Young Eliot (34 page)

We are here in face of an infinite regress, dealing with interpenetrating systems; so we handle the world, just like any object, through categories, and can arrive at a metaphysical construction which will be part of another system, bearing just the necessary and systematic relation to that which we have been handling as the world system, as the perception does to the object. Hence we can know neither an object, nor our own ideas, nor the world, except as phenomena: and our knowledge is itself a phenomenon – as known.
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This, like Tom's work for Bakewell's 1912–13 metaphysics course, Philosophy 20c (dealing with the nature of reality), is the stuff of grad-school seminars, hard going for non-philosophers. Yet a sense of potentially infinite regress involving interpenetrating systems is just what
The Waste Land
, questioning what is real and unreal,
would offer readers – not because it is a drily Kantian speculation but because its poet, striving to express his mental agony, had been nourished by such complex ways of thinking.

Studying Kant with Bakewell, Tom grew interested in agnostic, critical and especially ‘sceptical' attitudes which called ‘any dogmatic point of view' into question. Sceptics he had in mind included ‘[David] Hume [F. H.] Bradley [Harold] Joachim' and ‘[Arthur] Balfour'. The Oxford philosopher Bradley (and to a lesser extent his colleague Joachim) began to preoccupy him. Tom's philosophical essays could be quite metaphorical: as spring came to Ash Street in 1913, that April, he discussed philosophical ideas almost as if they were forms of vegetation:

… the germ of scepticism is quickened always by the soil of system (rich in contradictions). As the system decomposes, the doubts push through; and the decay is so general and fructifying that we are no longer sure enough of anything to draw the line between knowledge and ignorance. For Bradley the only recourse is an Absolute which maintains some of the visual features of German Idealism, but none of the
Gemüth
; which represents in fact only the pathetic primitive human
Credo
in ultimate explanation and ultimate reality which haunts us like the prayers of childhood. This Absolute is mystical, because desparate. Ultimate truth remains inaccessible; and it only remains for Mr. Joachim to shatter what little Bradley has left standing, by urging upon us that we have no right to affirm (though he still affirms it!) that there is truth at all.

Tom was fascinated by such intense scepticism, even as he studied the ‘mystical' and explored the idea that ‘in order to know we must begin with
faith
'.
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What was going on in his philosophical investigations highlighted a continuing clash. On the one side stood the values of religious commitment so prevalent in his mother's writings and (however scornful he now was of Unitarianism) part of his own upbringing. Opposite were ranged intellectual forces of corrosive scepticism, questioning the very bases of thought and belief. Out of that clash came not just philosophising but also, in succeeding years, poems simultaneously fascinated by questions of knowledge and provocatively sceptical or hostile towards established systems of faith.

Keeping up his interest in Bergson, he read the French thinker's article on consciousness in the October 1911
Hibbert Journal.
Yet despite Bergson being the subject of a popular 1912 series of Harvard lectures by E. C. Wilm, Tom's scepticism eroded his earlier Bergsonian fervour. Some time after reading the
Hibbert
piece, he attempted to ‘raise objections' to and highlight ‘inconsistencies' in
Matter and Memory
and
Creative Evolution.
He subjected the original French texts to close scrutiny, bringing to bear some of his reading in Greek philosophy. ‘Bergson's critics', he summarised, ‘call him a mystic. With this appellation I am not disposed to quarrel; though, as at present elaborated in Bergson's work, it is rather a weakling mysticism.'
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Conrad Aiken was glad that by March 1913 Tom had ‘shunted Bergson down the hill'.
56
Yet Tom remained fascinated by mysticism – and not just from Asia. ‘I'm eager to have wisdom from you
in re
these your Buddhistic and Indic mysteries', Aiken wrote; but Tom read about other mysticisms too.
57
Sometimes drawing on ways of thinking that he had encountered in Paris, he took copious notes from books on mysticism, asceticism and primitive religion. In November 1912 he purchased his own copy of William James's
The Varieties of Religious Experience
. Making notes from this book, he concentrated on considerations of Eastern and Western mystical thought, interested in ‘signs' associated with mysticism, including ‘Ineffability' and ‘Passivity'.
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James's was only one of many works in this area that he perused. Others included such slightly older writings as W. R. Inge's
Christian Mysticism
(1899) and Ernest Murisier's
Les Maladies du sentiment religieux
(1903), from which he took notes on such topics as ‘L'extase' and ‘lévitation'. He read recent publications including Henri Delacroix's
Études d'histoire et de psychologie du mysticisme: les grands mystiques chrétiens
(1908), which interested him with its detailing of St Theresa's sexualised ecstasy, and the 1912 edition of Evelyn Underhill's six hundred-page
Mysticism
, which he summarised on notecards.

