Young Eliot (19 page)

Digamma members had a taste for his most laddish imaginings, and he was not the only Foxite to purvey scurrility; many years afterwards Nick Brooks sent to London what Tom hailed as ‘a very bawdy verse … quite a gem, up to his best style'.
63
Tom relished Nick's turns of phrase, such as ‘I'll be horse-fucked.'
64
Designed to be as offensively subversive as possible, Tom's Columbo poems and their close cousins the King Bolo series are comically, anxiously and disturbingly over-assertive in their sexualised masculinity. They go all out to shock. All this went down well with whisky-drinking friends like Nick:

One day the king & queen of Spain

They gave a royal banquet

Columbo having passed away

Was brought in on a blanket

The queen she took an oyster fork

And pricked Columbo's navel

Columbo hoisted up his ass

And shat upon the table.

Knowing he was able to counterbalance his customary shyness and formality by unleashing among his mates a talent whose scatological, sometimes misogynistic, always beyond-the-pale brio would both delight and appal, Tom tried to make each performance more scandalous than the last.

One Sunday morning out at sea

The vessel passed Gibraltar

Columbo sat up on the poop

A-reading at the psalter.

The bosuns wife came up on deck

With a bucket full of cowshit

Columbo grabbed her round the neck

And raped her on the bowsprit.

Now when they were three weeks at sea

Columbo he grew rooty

He took his cock in both his hands

And swore it was a beauty.

The cabin boy appeared on deck

And scampered up the mast-o

Columbo grasped him by the balls

And buggered him in the ass-o.
65

Relishing the outrageousness of such verses, Tom and his male cronies bonded. The Columbo stanzas, and their equally scandalous companion verses about ‘King Bolo and his big black queen', could be chanted or sung (they suit the tune of ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy'), though by around 1910 Tom was collecting several in a notebook. In a predominantly male milieu with marked strains of anti-Semitism, sexism and racial prejudice, rich white Harvard men, not least in a fraternity house like the Fox with its own private liquor store, might snigger and whoop at ‘A great big whore' who ‘bitched' Columbo ‘with a pisspot'; or at ‘the only doctor in his town / … a bastard jew named Benny', who ‘With countenance so placid' went on to fill ‘Columbo's prick / With Muriatic Acid'.
66

To link Tom's most effortfully shocking poetry exclusively to the Fox Club would be misleading, though Nick Brooks, reminiscing years later, clearly associated the verses with its ‘frat' nights. Nick, who shared with Tom not just a locker-room delight in bawdy rhyming but also an interest in bird-watching and sailing, graduated in 1909 and spent much of the next few years in Canada, Siberia and Alaska. So, while individual Columbo poems are impossible to date precisely, it is a fair assumption that when Nick, remembering Tom, writes of spending ‘many happy hours with him' going over the Columbo poems, he is referring to the period before 1909, and specifically to the time when he knew Tom in the Fox (alias Digamma) Club.
67
Though in our own day ostracised by the Harvard authorities because of its refusal to admit women as members, the secretive Fox Club continues to exist in the building where Tom drank, recited and bonded with Nick Brooks, Leon Little, Harold Peters and their buddies. Flanked by elegant circular pillars and topped by a pale classical pediment, the clubhouse's front door at what is now 44 JFK Street is no longer white, but painted an imposing dark green and fronted by a foxy polished door-knocker. If you look at the society's website, it reveals only preening exclusivity: ‘for members of the Fox Club only. Unauthorized access is strictly prohibited.'
68

In some ways, at least, attitudes to gender, race and sexuality were strikingly different in early-twentieth-century America when compared with those of a century later. During the year when Tom became a freshman, the university's official
Harvard Illustrated Magazine
published solemn photographs of the naked buttocks and muscular bodies of student athletes demonstrating their ‘organic vigor' in the university gymnasium while undertaking ‘Dr Sargent's Physical Test for Strength, Speed and Endurance'.
69
The same magazine and other Harvard publications regularly printed pictures of male students posing cross-dressed as (usually young) women in college societies' plays; such cross-dressing, regarded as routine and ridiculous, brought its own dangers: the manly 1908 editor of the
Harvard Monthly
recalled later how he ‘was dressed up as a chorus girl, laced with a very tight corset, and fainted in the midst of the evening'.
70

