Young Eliot (28 page)

He stopped off in England for a short time en route: his London Baedeker carries on its title page the solemnly dated black-ink inscription ‘Thomas S. Eliot, October the 14th, 1910'.
23
But Paris was his destination. Bankrolled from St Louis, he had set up an arrangement with the stunningly palatial headquarters of Crédit Lyonnais at 19 boulevard des Italiens, in the second arrondissement not far from the Opéra, which allowed him to receive mail there. Tom, however, lived some distance away, on the other side of the Seine, in the Latin quarter. There he had secured a ‘petite chambre' in a house looked after by an old French couple, the Casaubons. Madame Casaubon refreshed lodgers with tea from her gleaming silver teapot, and white-bearded Monsieur Casaubon was strikingly elegant. This French husband and wife were used to taking in Anglophone as well as Francophone boarders.
24
There was ‘a prim but nice English lady' whom Tom got to know a little; ‘she does not understand the American dialect'.
25
Several other residents were Harvard men: liking to sport a ‘gold
pince-nez
'
the resonantly named, socialist-inclined Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana, grandson of the author of
Two Years Before the Mast
, shared Tom's taste for Dante. Dana
had come from Harvard two years earlier to lecture on English at the Sorbonne.
26

Arrested decades later in New York for allegedly propositioning a teenage boy, Dana, like another of the Pension Casaubon's residents, Matthew Prichard, was probably homosexual.
27
Tom's brother had introduced him to Prichard, an Englishman who had worked for Boston's Museum of Fine Arts and had known Isabella Stewart Gardner. Tom later mentioned Prichard's ‘very remarkable sensibility'; in Paris, like Tom, Prichard discussed Bergson's philosophy. He was also friendly with English art critic Roger Fry and enthusiastic about Byzantine art at Ravenna and San Marco.
28
Prichard had got to know Henri Matisse in 1909, introducing him to Byzantine visual culture. In 1910 he took Tom to meet Matisse.
29
Going beyond Gauguin, Matisse was then experimenting with non-naturalistic colour, and had recently painted the ‘primitive' frolicking female nudes of
La Danse
. Yet, later at least, Tom was wary of Prichard: ‘I should prefer not to see him again.'
30

When Tom arrived, Dana was already used to Paris. Certainly he could advise Monsieur Eliot who was to enrol as a foreign student at the Sorbonne and attend Bergson's lectures at the Collège de France. Prichard was able to tell Tom about Bergson, and emerging artistic developments such as Cubism and Futurism: Cubist art became a Paris sensation at an April 1911 exhibition; Futurism had featured in
Le Figaro
since at least 1909.
31
‘My opinions on art, as well as other subjects, have modified radically', Tom wrote in 1911. In Paris, he recalled, ‘discussion of Bergson was apt to be involved with discussion of Matisse and Picasso'.
32

Yet at the Pension Casaubon Tom grew close not so much to fellow Americans as to a French lodger who remarked with a certain sarcasm how ‘Monsieur Dana en tressaillerait derrière ses lorgnons d'or' (Monsieur Dana would shudder behind his gold pince-nez). This French medical student, Jean Jules Verdenal, found Prichard boring, prone to being taken in by charlatans. Verdenal joked with Tom about these visiting, apparently gay aesthetes, but it would be wrong to assume Verdenal was either homophobic or anti-American; likewise, it would be naïve to decide that Verdenal, who could use expressions in letters to Tom such as ‘Cher ami, je vous serre la main' (Dear friend, I shake your hand), was homosexual.
33
He was a young Frenchman of 1910, who spoke, behaved and wrote as one; in his letters to Tom he used the more formal ‘vous' (you), rather than the more intimate ‘tu'. Tom, eager to become as much of a young Frenchman of 1910 as he could, found Jean Verdenal the best of companions. He was delighted by how much they shared – from a taste for Laforgue's poetry to philosophical interests, and from tentative habits of mind to astutely ironic observations. Verdenal had friends in Parisian literary circles, and knew such young writers as Jacques Rivière, brother-in-law of the aspiring novelist Alain-Fournier. Remarkably, right here in his lodgings, Tom had found a soulmate.

