Young Eliot (22 page)

Dear Sir,

It gives me great pleasure to inform you of your election to the fourth seven from the class of 1910. For your initiation, which takes place Friday evening, April second at seven thirty, you will prepare a part of not less than ten hundred words.

Very sincerely

Morton Peabody Prince
47

This was an honour, even if Tom, in the ‘fourth seven', was hardly among the first chosen. Held in its clubhouse, the Signet's secret initiations were less riotous than Digamma ones, but still formidable. Rumours circulated that there might be ‘very drastic physical dangers'. We do not know the exact nature of Tom's initiation, but candidates were expected to prepare a ‘part', or speech, for delivery to an intimidating jury of former members who then interrogated them, not necessarily on issues related to the ‘part'. An account of another, less shy poet's ‘quite overawing' interview with a Signet jury about three years earlier indicates the club's style. Candidates were kept waiting to make them nervous. Then they were led ‘into this beautifully lighted room, and sitting before us were George Lyman Kittredge, the great scholar; William James, Professor of Psychology at Harvard; Josiah Royce, the philosopher; Hugo Münsterberg, the philosopher, I think was also there; and Charles Townsend Copeland, Boylston Professor of Rhetoric'. Questioning of candidates was carried out individually. Tom's jury would have been similarly constituted, and his questions may have been as unexpected as those of his fellow-poet candidate John Hall Wheelock, whose interrogation was opened by Kittredge:

‘Spell “syzygy”.' I couldn't spell it. He then said, ‘That's spelled S-Y-Z-Y-G-Y.' He looked at the other inquisitors, and said, ‘This candidate doesn't seem very promising to me.'

Then one of the other professors … said to me, ‘Would you please let us know to which of Longfellow's sisters he addressed that beautiful line, ‘Hail to thee, blithe spirit, bird thou never wert.' And I was confused, because I knew of course that this was from Shelley's ‘Ode to a Skylark,' and it would seem rude to catch a professor in a mistake of that sort, so I had to claim that I wasn't familiar with that either. Then they looked very doubtful.

Then the third question was: ‘could God make rocks bigger than He could lift?' I'd never heard this question before. I have heard since that it's sometimes been used by boys to stump a Sunday school teacher. But there didn't seem any answer to that. So I just said I couldn't answer it.

All unanimously agreed – James, Munsterburg, Royce, Kittredge, Copeland, and whoever else was there: ‘This man is not fit for admission to the Signet. I'm sorry that we've subjected him to this ordeal' and so on. ‘Next candidate, please.' And I retired in the most dreadful state of shame and annoyance. Then, when they'd all been listened to and been subjected, I suppose, to the same humiliation, punch bowls were brought in, and I was welcomed with the rest of them as a new member.
48

Tom, having presented his ‘part', was suitably initiated. After the news was broken to them that they had been admitted after all, new members were expected to drink from a bowl, a ‘loving cup', and each received a red rose which he was expected to press and preserve before eventually returning it to the club after he had published his first book. Today the Signet Society at Harvard numbers among its proudest possessions Tom's rose.

In this club Tom fraternised with his fellow classman Robert Canby Hallowell (later to work for the
Century Magazine
) and with Thomas Powel, editor and secretary of the
Lampoon
; his friend Tinckom-Fernandez, who became President at the
Advocate
; and other student poets, including Eyre Hunt, soon to be editor of the
Monthly
, Haniel Long and Rogers MacVeagh (both
Advocate
men). Just as helpful was the fact that distinguished academics mixed with student members. The Signet was a place for inter-generational conversation as well as undergraduate discussion and sumptuous reunions where members and alumni would quaff Moët et Chandon, sing (‘Champagne? Yes, yes. Rum punch? Yes, yes'), and smoke Romeo and Juliet cigars.
49
Tom's election to another club with a literary bent, the Stylus, brought him into contact with many of the same people – Hallowell, MacVeagh, Powel, Prince and Tinckom-Fernandez were all members there too – while again granting him access to an informal space where students sometimes mixed with faculty.

