the Grail legend seem ‘democratic' to Americans.
14
Utterly different, Tom's poetry too would feature exhausted old men linked to seasonal cycles. Lowell uses the word ‘tent' of green vegetation; the notes to the school edition call attention to an odd expression, ‘“the river's shroud”', perhaps picked up in that unusual phrase in
The Waste Land
, ‘the river's tent'.
15

Tom's appropriative poetic ear retained cadences, his imagination was sustained by images and stories. A striking number of the tales he read were about unfortunate love affairs. In German, Theodor Storm's
Immensee
, which he studied when he was fifteen, is an old man's narrative of lost love, memory and desire; Wilhelm Hauff's
Das kalte Herz
(
The Cold Heart
) has a protagonist who kills his wife; Paul Heyse's ‘L'arrabbiata' (‘The Fury') deals with a violent, difficult erotic relationship. In French George Sand's
La petite Fadette
features another problematic love affair, though
Mademoiselle de la Seiglière
by Sand's lover Jules Sandeau at least ends happily; Pierre Loti's sensuous novel
Ramuntcho
, presenting spring as sad for the aged, evokes lost love. Teaching such texts, Tom's French teacher at Smith Academy, Julia Juvet Kaufmann, born in Geneva to Swiss parents, was sophisticated and cosmopolitan. All his life Tom remembered her as ‘the French Mistress who gave me my first taste for that language'.
16
When he was fifteen the local press reported that Mme Kaufmann ‘goes abroad annually and has done so for many seasons'; in a socially conservative milieu this widow in her fifties was the only single woman listed among ‘St. Louis Travelers who have made from Ten to Twenty Transatlantic Trips'.
17
For a time she had lived further along Locust Street at number 3200, a not-so-distant neighbour but one very different from Tom's parents who had never even set eyes on Europe.
18

Classroom reading prepared the way for his subsequent work. Extended study of Xenophon's
Anabasis
in Greek when he was fourteen and fifteen set him up for his much later translation of St John Perse's
Anabase
.
Julius Caesar
and
The Merchant of Venice
yielded phrases used in his mature verse. As early as 1901 four purple stars and a gold star were placed on the board to indicate that he had given seventy ‘excellent recitations in Latin'. Principal Curd as well as Tom's teacher, Miss Mabel Evans, a dedicated Washington University alumna, signed a 1901 report which told the boy's parents, ‘We consider his work worthy of the highest praise.'
19
Soon he began reading Ovid's
Metamorphoses
(cited in
The Waste Land
's notes), and Virgil's
Aeneid
which became a lifelong talisman.

In Palgrave's
Golden Treasury
, a set anthology when Tom was in his penultimate year at Smith Academy, poems LXV and LXVI were short extracts from Renaissance dramas: lyrics of the sort liked by Mr Hatch. The first, Shakespearian song (which Palgrave called ‘A Sea Dirge') comes from
The Tempest
. It contains the line ‘Those are pearls that were his eyes', which would become part of
The Waste Land
.
20
The second lyric, from John Webster's Jacobean tragedy
The White Devil
, was entitled by Palgrave ‘A Land Dirge'. It concerns ‘The friendless bodies of unburied men': its last couplet, ‘But keep the wolf far thence, that's foe to men, / Or with his nails he'll dig them up again' would be recast in
The Waste Land
. A few pages further on in the first book of Palgrave's anthology is Edmund Spenser's ‘Prothalamion' whose refrain ‘Sweet Thames! Run softly, till I end my song' would haunt Tom.
21

He was taught that ‘committing a poem to memory … is most desirable'.
22
But the verse he memorised did not necessarily come from school. In the
Fireside
he mentions that ‘There have been many parodys [
sic
] on “The White Man's Burden”', a well-known 1899 poem by Kipling addressed to Americans during a crisis in the Philippines, urging them to ‘Take up the White Man's burden' of imperial responsibility over ‘new-caught, sullen peoples, / Half devil and half child'.
23
In St Louis ten-year-old Tom, writing that ‘The Philipines [
sic
] are dangerous' and that the word from ‘
England
' was that ‘The Anglo-Saxon American is marching on', no doubt came into regular contact with racist rhetoric, but Kipling appealed to him for other reasons.
24
When Tom was ten or twelve, he fell in love with the sound of the Anglo-Indian poet's ballad about the hanging of a soldier, ‘Danny Deever', and memorised it.
25
This ballad of ‘drinkin' bitter beer' deploys Cockney speech; like Tom in later life, the Kipling of
Barrack Room Ballads
is a great poet of English pub-talk: his ‘Tommy', a poem Tom afterwards picked out, begins, ‘I went into a public-'ouse to get a pint o' beer'. But the lines of ‘Danny Deever' that most fascinated the boy were in its last stanza, ‘“What's that that whimpers over'ead?” said Files-on-Parade. / “It's Danny's soul that's passin' now,” the Colour-Sergeant said.' Remembering this poem all his life, Tom realised he loved the imperfect rhyme between ‘Parade' and ‘said'; ‘the word
whimper
' was ‘exactly right'. In adulthood, misquoting from memory, Tom turned Kipling's dying ‘whimpers' into ‘whimper', surely because by then it had been absorbed into his own most quoted line about dying, ‘Not with a bang but a whimper'.
26

Like most late-nineteenth-century children, he grew up familiar with death. His dead Grandfather's mores still dominated family life; his own birth had been preceded by the passing of his sister Theodora; he had been enamoured of the child actress who played the dying Carol in
The Birds' Christmas Carol.
At school during an outbreak of fever in early 1900, Dr Curd had to give a speech memorialising a pupil who had died; a week later an assembly of staff and pupils paid tribute to another dead boy.
27
In 1901 one of Tom's school contemporaries, Walter Crunden, whose brother had just died of meningitis, became ‘nervous' and ‘was stricken with brain fever' said to have been brought on by ‘long-continued nerve strain in preparing for a school debate'.
28
Like Tom, Walter was a reciter of poetry, and had a marked taste for literature. Such events did nothing to lessen Lottie Eliot's fearfulness about her potentially vulnerable younger son. Long afterwards, when a commentator on Tom's upbringing remarked on the ‘anxiety' and even ‘distress' in his mother's face, he did not demur.
29
His mother worried he was lonely. As he moved through Smith Academy, she grew increasingly aware that, though her youngest child was ‘most friendly', nonetheless ‘We have lived twenty-five years on the old Eliot place, while all our friends have moved out, and Tom desires companionship of which he has been thus deprived.'
30
His lack of friends and his health concerned her.