Young Eliot (32 page)

Leafiness suited him. Harvard Yard was a ten-minute walk away; he was closer to Radcliffe, and not far from where his cousin Eleanor lived in a similar, suburban-style house. ‘For rent of rooms' in 1912–13 Miss Carroll charged him $40 per quarter plus a few dollars more for coal and wood – New England winters were chilly after Paris.
9
There were two other ‘principal residents', Miss Mary Stimpson and Miss Ella M. Palmer.
10
Verdenal could share a joke with Tom about the ‘label “elderly American spinster”'.
11
Now back in Cambridge, Tom shared a house with several unmarried ladies in the markedly feminine Radcliffe part of town. That November he returned to a poem he had worked on in Paris, ‘Portrait of a Lady'. Like Prufrock's ‘Love Song', this work about strained nuances of etiquette between a young man and an older woman conscious of her ‘buried life, and Paris in the spring' seems to have developed alongside raunchier writings, each perhaps spurring the other. In manuscript the first part of ‘Portrait of a Lady' has, Christopher Ricks notes, ‘Bolo verses on the other side'.
12
Apparently drawing on Tom's undergraduate interaction with the considerably older Miss Adeleine Moffatt who ‘lived behind the State House in Boston and invited selected Harvard undergraduates to tea', the poem's third section involves an awkward conversation about ‘going abroad'. The male speaker, nervous about his ‘self-possession', envisages smiling after the lady's death, but questions whether he has ‘the right' to do so.
13
His mind wanders from talk of Chopin to popular culture – Tom and Aiken were fans of comic-strip characters Mutt and Jeff. Tom anatomises male (and sometimes female) anxieties, several of which seem hard to separate from his own shyness, however offset by a dash of Parisian swank.

Some French passions he shared with his family. His mother, always eager to understand her younger son, read Bergson's newly translated
Creative Evolution
, and even attended ‘lectures thereon, largely influenced by Tom's enthusiasm', though she noticed less Bergsonian ardour now her son was back from France.
14
Further ongoing interests – Boloesque and otherwise – he kept more private. He and Verdenal went on corresponding, still sharing the same wavelength, but the Frenchman's letters show no awareness of Bolo or Columbo. In the Pension Casaubon the Parisian medical student had moved to Tom's old room:

the pattern of the wallpaper (do you remember it?) often gets on my nerves. Damn. It occurred to me a moment ago to send you a little bit of wallpaper – then I immediately realised that the idea was not mine but that I had got it from a letter by J. Laforgue, so I will abstain. I am not quite sure of ever having had an idea that really belonged to me.

Though committed to pursuing his studies, Verdenal had regrets about having chosen a scientific career. He worried he read too much, and had ‘little gift for action'. He invoked Bergson with an ironic tone, and his rather Prufrockian concerns about his own self-consciousness make it clear why he and Tom felt close: ‘if I act (O action, O Bergson), I am bright enough to take a sincere look at the joy of action and destroy it by analysis.'
15
Tom's poems show he, too, pondered how self-analysis could inhibit action. Like Verdenal, he went on with his reading in French. April 1912 saw him buying from Boston's Schoenhof Book Company works by Corneille and Racine as well as Charles-Louis Philippe's
Lettres de jeunesse
, newly published by the
Nouvelle Revue Française
.
16
Yet his Paris life was fading. For all their friendship, he and Verdenal were rather dilatory correspondents. If Verdenal's final surviving note to him dates from December 1912, then as early as April, in his last extended letter, the young Frenchman realised that, continents apart, they were each getting on with their considerably different lives.

Mon cher ami, nous ne sommes pas très loin, vous et moi, de la limite au dela de laquelle les êtres perdent, l'un l'autre, je ne sais quelle influence, quelle puissance d'émotion naissant à nouveau quand ils sont rapprochés. Ce n'est pas seulement le temps qui peut faire l'oubli – la
distance
(l'espace) y a une part qui est grande. Elle déjà pèse entre nous, sans doute (avouons le franchement) puisque des occupations stupides, et beaucoup de paresse ont tellement raréfié ma correspondance.

