Young Eliot (24 page)

Before late 1908, Tom had never heard of Laforgue. By late 1909 he was almost his reincarnation. The experience was like falling in love. A decade later, when his marriage was in trouble, Tom used strikingly erotic language to describe vital, transformational reading, implying, perhaps, that (though the object of attention was a dead man) it had been better than falling in love. ‘When a young writer is seized with his first passion of this sort he may be changed, metamorphosed almost, within a few weeks, from a bundle of second-hand sentiments into a person.'
6

Though he could not have expressed it so arrestingly in 1909, Tom's encounter with Laforgue had this remarkable power. At a deep level there is less a one-to-one mapping between Laforgue's poetry and Tom's than a weird sense of confirmatory consonance. The ‘cosmiques chloroformes' of Laforgue's ‘Jeux' (Games) is not the verbal equivalent of the verb ‘etherised' at the start of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', but surely it nourishes that poem. From his childhood, Tom would have seen the famous Ether Monument – a tribute to pioneers of anaesthetic surgery – in the Boston Public Gardens.
7
The daring modernity of ‘When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherised upon a table', prefacing mention of ‘half-deserted streets', has been spurred by a related daring in the Laforgue who could write in ‘L'hiver qui vient' (The Coming Winter) of how ‘La rouille ronge en leurs spleens kilométriques / Les fils télégraphiques des grandes routes où nul ne passe': lines which Peter Dale translated as ‘Rust along deserted thoroughfares / Gnaws the kilometric spleens of telegraph wire'.
8
Laforgue's shocking modernity, born out of and clashing against his deeply felt Christian upbringing, is everywhere apparent; yet his quirkiness makes him a stunning nineteenth-century minor writer. Without his intoxicating example, however, Tom might have stalled forever.

In 1909 he read Laforgue with delight. Almost a decade later, he still had a vivid sense of ‘sending to Paris for the texts', then poring over them after they arrived, acclimatising to the French poet's language.

I puzzled it out as best I could, not finding half the words in my dictionary, and it was several years later before I came across anyone who had read him or could be persuaded to read him. I do feel more grateful to him than to anyone else, and I do not think that I have come across any other writer since who has meant so much to me as he did at that particular moment, or that particular year.
9

Laforgue's most intent American reader was this shy, bright, sexually inexperienced twenty-one-year-old, anxiously desperate to sound utterly knowing in his Bolo poems and, though he had not yet managed it, in other poems too. Tom came to believe that Laforgue, ‘if not quite the greatest French poet after Baudelaire, was certainly the most important technical innovator' in his development of a form of
vers libre
which ‘contracts and distorts' traditional verse measures. Tom read Laforgue alongside ‘the later Elizabethan drama' (which he heard in terms of a contracting and distorting of blank verse), and the French poet's ear for language astonished him.
10
In ‘Complainte de cette bonne lune' (Complaint of This Good Moon), ‘la Lune' (moon) rhymes with ‘rancune' (rancour), a rhyme Tom's ear would retain for years and echo in his Laforguian ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night'.
11
Laforgue's devices, such as snapping off bits of the Lord's Prayer, or mixing Classical mythology with modern tawdriness and boredom, would become Eliotic hallmarks. Laforgue's sense of windy desolation, ennui and ‘Néant' (Nothingness – a favourite word) haunts some of Tom's early poems. Moreover, in a number of poems Laforgue presents intimate judgements, overheard or imagined in a way that inhibits the speaker. In 1923, crediting this poet with inventing a ‘particular type of fragmentary conversation', Tom confessed that he had ‘been a sinner myself in the use of broken conversations punctuated by three dots'.
12
When a voice in one of the several Laforgue poems entitled ‘Dimanches' (Sundays), begins ‘J'aurai passé ma vie à faillir m'embarquer' (I will have spent my life in failing to embark), it offers, surely, an impossibility: a nineteenth-century J. Alfred Prufrock.
13

