Young Eliot (40 page)

Like Marburg, Oxford was a medieval university city, though one experiencing peripheral industrial growth, giving rise to what Max Beerbohm called in 1911 ‘those slums which connect Oxford with the world'. After London, it was small, its population around 50,000. Tom was well placed to savour central Oxford's ‘last enchantments of the Middle Age'.
40
On arrival, he turned in off the busy High Street, heading along quieter, narrower medieval Merton Street, lined with honey-coloured sandstone academic buildings. Entering Merton College through its fifteenth-century gatehouse surmounted by relief sculptures of Bishop Walter de Merton, St John the Baptist and other religious figures was like stepping into a monastery. Its hefty wooden gate led through a stone archway past a porter's lodge where a college servant kept a suspicious watch on all incomers. Having introduced himself to the porter, Tom was directed to his room. Turning left, he walked across the uneven flagstones, looking for staircase 2:1 in the St Alban's Quadrangle.

Though the oldest of Merton College's four stone quadrangles dates from the thirteenth century, the later St Alban's buildings had been reconstructed in 1910, so their plumbing, while not up to American standards, was in advance of the rest of the college. Merton hygiene could be an ordeal. A fellow American student recalled how ‘Stored away under the bed was a tin tub, refilled daily, which you were supposed to pull out each morning, leap into, throw water over your quivering torso, and then rub down with a towel so moist that you could almost wring it out before using.'
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Unfazed by Merton's Spartan regime, Tom boasted to Eleanor Hinkley, ‘I think I am the only man in the college who takes
cold
baths.' A college servant asked him, ‘“Do you keep it hup all winter, Sir?”'
42
To Tom English working-class accents were exotic. Cold baths or not, Oxford was ‘exceedingly comfortable and delightful – and', he added, ‘very “foreign”'.
43
Just yards away stood Merton's imposing medieval chapel, its ornamental screen designed by Sir Christopher Wren.

He had to climb several stairs to reach his room. It had an odd atmosphere due to the differing levels of Merton Street to the north and the college quadrangle to the south. Tom looked out of a small raised window at street level on to Merton Street, but when he turned round and looked out the larger window on the other side, into the quadrangle which had no buildings on its southern border, he had a fine, elevated view across a lawn to the broad green expanse of Christ Church Meadow. ‘You can leave the curtain up, sir', a college servant told him. ‘It ud take a seven footer to look in your window.'
44

On Tom's staircase were several students from England. Clergyman's son John Legge Bulmer, a second-year undergraduate from Yorkshire, had studied at Marlborough fee-paying boys' school and come to Merton on a scholarship. He and Tom attended the college's debating society. Finding the undergraduates agreeable, Tom was struck by the way (though Merton was an all-male college) ‘girls attend the lectures here – come right into the college buildings, and attend the same lectures as the men', he wrote to Eleanor (having just expressed his hope that ‘Emily' was thriving). ‘P.S. No one looks at them.' Emily Hale had been writing to him from her home at 5 Circus Road, Chestnut Hill, in Brookline (a handsome, tree-lined street rather like Ash Street) to let him know that she was likely ‘to start in acting very soon'.
45

Tom had grown up with St Louis family servants. He hoped Miss Hale in Brookline would ‘have a good servant'. At Oxford, disliking ‘having to look out for myself', he acclimatised himself to ‘being taken care of'.
46
As his fellow American graduate student Percy (‘Brand') Blanshard, then in his second year at Merton, put it later: ‘the class system was still strong: a man old enough perhaps to be your grandfather waited on you like a footman, built a fire daily in your grate, served in your rooms (and I mean room
s
) a hearty English breakfast and a lunch of bread and cheese'.
47
Used to being waited on, sometimes Tom wrote letters before breakfast; he had his own typewriter. He came to enjoy getting up at 7.15 a.m. since students were required to sign a ‘roll call' sheet at ten minutes to eight each morning. This meant rushing ‘across two quadrangles', often in the rain (‘dreadful climate'), then waiting more than half an hour for breakfast.
48

Dinners were served in the sombre college hall, rebuilt in Victorian times in imitation of medieval traditions. As they still do, students sat side by side on dark wooden benches, dining at long, hefty refectory tables; dons ate separately at High Table beyond. In such conditions, and given the small number of students, Tom soon got to know people. He tried to blend in, dressing, Blanshard recalled,

like most of us, in a brown tweed coat, a sweater, and gray flannel trousers; but the trousers would be punctiliously pressed in spite of the incessant autumn rain. He wore the same jacket-length gown that we commoners did, for unless one held an Oxonian scholarship or degree, one could not wear a scholar's gown … My first impression, an impression never removed, was that though he was friendly and ready with his smile, he was shy, reticent, and reserved.
49

Tom knew some other Americans in Oxford. Eleanor Hinkley's Anglophile acquaintance Francis Wendell Butler-Thwing had published several mediocre poems in the
Harvard Advocate
, assembling them with other juvenilia in his 1914
First-Fruits
with its epigraph from Dante's
Inferno.
Butler-Thwing had just arrived at New College. He impressed Tom by telling him he was going to be ‘naturalised as an Englishman' so he could join up.
50
Along the road at Magdalen College, Scofield Thayer, familiar from Milton and Harvard, had come, like Tom, to study philosophy; Tom renewed his acquaintance. Soon he lent Thayer Aiken's new poetry collection. Taking long walks, that autumn Tom hiked to Cumnor, a nearby village of quaint thatched cottages. He liked the countryside, eyeing it as a fascinated foreigner.

His closest English friend at Merton was also something of an outsider. Bright, independent-minded, Karl Culpin was a bespectacled twenty-year-old, literature-loving Yorkshireman. A third-year undergraduate reading history, he had an English father and a German mother: a difficult background in World War I England. In October 1914, as they had done a year earlier, the college authorities granted Culpin a scholarship ‘on the ground of poverty'.
51
He was considered outspoken. On 9 February the college debating society had voted on whether he should be ejected for ‘a seditious speech'; two weeks later, after he defended the motion ‘that the time has come when civilised nations should settle their disputes by arbitration rather than by force of arms', the motion was carried but Culpin found himself chucked out of the meeting.
52

Culpin was still a controversial figure when, probably encouraged by Blanshard (elected secretary of Merton's Debating Society for 1914–15), Tom got to know him. In early November 1914 the club's President ruled against a proposal that voting procedures should ‘conform entirely to American models'. Culpin tried to censure this decision. Later, when Tom's neighbour, John Bulmer, moved ‘that in view of the state of international relations revealed by the war, it is desirable to introduce conscription into the British Empire', Culpin opposed this, bolstering his case with convincing statistics. The vote was lost by 13 to 6. Tom liked Culpin whom he regarded as ‘the most intelligent of the Englishmen at Merton', and he got on with Blanshard well enough: ‘an excellent butt for discourse', exhibiting ‘all the great American fallacies', including vagueness and diffuseness.
53
On 23 November the motion was debated ‘that this Society abhors the threatened Americanization of Oxford'. Bulmer spoke against it. So did Tom, who, the minutes record, ‘preserved the appearance of gravity, which was more than the house did'. Sure he had not been so grave, Tom was pleased to have worked in references to a brand-new ragtime dance-craze: the fox trot. ‘I pointed out to them frankly how much they owed to Amurrican culcher in the drayma (including the movies) in music, in the cocktail, and in the dance', he informed Eleanor Hinkley.
54
The meeting's twenty-two voters included several Americans, Indians and a Frenchman as well as students from England. Debate was lively: a visiting speaker from Magdalen College ‘showed the House how dreadful the American accent was by mimicking it'. Another, unEnglish speaker attempted to assume the most Oxonian English voice. The motion was lost, narrowly, by 12 votes to 10.
55
Tom was on the winning side.

As in Paris, so in Oxford, he made a small number of close friends. He spent part of the Christmas vacation in London, surrounded by more Americans, in lodgings at 1 Gordon Street off Gordon Square, Bloomsbury. Nearby, at a table under the great dome of the circular reading room in the British Museum, he perused another commentary on Aristotle. On one occasion, probably through Pound, he found himself invited to a ‘cubist tea', meeting ‘two cubist painters, a futurist novelist, a vorticist poet and his wife, a cubist lady black-and-white artist, another cubist lady, and a retired army officer who has been living in the east end and studying Japanese'.
56
A long time afterwards, Tom remembered attending an artists' soirée during this period. He recalled ‘Bomberg, Etchells, Roberts, Wadsworth, Miss Sanders and Miss Dismorr as being present'.
57
In London he chatted, too, with Charles Abraham Ellwood, a University of Missouri professor, staying at 1 Gordon Square surrounded by his family. Interested in eugenics and social psychology, Ellwood was spending session 1914–15 in Oxford, consulting works on sociology and anthropology in the Bodleian Library. He told Tom that Lottie Eliot was one of his ‘three dearest friends in St Louis'.
58
Far from his own family, Tom found the Christmas period very quiet. A card came from Adeleine Moffatt in Boston, whom he had portrayed in ‘Portrait of a Lady'; she sent him ‘ringing greetings of friend to friend at this season of high festival'.
59
Norbert Wiener, then spending time at the University of Cambridge, working with Bertrand Russell, recalled meeting Tom for ‘a not too hilarious Christmas dinner together in one of the larger Lyons restaurants'.
60
As gifts and loans Wiener brought a handful of his own recent philosophical publications on such topics as relativism and logic. Christmas turkey was inappropriate. Jewish Wiener, Tom noted, was ‘vegetarian, and the lightest eater I have ever seen'.
61

Usually in London Tom felt a certain big-city excitement, confessing (or perhaps boasting) to Aiken, ‘Oxford is very pretty, but I don't like to be dead.'
62
Like many people, he altered his tone to take account of his correspondent: as far as his Harvard professors were concerned, Oxford was splendid. To Aiken he explained that London made him feel very alive, but also lonely, not least on New Year's Eve. He wandered the city streets, and had ‘tea when there is anyone to have it with'.
63
Though in correspondence with his cousin Eleanor he did his best to sound buoyant and busy, to Aiken he confided that his sense of isolation had a sexual dimension. Joking that he longed for ‘concubinage and conversation', he wrote from London with perceptive introspection about problems in his sex life.

How much more self-conscious one is in a big city. Have you noticed it? Just at present this is an inconvenience, for I have been going through one of those nervous sexual attacks which I suffer from when alone in a city. Why I had almost none last fall I don't know – this is the worst since Paris. I never have them in the country … I am very dependent upon women (I mean female society); and feel the deprivation at Oxford – one reason why I should not care to remain longer – but there, with the exercise and routine, the deprivation takes the form of numbness only; while in the city it is more lively and acute. One walks about the street with one's desires, and one's refinement rises up like a wall whenever opportunity approaches. I should be better off, I sometimes think, if I had disposed of my virginity and shyness several years ago: and indeed I still think sometimes that it would be well to do so before marriage.
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Marriage, though, did not seem on the cards. Aiken was privy to at least some secrets of Tom's love life, or lack of it. From Oxford Tom had written asking if in early December Aiken would buy ‘some red or pink roses, Killarney I suppose', and send them with a card to Emily Hale at Brattle Hall.
65
She was going to be acting there in the Cambridge Dramatic Club's production of a three-act comedy about social climbing,
Mrs Bumstead-Leigh.
Tom was eager that Aiken in America make sure the roses reached Emily, if not at the play then later at Christmas, but there is something tentative and sad in his specifying not that they should be red but that they should be ‘red or pink'. As well as Emily, Amy de Gozzaldi came into his mind over the vacation. Both were out of reach.

With Culpin and Blanshard he had been on a mid-December holiday to Swanage in Dorset. This south-coast seaside town was the sort he liked – an English version of Gloucester, Massachusetts. Staying over a fortnight with a local landlady, each student had his own bedroom, reading there mornings and evenings. They ate together in the dining room, and enjoyed long afternoon walks by the sea or over the soft-turfed, treeless downs. Visiting tourist sites including Corfe Castle and the Tilly Whim caves, they had enjoyed themselves. Culpin and Blanshard sensed Tom's reserve, but were conscious he liked them. They were appropriately impressed when he propped Bertrand Russell and A. N. Whitehead's
Principia Mathematica
open in front of him at the breakfast table, eyeing its symbols with
savoir faire
. ‘He said that manipulating them gave him a curious sense of power.' Blanshard thought he was friendly, ‘but preferred to wear that Mona Lisa smile and listen with laconic remarks rather than to initiate or develop subjects himself'.
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