Young Eliot (17 page)

When they recalled Tom, ‘shy' is the word fellow students regularly associated with him. Some also thought him clever, despite the loafing, and even perceived that, beyond his shyness lay a capacity for companionship. An early college friend was Leon Magaw Little, who came from a New England family brimming with Harvard connections; Tom's brother had collaborated with Edward Little on
Harvard Celebrities
. As a freshman Leon lived near Tom, sharing a suite of rooms with a fellow first-year at 133 Westmorly Court. A recently built Gold Coast private hall (now part of Adams House), Westmorly charged some of the highest rents, but boasted excellent plumbing, and even had its own ornate private swimming pool.
27
As an old man, Leon Little remembered the impression Tom made from his first year onwards; he mentions a companionability and academic accomplishments less evident to others.

As a freshman T. S. Eliot was of the type that welcomes friendships but is too reserved to seek them. However, his scholastic brilliance and his charming personality quickly brought to him a circle of friends of two quite divergent types, the intellectuals on the one hand and, on the other, many of those who were not considered in that category. His requirements seemed to be a reasonable amount of brains but above all a happy, keen sense of humor. Within the circles of these friends he was a very gay companion.
28

In late February 1907 Tom received another letter from Assistant Dean Wells: the Administrative Board was taking him off probation. This brought relief, not least to his parents. Tom had hardly become a ‘grind' – a student devoted to his studies – but he had bought more time to come to terms with what Harvard had to offer.

He was enrolled at America's oldest university. In 1886, six years after the future United States President Theodore Roosevelt had graduated, Harvard had celebrated its 250th anniversary. That milestone encouraged intensive fundraising. New buildings went up across the campus. Still aligned to the older Calvinistic or Unitarian values of New England, Harvard was increasingly an academic centre of national and international renown. Its faculty were effortfully cosmopolitan. So, for instance, Tom's Professor Wendell was not only a historian of American literature. He also authored
The France of Today
(1907), while Anglophilia was evident alike in his tailoring and in his knowledge of seventeenth-century English literature, on which he delivered the Clark Lectures at King's College, Cambridge, England. Years afterwards, so did Tom.

Leading American intellectuals such as philosopher and psychologist William James (Henry James's brother), fellow philosopher Josiah Royce and polymathic cultural critic Irving Babbitt – another Francophile – were distinguished figures around the campus. Under the ambitious leadership of President Eliot, arguably the most widely known academic in America, Harvard had attracted outstanding tenured and visiting faculty, and it went on doing so. Tom would benefit in a later year from the presence of Bertrand Russell as a visiting philosophy professor; and during his second semester the famous young classicist Gilbert Murray, formerly professor of Greek at the University of Glasgow and soon to move to Oxford, delivered in Harvard's capacious new Fogg Museum of art a series of lectures on ancient Greek poetry.

Editor and translator of Euripides (his
Medea
appeared in 1907) as well as an enthusiast for Aristophanes, Murray was associated with interdisciplinary thinking that linked literature to anthropology. Admired by several Harvard faculty members, an emergent intellectual movement connected poetry and plays to more ancient rites. Murray's
History of Greek Literature
had spoken up for ‘the Greek of the anthropologist'.
29
Tom, fresh from studying
Medea
and hearing freshman lectures on Greek literary history, would study Aristophanes the following year. Not only were his teachers excited to host Murray, but Murray's lectures were reported regularly in the
Crimson
. His interest in linking literature to rituals was attuned to that student imagination which, spoofingly, had so recently brought together in the
Harvard Advocate
rituals of the freshman life of ‘Goldkoastides' with the forms of ancient classical drama, ‘Parodos', ‘Choros' and all. Later Tom criticised Murray as a translator of Greek drama, but in his own ‘Aristophanic Melodrama' ‘Sweeney Agonistes' and elsewhere, he would fuse modern-day life with Classical scholarship that invoked anthropology. At Harvard Murray argued that the
Iliad
's ‘originality' lay precisely in the way it took materials ‘ready-made from older books or traditions' and so registered ‘an intensity of imagination, not merely of one great poet, but the accumulated emotion of generations'.
30
Such ideas were being discussed around Tom while he studied Greek.