The Stylus attracted, for instance, flamboyant aphorist Pierre La Rose – also linked to the Signet. An enthusiast for heraldry, Catholicism, style and
bon ton,
‘le bon Pierre' had designed several of the Signet's splendid interiors as well as its vast, bee-crowded crest above the door. The Signet boasted a well-heated 18-by-40-foot library (with ‘shelf-room for 6000 volumes', La Rose stated in 1903); a house speciality in Tom's day was Chateau La Rose claret.
50
Friendly with Harvard philosopher George Santayana, La Rose was associated by Tom's brother Henry with Mount Auburn Street and the ‘
elite
' welcomed by ‘Mrs Jack' – Isabella Stewart Gardner – to gatherings at her magnificent Boston home.
51
Tom would go there too. Through these clubs he had the opportunity to meet socially men like the stocky, shrewd Josiah Royce, with whom he would later study, and other influential academics including the dapper English professors Copeland and Briggs. Some members, including Eyre Hunt, courted the faculty: in 1909 Hunt wrote the introduction to his modern translation of the medieval poem
Sir Orfeo
, prefacing it with a chunk from one of his English professor's books, ever so gratefully acknowledged.

Tom did not go in for such sycophancy, but his was a Harvard with friendly, club-level as well as formal, class-level contact between privileged circles of students and professors. If the former might caricature or adulate the latter, the faculty also reviewed the ‘drones'. So, for instance, several professors involved with Tom's English courses were readers and reviewers of the
Advocate
. Others who took an interest included the great Sanskrit scholar Charles Lanman, with whom Tom would study as a graduate student, and the art historian, Professor Chase. Such contacts could work wonders. It was after reading Hunt's
Sir Orfeo
in the October 1909
Monthly
that Professor Schofield suggested it should be ‘published in separate form'; just months later, it was.
52
Nothing so promising happened to Tom, though he was ‘cheered' to receive a letter from Thomas Head Thomas, an old student friend of his brother, praising his
Advocate
poems.
53
In print, less generous comments came from an anonymous November 1909 reviewer who merely mentioned that the new
Advocate
's ‘contributions of verse are from T. S. Eliot and C. P. Aiken'.
54
Yet Tom's membership of literary clubs and writing for the
Advocate
, to whose editorial board he was elected in his junior year, countered his often deserved reputation for shyness and brought him greater visibility. He obtained, too, first-hand experience of the business of literary publishing.

Among the professors Tom liked was George Herbert Palmer, whose survey History of Ancient Philosophy (Philosophy A) he had taken as a sophomore. In his sixties and recently widowed, Palmer had a ‘splendid personality'; his ‘high quality of lecturing' was particularly prized by students in Tom's year who gave Philosophy A ‘more favourable “points” than any other course'. It was ‘a good essential introduction' that ‘no educated man can afford to neglect'.
55
A committed Christian as well as a scholar of Greek and Philosophy, Palmer was affable, polymathic and engaging. He made time to meet students in societies, to preach at chapel and to give public talks about George Herbert, the poet whose name he shared. Avidly, Palmer collected editions of Herbert, having edited the complete works in 1905. Encouraged by Palmer, a public ‘exhibition of books by and relating to George Herbert' was held in the Treasure Room in Gore Hall during Tom's junior year – another indication of Harvard's interest in Metaphysical poetry.
56
Much later, Tom would write a small book about Herbert.

It was Palmer whose writerly advice had been quoted in
Composition and Rhetoric for Schools
, Tom's textbook at Smith Academy. The professor, who encouraged students to ‘seek out the company of good speakers and writers', had translated Homer in his youth. He was revising his widely read
Self-Cultivation in English
when he first taught Tom. Interested in ‘the transmission of the power to write', Palmer detected Tom's ‘early promise'. Later, when he taught him as a graduate student, he decided Tom had ‘a mind of extraordinary power and sensitiveness'.
57
Palmer liked to emphasise that writers should be ‘obedient' to their matter, suppressing their own personality when they wrote:

Great writers put themselves and their personal imaginings out of sight. Their writing becomes a kind of transparent window on which reality is reflected, and through which people see not them but that of which they write. How much we know of Shakespeare's characters! How little we know of Shakespeare!
58

In time, especially after engaging with Laforgue's poems, Tom adopted a similar aesthetic, at least when it came to dispelling a Romantic aura of ‘personality'. Palmer's pleasurable classes introduced him to a subject beyond his high-school curriculum: philosophy. He started to learn about Heraclitus and Aristotle, Plato and Plotinus, to all of whose work he would return.

