Young Eliot (21 page)

I step into my heart and there I meet

A god-almighty devil singing small,

Who would like to shout and whistle in the street,

And squelch the passers flat against the wall;

If the whole world was a cake he had the power to take,

He would take it, ask for more, and eat them all.
24

In 1908 Tom wasn't able to write like this. He was listening for something. He wasn't sure what. Then, at the end of that year, he found it.

He had gone to a favourite haunt, the Union Library. There, upstairs, warmly protected from the December weather outside, he was looking through recently received books. Alert University library staff helped stock the Union's shelves. Tom's eye was caught by the name of Arthur Symons, and by his book's title,
The Symbolist Movement in Literature.
It was a small second edition published earlier that year and just imported from London.
The volume's dedication to W. B. Yeats presented Symbolism as the pre-eminent literary movement in Europe from Ireland to Russia. ‘Without symbolism there can be no literature', began the first chapter, but Symons's special Symbolism had a capital ‘S' and was, he argued, something new: ‘What distinguishes the Symbolism of our day from the Symbolism of the past is that it has now become conscious of itself.' This Symbolist poetry fused self-conscious rebellion against tired conventions with a sense of renewed religious mission. ‘It is an attempt to spiritualize literature, to evade the old bondage of rhetoric.' Here was a ‘revolt' against ‘rhetoric' and ‘materialistic tradition'; it had the power to speak ‘as only religion had hitherto spoken to us, it becomes itself a kind of religion, with all the duties and responsibilities of the sacred ritual'.
25

Symons's book invoked ‘Mysticism', but in a very different way from Tom's mother.
26
It was full of modern French poets whose behaviour would have horrified Lottie Eliot, and who had certainly not been part of the curriculum of Professor Wright's French course. Probably Tom had been reading Baudelaire for some time. Years later, he recalled:

I think that from Baudelaire I learned first, a precedent for the poetical possibilities, never developed by any poet writing in my own language, of the more sordid aspects of the modern metropolis, of the possibility of fusion between the sordidly realistic and the phantasmagoric, the possibility of the juxtaposition of the matter-of-fact and the fantastic. From him, as from Laforgue, I learned that the sort of material that I had, the sort of experience that an adolescent had had, in an industrial city in America, could be the material for poetry … It may be that I am indebted to Baudelaire chiefly for half a dozen lines out of the whole of
Fleurs du Mal
; and that his significance for me is summed up in the lines:

Fourmillante Cité, cité pleine de rêves,

Où le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant …

[Swarming City, city full of dreams.

Where the ghost in broad daylight accosts the passer-by…]

 

I knew what
that
meant, because I had lived it before I knew that I wanted to turn it into verse on my own account.
27

Reading French poetry, he understood how his own childhood among the St Louis fogs could be an artistic asset. But Symons's book, with its account of Jules Laforgue and other poets, took him beyond Baudelaire. As he read about Gérard de Nerval (whose works he would buy – ‘two copies' – and whom he would quote in
The Waste Land
), he discovered a poet haunted by his sense of isolation in the ‘crowded and more sordid streets of great cities', a man who had found ‘his ideal in the person of an actress' and craved ‘the fatal transfiguration of the footlights' in a theatre where ‘reality and the artificial change places with so fantastic a regularity' that men were drawn like ‘moths into its flame'.
28
Such a process, Symons asserted, would continue ‘as long as men persist in demanding illusion of what is real, and reality in what is illusion'. To its readers Symons's book offered heady, even bewildering stuff; but to Tom, divided between shy Harvard bookishness and slumming it in Boston's South End, it brought clarity too: it was a ‘revelation'.
29
‘Every artist lives a double life', wrote Symons. Though poets were ‘for the most part conscious of the illusions of the imagination', nevertheless there were peculiarly intense writers such as Villiers de L'Isle Adam, ‘The Don Quixote of Idealism', for whom ‘it was not only in philosophical terms that life … was the dream, and the spiritual world the reality'. Writing of ‘hallucination' and of scandalous Paul Verlaine who had ‘realised the great secret of the Christian mystics', or decadent Catholic novelist Huysmans or playwright Maurice ‘Maeterlinck as a Mystic', Symons presented authors – principally poets – able to set forth vision with religious intensity, but not with vagueness: ‘the artist who is also a mystic hates the vague with a more profound hatred than any other artist'.
30