‘Abeunt Studia in Mores' read one of the inscriptions in Harvard's Memorial Hall: ‘Our studies breed our habits'.
31
Tom's studies were magpie-like, and the Harvard of his day, with its ‘elective system' which allowed students to assemble their degree in piecemeal fashion, encouraged that. Though in his second year he studied Aristophanes, Aeschylus and Sophocles, he did not major in Greek or in any other single subject. Between 1906 and 1910, when he graduated Master of Arts, he took twenty-five courses (some, to be exact, were designated ‘half-courses') in ten subjects: English, Latin, Greek, French, German, Comparative Literature, Philosophy, History, Fine Arts and Government. In modern parlance, one might say that his undergraduate work was substantially in comparative literature. The elective system let students follow their instincts, with the result that, as one of Tom's lecturers put it in 1908, ‘Boys drift.'
32
Generously bankrolling his son's student years, that was what Tom's father worried about.

As he loafed around Harvard Yard, Tom observed buildings familiar today, but his Harvard, smaller and less driven than now, was also subtly different. Including summer school participants, there were just over 5,000 students; across the whole institution the staff–student ratio was roughly one-to-twelve, and in Tom's part of the university, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, there were a little over 2,200 students, most expecting to reside for three or four years.
33
Lecture audiences could number nearly four hundred in big courses like Government 1, and over three hundred for History, German and English; instructors and assistants led smaller group discussions and helped with grading.
34
Some undergraduates, including members of Tom's own Class of 1910, thought the university had grown excessively large, and that it was too easy for students to avoid notice. Yet, though the red-brick dormitory of Forbes House had prepared Tom for the look of Harvard Yard, after St Louis Cambridge was very small. One of his friends, who arrived in 1907, recalled it as ‘a village', albeit an atmospheric one: ‘Lilacs, white picket fences under elms, horse-drawn water-carts to lay the dust in the blindingly dusty streets of summer, board-walks put down on the pavements every winter and taken up every spring, sleighs and pungs [sleighs with box-shaped bodies] in the snow, and the dreadful college bell reverberant over all.'
35

Though a few rich Harvard men brought with them those newfangled machines, motor cars, most, including Tom, did not. Cambridge was walkable. One could stroll to eat with over a thousand fellow students in the great dining hall attached to Sanders Theatre, its roofbeams over sixty feet above diners' heads, and stare at stained-glass windows depicting Chaucer, Dante and, less predictably perhaps, Sir Philip Sidney; or, as Tom sometimes did, one could scrutinise statuary and paintings in the Fogg Museum, or walk a few hundred yards towards the Weld Boat House if the weather was suitable for rowing. Everywhere, even in the newest buildings, there was a weight of tradition redolent of New England. Completed in the College Yard the year before Tom arrived, Emerson Hall, home to the Philosophy Department, had a large bronze statue of the seated Ralph Waldo Emerson in its concourse, positioned to confront all who entered the building; an inscription over the grandly pillared doorway quoted the biblical book of Psalms, ‘WHAT IS MAN THAT THOU ART MINDFUL OF HIM?' Tom grew used to such imposing spaces. Later, he would craft a mock-grandeur of his own: ‘The lengthened shadow of a man / Is history, said Emerson'.
36

The present-day centrepiece of Harvard Yard, the great Widener Library, had not yet been built. In its place stood the several times extended Gore Hall. Cathedral-like outside and in, this library held about half a million books. Specialities including its Dante collection were not open for undergraduate browsing, but it had a large reading room accessible to all students, even if its librarians seemed stern. A member of the Class of 1907 noted a growing undergraduate wish to seem ‘literary', a symptom of which was ‘the falling off in attendance at Gore Hall, and the increase at the Union library'.
37
As he got used to Harvard, Tom came to prefer student-controlled reading spaces like that of the Harvard Union. Endowed by Henry Lee Higginson, founder of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, this extensive club had been built a few years earlier at the corner of Quincy and Harvard Streets, overlooking attractive gardens.