As well as Palmer's Ancient Philosophy survey, in that 1907–8 session Tom took Philosophy B, History of Modern Philosophy, taught by Pierre La Rose's friend and fellow Signet member, George Santayana. It seems to have been less this Spanish-born professor's philosophical stance that impressed Tom than his cosmopolitan sophistication. Like Palmer, Santayana enjoyed ‘informal meetings with his students', and had a practitioner's interest in writerly style as well as in philosophy.
59
An agnostic powerfully shaped by several aspects of Catholicism, he used his philosophical training to think about poetry. Maintaining later that Santayana was ‘more interested in poetical philosophy than in philosophical poetry', with a hint of misogyny or homophobia Tom stated that ‘I have never liked Santayana myself, because I have always felt that his attitude was essentially feminine, and that his philosophy was a dressing up of himself rather than an interest in things.'
60

When he taught Tom's class Santayana was at work on his
Three Philosophical Poets
, which devotes considerable attention to Dante. His earlier
Interpretations of Poetry and Religion
argued that

The poet's art is to a great extent the art of intensifying emotions by assembling the scattered objects that naturally arouse them. He sees the affinities of things by seeing their common affinities with passion … By this union of disparate things having a common overtone of feeling, the feeling itself is evoked in all its strength …
61

Tom would ponder similar ideas in his own philosophical way. Years afterwards, he theorised the ‘objective correlative' and, when considering the Metaphysical poets, wrote of how ‘a poet's mind … is constantly amalgamating disparate experience'.
62
His later ideas grew from a pervasive Harvard milieu in which Santayana, Palmer and others so readily linked philosophy to poetry, assuming it was a great thing to be a philosophical poet. Like most good students, Tom reacted against aspects of his teachers' teaching, but he came to share several of their enthusiasms, not least for Dante and Metaphysical poetry. In 1909–10 he took another course with Santayana, whom some considered a dilettante. Palmer's counsel to writers was to ‘work day after day unwearyingly'.
63
Sophomore Tom hardly lived up to this ideal: he got a C on Palmer's Philosophy course, and a B for Philosophy B. Among his sophomore grades, B was his highest. Yet in his junior year he began to hit his stride academically – which meant at least that the Bs became more common – and, thanks to Symons and Laforgue, he worked more productively on his poetry.

Having already studied French, German, English and Greek in his first two years at Harvard, it seemed reasonable to Tom to proceed to take courses during 1908–9 in the small Comparative Literature department. This had been established in 1906 with the appointment of Professor William Henry Schofield to a chair in the subject. Conveniently for Tom, some of its classes were held right next to the Union in Warren House, a handsome 1833 building which had once been the residence of the Professor of Sanskrit. In the academic village of Cambridge, nothing was ever very far away. To register for his 1908 first-term classes Tom needed only to cross the road from Holyoke House to the Yard.

Relishing institutional history, Harvard asked students to present themselves for classes at the first meetings in the appropriate ‘recitation rooms', a term dating from the days when undergraduates, instead of simply listening to lectures, were expected to recite and comment on their learning.
64
In the first week of October 1908, the recitation room for the first meeting of Comparative Literature 7, Tendencies of European Literature in the Renaissance, was in room 31, one of the smaller spaces in Henry Hansel Richardson's imposing red-brick Sever Hall in the Yard. In charge of the course, Assistant Professor Anthony Murray Potter had interests that ranged from Petrarch and Dante to Spanish literature. Deeply committed to the new department, Potter had just endowed Comparative Literature prizes (still awarded today) in memory of his mother. His doctoral thesis had been published in 1902 as part of a distinguished series of literary studies including volumes by his senior colleague, Professor Schofield, and by the anthropologically-minded English folklorist Jessie L. Weston, with whom Schofield would soon collaborate.