Though Tom would not have used anachronistic twenty-first-century terminology, as it seems to have been at his high school, so at Harvard the social performance of masculinity was sometimes difficult for him. Handsome and hazel-eyed, he remained self-conscious about his shyness, but also determined to be articulate about it. One undergraduate friend familiar with his scandalous verses and who met him both in the context of an all-male student club and at mixed college dances (held in the elegant surroundings of Buckingham House in the female domain of the yard at Radcliffe College) remembered that Tom ‘was early explicit, too, about the necessity, if one was shy, of disciplining oneself, lest one miss certain varieties of experience which one did not naturally “take” to. The dances, and the parties, were part of this discipline.'
71
In part, at least, the Columbo and Bolo poems let him fraternise with male friends who did not share his other literary interests and who were committed to uproar and sports. The boy who had grown up with a congenital hernia, and who had not been allowed to take part in team sports was ‘chided about his frail physique' by at least one other Digamma Club member.
72
Stringing together his Columbo and Bolo poems let him present an absurd epic of masculinity that allowed this young man (who was, by his own later admission, still very much a virgin) to appear shockingly blasé about all aspects of sexuality from heterosexual ‘fucking on the sofa' to ‘syphilis' and homosexual buggery.
73

That this was all an over-assertive performance is suggested not least by the way when Tom collected some of these poems in his notebook, he introduced them with an antique, somewhat risqué stage direction: ‘Let a tucket be sounded on the hautboys. Enter the king and queen.'
74
The accompanying poems suggest a sequence built up over time (perhaps since his ‘Big Slam' days at Milton Academy), and an imagination grown used to thinking up rhymes for words like ‘masturbation'. Yet the staginess suggests the Columbo poems may even have been spurred by Tom's more literary reading. Performing and perusing Elizabethan plays by Ben Jonson, Thomas Heywood, George Chapman and other lesser-known Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists was a Harvard habit of the era. It was encouraged particularly by Professor George Baker whose course on early English drama Tom would take in 1909–10; but he was reading plays by Donne's contemporaries considerably before then. An undated sheet of notes from his student days includes a very brief plot summary of James Shirley's 1641 play
The Cardinal
, an over-the-top drama of forced marriage and wedding-day slaughter set in Navarre and featuring ‘Columbo', a character who is, Tom noted, ‘a great captain'.
75
His own Columbo's vigorous feats were even more atrocious: an offensively crazy, overemphatic performance of maleness.

Perhaps, as at school and later, his shyness and physique made him feel awkward about his masculinity. After his close friend and fellow clubman Peters reproached him about his physical development, he began to exercise according to the published guidance of Eugen Sandow. Here was another hyperbolic performer of maleness. Famous as the world's first bodybuilder, Sandow, ‘a Titan in muscle and thews', had studied heroic sculpture; he liked to display his physique in ‘classical poses'. Tom used ‘the Sandow system', and later remarked that he had hoped to expand his chest to forty-six inches.
76
Exhibited by Ziegfeld of the Ziegfeld Follies, Sandow, who emphasised (as the capital letters in
Sandow on Physical Training
put it) ‘ATTENTION TO CHEST DEVELOPMENT', was very much approved of by Harvard men.

