Young Eliot (36 page)

He sees the roots of religion as ultimately inscrutable. It may be possible to reconstruct an ‘external order in ritual and creed and in artistic and literary expression', but only approximately, and examination of the elements of that order moves us immediately from unstable ‘fact' into interpretation. ‘The actual
ritual
' is part of ‘a complex which includes previous stages' interpretations of the ritual of the preceding stage, and so on back indefinitely'. Though Tom's interest here was in the way ‘“
fact”
melts into interpretation, and interpretation into metaphysics', later this sense of ritual, artistic expression and religious forms being layered one on top of another in a possible order that went ‘back indefinitely' would be part of the underpinning of
The Waste Land
, and of other poems.
83

By 1913 he had been reading parts of anthropologist J. G. Frazer's vast ‘comparative work',
The Golden Bough
. He was in awe of it, but critical of how it imposed interpretations on its data:

I have not the smallest competence to criticise Dr Frazer's erudition, and his ability to manipulate this erudition I can only admire. But I cannot subscribe – for instance to the
interpretation
with which he ends his volume on the Dying God. He is accounting for the magical rites of spring festivals: –

P.266
84

At this point he seems to have read to the seminar group some of Frazer's words from the opening of his section ‘The Magic Spring'. After supplying accounts of various vegetation ceremonies, including Indian ones involving Siva and Parvati and European ones featuring ‘the May Bride, Bridegroom of the May, and so forth', Frazer (on page 266) opines:

The general explanation which we have been led to adopt of these and many similar ceremonies is that they are, or were in their origin, magical rites intended to ensure the revival of nature in spring. The means by which they were supposed to effect this end were imitation and sympathy. Led astray by his ignorance of the true causes of things, primitive man believed that in order to produce the great phenomena of nature on which his life depended he had only to imitate them …
85

Convinced such speculations are unjustified in terms of philosophical method, Tom exclaimed pointedly to his 1913 seminar group that ‘This volume appeared as recently as 1911!' Yet he argues, too, that other thinkers such as Durkheim, more methodologically up to date, also blur lines between fact and interpretation, and between individual and group consciousness, in ways that are untenable. A science of religion is impossible, however much craved. ‘I do not think that any definition of religious behavior can be satisfactory, and yet you must assume if you are to make a start at all that all these phenomena have a common meaning; you must postulate your own attitude and interpret your so-called facts into it, and how can this be science?'
86

Tom the impressive graduate student cut through other thinkers' assumptions with commendable incisiveness. Yet he also tied himself in knots. Tom the poet retained several ideas and images his reading supplied. This can be seen only in retrospect. In Cambridge, as he walked between Emerson Hall and Ash Street for the umpteenth time, he had other thoughts on his mind. He was very struck by the arrival of the English philosopher Bertrand Russell, lionised as a visiting professor at Harvard where he was delivering a lecture series on ‘Our Knowledge of the External World'. Russell (who found Harvard ‘soul-destroying') invited students to visit him in his office, and on 27 March 1914 Tom went there along with a friend of his, fellow philosophy graduate student Raphael Demos whom he knew through the Philosophical Club. After talking to the two students, Russell observed that

one, named Eliot, is very well-dressed and polished, with manners of the finest Etonian type; the other is an unshaven Greek, appropriately named Demos, who earns money for his fees by being a waiter in a restaurant. The two were obviously friends, and had on neither side the slightest consciousness of social difference.
87

Tom described himself later that year as ‘a thorough snob', but that was not how Russell saw him.
88
Tom audited some of Russell's logic classes at Harvard and they spoke about Heraclitus (whom Russell was about to discuss in a lecture on ‘Mysticism and Logic'). ‘Yes, he always reminds me of Villon', said Tom – presumably linking the medieval French poet François Villon's lament for the vanished snows of yesteryear with Heraclitus' perception of transience expressed through the idea that one cannot step into the same river twice. Russell thought Tom's remark ‘so good that I always wished he would make another'. But Tom, in whom shyness and incisive eloquence often contended, was ‘extraordinarily silent'.
89

