Young Eliot (33 page)

Tom took copious notes on the Presocratic philosophers, especially Heraclitus whose work had survived in fragments, Woods explained in October 1911, because it was ‘quotable'. Deploying alliteration, repetition and even rhyme, it was ‘Poetic'. Reading G. T. W. Patrick's
Heraclitus of Ephesus
, Tom noted Patrick's view that it was ‘Impossible to understand Hct. unless we consider the ethical and religious character of his mind.'
35
Speaking of Heraclitus' belief in a ‘primary substance –
pur
', Woods explained that this substance was not quite ‘fire as we should say', but was ‘accepted because he can find no better word'. Heraclitus presented a vision of flux that involved the elements. Tom took dictation:

anathumiasis
: a difficult word. Means the movement from earth towards
pur.
A kind of substitute for
air.
While the fire is solidifying into water and earth you have the contrary action going on in the same substance. And the world is merely the result of these contrary strains.

The essence of the substance is the flux.
36

This was oddly fascinating. Tom wrote of ‘fire' and ‘flow' in a poetic fragment of his own.
37
Woods pointed out there were three worthwhile modern editions of Heraclitus; the best arrangement of the fragments was that of Hermann Alexander Diels. Heraclitus, Woods explained, ‘complains of the inability of the ordinary man to pierce the appearance of stability and see the finer play of the world movement'. He was the ‘originator of the idea of opposites … He shows that the opposites do not neutralize each other, but may sometimes be the same thing.' More than two decades after noting all this down, Tom returned to the Heraclitus section of Diels's
Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker
and took from it two fragments as epigraphs for ‘Burnt Norton', first of his
Four Quartets
. The initial epigraph means, ‘Though the law of things is universal in scope, ordinary people live as if they had their own insight'; the second means, ‘the way up and the way down are the same'.
38
Each of the
Four Quartets
seems to correspond to one of the elements: air, earth, water, fire. All this is just one of many indications of how even the most recondite details of his graduate learning bore fruit in later poetry.

Yet larger-scale philosophical thought processes also shaped his poetic procedures. Discussing Heraclitus' habit of seeing ‘the same object in different relations', Woods encouraged ideas of juxtaposition and shifting interpretations.
39
In poetry Tom was always open to recontextualising older materials so that, without altering the original words, he let them be read in new ways. In retrospect, we can see that he shared this technique with other well-read modernist writers from Ezra Pound to James Joyce and Hugh MacDiarmid; it was encouraged, too, by his philosophical studies. Grounded in Western thought from the ancient Greeks through Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz to Kant and recent speculation about the nature of reality, he grew increasingly interested in fundamental questions of knowledge and interpretation; his awareness of these was enhanced by his schooling in Indic and Oriental philosophy. Reading Spinoza's
Ethics
, he jotted comments in the margin: ‘Intellect an abstraction. There is only the stream of ideas.'
40
Ideas, reality and flux obsessed him. He was not infallible but was – and remains – hard to keep up with. Reading Bergson in French, then in English, he also read Patanjali in the original Pali, the
Upanishads
in Sanskrit, Heraclitus in Greek, Kant in German, Dante in Italian – and, as for Spinoza, he read that great Jewish philosopher in elegant seventeenth-century Latin. No other major twentieth-century poet was so thoroughly and strenuously educated.

Though focused on the philosophy classroom, his studies involved, too, aspects of modern scientific culture. Psychology was a field in which William James's work and the establishment of a psychological laboratory upstairs at Emerson Hall had made Harvard a centre for advanced investigation. In 1912–13 Tom studied in Philosophy 20b the relations between mind and body with leading psychologist Hugo Münsterberg, a German Jewish intellectual hired by James and trained in Berlin by Wilhelm Wundt. Practically-minded, the prolific Münsterberg had recently published
Psychotherapy
; he had little time for mysticism, though he did admit, in his idiosyncratic idiom, that it could have value for those with personal problems. ‘The own personality is submerging into a larger all-embracing hold and thus inhibits the small cares and troubles of merely personal origin. The consciousness sinks into God, a mental process which reaches its maximum in mysticism. The haphazard pains of the personality disappear and are suppressed by the joy and glory of the whole.'
41
Tom was much more fascinated by this sort of thing than was Münsterberg, but eventually Tom's doctoral thesis would contain a chapter entitled ‘The Psychologist's Treatment of Knowledge'. During the previous session, having come into contact with the Parisian explorations of Janet, he had also embarked on an elementary laboratory course in Experimental Psychology, Philosophy 21, taught by Münsterberg's colleague, Dr Herbert Sidney Langfeld. Dutifully, Tom took notes on how the skin reacted to touch, pain, heat and cold. These jottings, which appear burned at the edge, make it look as if at some point his practical experiments went too far, but perhaps he was just careless with one of the pungent Gauloise cigarettes he favoured for much of his life: a Parisian vice that may not always have endeared him to the other residents of 16 Ash Street.
42