Even if, in response to his former professor's request, he sent back to Harvard's Edward Waldo Forbes a catalogue from the Trocadéro and offered him brochures from the Luxembourg Museum, Tom had come to Paris to loosen his ties with New England.
Situated a short stroll from the Sorbonne and the Collège de France, the Pension Casaubon welcomed Americans, but was most attractive when most Parisian. At 151 bis rue Saint-Jacques it stood between a poultry shop and a café-restaurant. The restaurateur liked to set out chairs and tables on the pavement. Above the Pension's doorway was a balcony with an ornamental wrought-iron railing. A street lamp stood right beside the front door, and at night, when in this part of Paris (as a fellow lodger put it) one could hear at ten o'clock ‘all the bells in the area … ringing and, almost at the same time … a tinkling of fairly distant chimes, soon blotted out by the measured pealing of a deeper bell', the Pension Casaubon's street lamp lit up rows of plucked fowls hanging in the adjoining poulterer's window.
34

To come from the ‘village' of Cambridge to Paris, a capital city of 3,000,000 people still substantially bounded by its ancient city walls, was wonderful. Aged twenty-two, Tom was just a year older than the Eiffel Tower. Four years earlier, not far from his lodgings, Rodin's famous statue,
The Thinker
, had been set up outside the Panthéon. The area around the Pension Casaubon was steeped in several nations' history. Just off the rue Saint-Jacques (an ancient pilgrim route) was the church of St Séverin, its stained glass depicting the murder of England's St Thomas à Becket; near Tom's pension, in the direction of the River Seine, was the medieval rue de Bièvre where Dante (said to have attended lectures nearby) was reputed to have written some of his
Divine Comedy.
Walking by the Seine, Tom could catch a glimpse of ‘Anatole France'; then in his mid-sixties, this writer had produced his earliest work while Baudelaire was still alive.
35
The American student liked to saunter in the ‘Luxembourg Gardens' near the place Edmond-Rostand, a few hundred yards downhill from his lodgings. There, as young ‘Uncle Tom' (aka ‘L'Oncle Tom') explained to his six-year-old niece Theodora, children sailed boats in a pond, spun tops and rolled hoops in ‘a sort of park like the Boston Public Gardens'.
36
Sketching French infants surrounding him as he bowed, he sent his scribbles to Theodora, who preserved them. She liked Uncle Tom.

The Pension Casaubon was close to both the Collège de France with its imposing statue of Dante, and the Sorbonne, one of the world's oldest universities. Intellectually, Tom found himself at an intersection between ideas emanating from both insitutions. ‘At the Sorbonne', where he was now a student, ‘the sociologists, Durkheim, Lévy-Bruhl', he observed, ‘held new doctrines'.
37
The great Jewish thinker Émile Durkheim, a Sorbonne star, established sociology as a fully-fledged academic discipline. He stressed that individuals were bound to a greater cultural whole, a tradition, though in Europe this bond had been weakened by Christianity's decay. Durkheim had studied at Marburg in Germany; his work's philosophical underpinnings drew on epistemological as well as anthropological thought. From 1906 onwards in his Sorbonne lectures Durkheim outlined the matter of his last great book,
The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life
(1912), which Tom would read in French. Reviewing its 1918 English translation shortly before writing ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent', he described it as ‘intensely interesting', not least for its ideas about ‘“group-consciousness'''.
38

Durkheim's Sorbonne colleague, philosophy professor Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, was also concerned with epistemology, anthropology and religion; in 1910 he published
Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures
, arguing that there was a separation between the mentality of ‘savages' and that of modern civilised people. Soon Tom took issue with this: Lévy-Bruhl ‘appears to me to draw the distinction between primitive and civilized mental process altogether too clearly'.
39
Following those intellectual currents, familiar at Harvard, which linked anthropological thinking to literature, Tom's greatest poetry would juxtapose modern-day life with the rituals of societies supposedly ‘
inférieures
'. Though the Sorbonne's records of his studies do not survive, he encountered the work of its leading thinkers. He mentioned once working on ‘un travail de quelque envergure que je désirais présenter à l'Université' (a project of some magnitude that I wanted to submit to the university).
40

At that time, he thought, ‘[Pierre] Janet was the great psychologist.'
41
A correspondent of William James, Janet had lectured at Harvard Medical School on hysteria in 1906, and coined the terms ‘subconscious' and ‘dissociation' (indicating a psychological detachment from reality). Tom, soon to write a poem called ‘Hysteria', would adopt and adapt the word ‘dissociation' when, a decade later, he argued that English poetry suffered from a ‘dissociation of sensibility'.
42
These Sorbonne thinkers were an important stimulus for his reading about the intersection between religious mysticism, asceticism and hysteria in ‘primitive' and modern life. Among his student notes a substantial reading list of works in French and English contains nothing published later than Edward Scribner Ames's
The Psychology of Religious Experience
(1910); almost all the books Tom listed are in the Sorbonne's library. His notes from Janet's 1898
Névroses et Idées Fixes
include (from Volume II) a summary of ‘
Observation 95
. Woman who showed hereditary traces of hysteria', and cover such topics as hearing voices in different languages and links between sexual pathology and religious rapture. Tom, whose first collection of poems would be made up of ‘Observations', noted down, too, details of articles by Maxime Bernier de Montmorand in the
Revue philosophique de la France et de l'étranger
between 1903 and 1905 with titles such as ‘L'érotomanie des mystiques chrétiens'. These studies investigated the relationship between asceticism, mysticism and sexual ecstasy. At least one of them argued with the work of ‘M. le Dr Pierre Janet' on ‘les hystériques' and on those described as ‘
abouliques'
. Tom jotted down the relevance of this ‘to Janet' and ‘aboulie theories'.
43
This material and terminology would haunt him.

While these might seem weirdly arcane interests, connections between erotomania and Christian mysticism were also part of the most exciting avant-garde culture Paris had to offer. They not only featured in Janet's lectures but, as Nancy Hargrove points out, were seen also on stage in May 1911 when the Théâtre du Châtelet premiered a shocking five-hour extravaganza,
Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien
, which became ‘the talk of Paris'. With a script by Gabriele d'Annunzio, specially composed music by Debussy, choreography by Mikhail Fokine and costumes by Leon Bakst, its star was Jewish Russian ballerina Ida Rubenstein. She had played Cleopatra in a Ballets Russes production the previous year. Now, cross-dressing, she was Saint Sebastian, dancing ecstatically over burning coals, her ultimate fate to be bound to a tree and martyred by being shot full of arrows. This Sebastian was, one reviewer wrote, ‘a woman with a supple and voluptuous body of pale and gleaming flesh who portrays, in languid and sensual dances, the Stations of the Cross' in ‘a savage, insane, but very impressive work of art, which produces piercing sensations, divine or diabolical, in our minds'. Jean Cocteau put it more succinctly, ‘
She is delicious.
'
44

The Pope had just proscribed d'Annunzio's works. In Sebastian the erotically excited and anthropologically-informed Italian playwright sought to fuse, as he put it, ‘Christian myth' with ‘the beautiful wounded god' Adonis. ‘Let me know your love / again, in the arrows', Sebastian begs the archers. The archbishop of Paris denounced the play, threatening Catholics with excommunication if they went to see it. The row became a public scandal.
Le Figaro
published a cartoon on 25 May depicting a fashionably dressed young woman confessing to a priest that she has seen the drama. ‘Combien de fois?' he asks her – ‘How many times?'
45
Tom enjoyed Parisian theatre, seeing, for instance, a performance of
Les Frères Karamazov
at the Théâtre des Arts that spring. Whether or not he attended
Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien
, he surely knew about it, and had previously described Pollaiuolo's St Sebastian. Three years later, writing to Conrad Aiken (who had also been in Paris in 1911), enclosing his poem of erotic violence ‘The Love Song of St Sebastian', Tom asked, ‘no one ever painted a female Sebastian, did they?'
46

Though no match for d'Annunzio's wild eroticism, the Collège de France nonetheless attracted large audiences – including Parisians who were not students – thanks to the sheer excitement of its lectures. Alfred Loisy, its professor of religion, had been excommunicated recently by the Pope for implying the Catholic Church had betrayed Jesus Christ. ‘Loisy', Tom recalled, ‘enjoyed his somewhat scandalous distinction'.
47
Even more popular were the Collège de France lectures of Durkheim's old classmate, Bergson, whom Tom remembered as a ‘spider-like figure' dangling above Parisian intellectual life.
48
Crowds flocked to Bergson's lectures, so to secure a seat Tom needed to arrive early. He took out his squared-paper exercise book (map of France on the back, illustration of the Paris Odéon on the front), and inked on its cover in block capitals, ‘
BERGSON
=
VENDREDI
'. Every Friday in January and February (and perhaps later too, though only these jottings survive), he took notes in French as Bergson discussed ‘la psychologie' and ‘la personnalité'. Fundamental to these lectures was David Hume's sense of the self not as singular and fixed, but made up of fleeting impressions. Bergson quoted Hume in English, and Tom wrote down the words, ‘I always stumble on some particular perception. I never can catch myself.' Though Bergson went on to contend that ‘La question de l'unité ou la multiplicité de la vie de la personnalité n'est pas une question vitale' (The question of the unity or multiplicity of the life of the personality is not a vital question), and passed on to Kantian ideas of personality, that notion of the self as fragmentary and in flux would pervade Tom's poetry.
49