Young Eliot (39 page)

Most striking, though, is its troubled eroticism – an exploration of violent, sometimes self-loathing behaviour that may emanate from sexual frustration. The poet of J. Alfred Prufrock was now authoring further love songs; but whereas in 1911 Tom had mixed worries about declaring love with finely judged ironic wit, in 1914 he presents a far more extreme scenario. In ‘The Love Song of St Sebastian' the speaker flogs himself until he stands in a pool of blood. Scourged, he approaches the bed of his white-gowned beloved:

Then you would take me in

Because I was hideous in your sight

You would take me in to your bed without shame

Because I should be dead …

This poem's first stanza presents a saint who mortifies himself to death; its second shows him strangling the object of his affections with obsessive erotic attentiveness: ‘Your ears curl back in a certain way / Like no ones else in all the world'.
13
Mentioning how ‘the world shall melt in the sun', the phrasing echoes Robert Burns's famous promise to stay faithful to his sweetheart until ‘the rocks melt wi' the sun'.
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However, designed to lead readers towards a planned ‘Insane Section', Tom's lines present the lover as a possessive psychotic killer:

You would love me because I should have strangled you

And because of my infamy.

And I should love you the more because I had mangled you

And because you were no longer beautiful

To anyone but me.
15

Surely conscious that St Sebastian had become associated with homosexual imagery, Tom, unable to have Emily Hale, ponders the psychology of sex, possession and martyrdom. His covering letter to Aiken (who had his own fascinations with disturbed psychology) maintains, a little anxiously, ‘there's nothing homosexual about this'.
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Having been in Paris when d'Annunzio's scandalously female
Martyrdom of St Sebastian
was performed (it had been staged, too, at the 1912 Boston Opera House), Tom was aware that this saint's ‘Love Song' could speak of heterosexual as well as homosexual experience. His 1914 poem should not be interpreted as direct autobiographical revelation. Yet, counterbalancing Aiken's predictable celebration of young love, it plumbs the psychology of religious and sexual obsession. Tom's experience with Emily Hale had done nothing to calm his sense of sex as a source of unease. His poetry saw the sexual and the religious coming together not just in ancient primitive rites, but also in the present-day realm of ‘underwear and socks'. ‘The thing is', he wrote to Aiken that September, ‘to be able to look at one's life as if it was somebody's else – (I much prefer to say somebody else's)'.
17

That grammatical construction (already old-fashioned in 1914) calls to mind his writing of ‘ones else' in his St Sebastian poem. This new ‘Love Song', he feared, wasn't working: ‘Does it all seem very laboured and conscious?' he asked Aiken.
18
In it and other verses that Tom tried to fit together in Marburg, he drew indirectly on aspects of his recent experiences, fusing them with his philosophical and religious reading, then distorting both with disturbing aesthetic impact. Yet as in his attempt to woo Emily Hale, so, trying to assemble this ambitious poetic structure, he felt failure.

Despite intellectual sophistication, he could be naïve. ‘We rejoice that the war danger is over', he wrote on 25 July from Marburg.
19
Discussing ‘the Balkan Question' with his hosts, he enjoyed listening to the Happichs' daughter Hannah (later described to Eleanor as ‘my old flame') playing Beethoven on the piano or singing. Tom spent part of Sunday 26 July doodling pictures of dachshunds on a witty illustrated letter.
20

On Saturday 1 August he found himself in a changed country. Germany had declared war on Tsarist Russia. Having only just commenced, his summer school was over. On Sunday its director warned the students not to speak foreign languages in Marburg's streets, and explained no one could leave for two weeks. On Monday 3 August, the Germans declared war on France. At 4.21 that afternoon, conscious his parents would realise that their son was stranded in a European conflict, Tom spent 10 of the 20 marks he had on him and managed to get a cablegram through to his father at East Gloucester. Slightly garbled, the German operator's message arrived the same day: ‘Ver staate nordamerika Keine angst haben [
sic
]' (Have no fear about the United States).
21
Immediately there were further developments. On Tuesday the Kaiser's army invaded Belgium; Britain declared war on Germany.