Langfeld's scholarly concerns included synaesthesia and the effects of fasting. Tom had shown interest in synaesthesia in poems he had worked on in Paris; this phenomenon fascinated several Symbolist poets as well as writers on mysticism. Still thinking of his friend as working in this vein, Conrad Aiken, probably his closest poetic associate during these years, wrote to him from Rome where he had gone to enjoy life with his wife Jessie, asking if Tom had a ‘superfluous copy of the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', which Aiken could not get out of his head. He mentioned he had written ‘a caricature of T. S. Eliot Esq., – O, a most seductively horrible pome – entitled “Decadence.” – It is a caricature worthy of Beerbohm. It has you, and your poems (the earlier Lamia kind as well as the later Prufrock variety) and your hoisted Jesus, and all; a complete composite photograph. Tom posed as a decadent!'
43
Though this poem does not survive, and Aiken did not mail it, clearly Tom's print of Gauguin's yellow Christ – which could be linked to synaesthesia, martyrdom and Paris – appeared part of his ‘Decadence'. ‘What have you been writing – futurist poems?' Aiken asked, mentioning that he had written ‘some dozen or less of long narrative poems' himself. He also asked about Tom's ‘latest meditations'.
44
With no wife, no long narrative poems and no grand travel plans, Tom in Ash Street was finding that philosophical ‘meditations' took up a demanding amount of his time. After the excitements of Europe and the poems he had made there, his decision to return to the States and to pursue graduate work in philosophy may have curbed his writing of verse. His courses were intellectually strenuous. Pursuing them involved unremitting interrogation of the grounds of knowledge and belief.

Eastern and Western philosophical and religious systems overlapped, but also conflicted. Though Tom grappled with them in ways that most people could not manage, they posed apparently impossible choices. Studying Greek philosophy alongside Sanskrit and Pali was almost mind-boggling. However much, sitting in class beside Belvalkar, or chatting with professors Lanman and Woods, he was attracted to and deeply impressed by Indic thought, he found it unsettlingly problematic. In Woods he saw a professional able to teach both Greek Philosophy and Philosophical Pali. Yet for Tom the two came to clash in ways he could not reconcile.

Two years spent in the study of Sanskrit under Charles Lanman, and a year in the mazes of Patanjali's metaphysics under the guidance of James Woods, left me in a state of enlightened mystification. A good half of the effort of understanding what the Indian philosophers were after – and their subtleties make most of the great European philosophers look like schoolboys – lay in trying to erase from my mind all the categories and kinds of distinction common to European philosophy from the time of the Greeks. My previous and concomitant study of European philosophy was hardly better than an obstacle. And I came to the conclusion – seeing also that the ‘influence' of Brahmin and Buddhist thought upon Europe, as in Schopenhauer, Hartmann, and Deussen, had largely been through romantic misunderstanding – that my only hope of really penetrating to the heart of that mystery would lie in forgetting how to think and feel as an American or a European: which, for practical as well as sentimental reasons, I did not wish to do.
45

This later (1930s) account may telescope chronology somewhat – Tom's interest in Buddhism continued for several years – but it shows how, even as he made excellent academic progress, he was studying systems of belief which, potentially, might overwhelm everything he had been brought up to be. As with his momentary conversion to Bergsonism, this had its attractions, bringing real intellectual excitement, and a sense of wide horizons. In the long term it would be of most use to him as a poet in providing, through its very clash of styles of thought, a way of helping to articulate torment, unknowability and breakdown.