From Underhill he copied out the words, ‘If we would cease, once for all, to regard visions & voices as objective, and be content to see in them forms of symbolic expression, ways in which the subconscious activity of the spiritual self reaches the surface mind, many of the disharmonies noticeable would fade away. Visionary experience … is a picture which the mind constructs … from raw materials already at its disposal.' Though Underhill did not say so, this argument brought mystical experiences close to Symbolist poetry and the kind of verse that interested Tom. As he read about St Theresa and St John of the Cross, he pondered experiences of ‘The Mystic Way' as outlined by Underhill, noting that its stages were

1.    Revelation of Divine Reality

2.    Purgation

3.    Illumination

4.    Dark Night of the Soul

5.    Union

Tom stored away images and ways of thinking that would fuel his poetry for decades. Yet he read as a fascinated sceptic, taking on board not just Underhill's sympathetic commentaries but also the more distanced treatment in Josiah Moses's 1906
Pathological Aspects of Religion
. Its accounts of phallicism led Tom to note the ‘Sexual element' was ‘very dominant'.
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His note-taking in this and related areas, and the subtle changes in the handwriting of his notes suggest that his interest, though tied at times to particular papers he was writing, went on for an extended period.

It was spurred in part by his encounters with Parisian intellectual life. There were also links to the work of Harvard philosophers including Josiah Royce. Tom jotted down that the chapters dealing with ‘Realism and Mysticism in the History of Thought' and ‘The Unity of Being, and the Mystical Interpretation' in Royce's
The World and the Individual
(1900) constituted ‘An excellent exposition of philosophical mysticism'.
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There was intellectual grit in all this, but also voyeuristic fascination in some of the stranger psychosexual aspects of religious extremism. All added fuel to Tom's poetic as well as his philosophical, often religiously inflected imagination. Sitting by the fire in his Ash Street lodgings, or more sumptuously provided for in Harvard's libraries, he read books, papers in specialist journals, essays, memoirs and scriptures.

His unusual intellectualism may have made him intimidating, but he knew how to counterbalance it. Besides, it also made him friends among some of the ablest graduate students. The most remarkable of these was the American Jewish thinker Norbert Wiener, a prodigy from infancy and later the pioneer of cybernetics. Like Tom, Wiener had been born in Missouri; his family had moved to Boston when he was very young. His father, who taught Slavic languages at Harvard, had home-schooled his nervous, introspective son; by fifteen this prodigy was a Harvard graduate student with a background in zoology and philosophy, though he also suffered from depression. Interested in the border zone where philosophy and mathematics overlapped, he had wanted to study with Royce, but Royce was ill. So the teenager worked instead on mathematical logic first with E. V. Huntington of the Mathematics Department, then with a visiting professor from Tufts, Karl Schmidt, who supervised Wiener's PhD. This compared aspects of the algebraic thinking of Ernst Schroeder, A. N. Whitehead and Bertrand Russell.

