Young Eliot (14 page)

His brother Henry was surprised to hear Tom's later statement that it was reading Edward Fitzgerald's
Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
which had been his crucial early encounter with poetry. Instead, Henry remembered discovering Tom about the age of ten immersed in Milton's
Samson Agonistes
. When Henry, then a university student, reported this to the rest of the family, they were astonished.
58
Milton was regarded by many Unitarians as sharing their beliefs; he was a great religious poet, though a difficult one. Perhaps Tom was reading what he thought he
should
be reading; yet his being discovered poring over
Samson Agonistes
in private suggests that he genuinely wanted to come to terms with it. At the very least it is obvious that, albeit ironically, he did go on to make use of Milton's title in his own ‘Sweeney Agonistes'.

Henry also recalled his brother reading Browning before he encountered Fitzgerald's
Rubáiyát
.
59
Browning too was a difficult poet. His interest in saints and in religious tensions, whether in ‘St Simeon Stylites' or ‘Fra Lippo Lippi', was both akin to and sceptically different from Tom's mother's pious literary commitment. Browning had perfected the dramatic monologue, the poetic form that ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' would build on. At one point in later life, Tom would be dismissive of the Victorian poet in relation to his own work: ‘Browning was more of a hindrance than a help, for he had gone some way, but not far enough, in discovering a contemporary idiom.'
60
However, it was precisely Browning's combination of conversational tone, intellectual rigour, passion and irony that would stand Tom in good stead, and on occasion he came to recognise that Browning among nineteenth-century writers was ‘the only poet' to devise a way of speech which might be useful for others and that ‘Browning's lesson' lay ‘in [the] use of non-poetic material – in reasserting [the] relation of poetry to speech'.
61
Henry remained insistent that his brother was wrong about the age when he read certain books, maintaining that Tom read Milton before he devoured Fitzgerald, and that, by the time he was fifteen, Tom, reading voraciously in ways not suggested by his elders, had absorbed a good deal of Browning.
62
Tom's precocity struck some observers. Aged about fourteen and on holiday in Massachusetts, he was introduced to Harvard historian Professor Kuno Franke, a neighbour of his cousin Eleanor in Cambridge. The professor asked Tom with a twinkle if he ‘was a sub-sub-Freshman'.
63

Certainly during this formative period Tom encountered Fitzgerald's
Rubáiyát
, the work which, from at least the 1930s to the 1960s (when Henry was no longer alive to contradict him), he consistently presented as having provided his first profound experience of enjoying poetry. Asked in 1959, ‘Do you remember the circumstances under which you began to write poetry in St. Louis when you were a boy?' he replied, ‘I began I think about the age of fourteen, under the influence of Fitzgerald's
Omar Khayyam
, to write a number of very gloomy and atheistical and despairing quatrains in the same style, which fortunately I suppressed completely – so completely that they don't exist. I never showed them to anybody.'
64
This poetic start is presented as totally private, and (though Tom does not explicitly say so) in complete opposition to his parents' values. When he wrote in the 1930s about being excited by poetry as an adolescent, his vocabulary was a sexual one of ‘seduction' and ‘infatuation':

Everyone, I believe, who is at all sensible to the seductions of poetry, can remember some moment in youth when he or she was completely carried away by the work of one poet. Very likely he was carried away by several poets, one after the other. The reason for this passing infatuation is not merely that our sensibility to poetry is keener in adolescence than in maturity. What happens is a kind of inundation, of invasion of the undeveloped personality by the stronger personality of the poet.
65

This seems to be what happened to Tom when he ‘happened to pick up a copy of Fitzgerald's
Omar
which was lying about', and found in the poem an ‘almost overwhelming introduction to a new world of feeling' that was ‘like a sudden conversion; the world appeared anew, painted with bright, delicious and painful colours'.
66
As Henry pointed out to him, there had been a vogue for Fitzgerald's poem when Tom was about ten or twelve.
67
In 1898 the St Louis Musical Club had performed English composer Liza Lehmann's settings of parts of the
Rubáiyát
; that same year the
Globe-Democrat
discussed poet Richard Le Gallienne, agreeing with ‘those who laugh at his impudence in trying to improve upon Fitzgerald's version of Omar Khayyam'.
68

