Young Eliot (30 page)

l'histoire conte que le terrible Schopenhauer en était fort amateur. Il jouait aussi de la clarinette, mais c'était peut-être pour embêter ses voisins. Voilà bien assez de choses pour nous rattacher à la vie. La volonté de vivre est mauvaise, cause de désirs et de peines mais la bière est appréciable – et l'on continue. O! Raison.

history tells us that the formidable Schopenhauer was a great beer-lover. He also played the clarinet, but perhaps that was just to annoy his neighbours. Such things are quite enough to make us cling to life. The will to live is evil, a source of desires and sufferings, but beer is not to be despised – and so we carry on. O Reason!
77

Unlike other lodgers, such as the sometimes boring Prichard, Verdenal combined brilliance with fun. None of Tom's Harvard companions had been on his wavelength in quite the same way: Harold Peters was great company on a boat, but hardly the man for Laforgue. Verdenal came from another country. He spoke another language. Yet those things made him all the more valuable as a friend. He'd wander downstairs to Tom's room in his slippers, collarless, in an old jacket, ready to chat about anything: anything, usually, except his medical studies. Often those seemed to interest him less than literature and philosophical speculations.

Later, it would be suggested by some commentators that Tom and Verdenal had been lovers. They were close, kindred spirits. Tom, at least, was so clever and complicated that he almost never found a kindred spirit, which made this friendship, so unexpected and strong, matter all the more. They went walking together, sometimes with Prichard and with Harrison Bird Child, that old acquaintance of Tom's from Milton and Harvard, who was studying during 1910–11 in England. They strolled among the trees at the large parklands of Saint Cloud a few miles along the Seine.
78
They talked culture and philosophy. But there is no evidence that Tom and Jean Verdenal slept together or even that their mutual attraction was essentially homoerotic. Certainly they liked each other enough to be daft with one another. Spotting Verdenal outside in the garden, Tom ‘threw a lump of sugar at him'.
79
The two students went on corresponding after Tom left Paris, and some of the daftness lingered. The Frenchman sometimes felt trapped in a Pension Casaubon time-warp: ‘everything is just the same (this evening, for the 2474th time, I shall see Madame Casaubon hold her napkin between her chin and her chest as her wrinkled hands mix the salad)'.
80

These student friends shared hopes and dreams. At times, despite their different native languages, they even seem to share turns of phrase: Verdenal's ‘Ce n'est pas facile de se faire comprendre' sounds almost like a recollection of Tom's ‘It is impossible to say just what I mean' from his Prufrock poem.
81
There is no evidence that Tom showed Verdenal his verse, but he kept his French friend's letters and occasionally a usage or a phrase in them seems to anticipate his own later work: Verdenal's ‘C'est un homme charmant' (used of Harvard philosopher B. A. G. Fuller), for instance, becomes Tom's ‘“He is a charming man”' in ‘Mr. Apollinax', a poem based on incidents at Fuller's Massachusetts home.
82
Tom's friendship with Verdenal may have been the closest friendship he ever enjoyed with another man. It stayed with him particularly intensely for a terrible reason. In 1934, recalling that year in Paris, Tom confessed ‘that my own retrospect is touched by a sentimental sunset, the memory of a friend coming across the Luxembourg Gardens in the late afternoon, waving a branch of lilac, a friend who was later (so far as I could find out) to be mixed with the mud of Gallipoli'.
83

The last letter Tom kept from this friend, who died in the Great War at almost the same age as Jules Laforgue, was sent at the end of 1912. The young Frenchman signed off characteristically: ‘Au revoir, mon cher ami, et bien à vous … J. Verdenal.'
84
Five years later, when Tom published his first collection of poems, he added the simple dedication, ‘For Jean Verdenal, 1889–1915'. Some years again after that, he appended to the dedication the words ‘mort aux Dardanelles', and some lines from Dante's
Purgatorio
in which two poets meet in the afterlife. Virgil speaks first to his ‘brother' (‘Frate'), Statius; then Statius replies:

              ‘Or puoi la quantitate

    comprender dell' amor ch'a te mi scalda,

    quando dismento nostra vanitate,

trattando l'ombre come cosa saldi.'

which Tom translated into prose in 1929 as

 

‘Now you can understand the quantity of the love that warms me towards you, so that I forget our vanity, and treat the shadows like the solid thing.'
85

These Dantescan words are not just a declaration of fraternal love. They state, too, an enduring literary bond.

Tom's voyage to Paris for that academic year 1910–11 brought him a sense of deep, unexpected personal kinship, but also an excitingly immediate sense of European culture. Like many Americans on a year's study abroad, he planned several side-trips. During the Christmas vacation he travelled for two weeks, including visits to ‘Poitiers, Angoulême, Toulouse, Albi, Moissac, and other places in the south west'.
86
All these towns were on railway lines. Conceivably Tom visited them with his good friend and fellow lodger if Verdenal went home to Pau, about sixty miles from Toulouse. In mid-May 1911 Tom visited Rouen, planning visits to further ‘towns about Paris'.
87
By then he had also crossed the English Channel to spend a good deal of the Easter vacation in the city that he had read about in childhood and which would one day become his home. It was the place where Jules Laforgue had married, the metropolis of Dickens and Sherlock Holmes.

‘At London one pretended it was spring', he wrote to his cousin Eleanor on 26 April. He had returned to Paris the night before, finding a note from her among ‘a pile of letters'. In Paris it was ‘full spring', but London's spring had been a mere pretence and ‘one continued to hibernate among the bricks'.
88
That last phrase also formed part of his poem, ‘Interlude in London', written the same month. Christopher Ricks has pointed out this poem shares phrasing with ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', ‘Preludes' and even, perhaps,
The Waste Land
, while drawing at times on French poetry.
89
Apart from the word ‘London' in its title, the urban details could come from almost any city. In London, though, Tom went to a number of specifically English churches. Mainly in the financial district – the City – they were mentioned in his Baedeker, and included the Church of St Bartholomew the Great. The Baedeker entry for this carries Tom's pencilled note ‘St. B. Inscription “John Eliot” gave £30 for the poor.'
90
Even here, he was among Eliots.

His letter to Eleanor Hinkley contains a list of places visited that roughly corresponds to a pencilled tally on one of the back pages of his Baedeker. These sites include the ‘National Gallery', the ‘Brit[ish] Mus[eum]', ‘S. Kensington' (i.e. the Victoria and Albert Museum) and the ‘Wallace Collection'.
91
Ticks in Tom's Baedeker suggest his particular interests included the ‘Egyptian Antiquities' and ‘Religious Collections' dealing with ‘Early Christianity' in the British Museum; also rooms XVIII and XIX in the Wallace Collection, which contained respectively ‘a charming series of fêtes champêtres, conversations galantes, pastoral and romantic scenes, etc., by
Watteau
', and Fragonard's painting
The Swing
in which a man looks up a lady's skirt as she swings.
92
Tom wrote to Eleanor that he had ‘made notes!!' at the Wallace Collection, but did not say what they were about.
93
About five years later, he would write about ‘Priapus … Gaping at the lady in the swing' in ‘Mr. Apollinax', and would publish another poem ‘Conversation Galante'.
94
Visual images and fragments of text lingered long in his mind. So did snatches of song and music. He always associated this youthful visit to London with Herman Finck's tune ‘In the Shadows' which was made popular by a 1911 show featuring the glamorous Palace Girls at the Palace Theatre.
95

In London, despite cool weather, he spent much time outdoors. He perused the banking hub, ‘The City – Thoroughly', and mentioned to Eleanor ‘Whitechapel (note: Jews)'. Perhaps the anti-Semitism of Maurras's Paris made him all the more alert to Whitechapel's Jewish presence, though visitors often noted it. At London Zoo he ‘gave the apterix a bun'; fond of the word ‘apterix' (kiwi bird), years later he signed a review ‘T. S. Apteryx'.
96
London offered music-hall treats: while Tom was there, George Robey was performing at the Empire Theatre, and Marie Lloyd at the Pavilion.
97
As well as visiting the zoo, he went to Cricklewood – in those days a semi-rural village on the Edgware Road, though already on its way to becoming a suburb. Maybe, as with ‘apterix', he simply liked the sound of the name; or perhaps he went because, though easily accessible, Cricklewood was
not
a place mentioned by Baedeker.

I made a pilgrimage to Cricklewood. ‘Where
is
Cricklewood?' said an austere Englishman at the hotel. I produced a map and pointed to the silent evidence that Cricklewood exists. He pondered. ‘But why go to Cricklewood?' he flashed out at length. Here I was triumphant. ‘There is no reason!' I said. He had no more to say. But he
was
relieved (I am sure) when he found that I was American. He felt no longer responsible. But Cricklewood is mine. I discovered it. No one will go there again.
98

Cheered by this exotic English adventure, and safely back in Paris, he planned further foreign trips: ‘After the middle of June I shall go to Munich for some time, to study German. I hope to spend a few weeks, at least, in Italy.'
99

When he reached Munich in July, he found another great city of European culture. Its Maximilianstrasse, a broad, tree-lined royal avenue whose monumental buildings led the eye towards the heroically imposing Maximilianeum across the River Isar, was one of the Continent's grandest streets. In London Tom had stayed in a hotel. Here in this Bavarian capital of 600,000 people he had arranged lodgings in a boarding house, the Pension Bürger, which occupied two storeys at 50 Luisenstrasse. On the half mile or so journey from the main railway station to this address visitors passed the 765-foot long Glaspalast; opened in 1854, it was modelled on London's Crystal Palace. Munich was full of palatial architecture. Beyond the Glaspalast was the imposing Basilika St Bonifaz (built in imitation of an early Christian basilica). Tom's lodgings were close to a great Corinthian-style art gallery opposite the magnificent marble halls of the Ionic Glyptothek (sculpture-hall), built for King Ludwig I of Bavaria to house classical statuary. ‘A walk through Munich', the 1911
Encyclopedia Britannica
article about that city proclaimed, ‘affords a picture of the architecture and art of two thousand years'. From the Luisenstrasse one could walk along Briennerstrasse, passing through a great stone gateway in the Propyläen (built to imitate a temple on the Athenian acropolis) to the massive Residenz (Palace) complex of the Bavarian monarchs. The Arcades to the west and north of the Hofgarten with its several open-air cafes contained one-hundred-twenty-five pier-arches and had been adorned with frescoes, including Joseph Rottmann's Italian landscape pictures depicting classical ruins – a veritable ‘Ruinenpanorama', to use a word that circulated in the Munich of July 1911 – though when Tom visited they were in poor condition.
100

So was he. ‘In Munich', he recalled during a later bout of low blood pressure, ‘in 1911' he had experienced ‘cerebral anaemia'.
101
At its worst, this disease is fatal. Usually accompanied by intense diarrhoea, dizziness, faintness and pallor as well as some mental confusion and general sensation of physical weakness, the illness in its milder forms (which seems to have been what Tom suffered) can be treated with drugs backed up by healthy eating, fresh air and exercise. ‘Most unpleasant', he later summed up his ordeal.
102
Following not so long after scarlet fever, this was the second time in just over a year that he had contracted a potentially life-threatening disease. Being ill alone in a foreign city is never easy. Yet for Tom it coincided with a poetic breakthrough. Later in life he came to suspect that sickness and poetic creativity could be linked. During his stay in Munich he completed his first great poem.

It deals with weakness. Some of its fragmentary drafts mention ‘nausea' and even ‘Madness'. However, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' is not directly autobiographical; nor is it set in Munich.
103
Tom appears to have brought with him the notebook he had bought in Gloucester, and copied into it extended sections – at one time, perhaps, intended as separate poems – that drew on earlier fragments. This way of hoarding bits of older material, then piecing them together, would become a compositional strategy. Schooled but not confined by Laforgue's style, his new poem with its generalised yet tellingly memorable cityscape of ‘restless nights in one-night cheap hotels / And sawdust restaurants with oyster shells' tosses and turns restlessly. It presents a masculinity hampered by incisive self-consciousness and inhibition.

Three titles were in play: ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', ‘Prufrock among the Women' and ‘Prufrock's Pervigilium'. Eventually Tom spliced together what may have started life as at least two different related works. In draft his first line began with ‘…' Those dots sent a signal at the very start of hesitancy and, perhaps, of something ending before it had even begun. The final version, not published until 1915, four years after he completed it at the age of twenty-two, begins more confidently.