Young Eliot (25 page)

Still, he was hardly leading a deprived existence. To his father's relief, he looked likely to graduate as a credit to the family. Generously bankrolled, the young man made arrangements to live during his master's year in one of the largest rooms in Apley Court, the swankiest private dormitory in Cambridge. Built in ornamented red brick, this lavish, five-storey block on Holyoke Street towered over the small wooden house next door. Its fine lobby led to a marble staircase; its large rooms boasted magnificent woodwork and handsome fireplaces. Apley Court was associated with wealth, aestheticism and such figures as Pierre La Rose, termed by Tom's brother ‘The nifty Prince of Apley Court'.
29
Moving into this regal splendour, now Tom applied himself more intensively to his studies as well as to extra-curricular reading and writing. In the first term of 1909–10 Tinckom-Fernandez ‘made a desperate effort to get editorials from him' for the
Advocate
and was forced ‘to run him to earth in his room' at Apley Court where Tom, ‘working harder than ever', had become ‘a recluse'.
30

He took three courses in 1909–10 with Professor William Allan Neilson. One was English 1 (on Chaucer), which Neilson co-taught with Fred Robinson; the others were Neilson's own courses: Comparative Literature 18 (Studies in the History of Allegory) and English 24 (Studies in the Poets of the Romantic Period). The terms Classicism and Romanticism were important to Neilson. He used them not so much to designate literary periods as to highlight ‘persistent tendencies'. Just as he saw the Middle Ages and the Renaissance as interlinked, so Neilson was wary of splitting apart a Classical from a Romantic era. In 1911 he gave a lecture series, published the following year, drawing on his teaching ‘of students in Harvard University':

Romanticism is the tendency characterized by the predominance of imagination over reason and the sense of fact. Classicism is the tendency characterized by the predominance of reason over imagination and the sense of fact. Realism is the tendency characterized by the predominance of the sense of fact over imagination and reason.

Deprecating Rousseau, Neilson was suspicious of a vagueness associated with ‘Romanticism'. Enumerating prose writers from Balzac, Flaubert and Tolstoy to ‘Howells and James in America', he thought that the temper of the modern age was ‘truth to fact'. A scientific age was interested not least in the ‘psychological', though ‘in poetry … we are still in the romantic age'. For Neilson ‘We have suffered, and we continue to suffer, from a defect of the classical qualities, both in creation and in appreciation: we have much to gain from a greater reverence for tradition, a finer sense of the beauty of retained and regulated form, a more rigorous intellectual discipline.'
31
These became Tom's beliefs too.

Neilson's views had a good deal in common with those of another of Tom's teachers that session, Professor Irving Babbitt, whom Neilson signed up to write on ‘literary criticism' for his series of volumes, The Types of English Literature.
32
When Tom took his half-course French 17hf, Literary Criticism in France with Special Reference to the Nineteenth Century, Babbitt was an Assistant Professor best known for his recent volume,
Literature and the American College: Essays in Defense of the Humanities
. Unlike most of Tom's other teachers, but like Matthew Arnold, whose work Babbitt admired, this professor wrote for a wide audience; much of his recent book had appeared in the
Atlantic Monthly
and the
Nation
. As a young man, Babbitt had studied at Harvard and in Paris, and, though he taught modern literature, his background was in Classics, Sanskrit and Pali. He had an interest in Buddhist as well as in Christian thought, but was not a Christian. Like Neilson, Babbitt disparaged Rousseau's Romantic ‘horror of every form of discipline', arguing that ‘Liberty, to be humanized, must be tempered by true restraint'. Babbitt supported democracy, but, attuned to the writings of France's Charles Maurras, advocated ‘an aristocratic and selective democracy'. In a culture dominated by capitalism and commerce, Babbitt spoke up for ‘Academic Leisure', saw the value of ‘monasteries' and argued that to benefit society colleges must ‘insist on the idea of quality'. He was suspicious of Harvard's cafeteria-style elective system, and even of the ‘sudden prosperity' of ‘Comparative literature' if it took students away from ‘“the constant mind of man”'. Defending an ideal he termed ‘humanism', he wanted ‘Genuine originality', which was ‘a hardy growth, and usually gains more than it loses by striking deep root into the literature of the past'.
33

Influenced by Babbitt, Tom came to share many of these ideals. The half-course he took drew on material soon developed in Babbitt's
The Masters of Modern French Criticism
which sought ‘to criticise critics' and to portray the ‘ideal critic'.
34
Tom, future author of
To Criticize the Critic
and ‘The Perfect Critic', would recommend Babbitt's book in 1916. It saw the fashionable French thinker Henri Bergson as ‘perhaps the chief spokesman' of a ‘new tendency' in French thought which foregrounded anti-intellectualism.
35
Though later he came to disagree with some of Babbitt's non-Christian emphases, over the next few years Tom inclined towards Paris, towards the study of Sanskrit and Pali, towards Buddhist thought and towards a politically conservative ideology engaged with adventurous aesthetics and expounded through prose that might reach beyond academic classrooms. At the end of his life Tom wrote that Babbitt was the ‘one teacher at Harvard' who ‘had the greatest influence on me'.
36

In 1909–10 he also studied with George Pierce Baker, taking his course English 14 on The Drama in England from the Miracle Plays to the Closing of the Theatres. This professor introduced students not only to medieval English religious dramas but also to Ben Jonson's stagecraft and work by lesser known Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights including Dekker and Heywood.
37
Baker's interest in theatre was practical. Plays were scripts for performance, and he liked to mingle with students. Tom's cousin Eleanor Hinkley was developing an interest in drama, as was his cousin and fellow Harvard student, Fred Eliot. The taste for drama that Tom shared with Baker ran alongside his rather different enthusiasm for vaudeville and melodrama – all part of what his father complained about when he complained in 1910 that Tom was ‘too dramatic busy' at Harvard.
38

Poetry, though, was his first love, and several fellow students knew it. For session 1909–10 ‘Thomas S. Eliot' was elected secretary on the
Advocate
's
Board of Editors.
39
His friend Tinckom-Fernandez began that session as president, though he left before its end, heading back to New York. Other companions and acquaintances such as Haniel Long and Conrad Aiken were on the Board too, along with 1910 classmen including poet Rogers MacVeagh. Tom's position as ‘Secretary' suggests that, even while immersed in the poems of Laforgue, he was regarded as a safe pair of hands. On 13 December 1909, he was nominated Odist of the Class of 1910 in a ballot held in the Lodge of Harvard's Class of '77 Gate, one of the entrances to the Yard. Alan Seeger stood for Class Poet, a separate position, so he and Tom were not in direct competition. When the votes were counted that Monday evening at the
Crimson
office, Seeger lost to Edward Eyre Hunt, but Tom beat his rival, MacVeagh, comfortably.
40
In the summer he would have to stand in front of a vast audience at his class graduation and read his poem aloud. Even more than at Smith Academy, this was bound to make his parents proud.

In due course Tom wrote to inform his mother. ‘You must be sure', she replied, ‘and secure tickets when the time comes for Father and me to hear your Ode'.
41
He mentioned, too, that he was about to give a lecture (probably to a student society) and to visit New Haven. He had been in the habit of sending home copies of the
Advocate
when he had work published there. Lottie, conscious of her own relative failures as poet and teacher, was very keen that her ‘dear Boy … receive early the recognition I strove for and failed'. She wished he would send letters more frequently. What were his most recent marks? Would he please send them now? She was, she assured Tom, ‘interested in every detail of your life'.
42

Apparently, he had not been going into full details about his latest reading and writing. Some knowledge was best kept secret. He had been drafting several poems influenced by Laforgue and other French poets. He did, though, signal to his parents that his work, encouraged by courses such as Babbitt's, was taking him in the direction of French culture and that he would like to go to Paris. His mother made it clear in April 1910 that she had ‘rather hoped you would not specialize later on in French literature', and wondered if he might change his mind. ‘I cannot bear to think of your being alone in Paris, the very words give me a chill. English speaking countries seem so different from foreign. I do not admire the French nation, and have less confidence in individuals of that race than in English.'
43
In Lottie Eliot's St Louis, fashionable Paris was still the City of Sin. To Tom it meant Baudelaire, Laforgue and others whose work fascinated him; it was that heady philosopher Bergson's headquarters, the capital of sophistication, a compass point for Americans, from Henry James to Van Wyck Brooks, eager to engage with European culture. He made clear his resolute Francophilia. Probably his mother didn't know the half of it.