Yet it offered valuable philosophical guidance. If psychologists including Janet questioned the nature of the self, then in Buddhism Tom found a profound scepticism about the desirability of such a thing as personality. Indic Philology 9 involved, among other things, a study of the Yoga system and Patanjali's
Sutras.
These
Sutras
contained an examination of what Woods, working on his Harvard Oriental Series translation of
The Yoga-System of Patanjali: Or the Ancient Hindu Doctrine of Concentration of Mind
while he taught Tom, termed ‘sense-of-personality'. But the ultimate aim was to move beyond and even extinguish this in achieving a transcendental ‘higher passionlessness' or enlightened ‘Isolation' beyond what the Indic text termed the ‘Rain-cloud of knowable things'.
46
Tom's intellect was moulded by such ideas. They would return, sometimes as metaphors, in his poetry, encouraging praise of ‘impersonality' in his prose. More generally, they shaped his character.

So interested was he in Eastern thought that in 1913–14 he attended an additional Harvard lecture course given by Masaharu Anesaki, a visiting professor from the Imperial University of Tokyo. Anesaki pioneered religious studies as an academic subject in Japan, and had published on ‘How Christianity Appeals to a Japanese Buddhist' in the
Hibbert Journal
. He maintained that ‘No religion, not even the most catholic or cosmopolitan in its character, can claim an absolute unity and homogeneity.'
47
Invited by his ‘old friend' J. H. Woods, Anesaki held Harvard's newly endowed Professorship of Japanese Literature and Life. His course Philosophy 24a, Schools of Religious and Philosophical Thought in Japan, ranged from ‘Buddhist Transcendentalism' through ‘Mystic Pantheism' to ‘Confucianism' and aspects of Western thought in Japan.
48
Auditing Anesaki's lectures in the winter of 1913–14, Tom noted in black ink on his favoured square-lined paper not only the statement that life was pain but also the notion of the cyclic ‘turning of the wheel' in Buddhist thought, and that ‘Everything is interrelated.'
49
In the disturbingly interrelated, painful cycles of
The Waste Land
such ideas would return with a vengeance. The thought that Anesaki expounded was mind-bending: ‘does reality exist or not?… The views that the world exists, or not; both are false; the truth lies in the middle, transcending both views.'

Increasingly preoccupied with considerations of the nature of reality, Tom took notes attentively. He was fascinated, too, by Anesaki's imagistic details. Used to reading about lotus flowers in Sanskrit and Pali, he noted how ‘the lotus alone is perfect, because it has many flowers and many fruits
at once.
The flowers & fruit are simultaneous. The real entity represented in the fruit, its manifestation in the flower. Mutual relation of final reality and manifestation.'
50
Tom transcribed, too, Anesaki's explanation of a Pali text's conception of ‘past present and future', as well as absorbing Anesaki's class handouts about ‘the parable of plants nourished by rain' and ideas about ‘Apperception of reality', the ‘Hallucinatory' and ‘Neither being nor non-being'.
51
Studying the thirteenth-century Buddhist thinker Nichiren, Tom was asked to consider ‘the connection between individual salvation and universal salvation'.
52
So, in a Japanese context, he thought again about the relationship between individual, society and belief which, in a very different environment, had been an issue central to the work of Maurras in Paris. Over twenty years later, considering past, present and future in ‘Burnt Norton', Tom returned to the image of the lotus, to ideas of ultimate reality and to hallucination. No other Western poet of his era was more professionally schooled in traditional Indic and Japanese thought.

A good sense of his wrestling with complex theories of knowledge is afforded by essays that he wrote for Philosophy 15 (The Kantian Philosophy). This was one of two courses he took in 1912–13 with Charles Montague Bakewell, a visiting Yale professor who had studied at Harvard with Woods, William James and Josiah Royce, before establishing himself as an authority on ancient Greek philosophers including Heraclitus. Bakewell had served recently as President of the American Philosophical Society. He thought well of Tom, grading his essays A and A-. Supplying ‘an irreverent burlesque of Kant's thought', Tom, that fan of music halls, wrote a ‘Report on the Kantian Categories', trying to set out Kant's thinking on how different systems of thought and interpretation might interact: