Young Eliot (37 page)

The kissing was famous. Dick Hall, whom Tom later described as one of the ‘old theatrical friends of mine from the days of the Cambridge Dramatic Society', told heroic tales about it.
104
It was also remembered by a local Unitarian minister's son called Edward who had grown up in Irving Street, just along the road from Josiah Royce. At the age of eighteen Edward played the part of Ernest Bennet, Lady Bantock's second footman, in the summer 1913 production of
Fanny and the Servant Problem.
During the play the second footman has to kiss Lady Bantock, but in real life the young actor was intimidated by the well-travelled, sophisticated twenty-two-year-old Amy so his kissing was too tentative. ‘At rehearsals the director continually encouraged him to be more bold. At length, on the night of the performance, he outdid himself in a kiss that he remembered for months.'
105
In fact, he remembered it for decades: ‘billions cheered:I shall never forget'.
106
The second footman's name was Edward Estlin Cummings, later better known as E. E. Cummings.

Tom got to kiss and be kissed by Amy de Gozzaldi several times in the play. Amy played Fanny, an actress who has married Vernon, Lord Bantock, and turns out to be the niece of his butler. That butler seeks to order Fanny about, despite the machinations of her agent, Newte: hence the ‘servant problem' in English humorist Jerome K. Jerome's play. Tom's onstage interactions with Amy were rather different from his exchanges with the members of the Harvard Philosophical Club:

FANNY (
she laughs – takes his hand in hers
). I wish you hadn't asked Newte any questions about me. It would have been so nice to feel that you had married me – just because you couldn't help it – (
laughs
) – just because I was I; and nothing else mattered.

VERNON. Let's forget I ever did. (
He kneels down beside her.
) I didn't do it for my own sake, as you know. A man in my position
has
to think of other people. His wife has to take her place in society. People insist upon knowing something about her. It's not enough for the stupid ‘County' that she's the cleverest, most bewilderingly beautiful, bewitching lady in the land.

FANNY (
she laughs
). And how long will you think all that?

VERNON. For ever, and ever, and ever.

FANNY. Oh, you dear boy. (
She kisses him.
) You don't know how a woman loves the man she loves to love her (
Laughs
.) Isn't that complicated?

VERNON. Not at all. We're just the same. We love to love the woman we love.

FANNY (
laughs
). Provided the ‘County' will let us. And the County has said: A man may not marry his butler's niece.

VERNON (
laughing
). You've got butlers on the brain. If I ever do run away with my own cook or under-housemaid, it will be your doing.

FANNY. You haven't the pluck! The ‘County' would laugh at you. You men are so frightened of being laughed at.
107

Gently exploring issues of gender, social class and English mores, such plays were just the sort of thing that the markedly Anglophile Social Dramatic Club relished. E. E. Cummings seems to have felt some jealousy of Tom's role and the relationship with Amy de Gozzaldi that it afforded him; Tom, who later imagined Amy dancing to the music of
Carmen
with ‘huge eyes', did not complain.
108
The woman he had fallen in love with, though, was not Amy (who went on to marry Tom's fellow actor and Harvard classmate Dick Hall) but her friend Emily Hale. Given that Emily had known Amy and Tom's cousin Eleanor so long, it seems inconceivable that she was not watching Lord and Lady Bantock's performance closely.

Later, Emily Hale acted in several Dramatic Society productions, and taught acting at various colleges, but in her youth her family forbade her to go on the professional stage – it was not considered respectable. Having returned from Miss Porter's School to the Boston area, she was a regular visitor to Eleanor's house. Planned from early in the year, the June 1912 fiftieth anniversary of the Berkeley Street School and the setting up that February of a Berkeley Street School Association (in which Amy's mother was to the fore) brought together a number of former pupils.
109
It was in 1912 that Tom met Emily through Eleanor.