‘We must all develop our originality in the same way', Tom wrote in 1925, ‘by steeping ourselves in the work of those previous poets whom we find most sympathetic.'
14
For him none was more sympathetic than this Frenchman. ‘There was', he claimed in 1946, with perhaps a hint of exaggeration, ‘no poet, in either country [Britain and the USA], who could have been of use to a beginner in 1908. The only recourse was to poetry of another age and to poetry of another language.'
15
Laforgue remade English speech for him. Several of the more unusual words of Tom's poetry – ‘anfractuous', ‘bocks', ‘cauchemar', ‘estaminet', ‘hebetude', ‘sempiternal' and ‘velleities', for instance – also occur in Laforgue's French, while some Laforguian imagery, whether ‘sous-marine' (submarine) strangeness or street-lamps or geraniums or bats or urban industrial smoke or horns or whirlpools or Philomel, becomes Tom's too. Laforgue's prose revealed interests in the ‘cauchemar' (nightmare) quality of Egyptian art, in experimental metaphysics and mysticism, in the unconscious and a sense ‘du moi et du non-moi' (of I and not-I).
16
In his
Moralités Légendaires
where he brought ancient myths and older works of literature disturbingly up to date, Laforgue has Salome encounter the Administrator of Death, conjuring up a labyrinth of corridors and deploying submarine imagery of molluscs and undersea ‘silence'. Elsewhere he offers a rocky landscape of ‘pittoresque anfractuosité' (picturesque anfractuosity).
17
In ‘Pan et la Syrinx' the prose is perforated by weird Wagnerian ‘clameurs de Walkyrie!'

Hoyotoho!

Heiah!

Hahei! Heiaho! Hoyohei!
18

Tom's most famous poem is famous not least for its own Wagnerian cries, those of ‘Rhine-daughters' transposed from
Götterdämmerung
to the modern-day Thames. Their sounds disturb part III of
The Waste Land
:

Weialala leia

Wallala leialala …
19

Quoting in English, Laforgue could take a familiar passage of Elizabethan drama and recontextualise it: ‘“
Good night, ladies; good night, sweet ladies! Good night good night!”
Ça chantait, et souvent des gravelures.' (It sings, often dirtily). In
The Waste Land
Tom would redeploy a version of the same line from
Hamlet.
When he wrote in 1928 that ‘The form in which I began to write, in 1908 or 1909, was directly drawn from the study of Laforgue together with the later Elizabethan drama', this was true, and Laforgue had encouraged him even to make the connection.
20
Never in the history of English language poetry has the importation of three new French volumes had such spectacular results.

Compared with this, Tom's academic studies were comparatively unexciting. Yet, just as he was about to hit his poetic stride, so in his courses he found a new dedication. Laforgue boosted his confidence. He could be his own man. At times this carried over into his classroom tasks, though not always with stellar results. In the spring of 1909, he took the popular, preening Charles Townsend Copeland's course on English Composition, English 12. Tom submitted on 2 March a neatly handwritten essay about an author whose work he had known since childhood. He began with a title and an opening sentence that adopt a confident tone:

The Defects of Kipling

As the novelty of certain innovations dies away, as the school of literature of which Mr. Kipling is the most illustrious representative, the exotic school, passes with all its blemishes exaggerated more and more into the hands of less brilliant practitioners, so Kipling's fame is fading, and his unique charm is diminished.

Professor Copeland changed Tom's word ‘brilliant' to ‘able'. He described this as ‘A mouth-filling sentence'. A seasoned public reader of verse, Copeland had a sense of the oratorical. He was strict with Tom, whose judgement he considered ‘harsh', though ‘with some elements of truth'. Tom thought some of Kipling's short stories such as ‘the “End of the Passage”' (which later supplies an image in ‘The Hollow Men') were ‘masterpieces'; Copeland, grading Tom's essay B+, wanted to keep this student in his place. ‘Youthful rashness', he wrote waspishly, ‘is not likely to be one of your attributes, at least till you are middle-aged'.
21
Attempting to project mature confidence in his verdicts, Tom only succeeded in amusing his teacher. Still, B+ was a higher mark than any he had got for his previous year's courses. Overall on English 12, Copeland graded him B – also Tom's grade on Rand's two Latin half-courses, and on Comp. Lit. 7 with Murray Potter. Both of Professor Schofield's Comp. Lit. half-courses brought him As, however: his first such marks since his freshman-year English 28. Things were starting to look up.