They met again on Sunday 10 May 1914 at a garden party held at the house of Santayana's and Jean Verdenal's Francophile friend Benjamin Apthorpe Fuller, high-minded author of
The Problem of Evil in Plotinus
, which saw ‘Evil' as linked to ‘the body'.
90
Fuller lived in the country with his wife and his mother, and Russell thought him ‘an Oxfordized Harvardian, cultivated, full of the classics, talking as like an Englishman as he can, full of good nature, but feeble – quite without the ferocity that is needed to redeem culture'. Noticing Tom, too, at this party, Russell decided he was ‘a very similar type, proficient in Plato, intimate with French literature from Villon to Vildrach [Vildrac], very capable of a certain exquisiteness of appreciation, but lacking in the crude insistent passion that one must have in order to achieve anything'.
91
As Russell observed the shy graduate student, so Tom watched Russell. His observation of this visitor at the Fullers' home prompted his later poem ‘Mr. Apollinax', in which the physicality, behaviour and ‘dry and passionate talk' of a visitor to the United States discomfit his academic hosts, whose logic is less than perfect: ‘“His pointed ears … He must be unbalanced.”'
92
Apollinax comes over as clever, disruptive, ready to violate the proprieties. Unsettling this genteel milieu, he makes the poem's speaker think of the Classical sex god Priapus juxtaposed with the ‘shy figure' of the delicate-sounding ‘Fragilion': this (though the poem was authored considerably later) was perceptive, for Russell liked to give free rein to his sexual appetite. Tom, customarily far more repressed in his conduct, remained part of the polite New England milieu, but knew well that it needed disrupting. As a forceful personality and as a philosopher, Russell was fascinating. However, for some time, though philosophical argument was certainly important to Tom, he had known it was not his sole concern.

Since at least the previous summer he had had lines to learn, and had been enjoying mixing with people who were not philosophers. He had been playing the leading man, Lord Bantock, in
Fanny and the Servant Problem
, performed in summer 1913 by the Cambridge Social Dramatic Club in Brattle Hall, not far from Harvard Yard. The female lead, Lady Bantock, was a dark-eyed, sophisticated young woman called Amy de Gozzaldi. Schooled at Cambridge's Berkeley Street School along with Tom's cousin Eleanor (who lived along the road at 1 Berkeley Place), Amy had grown up at 96 Brattle Street. Both girls loved acting; their school had a tradition of performing plays. Amy would act in the Social Dramatic Club for much of her life. For a few years she and Eleanor had been schoolfellows with another girl with a passion for drama, Emily Hale from Boston. Emily's mother had had a mental breakdown, so the girl had been brought up by her uncle and aunt, the Reverend and Mrs Joyce Carroll Perkins. After Berkeley Street School Emily had attended Miss Porter's School in Connecticut where the headmaster was married to a Hale. Tom's parents knew the Perkinses, and were familiar with the circles in which Emily and her friends moved. Amy's mother was active in the recently founded Cambridge Historical Society; Eleanor, who wrote plays as well as acting in them, had played with the Eliot children at East Gloucester and Cambridge since infancy. Emily's uncle was a music critic for the
Boston Globe
; her father Edward was, like several of Tom's uncles, a Unitarian minister. He had taught at Harvard Divinity School and became first assistant to the Reverend Edward Everett Hale in Boston. At one point, in 1900, it had been expected that the Reverend Edward Everett Hale would be succeeded in his ecclesiastical ‘pastorate' by one of Tom's relations, the Reverend Samuel A. Eliot.
93
Each of them born in 1891, Amy, Eleanor and Emily belonged, like Tom, to the cultured upper echelon of New England society.

Lord Bantock was a major part. Since it was customary for the players to work up from minor roles to larger ones, probably Tom had done so too; later in life Eleanor Hinkley stated that his ‘first dramatic appearance' was in February 1913, but his interest in drama predates that.
94
Certainly he enjoyed the work of the Social Dramatic Club. Though much of its archive was destroyed in a flood, a list of productions survives, and Tom's enthusiasm would fit with his father's concerns about his son spending too much time on drama. During Tom's junior undergraduate year the Social Dramatic Club, an amateur group mounting three or four shows annually, had as its 75th performance
She Stoops to Conquer
, a work alluded to in
The Waste Land
. While he was away in Paris they had performed J. M. Barrie's
The Admirable Crichton
; as one of Tom's friends put it, this was long remembered since ‘one of our better actresses walked on stage clad in a rather short leopard skin with no shoes or stockings – quite a sensation in those days and a fine conversation piece for the rest of the season'.
95