Shrewd, observant, musical, slim and elegant, Emily, like Tom's mother, was intelligent but had not gone to university. She had the polite manners of an upbringing in Chestnut Hill, just outside Boston, and of her several single-sex schools. Her ability to act helped conceal a history of familial damage: in early childhood she had had to cope with the death of her infant brother, then with separation from her increasingly mentally ill mother. Those close to Emily (including Tom) detected a vulnerability about her, as well as a gift for friendship. She could be very fine company; with those whom she really trusted she was a prolific, entertaining correspondent. People who knew her less intimately sometimes thought her snobbish, aloof and repressed. Tom, too, could be perceived this way. His intellectual brilliance, and the persistent shyness he had fought hard to overcome through various pursuits from acting to taking some boxing lessons in Boston, could set him apart. Many years later, Cummings, when it was pointed out to him that his fellow actor had been T. S. Eliot, remembered ‘a snob, cold, older than me, aloof, never sat with the rest of the cast at rehearsals, immaculately dressed; you know, a type “the frozen jeunesse dorée”'.
110
In choosing this ‘gilded youth' for the part of an English lord, the play's director may have detected something similar too, yet could not have thought Tom too ‘frozen' to kiss Amy convincingly.

At twenty-four, Tom knew St Louis, Boston, Cape Ann and parts of Maine. He had been to London, Paris, Munich and Italy; he was sophisticated, nattily dressed. He had written unpublished poems such as ‘Preludes', ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', and ‘Portrait of a Lady'. For all his effortfully bawdy poems (shared only with his male buddies), he could dissect subtly and minutely social awkwardnesses between men and women. Yet his insight came not least from introspection. He was as vulnerable as anyone to such social awkwardnesses, but knew how to prepare a face to meet the faces that he met. He possessed, too, the skill and courage to interrogate his own vulnerability as well as to observe the awkwardness and assurance of other people.

On 16 December 1912 the Tom who had rhymed about Lulu and the whorehouse ball purchased from the Schoenhof Book Company a copy of Pierre Loti's
Le roman d'un d'enfant
with its account of young dreams of ‘l'amour' and ‘tendresse infinie', and its sense of ‘une commotion intérieure'.
111
Three days later he went back to the same Boston shop to buy popular English novelist Leonard Merrick's 1908 short-story collection,
The Man Who Understood Women
. Its opening words could be taken as speaking, at least indirectly, to his own situation in an accent that owed something to J. M. Barrie and Jerome K. Jerome:

Nothing had delighted Wendover so much when his first book appeared as some reviewer's reference to ‘the author's knowledge of women.' He was then six or seven-and-twenty, and the compliment uplifted him the more because he had long regretted violently that he knew even less about women than do most young men.
112

At eight o'clock on the wintry Massachusetts evening of Monday 17 February 1913, Emily Hale sang several songs at the very beginning of the ‘Stunt Show' held in Eleanor Hinkley's home to raise money for the Cambridge Visiting Housekeeper scheme which Eleanor's mother helped organise. It trained unskilled young women to be domestic servants, and the evening's entertainment, with its own printed programme, was well fitted to genteel taste. Despite her family's reservations, Emily was allowed to act and sing in this private performance for relatives, neighbours and friends. Her opening the show suggests that she had, and was seen to have, presence and a good voice. Eleanor, though, was the moving spirit. She had recruited old school companions, neighbours, brothers of her friends and some cousins to take part. She had written two original sketches, and had ‘arranged' several ‘scenes' from literary works such as Dickens's
Bleak House
, for small group performance.

Certainly Tom could mock mannered domestic theatricality (‘You have the scene arrange itself – as it will seem to do –'), but he also had a taste for it, and Eleanor Hinkley had his measure.
113
She played a strict mamma in ‘Rosamond and her Mother', dramatised from Maria Edgeworth's
Rosamond
– one of whose stories, ‘The Purple Jar', was a favourite in America. Eleanor also acted Emma in ‘An Afternoon with Mr. Woodhouse' from her beloved Jane Austen. In this scene Tom (whom Eleanor had known from his delicate childhood) was cast as the prematurely aged hypochondriac Mr Woodhouse. To fine-mannered Emily Hale in the same
Emma
‘stunt' went the part of the vain but vulgar Mrs Elton. In another sketch of Eleanor's own, entitled ‘Arnold Bennett chooses a Heroine', Tom's sister Marion (who had studied at Miss Folsom's school for social service in Boston) was cast as ‘The Sunday School Teacher'.
114

The evening was carefully choreographed and full of teasing. ‘Mr. Thomas Eliot', that would-be Parisian, found himself cast as ‘Monsieur Marcel' in a sketch Eleanor had written specially, ‘Monsieur Marcel and his latest Marvel'. Here Tom played opposite Amy de Gozzaldi, who acted the part of his ‘Marvel'.
115
Casting Tom alongside two of her friends, Emily and Amy, Eleanor knew what she was doing, but Emily rather than Amy was positioned as star of the show: she sang at its start as well as after the interval, and she was central to the evening's conclusion.