During that spring of 1909 he absorbed not just Laforgue, but also a new book by a recent Harvard graduate who had served on the
Advocate
editorial board of 1908. Poet-critic Van Wyck Brooks, whom Tom later claimed to ‘remember at Harvard as a dapper little man with a taste for Charles Lamb', had fallen in love with European culture.
22
Like Henry James he had crossed the Atlantic in pursuit of it. Precociously, Brooks had completed in October 1908 a critique of American mores,
The Wine of the Puritans: A Study of Present-Day America
. In his first published book review Tom wrote about this volume admiringly for the May 1909
Advocate
. Brooks thought New England's Protestant and Unitarian values of thrift and industry (represented by Whittier and Emerson) ‘unable to meet the needs of great prosperity, imperialism and cosmopolitanism'; Emerson's thought, ‘the direct result of a provincial training', might have been ‘rational as an explanation of the peculiar life of one corner of the world' but was ‘inadequate to explain life in the wider sense'. Acutely aware of what he perceived as American provincialism and of a need to learn more about European culture, if only to establish a sophisticated ‘tradition for those who come after', Brooks wanted an idiom to express ‘full-grown, modern self-consciousness'. The American, he argued, was ‘independent of tradition'; lacking an appropriate reservoir of myths and tradition suitable for ‘modern, cosmopolitan life', he had ‘to think it all out for himself'. That was what Tom, with Laforgue's help, sought to do. With apparent approval he quoted – or, not entirely uncharacteristically, misquoted – Brooks's wish for a future when ‘the names of Denver and Sioux City will have a traditional antique dignity like Damascus and Perugia – and when it will not seem to us grotesque that they have'.
23

Brooks's book, exposing, as Tom put it, ‘the failure of American life (at present) – social, political, in education and in art', was ‘if one take it rightly, a wholesome revelation'.
24
Yet, however increasingly Francophile, Tom felt strong New England filiations. ‘Those of us who can claim any New England ancestors', he wrote in the
Advocate
three weeks later, ‘may congratulate ourselves that we are their descendants', though he added that such descendants could ‘rejoice that we are not' those ancestors' ‘contemporaries'. Reacting against his American familial inheritance, he also loved and venerated it. This would become a lifelong pattern. Even as he read Jules Laforgue, he relished ‘fine old ships' and locations such as Salem or nearby Baker's Island – which he probably knew through his own sailing exploits with his friends. He wanted to afford ‘our New England forbears … the grace of recognition'.
25
Yet, commenting on Tom's article in a review, Harvard's Dean Briggs thought it revealed immaturity: ‘“Gentlemen and Seamen” treats of the old merchant sea-captains in New England and of Salem, the old seaport for trade with the East. The feeling in the article is good; but the imperfect workmanship and the tendency to moralize give the effect of a school composition.'
26
Harsh but fair, such criticism indicated Tom was not yet a fully fledged writer. That May, after reading
The Wine of the Puritans
, he contributed to the ‘cocktail chorus' of the Fox. Having found a place in his life for Sandow exercises as well as for avant-garde French poetry, he argued there needed to be room at university both for the physical liveliness of the ‘sport' and for the studious pursuits of the ‘grind'.
27
Mixing immaturity and precocious brilliance, he bided his time.

Thanks to Tom's father's wealth, money for his studies was never a problem. By the time he had completed sufficient classes for his A.B. (Bachelor of Arts) degree in summer 1909, taking into account half-courses and whole ones, he had a total of 1.5 courses at grade A, 6.5 at grade B, 5 at C and 1 at D. It was hardly a stellar record, but his marks had improved in his third year (no Cs or Ds then), and he stayed on for a fourth, studying for a master's degree. As he matured, his interest in European culture increased. Henry James was the consummate novelist of New England society's engagement with Europe, and Tom read
The American, The Europeans
and
The Portrait of a Lady.
Friends including Conrad Aiken went off to Europe that summer, and considered living in London or Paris. Tom, though, as usual, summered in New England (sailing off the Maine coast), and could only read about those European capitals.
28