Tom never forgot the Happichs' kindness to their anxious lodger. Realising his letters of credit were not being accepted in Marburg, they did not charge him for board (he repaid them years later). Down to about 40 marks, he worried if he stayed longer he might not have enough cash to reach the frontier. Russian and French summer-school students were detained indefinitely. Foreign nationals faced the poorhouse if their money ran out. Tom sent a postcard in German to his parents requesting cash, but could not be sure it would reach them. For two weeks he and other English-speaking students met each evening at a local hotel, trying to work out what was happening. Eventually, on Sunday 16 August with several companions, he set out on the ninety-minute rail journey to Frankfurt. It took five hours. Many passengers were soldiers and reservists: jumpy, on the lookout for bombs and bidding anxious farewells to sweethearts. Having said goodbye to his own loved ones just over a month earlier, Tom registered these scenes acutely: ‘I shall never forget one woman's face as she tried to wave goodbye. I could not see his face; he was in the next compartment. I am sure she had no hope of seeing him again.'
22

From Frankfurt he headed to Cologne. Changing trains, he ran short of food, and had a long wait. Eventually, he departed Cologne at 3 a.m. after a meal and a kip in the station waiting-room. Twelve hours and several trains later he and other Americans reached the German-Dutch border. ‘We were very nervous, expecting to be searched, but they did not even open our bags; looked at our passes – “
Amerikaner – ach, schoen!
”
[“American – oh fine!”] let us by.'
23
By Thursday 20 August he was in England. A week later he wrote flippantly to his brother about his German difficulties: ‘an intolerable bore'.
24

He had found London accommodation at 28 Bedford Place in Bloomsbury – a central location identified on a sheet glued into his London Baedeker as ‘
Aiken's Lodgings
'.
25
Other tenants were Continental refugees. Here in the huge capital city of the largest empire on earth Tom was safe for the moment, and chatted in French about the war. Nearby he could hear ‘English, American, French, Flemish, Russian, Spanish, Japanese' being spoken. He listened rather scornfully as an old woman in the street sang a sentimental American song about ‘memories that bless – and burn'; people threw her coins from their windows. Afterwards he watched as ‘the housemaid resumes her conversation at the area gate'.
26
He found he could work among the din, and liked cosmopolitan, noisy London better than before. In his poem ‘Morning at the Window' a speaker upstairs in a foggy urban street hears ‘rattling breakfast plates in basement kitchens' and is ‘aware of the damp souls of housemaids / Hanging despondently at area gates'.
27

Eager for female company, he had met a ‘very interesting' French woman and enjoyed her shrewd remarks; he told Eleanor he had encountered, also, Ann Van Ness, a mutual friend who was, like Emily Hale, an American Unitarian minister's daughter. Ann was living not far away. Tom had tea with her in early September – ‘very pleasant company'. They walked to Regent's Park Zoo, but, though before she left London she ‘said that she “would be glad to hear from me”', Ann did not hold the same attraction for him as Emily.
28
Being abroad was exciting, but lonely too. Despite seeming Angicised to some Americans, on his own in London – a metropolitan area of 7,000,000 people – Tom felt foreign: ‘I don't understand the English very well.' His sympathies lay with Britain in the war, but he had been impressed by Germany, and mocked gung-ho patriotic efforts in some Boloesque verses entitled ‘Up Boys and at 'Em' which he mailed to Aiken. Even as he began to find his bearings and enjoyed dining in London with Martin Armstrong, an English literary friend of the Aikens, there seemed ‘a brick wall' between him and most Englishmen; English women were at least as hard to fathom.
29
Still, he admired the way ‘an Englishman is content simply to live'. He appreciated ‘the ease and lack of effort with which they take so much of life … I should like to be able to acquire something of that spirit.'
30