Number 1 Berkeley Square is not a vast house. Conditions for performers and audience were intimate. Eleanor recalled that ‘The scenes were laid by the parlor fireplace, in a space no bigger than seven square feet, so that the actors could be seen by the audience in the next room, through a door-way that was four feet eight.'
116
At home in this house that he had known from childhood, and among trusted relatives and friends, Tom listened to Emily singing ‘andantino con molto espressione' a song called ‘Ecstasy', which opened the evening:

Only to dream among the fading flowers,

Only to glide along the tranquil sea;

Ah dearest, dearest, have we not together

One long, bright day of love, so glad and free?

Only to rest through life, in storm and sunshine,

Safe in thy breast, where sorrow dare not fly;

Ah dearest, dearest, thus in sweetest rapture

With thee to live, with thee at last to die!
117

Written by pioneering Boston composer Mrs H. H. A. Beach, this was passion New England-style, but passion it assuredly was: as she sang the words ‘dearest, dearest' the soprano's voice soared into the lyric ecstasy of the title. Here was the woman with whom Tom was ineradicably smitten.

Emily sang five other love songs that evening: James Hotchkiss Rogers's ‘Julia's Garden' (Tom came to associate her with flowers and gardens), Francesco Paolo Tosti's ‘La Serenata' (another song of longing and the sea), an ‘Old Air', Luigi Denza's ‘A May Morning' (‘For you are the Queen of the May, my sweet, / And all the world to me'),
118
and Boston composer Margaret Ruthven Lang's ‘Mavourneen'. This last song had been sung as an encore at the Boston Symphony Orchestra the previous autumn, and was particularly popular; Emily's uncle Philip, a devotee of the Boston Symphony and one of America's leading music critics, was among the composer's admirers.
119
Formally entitled ‘An Irish Love Song', though often called ‘Mavourneen', its anonymous lyrics liltingly articulated both love and separation. The distinctive, constantly repeated Irish woman's name was drawn out for emotional effect across rising chords:

O the time is long, Mavourneen,

Till I come again, O Mavourneen;

An' the months are slow to pass, Mavourneen,

Till I hold thee in my arms, O Mavourneen!

Shall I see thine eyes, Mavourneen,

Like the hazel buds, O Mavourneen;

Shall I touch thy dusky hair, Mavourneen,

With its shim'rin glint o' gold, Mavourneen?

O my love for thee, Mavourneen,

Is a bitter pain, O Mavourneen;

Keep thy heart aye true to me, Mavourneen,

I should die but for thy love, O Mavourneen.
120

Emily Hale was not Irish, but Tom, who later went to some length to send her a bunch of Killarney roses, may have associated her with this Irish love lilt, and it is possible she accompanied him to the Boston Opera House's
Tristan und Isolde
when he went to hear Edoardo Ferrari-Fontana as Tristan and Margarete Matzenauer as Isolde in the production of 1 December 1913.
121
Tom, like his friend Jean Verdenal, found
Tristan und Isolde
profoundly moving; later, in the context of intense erotic desire, he quoted in
The Waste Land
those lines where Tristan, in the first act of Wagner's opera, longs for his Irish girl:

Frisch weht der Wind

Der Heimat zu

Mein Irisch Kind

Wo weilest du?
122

[The wind blows fresh

To the homeland

My Irish child

Where are you lingering?]

In the poem Tom follows these lines with a passage of his own about giving a ‘girl' flowers (hyacinths) and being unable to speak or to move for intense emotion. Then he returns to
Tristan und Isolde
for a sense of the sea that separates the lovers as ‘wide and empty': ‘
Oed' und leer das Meer
'.
123