At times Symons wrote about his French poets with well nigh messianic zeal. It was ‘on the lines of that spiritualising of the word, that perfecting of form in its capacity for allusion and suggestion, that confidence in the eternal correspondences between the visible and invisible universe, which [Stéphane] Mallarmé taught, and too intermittently preached, that literature must now move, if it is in any sense to move forward'. Yet, although Tom went on to read all Symons's Symbolists and would learn from them, one in particular obsessed him. Encountering Jules Laforgue, Tom, at the age of twenty, began reading a French poet who was also in his twenties; yet they could never meet, because Laforgue had died at the age of twenty-seven, about a year before Tom's birth. Markedly more than the Harvard student from Missouri, Laforgue was a displaced person: born in Montevideo, he had grown up in France. A poet of ‘nerves', Laforgue had written, according to Symons, ‘letters of an almost virginal
naïveté
', yet his literary art was peculiarly knowing, daring in content and, especially, in form:

[His] verse and prose are alike a kind of travesty, making subtle use of colloquialism, slang, neologism, technical terms, for their allusive, their factitious, their reflected meanings, with which one can play, very seriously. The verse is alert, troubled, swaying, deliberately uncertain, hating rhetoric so piously that it prefers, and finds its piquancy in, the ridiculously obvious. It is really
vers libre
, but at the same time correct verse, before
vers libre
had been invented. And it carries, as far as that theory has ever been carried, the theory that demands an instantaneous notation (Whistler, let us say) of the figure or landscape which one has been accustomed to define with such rigorous exactitude. Verse, always elegant, is broken up into a kind of mockery of prose.

Encore un de mes pierrots mort;

Mort d'un chronique orphelinisme;

C'était un coeur plein de dandysme

Lunaire, en un drôle de corps;

[Another of my pierrots is dead;

Dead from being chronically orphaned;

He had a heart full of lunar

Dandyism in a funny body;]

 

he will say to us, with a familiarity of manner, as of one talking languidly, in a low voice, the lips always teased into a slightly bitter smile …
31

Tom, remembered for his own ‘somewhat Lamian smile', clicked with all this. ‘The Symons book', he stated later, ‘is one of those which have affected the course of my life.'
32
At least two Symons phrases from the same page would find their way into his poetry. When Symons writes of Laforgue composing ‘love-poems hat in hand', Tom in a 1909 poem has ‘Romeo … hat in hand'. Symons's oddly phrased statement that ‘In Laforgue, sentiment is squeezed out of the world before one begins to play at ball with it' surely ghosts Prufrock's thought of having ‘squeezed the universe into a ball'.
33
In Symons's bibliography Tom noticed mention of Laforgue's three-volume
Oeuvres Complètes
, published in 1902–3. No Harvard library had these books. Tom ordered all three to be shipped from Paris. Probably he was the first person in the United States to do so. He knew exactly what he needed.

His interest in French literature may have been encouraged by his acquaintance with another young Harvard poet, Alan Seeger. Thirty-five years later, a fellow student, Gluyas Williams, who did not know Tom well, recalled how impressed he had been that Tom and Seeger shared rooms. Seeger had a reputation as an aesthete (he was rumoured to wear a golden fillet around his hair after he washed it), and Williams thought Tom ‘an aesthete too'.
34
Haniel Long, in his 1908–9 diary, writes of Seeger as rather friendless, ‘always in search of solitide' – so much so that he would sometimes lock himself into an unoccupied guest-room.
35
In his slightly self-mythologising prose, Seeger, who had a taste for Balzac and French literature, and would go on to become a celebrated American literary Francophile, recalled that ‘at college' he had ‘led the life of an anchorite … My books were my friends.'
36