Costing just $10 to join, the Union gave 2,000 student members access to dining rooms, reading rooms and facilities including a billiard room and barber shop. Entering it brought Tom close to the centre of undergraduate literary life. A basement suite of rooms comprised the offices and composing room of the
Crimson
; the top floor housed the offices of student literary magazines, the
Harvard Advocate
and
Harvard Monthly
. Tom sauntered through the entrance hall leading to a hundred-foot-long ‘Living Room', its oak-panelled walls hung with grand portraits. In winter wood fires blazed in great open hearths at either end while students lounged around, reading (‘Daily papers from the principal cities of the United States are kept on file'), or took coffee and refreshments at small tables. With its game room, writing room and periodical rooms adjoining the main Living Room, the Union was designed for privileged chaps: a separate, less impressive entrance provided access to a ‘ladies' dining room'.
38

Tom liked to wander upstairs to the Union Library, its windows overlooking the lawns, its shelves stocked with over 6,000 books in three connecting rooms. Here students could read unsupervised in ‘agreeable privacy'. For an undergraduate like Tom who enjoyed pursuing his ‘private reading' at least as much as his coursework, this was a refuge.
39
The Union Library was a great place for contemporary literature. New highlights added to its shelves – whether volumes of
Shelburne Essays
by St Louis-born critic Paul Elmer More or more risqué volumes such as Oscar Wilde's
Salomé
– were listed regularly in the
Crimson
.
40
Tom, who started reading
Shelburne Essays
at Harvard and whose ‘Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' with its image of a ‘head (grown slightly bald) / brought in upon a platter' would soon parody the Salome narrative, used the Union as an enlivening resource.
41

Somewhat sobered after being placed on probation, he chose a more coherent assortment of courses for his second year. Ancient Greek became his centre of gravity and in 1907–8 he signed up for Fine Arts 3 (History of Ancient Art), taught by Classicist and art historian, Assistant Professor George Henry Chase. Chase was cataloguing the classical pottery collection of James Loeb, soon to be presented to Harvard's Fogg Museum. Chase's lectures were considered dry, but their subject matter complemented Tom's study of Greek Prose Composition in the half-course called Greek E, as well as another course he took that session, Greek Literature, where teaching was led by Assistant Professor Charles Pomeroy Parker. An Oxford graduate, Parker had an interest in Greek philosophy, but Greek 2, the literary course that he and Professor Earnest Cary taught, included very different material. The Eliot scholar Grover Smith points out that ‘At Harvard there is a school copy of Aristophanes'
Acharnians
in W. W. Merry's edition, with marginal notes by Eliot.'
42
Merry, the Victorian editor, presented Aristophanes as ‘burlesque'.
43
Schooled in choral Aristophanic comedies including
The Acharnians
and
The Birds
, both of which he read for Greek 2, Tom later fused their structure with modern burlesque in ‘Sweeney Agonistes'. In his late sixties, he would still find the heartily obscene Aristophanes ‘delightful'.
44

As well as these Greek courses, in his second year he continued the study of German, an important language for Classical scholarship. He concentrated on grammar and written German, but also read some poetry and prose with a native speaker, the instructor Hermann Julius Weber, and his colleague William Arnold Colwell, whose interest in German literature in eighteenth-century England was a further example of Harvard's inclination towards comparative literature. Unfortunately Tom's German was not considered satisfactory. He slipped back into the danger zone with a ‘D' grade. In French 2a (where his grade was ‘C') his lead instructor, Assistant Professor Charles Henry Conrad Wright, was working on a compendious
History of French Literature
. Eventually published in 1912, it deals with the authors covered in Tom's course. These ranged from Corneille and Racine to the nineteenth-century writers de Musset, Sainte-Beuve and Rostand.

Wright was an assiduous scholar. His critical vocabulary included the terms ‘dislocation' and ‘impersonality', but his tastes show him to have been just the sort of critic that Tom, especially when discussing modern French literature, would come to attack. For Wright, de Musset, ‘perhaps the most characteristically French poet of his century', was far more attractive than the Baudelaire who, influenced by Poe, had helped give a questionable ‘vogue to Symbolism … and decadents who built their theory of poetry on the element of suggestion and the relations between things and the soul, precisely as they professed to see in the music of Wagner'. Sainte-Beuve was to be lauded as ‘one of the greatest of critics', a man preoccupied with the literary examination of ‘personality', even to the extent of becoming ‘a Peeping Tom, especially of women'. Rostand, though he achieved a ‘high level' in the ‘long and rambling'
Cyrano de Bergerac
, had fallen away in his more recent, fashionable
Chantecler
with its ‘evanescent modern Parisian wit, often sinking to the commonest slang'. Wright's French 2a stopped with Rostand. He disliked Symbolist poetry as ‘obscure', ‘unintelligible' and ‘freakish' – just the sort of line that his most famous student would soon react against with creative vehemence.
45