That session Tom took cosmopolitan Santayana's course Philosophy 10 (Philosophy of History) which examined ideals of society, religion, art and science in their historical development – further reminders that there was a world out there much greater than St Louis or New England. Santayana's teaching seems to have drawn on his recent five-volume
The Life of Reason, or the Phases of Human Progress
, a vast comparative survey of intellectual life which, like Babbitt's writings, considered aristocratic and democratic ideals while showing a marked, if agnostic, interest in religion. As would Tom, Santayana speculated about knowledge and experience, from the mores of ‘savages' to the world around him: ‘Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.'
44

Born in Spain, though schooled at Harvard, Santayana was fascinated by the aesthetics of Catholicism. He left Harvard not long after teaching Tom's class, and his later novel,
The Last Puritan
, satirises New England life as repressedly small-minded. Tom remembered ‘when an undergraduate' thinking Santayana ‘rather a poseur, who chose to look down upon New Englanders as provincial Protestants'.
45
Determined to come to terms with any threat of provincialism, early that session Tom had been reading the work of yet another American Francophile. In October 1909 he contended that ‘Now that Arthur Symons is no longer active in English letters, Mr. James Huneker alone represents modernity in criticism.' He had found Huneker's biography of Chopin interesting and, cheekily, he made clear just what he loved about this critic's writing: ‘he is far too alert to be an American; in his style and in his temper he is French'.
46

‘I suppose I am not enough of a scholar to know what is termed the “particular genius” of any people', Tom's mother wrote, rather woundedly, to her son, cautioning him against undue Francophilia.
47
Over half of Huneker's
Egoists: A Book of Supermen
was given over to French culture, and some of the rest to Nietzsche. Allusively, Huneker ranges from the ‘colossal and muscular humanity' of Michelangelo to ‘Rochefoucauld', Dostoevsky's
Crime and Punishment
and ‘Jules Laforgue'. He links Laforgue's Hamlet to Stendhal's ‘timidity with women'. Huneker is interested in Stendhal's dislike of America for being too ‘democratic' and ‘utilitarian' to produce art. Quoting Stendahl's remark, ‘My head is a magic lantern', Huneker regards Stendahl as a ‘man of action paralysed little by little because of his incomparable analysis'. Some of this inveigled its way into Prufrock who has his own nervously cerebral ‘magic-lantern'. Writing of ‘muffled delirium' (an arresting phrase which anticipates, perhaps, Tom's later ‘chilled delirium' in ‘Gerontion'), Huneker linked John Donne to Baudelaire. He admired Baudelaire's ‘power of blasphemy', seeing him as a ‘strayed' Manichaean Christian, ‘the patron saint of
ennui
' whose ‘disharmony of brain and body' and ‘spiritual bilocation, are only too easy to diagnose; but the remedy?
Hypocrite lecteur – mon semblable – mon frère!
' Tom, who had been reading Baudelaire as well as the other French poets in
Poètes d'Aujourd'hui
, would remember that line too. It ends the first section of
The Waste Land
, while his later Baudelaire essay too owes debts to Huneker.
48

Tom's extra-curricular student reading was remarkably resilient in shaping his subsequent work. Huneker's ‘The Pessimist's Progress' praised French novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans (whose work Tom read), not least for depicting ‘the nervous distaste of a hypochondriac for meeting people'. Huysmans was a ‘singer of neurasthenia' whose characters ‘suffer from paralysis of the will, from hyperaesthesia'. Yet Huneker also pointed to Huysmans's preoccupation with ‘the perverse odour of perfumes', and the figure of Salome, ‘symbolic deity of indestructible Lust, the goddess of immortal Hysteria'. A Catholic convert with a penchant for writing about Paris, Huysmans delighted in reading ‘the mystics' including ‘St. John of the Cross'. Huneker admitted that Huysmans's ‘union of Roman Catholicism and blasphemy has proved to many a stumbling block'.
49
Yet Tom was fascinated by ‘the genius of faith' he read about in Huneker as well as by other kinds of ‘perverse and lunary genius'.
50