His friend's delight in the frisson that a glimpse of leopard-skinned flesh could cause in Cambridge would be matched by Tom's own mischievous coining of the name ‘Professor Channing-Cheetah' in his priapic poem ‘Mr. Apollinax'.
96
The 1911–12 season had seen the Club performing Robert Marshall's comedy
The Second in Command
, in which a young woman reads aloud to a young man from a romantic novel and enacts what she reads: ‘“She stood gazing into his eyes, the sunlight turning her soft hair to golden lustre. Scarce knowing what she did her arms crept round his neck (
places her arms round
HILDEBRAND'S
neck
) And in a moment as a wild and sudden blush leapt to her cheek, she kissed him passionately.” (
kisses
HILDEBRAND).'
97
Tom's poems liked to mock such stagey, self-conscious romantic effusions. Sometimes, however, as in the sense of ‘a gesture and a pose' in his poem ‘La Figlia Che Piange', his verse shows an acute awareness of theatricality:

Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair –

Clasp your flowers to you with a pained surprise –

Fling them to the ground and turn

With a fugitive resentment in your eyes:

But weave, weave the sunlight in your hair.
98

Henry Arthur Jones's
The Manoeuvres of Jane
in which an English lord wonders how ‘self-possessed' he really is and Anthony Hope's
The Adventures of the Lady Ursula
completed the Dramatic Club's 1911–12 season.
99
1912–13 brought John Hartley Manners's
The House Next Door
, which staged English anti-Semitism (‘Jews, Jews, Jews everywhere one turns')
100
and Israel Zangwill's
Merely Mary Ann,
the production that preceded
Fanny and the Servant Problem.
During Tom's last year as a Harvard graduate student, the Club mounted productions of Somerset Maugham's
Jack Straw,
with its disconcerting waiter, and Hubert Henry Davis's 1914 comedy
A Single Man
in which a middle-aged writer is attracted to and eventually marries his secretary.

In such English plays well-bred men fall in love with actresses; upper-crust characters sport names like Agatha; situations unfold in country houses; upper-class mores and cockney dialect mix; scenarios are clever and traditionally plotted. Tom's poems might mock these kinds of romantic comedy, but they would supply narratives and images for his future life and work. Sometimes, much later, his own plays would mix their style with plots taken from ancient Greek drama, attempting to render ‘degrees of reality' and to appeal to popular audiences. The most striking theatrical moment in Davis's
A Single Man
is when, at the end of the second act, a confused group of lovers dance round and round to the nursery rhyme ‘Here we go round the mulberry bush'.
101
Having read much about interpretations of dances and rituals, about a decade later when his own love-life had become a disaster, Tom would move from thoughts of ‘Lips that would kiss' to a parody of that same nursery rhyme:

Here we go round the prickly pear

Prickly pear prickly pear

Here we go round the prickly pear

At five o'clock in the morning.
102

Acting provides a way for people to overcome their shyness. Tom, whose shyness was often perceived as arrogance, had worked hard to transform himself from the schoolboy whose public speaking was poor into the graduate student suitable for a starring role. Just as his St Louis dancing classes had been a way to meet girls, so, the Social Dramatic Club offered similar opportunities. It had been set up as a merger between two older societies in 1891 to meet ‘in Brattle Hall on Saturday evenings' with ‘some dramatic performance or other entertainment given in the early part of the evening, followed by simple refreshments and – from eleven to twelve o'clock – dancing'.
103
The ‘Brattle Hall dances', where Conrad Aiken remembered seeing Tom, were probably descendants of these functions. Very different from his all-male philosophy seminars, and from the all-female schools attended by Amy de Gozzaldi, Eleanor Hinkley, Emily Hale and their friends, the ‘Social Dramatic' encouraged respectable Cambridge young folk to mingle. Harvard's drama clubs were male-dominated, though some Radcliffe students participated; the Social Dramatic drew on a wider gene pool. Under its auspices young women and men danced, flirted, and even indulged in onstage kissing.