Intellectually hungry, Tom, too, was studying with Schmidt. In 1912–13 he took his course in advanced logic, Philosophy 8. It included an introduction to the algebra of logic. This helps explain why, a little later, Tom made reference to ‘my friend Dr Wiener'.
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Wiener, who obtained his Harvard doctorate in 1912 at the age of eighteen, was someone with whom he could discuss his most abstruse philosophical interests. A problem for advanced graduate students in the humanities can be intellectual isolation. As Tom progressed through graduate courses, probably no other Harvard student covered quite the same range. However, though his explorations in the algebra of logic and the nature of reality may have cut him off in some senses from many people around him, his philosophical agility gave him a position of clear utility within the Harvard system. Having impressed his professors, on 10 June 1912 he was appointed ‘Assistant in Philosophy for one year from September 1st 1912'.
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Renewed the following session, this teaching post demonstrated that at least some of his studies could be useful to other people. It paid him, too, for the first time in his life, a small monthly salary. His job was to teach ‘sections' (seminar groups with about two dozen students in each) from the big undergraduate class Philosophy A. Drawing sometimes on Professor Bakewell's
Source Book in Ancient Philosophy
,
this course covered Greek Philosophy, concentrating on the Pre-Socratics, Plato and Aristotle; then, moving through Plotinus and Seneca, it explored Christian thought of the medieval Patristic and Scholastic periods as well as their legacy. Philosophy A's reading list involved work by several authors who mattered to Tom, including Dante and St Augustine
.
In
The Waste Land
and elsewhere he would draw several times on Augustine's
Confessions
where he encountered an intense sense of self-consciousness to match his own.

He was quite able to teach this material, but it kept him on his toes: Plotinus and Seneca one week, Augustine the next. He had to set exercises and prepare students to answer such exam questions as ‘Compare very briefly the doctrines of Heraclitus with those of the Eleatics'.
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Administratively, he occasionally stumbled. On Friday mornings in the fall and winter of 1913, he had to teach two Philosophy A sections in Emerson Hall – at 10 a.m., then at noon – and was expected to take a roll-call, sending details of this to the university authorities. When no list was received for Friday 7 November's 10 a.m. meeting of section G, an official named Cram sent Tom a solemn pro-forma: ‘It is important for me to know whether there was an exercise held that day, and if possible to have the names of the absentees. Awaiting your reply…'
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If Tom was annoyed to receive this message, he could console himself that it was addressed, flatteringly but inaccurately, to ‘Dr T. S. Eliot'. Still doing his coursework, he had not even started writing his doctoral thesis, but was recognised nonetheless as a distinguished student. Active in Harvard's Philosophy Club, he participated in its twice-monthly meetings in Emerson Hall room C during session 1912–13, and was elected its 1913–14 president.

His interest in Indian philosophical studies, as well as in poetry, led him to go to hear Rabindranath Tagore, who gave a series of lectures (later published as
Sadhana
) in the Philosophy Department in the early part of 1913. Tagore's topics included ‘The Problem of Evil' and ‘Man's Relation to the Universe'. He was also invited to speak to the Harvard Philosophy Club on 18 February 1913 about ‘Brahma' – the creator, self-born in the lotus flower, a fundamental topic that Tom had pondered. Admired by Professor Woods, Tagore was asked back for further lectures in April when Robert Rattray, a Unitarian student who knew Tom through the Philosophy Club, was particularly enthusiastic about the ‘famous philosopher-poet of India', and wrote to the
Crimson
on 8 April to ‘call attention' to Tagore's significance:

In the Times Literary Supplement for March 20, 1913, leading article, is the following:

‘A new star, perhaps of the first magnitude, has lately appeared in the Indian poet, Rabindranath Tagore, whose exquisite art and keen vision of the eternal through the temporal stamp him as a religious genius of rare power. It may be hoped that the appreciation of his poetry in Miss Underhill's new book (The Mystic Way, by Evelyn Underhill) will procure many readers for the cheaper edition of “Gitanjali.”…'
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Tagore's prose translations of Bengali ‘song offerings' in
Gitanjali
(1912) had been published with an introduction by W. B. Yeats. They were likened to biblical texts. Yet their conventional poetic diction was far removed from what Tom was attempting. He listened to Tagore, but any comment he made does not survive. Writing poetry involves resisting some influences, integrating others. It would be several years before elements important to Tagore – Indic traditions, mysticism, philosophy and poetry – would be configured very differently by Tom.