(My dear friend, we are not very far, you and I, from the point beyond which people lose that indefinable influence and emotive power over each other, which is reborn when they come together again. It is not only time which causes forgetfulness – distance (space) is an important factor. It is already, no doubt, making itself felt between us (let us admit this frankly), since my stupid occupations and considerable laziness have made my letters few and far between.
17

Tom's academic interests were removing him, too, from his undergraduate friends, most of whom had left Cambridge. His doctoral work in philosophy would involve about five years' further study. Now he was safely home from Paris, his parents were happy to fund this.

Partly perhaps under Babbitt's lingering influence, and aware of his brother-in-law Shef's interest in Eastern thought, Tom began studying Sanskrit. Among other things, this involved leaving Western alphabets far behind. His professor was Charles Rockwell Lanman, whom he may have known through family connections: Lanman's wife was a Hinkley. Then in his sixties, Professor Lanman had developed Harvard's outstanding collections of Sanskrit books and manuscripts. His Sanskrit
Reader
, one of Tom's set texts, introduced such topics as ancient Indic customs and the transmigration of souls. Lanman liked to point out that ‘The belief that a man must be born and live and die, only to be born and die again and again through a weary round of existences, was widespread in India long before Buddha's day', and that ‘the “Jataka”, the most charming of all Buddhist story books', contained ‘a narrative of not less than 547 former existences' preceding the ‘birth' of Buddha. Benign but exacting, Lanman drew parallels between Buddhist and Christian traditions. He emphasised Buddha's analysis of ‘the cause of human suffering' which

he finds in the craving for existence (no matter how noble that existence) and for pleasure. If you can only master these cravings, you are on the road to salvation, to
Nirvana.
This, so far as the present life is concerned, means the going out of the fires of lust and ill will and delusion, and further a getting rid thereby of the round of rebirth.
18

Such thinking would condition
The Waste Land
, and during these graduate student years Tom wrote in black ink on square-lined paper lines that underpin parts of that poem. In their original form they begin, ‘So through the evening, through the violet air'. They describe wandering among ‘sunbaked houses' and encountering ‘strange images'. Among these is an image of a woman drawing ‘her long black hair out tight'. Conrad Aiken recalled reading this passage years before it was revised as part of
The Waste Land.
Imagery of ‘bats' leads to mention of ‘A man' with ‘abnormal powers' who is seen to ‘creep head downward down a wall'.
19
This derives from a passage in Bram Stoker's
Dracula
, that vampire narrative in which cycles of reincarnation involve the tormenting sexuality of the undead: a very different cycle of rebirth and destruction from the Buddha's, but one which would also be pertinent to Tom's famous poem.

During session 1911–12 he took Lanman's courses Indic Phililogy 1a and 1b (Elementary Sanskrit). He embarked on the
Panchatantra
and
Bhagavad Gita.
Meeting thrice weekly, on Monday, Wednesday and Friday afternoons, these were intimate classes. In 1a the students were a freshman, V. N. Banavalikar (who seems to have dropped out), Thomas Brown Kite, Jr (a Quaker graduate student of German), John Van Horne (a graduate student linguist), Levi Arnold Post (another graduate student, who went on to become a distinguished Greek scholar) and Tom. Course 1b was even smaller; Tom, Post and Van Horne got straight As.
20
Around this time, pondering world religions, Tom authored a fragment that draws on the
Bhagavad Gita
and ends, glancing towards sacred sacrificial ‘ghee' butter, ‘I am the fire, and the butter also'.
21
This tries to juxtapose Christ's words from the Gospel of John 11:25, ‘I am the resurrection, and the life', with allusions to the
Gita
; but the lines risk bathos: ‘butter' to many readers sounds a bit comical. Nonetheless, Tom hung on to this fragment, which clearly signals his continuing interest in religious rites, and forms part of the drafts from which
The Waste Land
would emerge.

Fired up by Paris, he now excelled in demanding areas of graduate scholarship. The following session he took two further Lanman courses on Pali, the language of the earliest Buddhist scriptures. ‘These courses in the language of the sacred books of Buddhism', Harvard's
Official Register
explained in 1913, were intended ‘for students interested in the history of religions and folk-lore', of whom Tom was certainly one.
22
He obtained a catalogue of books, published by the Vedanta Society in New York, on topics including ‘Reincarnation' and the ‘Theory of Transmigration'.
23
In Indic Philology 4 and 5, there was one other student. Shripad Krishna Belvalkar, a Hindu, had come to Harvard intending to edit Pali texts after he had met another of Tom's professors, James Haughton Woods, in India. Together Tom and Belvalkar read selections from the sacred books of Buddhism, the
Jataka
and Buddhagosa's commentary on the
Anguttara Nikaya
– lives of the Buddhist saints – as well as a selection of dialogues of the Buddha himself. The two graduate students shared an interest in chess. Conversing with this Indian fellow student and, later, reading about contemporary India made Tom wary of generalisations about ‘the Indian mind', and sympathetic towards Indian ‘aspirants after autonomy' at a time when India was still subject to ‘British rule' that often involved a ‘lack of sympathetic imagination'.
24

For Indic Philology 4, Tom and Shripad Belvalkar read through the first eighty-one pages in Part I of Copenhagen librarian Dines Andersen's
Pali Reader
. It contains ‘The Fire Sermon' in which the Buddha maintains all things are afflicted with burning (in the Pali text the word ‘addita' is repeated hypnotically); the noble disciple, disgusted with all these things, becomes divested of passion: the Pali word ‘nibbinhah' (disgusted with) recurs again and again.
25
Encouraged by Lanman and Woods, Belvalkar (graded ‘A') would become a distinguished editor, publishing in Lanman's Harvard Oriental Series. Tom, too, was a favoured, straight-A student. Within a decade his use of ‘The Fire Sermon' with its sense of disgust and repeated ‘Burning burning burning burning' would make this piece of preaching the best-known Pali text in Western literature.
26

Lanman liked Tom. During the academic session before they read ‘The Fire Sermon' in class, the great scholar presented his student with a 1906 Bombay edition of the
Upanishads
, inscribing its flyleaf, ‘Thomas Eliot, Esq., with C. R. Lanman's kindest regards and best wishes. Harvard College, May 6, 1912'.
27
Inside Tom kept a sheet of headed notepaper from 9 Farrar Street, Cambridge, Lanman's family home. Dated ‘May 22 1912', it is a handwritten list of passages from the
Upanishads
, including one (which has been ticked) from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, an ancient mystical and philosophical text about unknowability and the Absolute. In one passage thunder and lightning are envisaged as consciousness interrupting the darkness of sin. Lanman has listed a section where, as he notes, ‘Da-da-da = damyata
datta dayadhvam
'.
28
Thanks to
The Waste Land,
along with the concluding utterance ‘Shantih' (‘a formal ending to an Upanishad'), these words would become known to readers of poetry around the world.
29

‘
Life is pain
' was simply ‘a matter of fact, not necessarily pessimistic', Tom jotted in his notes on Eastern philosophy on 3 October 1913.
30
Next day he went to the Harvard Cooperative Society to buy an Indic text.
31
That September, bookish as ever, he had been browsing in the Coop's Sanskrit section, and had bought for $4.50 Paul Jakob Deussen's
Die Sutras des Vedanta,
along with Deussen's
Sechzig Upanishads des Veda
($4.95). Though he didn't know it, his $9.45 was a shrewd investment in the future of poetry; he would refer readers to Deussen's book in his notes to
The Waste Land.
32

For the previous session, 1912–13, he had enrolled in philosopher James Haughton Woods's Indic Philology 9 (Philosophical Sanskrit). Years later, in the midst of mental and emotional pain, his Harvard studies in Sanskrit and Pali – or moments from them at least – returned to him offering an articulation of burning, torment and disgust. Yet during his graduate student years these studies formed part of his preoccupation with the nature of reality. He read as a philosopher. In 1911–12 he had taken his old teacher George Herbert Palmer's ethics course, Philosophy 4, considering the theory of morals; also Woods's Philosophy 12, Greek Philosophy with Especial Reference to Plato. There were connections between these two courses. Woods, who began by outlining the ‘Origins of the Ethical Point of View of the Greeks', was well placed to compare and contrast Greek with Indic philosophy: ‘Read the Vedas and then Homer and you will feel that the Greeks have discovered a new kind of freedom', Tom noted. Woods took it for granted that poetry and philosophy could be bonded; he praised the way in Greek ‘Each thing is described with scrupulous honesty.'
33
Tom had sought such honesty in creating Prufrock, and continued to do so. Woods spoke not only of Greek ‘self-restraint' and the effort to be ‘disinterested', but also of Greek ideas of the ‘Independence of soul from body-ecstasy', of ‘a round of rebirth' and ‘transmigration' different from that of ‘India' and the ‘Buddhist'.
34