The popularity of the
Rubáiyát
in America explains why Tom was able to find a copy of Fitzgerald's translation of the Persian poet ‘lying about' a few years later. This poem about ‘reviving old Desires' was unashamedly hedonistic as it invoked ‘the fire of Spring' in a desert terrain of ‘the Waste', a milieu of wine, longing, fear of ‘the NOTHING', and admiration for the fleeting ‘Nightingale that in the branches sang'. Here was a sensuous poetry which asserted heretically, ‘“I Myself am Heav'n and Hell”', and whose insistent message was
carpe diem
– something the shy adolescent Tom seemed unable to do at his dancing classes. One of Fitzgerald's images for desire involves an exhausting search for water in the desert:

Would but the Desert of the Fountain yield

One glimpse – if dimly, yet indeed, reveal'd,

To which the fainting Traveller might spring,

As springs the trampled herbage of the field!
69

Though Tom's quatrains sparked by his absorption in Fitzgerald are lost, it is clear his reading propelled him into an intense engagement with nineteenth-century Romantic poetry. ‘Thereupon I took the usual adolescent course with Byron, Shelley, Keats, Rossetti, Swinburne.'
70
He was attracted not least to verse that mixed sexual longing with religious sentiment. A poem he mentioned along with Fitzgerald's
Rubáiyát
as part of the ‘intellectual pubescence' of ‘a boy of fourteen' was Dante Gabriel Rossetti's ‘The Blessed Damozel'.
71
This work was classed among Rossetti's ‘masterpieces' in one of Tom's textbooks, Henry S. Pancoast's
An Introduction to English Literature.
72
Even more sensuous than Fitzgerald, Rossetti's poem portrays a woman longing for her lover as she leans out from ‘the gold bar of Heaven', wearing ‘Her robe, ungirt from clasp to hem'. Such poetry excited Tom. He read on: ‘Her hair that lay along her back / Was yellow like ripe corn'.
73
Eventually he would ironise this material, not least by juxtaposing its phrasing with the repressed, polite milieu in which he came to move: ‘The readers of the
Boston Evening Transcript
/ Sway in the wind like a field of ripe corn'.
74
Probably such ironising began early, and indeed elements of it may be sensed in at least one piece Tom published in the
Smith Academy Record.

This was ‘A Fable for Feasters', a poem for Christmas published unseasonably in February 1905. Tom's tale about a ghost in a medieval monastery uses the stanza form favoured by Byron in
Don Juan
, another signal of the boy's liking for nineteenth-century poetry with an erotic tinge. Cheeky rhymes such as ‘Mormon' and ‘Norman' suggest Tom liked Byron's wit and acoustic nimbleness too.
75
Yet the immediate model, as readers from his brother Henry to modern critics have recognised, was the
Ingoldsby Legends
,
or Mirth and Marvels
, a once popular series of Victorian English comic verses about medieval life. The poems of the
Ingoldsby Legends
mix modern, sometimes slangy lingo (‘You
will
have a kicking!') with mock-medievalisms (‘Quoth his saintship, “How now!”'), and parody both actual medieval forms and nineteenth-century medievalising, such as that of Keats in ‘The Eve of St Agnes'.
76
Where Tom's admired
Morte d'Arthur
and
Vision of Sir Lanfaul
were solemnly medieval,
Ingoldsby
capered; so does ‘A Fable for Feasters'.

Tom's first printed poem describes the many-wived King Henry VIII as ‘that royal Mormon' and presents monks as ‘quacks'. Tom's brother relished the way, conducting an exorcism, the poem's Abbot douses a dining room with holy water, ‘And watered everything except the wine'.
77
Into his poem Tom works expressions such as ‘“O jiminy!”' rhyming with ‘the chimney'. As well as drawing on ‘The Ghost' from
The Ingoldsby Legends
, he learned from the poem that follows it in the same collection, ‘The Brothers of Birchington, A Lay of St Thomas À Becket'. When Tom wrote in his last stanza of how ‘Each morn from four to five one took a knout / And flogged his mates 'till they grew good and friarly', his use of the unusual word ‘knout' in this context probably owes something to the way in ‘The Brothers of Birchington' we hear of ‘such a knout! / For his self-flagellations! The Monks used to say / He would wear out two penn'orth of whipcord a day!'
78