Dr Dudley A. Sargent, Director of Applied Anatomy, Physical Training, and Personal Hygiene, at the Hemenway Gymnasium, Harvard University, has compiled an interesting Anthropometric chart of Sandow, recording accurate measurements of the different parts of the athlete's anatomy, and prepared a professional paper on him for the Press. In the latter he observes:

‘SANDOW IS THE MOST WONDERFUL SPECIMEN OF MAN I HAVE EVER SEEN'

He is strong, active, graceful, combining in his person the characteristics of Apollo, Hercules, and the ideal athlete.
77

Tom may have exercised in a Harvard gym, but he could never compete with this. Several of his early poems, most notably ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', exhibit in an ironic manner acute anxieties about masculinity; Columbo and King Bolo are at the other end of the masculine spectrum: unintellectual, grotesque sexual Sandows posed forever in flagrante delicto. Negotiating their way among misogyny, fear, over-protestation, unconvincing knowingness, homoeroticism, heterosexuality, wit, offensiveness and absurdity, such versions of manhood countered and balanced one another. They also allowed Tom to entertain not only some of his sporty frat buddies but also several of his literary chums; the former knew he had begun to publish serious poems in the
Harvard Advocate
, while at least one of the latter – his friend Conrad Aiken, an
Advocate
student poet from the class one year below Tom's own – knew and enjoyed the Bolo poems. In spite of his shyness, despite early teetering on the brink of failure at Harvard, and for all he might be reproached for his ‘frail physique', polite, loafing, yet occasionally foul-mouthed Tom, formally dressed and Gold-Coasty with his often inscrutable smile, was becoming accepted by groups of his student peers.
78
In public and in private he was learning how he could present himself; it took considerable effort to be a full-fledged Harvard man.

 

5

A Rose

B
Y
the end of his freshman year, Tom was already publishing verse in the
Harvard Advocate
: a single, eight-line poem. The
Advocate
was perhaps less weighty than its rival, the
Harvard Monthly
, but this was a start. However much he Gold Coasted and may have produced obscene rhymes, nonetheless in his first two undergraduate years he continued to read poetry and fiction. Yet his published output was utterly minimal. No notebooks of verse survive from this period. Apparently, just as his academic work skirted the unsatisfactory, so, for the most part, his ability to write printable poetry had stalled.

Part of him was still at high school. With its ‘flowers' and ‘withered petals', Tom's ‘Song' in the
Advocate
of 24 May 1907, like the poem Mr Hatch had praised in St Louis, was two stanzas long. Indeed, in a canny piece of recycling, Tom made minor adjustments to his Smith Academy lyric with its ‘flowers … withered', and now submitted it to the
Advocate
where it appeared in the following issue (also as ‘Song'). During the sophomore year when he shared rooms with Howard Morris and John Robinson, and was elected to the Digamma, he published nothing. In the first semester of his third year, his work resurfaced in the issue of 13 November 1908: another two-stanza lyric with ‘Petal on petal' of ‘withered flowers'. The near-repetition of phrasing across poems published several years apart indicates lack of development. Each of these pieces plays off the promise of what the revised 1905 poem calls ‘flowers of life' (and the 1907 poem calls ‘flowers' that ‘bloomed' and the 1908 poem terms ‘Fresh flowers') against an insistent awareness that ‘time … runs away' (revised 1905), that ‘roses' in a wreath have ‘faded' (1907), and blooms soon turn to ‘withered flowers' (1908). All conventional enough, but the flowers in the recent poems seem to wither as soon as they blossom, or at least budding and dying flowers are mixed up: ‘Fresh flowers, withered flowers, flowers of dawn' as the plangent refrain of the 1908 poem, ‘Before Morning', puts it.
1
Undistinguished, these poems signal fears of premature decline.

A withering parody of ‘Before Morning' appeared in the
Harvard Lampoon
. Probably taking his cue from Aristophanes, whose
Frogs
shows the poet Euripides substituting for Aeschylus' grandest phrases the words ‘little bottle of oil', the
Lampoon
spoofer swapped Tom's poetic flowers for bottles of milk. Apart from occasional other substitutions, the parodist completed his work by leaving most of the rest of Tom's poem, including its plangently monotonous rhyme words, devastatingly unaltered.

Before Morning

(With apologies to T. S. E. of the
Abdicate
)

While all the east was wearing red with gray,

The bottles on the backstep turned towards dawn,

Bottle on bottle waiting for the day,

Clean bottles, milk bottles, bottles of dawn.

This morning's bottles and bottles of yesterday,

Their contents drips across the steps of dawn,

Bottles of the fresh and bottles of decay,