More by accident than design, along with the ensuing summer, the academic session 1914–15 that Tom would spend in Oxford would be a turning point. He was pleased one day to encounter Bertrand Russell in the street near Bedford Square. Russell invited him back to his flat for tea, chatting about pacifism, Germany and ‘the European situation'.
31
‘I naturally asked him', the pacifist Russell recalled, ‘what he thought of the War. “I don't know,” he replied, “I only know that I am not a pacifist.”'
32
Tom kept in intermittent touch with Russell. Yet the rest of his most important early contacts in England were Americans. Aiken, attempting to help his friend, had tried to interest London editors in Tom's poems, only to be rebuffed: Harold Monro of the Poetry Bookshop thought them insane. ‘Go to Pound,' urged Aiken. ‘Show him your poems.'
33

Recently married to Englishwoman Dorothy Shakespear, the expatriate American Ezra Pound was lodging in London. With his shock of wild hair, bohemian friends and enthusiasms for everything from Japanese drama to the paintings of Whistler, Pound was a passionately committed artistic intellectual. Just three years older than Tom, this prolific and ambitious Idaho-born poet had published his collection
Ripostes
in 1912, and was employed as W. B. Yeats's secretary. Having left behind an academic career when he sailed from America in 1908, Pound worked, too, as a talent scout both for Harriet Monroe's Chicago journal
Poetry
and for London's
Egoist
magazine, which in 1914 started publishing James Joyce's
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Pound knew everyone, though not everyone liked him. His abrasive manners could be disconcerting. As Tom was aware, Pound's own poetry had featured in the Vorticist artist Wyndham Lewis's magazine
Blast
, where a few of his lines about sex had been blacked out to placate the censor. Quoting himself – ‘An Image is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time' – this unsettlingly energetic young American had stated that summer in ‘Vortex. Pound.' that ‘The primary pigment of poetry is the IMAGE.' 1914 saw the Poetry Bookshop publish his anthology
Des Imagistes
. Tom was warily familiar with Pound's writings before they met that September. When Tom showed him ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', the Imagist poet loved it, insisting it should appear in
Poetry
, and giving the author a few days to get it ready for the press.
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Here, Pound wrote to Harriet Monroe, was ‘the best poem I have yet had or seen from an American. PRAY GOD IT BE NOT A SINGLE AND UNIQUE SUCCESS.'
35

By the end of the month Pound was trying to set up a dinner at which he and Dorothy could introduce Tom to Yeats. What so impressed Pound was the way that as a poet Tom had modernised himself on his own. At Harvard Tom had had little time for what he saw as Pound's old-fashioned early poetry. Now he was excited to be welcomed by this fellow countryman who was at the heart of London's avant-garde: ‘Pound has been
on n'est pas plus aimable
' – couldn't have been kinder – he told Aiken, adding that he ‘wants me to bring out a Vol. after the War'.
36
Awkwardly, such encouragement brought a crisis of confidence. Showing Pound a range of his work, Tom reflected that he had accomplished nothing really good since ‘Prufrock'. His ambitious plan for ‘The Descent from the Cross' had failed. Neither love nor work seemed to be prospering. ‘But', he reflected phlegmatically, ‘it may be all right in the long run'.
37

About to go to Merton College, Oxford, and resume his philosophical studies, Tom was unsure about his future. Alluding to J. M. Barrie's
Sentimental Tommy
, whose hero, somewhat confused about women, finds it hard to mature, he wrote to Aiken: ‘I should find it very stimulating to have several women fall in love with me – several, because that makes the practical side less evident. Do you think it possible, if I brought out the “Inventions of the March Hare”, and gave a few lectures, at 5 p.m. with wax candles, that I could become a sentimental Tommy.'
38
Then, on the 6th of October, he headed for his next university.

War was denuding Oxford of its students. Predominantly upper-class English public schoolboys, they were regarded as ideal British military officers. That October Merton had just under fifty students, including six Americans, four Indians and two Canadians. About three-quarters of the undergraduates drilled every afternoon in the Officer Training Corps; among the Britons who started at Merton alongside Tom, over half would be killed in the war. ‘I should have liked to go into the officer training corps myself', Tom wrote to Eleanor Hinkley, ‘but they won't take a foreigner'.
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