Reading and imitating this work, Tom began to put together allusions to older cultural forms with anachronistically modern colloquial language. He also found a way both to indulge and subvert the taste he shared with his mother for sometimes ascetic medieval religious life. Though later he would be fascinated by masochistic saints and as a mature poet would return more solemnly to Thomas à Becket, what he started to essay in this teenage poem was mixing modern and antique diction. In doing so he drew on some of his interests in older poetry and religion, yet developed an ironic edge. Tom did not succeed fully in 1905, but perhaps the untonsured man in ‘The Brothers of Birchington' who worries about ‘a little bald patch on the top of his crown' would return later as J. Alfred Prufrock with a ‘bald spot in the middle of my hair'.
79

In his penultimate year at school, though absent from the sports field, he did win respect for his academic performance. Like his brother before him, he was awarded the school's gold medal for Latin. Tom's medal made his parents proud. Pa gave him a reward of $25, but secretly Tom took (‘stole' as he later put it) $2 of this to purchase a copy of Shelley's poems.
80
Reading the work of a poet who had written a notorious justification of atheism was in its way a rebellious act. It followed Tom's authoring of those ‘atheistical' quatrains spurred by his reading of Fitzgerald. He perused Edward Dowden's edition of Shelley's poems excitedly. On the first page of his introduction Dowden presented Shelley's genius as ‘primarily lyrical'. ‘No poet ever sang more directly out of his own feelings – his joys, his sorrows, his desires, his regrets.' A little-known, fragmentary lyric poem towards the end of Dowden's edition, where it was entitled ‘To the Moon', stayed with Tom all his life. He came to think it ‘the most perfect short poem that Shelley wrote':

Art thou pale for weariness

Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,

Wandering companionless

Among the stars that have a different birth,

And ever changing, like a joyless eye

That finds no object worth its constancy?
81

Like ‘The Blessed Damozel', this is a poem of longing and apartness that articulates a sense of the ‘companionless' – just what Tom's mother worried about when she feared Tom had been ‘deprived' of ‘companionship'.
82
If his taste in poetry was something he kept (in part at least) hidden from his parents, his attraction towards the ‘atheistical' may have led this boy perceived by outsiders as shy to feel cut off from some aspects of his family life too. This helps explain why at least once he said his Unitarian upbringing had formed him as an ‘Atheist'.
83
In some rather despondent moods, looking back twenty years later, he could intuit that his growing commitment to poetry had isolated him, feeling he had been ‘
forced
into poetry by my weakness in other directions … I took this direction very young, and learned very early to find my life and my realisation in this curious way, and to be obtuse and indifferent to my reality in other ways.'
84

Tom played no part in the editing of his school magazine, but he was published in it. His three short prose contributions in 1905 are undistinguished, but hint how his reading continued to guide him. ‘The Birds of Prey', about a vulture which comes to feast on a battlefield victim, has a title reminiscent of Kipling's ‘“Birds of Prey” March'. ‘The Man Who Was King' (the narrative about a man shipwrecked in Polynesia) echoes Kipling's short story ‘The Man Who Would Be King', but also inclines towards R. L. Stevenson. ‘The Man Who Was King' is narrated by a retired captain, ‘at present engaged in lobster-trawling and skippering summer visitors'. He sounds a bit like the skipper who taught Tom to sail at Gloucester. Terms such as ‘mizzen top-gallant shrouds', ‘flying jib-boom', ‘fore staysail' and ‘holystoning the deck' (all used in Tom's other story ‘A Tale of a Whale') demonstrate that the young mariner had been well taught. Moments in these narratives, as when sailors on the back of a whale eat ‘sponge-cake, made out of the sponges which grew on the bottom of the great animal', suggest Tom's more mischievous, Edward Lear-loving side.
85
So do occasional made-up words, including Tom's Polynesian ‘bhghons'. Veering between the comical and the serious, these prose pieces also essay themes that became lifelong preoccupations. The captain, worried about being ‘roasted for the consumption of his hosts', ends up being made king of an island where, later, colonists convert naked pagan ‘natives', rendering them disappointingly ‘civilised'.
86
All this came from an imagination which would grow fascinated soon by anthropology, by Conrad's
Heart of Darkness
, and would juxtapose the supposedly primitive with the civilised in
The Waste Land
and ‘Sweeney Agonistes.'