If Tom did indeed room with an ‘anchorite' of whom he saw little, he shared some of Seeger's tastes, including an attraction towards Dante. Seeger's version of
Inferno
Canto XXVI, which ends, ‘Over our heads we heard the surging billows close', seems to date from his Harvard student days and is interesting to set beside the drowning that concludes Prufrock's ‘Love Song'.
37
Tom and Seeger were in the same year as undergraduates, but very different as people and poets; since 1908 Seeger had been working on his long Keatsian poem, ‘The Deserted Garden', awash with fairyland imagery.
38
Yet his later poem, ‘Paris', hymning that city of ‘ragged minstrels', ‘Uncorseted … adolescent loveliness' and ‘Open café-windows', sums up a Francophilia that, increasingly, Tom shared.
39
After Seeger had been killed in World War I in France, Tom wrote a short, anonymous 1917 review that described Seeger's old-fashioned poems as ‘high-flown': ‘Alan Seeger, as one who knew him can attest, lived his whole life on this plane, with impeccable poetic dignity.' Tom singled out Seeger's ‘Paris'.
40
He thought, though, that his old classmate seemed to live ‘in a violet mist' so that ‘The Paris of his verse', to its detriment, ‘might be the Paris of a performance of “Louise” at the Boston Opera-House'.
41
When Tom followed Seeger in using the word ‘Uncorseted' (in his 1917 ‘Whispers of Immortality'), he did so with ironic precision, deploying a very different tone. Tom and Seeger shared a deepening commitment to literature, especially in French; and sometimes they circulated in the same Harvard society: in 1909 Seeger was hoping to move to a Cambridge ‘attic down on Ash St. No. 16', an address where Tom would reside a couple of years later.
42
However, Seeger, unlike Tom, wrote work that was ‘well done, and so much out of date as to be almost a positive quantity'. Tom thought Seeger's poetry ‘goes back to the early Keats'.
43
Seeger learned nothing from Jules Laforgue.

Some months before his three-volume Laforgue arrived, Tom wrote a sonnet, ‘On a Portrait'. Published in January 1909's
Advocate
, it juxtaposes the narrator's sense of being outside in a busy street against a remote, dreamy female figure in a room; she seems cut off, like ‘A pensive lamia' (that expression probably triggered Conrad Aiken's later description of Tom's own smile) or like Walter Pater's Mona Lisa, ‘Beyond the circle of our thought'; if that sounds a little grandly eloquent, the poem's last rhyming couplet snipes ironically at its earlier rhetoric, and at the lady: ‘The parrot on his bar, a silent spy, / Regards her with a patient curious eye'.
44
Though it has not yet got there, this poem heads towards the accurate, unsentimental perception and anti-rhetorical writing advocated by Symons and his Symbolists. ‘“Take eloquence, and wring its neck!” said Verlaine in his Art Poétique.'
45

Symons's book excited Tom, and socially things were looking up too. Haniel Long, the student so impressed by Tom's
Advocate
‘Song' (‘The moonflower opens to the moth'), spoke to him on Monday 8 March 1909 about his writing ability. Long thought Tom should be involved with both the
Advocate
editorial board and the Signet Society. One of the most writerly of Harvard's private clubs, the Signet was headquartered in a recently renovated large 1820s corner house at 46 Dunster Street where it joins Mount Auburn. A flamboyant heraldic crest over its door carried the words ‘
Mousikehn poiei kai ergazou'
(Greek for ‘Make music and live it'), while another Signet motto, from Virgil's
Georgics
, was ‘
Sic vos non vobis Mellificatis apes
' (So, not for yourselves, you bees make honey). As Long was aware when he spoke to Tom, this most cultural of clubs, whose undergraduate members were called ‘drones', needed to make money too. Over a thousand dollars in debt, the Signet wanted prosperous new members. There was a meeting on 19 March to discuss candidates for election. This went on for hours, with members trying to blackball various possibles, but Long waited and managed to get the name of ‘Tommy Eliot' accepted.
46
On 21 March a handwritten letter on a small sheet of Signet notepaper went out to ‘Mr. T. S. Eliot' from a member who also worked on the
Lampoon
: