Young Eliot (41 page)

In this small seaside town, the holidaying students had checked out the local female talent. ‘We had met a pretty, apple-cheeked English girl from Bournemouth whom we all liked, and we thought it would make for merriment to shivaree her. We divided the forms of celebration between us, and one of them was to indite a poem in her honour.'
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Blanshard made the poem. Tom had not even revealed that he wrote verse. To his friends he was simply available company, a young and dauntingly clever visiting American.

Back in Oxford the philosopher who interested him most at Merton was one of the college fellows, the idealist thinker F. H. Bradley, author of
Appearance and Reality
(1893). Eventually Tom came to think Bradley's ‘the finest philosophic style in our language'; it possessed a ‘reserved power'.
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Then approaching seventy, and having long enjoyed a fellowship without teaching duties, the long-faced, bearded Bradley was notoriously reclusive, his manner reminiscent of Merton's ‘mediaeval schoolmen'.
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Still active, in 1914 he had just published
Essays on Truth and Reality
, critiquing the work of William James and Bertrand Russell while developing his own thinking on epistemology, God and the Absolute. Bradley's colleagues, including Tom's college tutor Harold Joachim, protected the elderly don from students. Tom's shyness meant that, though the enterprising Blanshard dared submit a note with questions for the Great Man, who subsequently invited him for conversation, to Tom's disappointment he and Bradley never once met. Instead Tom went, sometimes accompanying Blanshard, for regular Oxford-style tutorials with the Hungarian immigrant's son Harold Joachim. Joachim's formidable 1908 study,
The Nature of Truth
(a copy of which Tom had brought from Harvard), censures Bertrand Russell, presenting an idealist theory of truth accompanied by detailed readings of Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza and the elusive Bradley. At these meetings Tom or his fellow tutee would read a paper aloud, after which the erudite, pipe-smoking Joachim, then in his mid-forties, would do his best, intellectually speaking, to shred it.

This shredding could be gruelling, but Tom learned from it. He had been used to producing Harvard student papers prinked with literary allusions or metaphorical flourishes. Joachim disliked these. ‘He taught me', Tom recalled, ‘in the course of criticizing weekly essays with a sarcasm the more authoritative because of its gentle impersonality.' The Oxford philosopher wanted clarity, not quasi-literary distractions. Between October 1914 and July 1915 Tom worked hard for these tutorials. As well as meeting Joachim to read Aristotle, once a week he presented ‘a short paper dealing with some one of the questions considered in the thesis which I hope to present for the degree of Ph.D. at Harvard.'
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Discussing these papers with Joachim ‘in detail', he wrote on such subjects as ‘real, unreal, ideal, and imaginary objects'. Thinking strenuously, he found himself taking a stance on what is ‘wholly real', only to realise that he must also argue against it: ‘But there is another point of view, obtained by standing this one upon its head, which I find equally necessary to insist upon. From this point of view it may be suggested that the absolute is the one thing in the world which is real. Reality is the one thing which doesn't exist.'
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Working intensively, even risking the occasional disturbingly vivid phrase as he contemplated ‘the suicide of knowledge', Tom in these tutorials came to realise that Joachim ‘was concerned with clearing up confusion rather than with scoring off his victim'. The Merton philosophy don wanted to instil the ideal ‘that one should know what one meant before venturing to put word to paper'.
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Reading Aristotle in Greek with Joachim, whose lectures on the
Nicomachean Ethics
he attended thrice weekly from 13 October 1914 throughout the session, was demanding. Tom had written to J. H. Woods at Harvard on 5 October to say he had been reading Aristotle's
Metaphysics
in the original Greek, and was expecting to go through the
Posterior Analytics
in Joachim's tutorials.
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From the college library he borrowed Giacomo Zabarella's weighty Renaissance Latin commentary on the
Posterior Analytics
in October and kept renewing it until the following June: he considered Zabarella ‘probably the greatest of all Aristotelian commentators'. Later, in January 1915, he consulted Pacius's sixteenth-century Latin commentary on Aristotle's
Organon.
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Supplementing Joachim's lectures, he attended R. G. Collingwood's on Aristotle's
De Anima
, consulting Pacius's commentary on that too: almost forty years later he still recalled how Joachim ‘made me read' Pacius.
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Tom's third lecture course during his first term was on Logic with Professor J. A. Smith, who was then in the first decade of his more than thirty-year-long editing of Aristotle. Conscious that as part of his doctoral ordeals at Harvard he could face an examination on Ancient Philosophy, Tom annotated thoroughly his Greek copy of the
Metaphysica
. Aristotle entered his bloodstream.

In Collingwood's lectures, he took detailed notes, sometimes drawing on his Harvard reading to annotate them. So, for instance, on 29 October as he recorded one of Collingwood's points about the
De Anima –
that ‘If the soul moves in space, it might move out of the body and back again' – Tom scribbled the words ‘Golden Bough', remembering the anthropologist Frazer's accounts of souls being said to leave bodies.
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Soon he acquired ‘the highest respect for English methods of teaching'.
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‘For anyone who is going to teach the Oxford discipline is admirable', he wrote to Professor Woods at Harvard, taking care to impress him by offering to type up and send his lecture notes.
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Tom gave Woods the clear impression in November 1914 that university teaching was his goal. Yet working with Joachim also sharpened his literary education in ways that matter to poets: ‘To his
explication de texte
of the Posterior Analytics I owe an appreciation of the importance of punctuation.' Tom remained proud of his sometimes rhetorical sense of punctuation, especially in verse; paying tribute to Joachim (a highly gifted musician) he maintained that ‘Any virtues my prose writing may exhibit are due to his correction.' He thought Joachim ‘perhaps the best lecturer' at Oxford, ‘really almost a genius, with respect to Aristotle'.
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Tom credited no other academic in England or America with such a detailed influence on the style and structure of his writing.
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Just three years after teaching him, Joachim wrote of Tom as ‘a man of very exceptional ability', stating, ‘it was a great pleasure to work with him'. He praised Tom's ‘thorough knowledge of ancient Greek' as ‘scholarly & profound'; his American ‘pupil' was ‘excellent in every respect'.
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During his strenuous philosophical training Tom argued for ‘a more minute examination of the question of truth'.
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Joachim expounded a ‘coherence theory of truth'. Truth was made up of ‘significant wholes'.

A ‘significant whole' is such that all its constituent elements reciprocally involve one another or reciprocally determine one another's being as contributing features in a single concrete meaning. The elements thus cohering constitute a whole which may be said to control the reciprocal adjustment of its elements, as an end controls its constituent means. And in this sense a Centaur is inconceivable …
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The philosophically-minded poet and theorist Tom, fresh from Royce's theories of how communities construct interpretations, would recast ideas like Joachim's in his thinking about tradition and the individual talent. As a poet he would draw on them too, sometimes subversively. Whereas the Merton tutor declared centaurs ‘inconceivable', his ‘pupil' wrote in verse around this time about the wonderfully disruptive presence of that foreigner Bertrand Russell at Fuller's Harvard tea-party: ‘I heard the beat of centaur's hoofs over the hard turf.'
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Tom's training in precision made him change ‘soft turf' to ‘hard turf' – at once consistent with those beating ‘hoofs' and more surprising.
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Even as he imbibed philosophy and was warned off metaphor, he reconceived his learning, sometimes mischievously, to lasting poetic benefit.

Rigorous study of Aristotle and regular ‘Informals' – intimate tutorials – with Joachim and J. A. Smith required antidotes. The River Thames flows through Oxford and, as he had done at Harvard, so here Tom took up rowing. He was, he confessed to Aiken, increasingly fed up with ‘professors and their wives'. Tom sounded off: ‘As you know, I hate university towns and university people.'
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Typically, in an often pleasantly and honestly contradictory way, he sought to counterbalance one side of his experience with another. However much he was excited by London and complained of lack of ‘intellectual stimulus' in Oxford, at Merton he excelled in argument; and when he went rowing with fellow students, American and English, he enjoyed that too. If he could be ratty about dons and donnishness, he could also describe himself in Oxford to Aiken as ‘contented and slothful, eating heartily, smoking, and rowing violently upon the river in a four oar'.
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He rowed in the position of stroke, and was pleased to boast in later life that he and his crew had beaten wartime Oxford's only other passable four-oar. He was awarded a pewter mug.

Offering a ‘Social Column of Births, Funerals, and Broken Hearts', Eleanor Hinkley's letters kept him abreast of life in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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As he had done from boyhood onwards, Tom offset highbrow material with popular entertainment. So, when not reading Aristotle, he amused himself and Eleanor by ‘working' (he used the word loosely) on outlining his ‘great ten-reel cinema drama, EFFIE THE WAIF'. Jokingly, he suggested which of their mutual friends, including Ann Van Ness, might act in this full-scale piece of ‘Amurrican culcher', a mock-movie ‘drayma' featuring, like his speech at the college debating society, Anglo-American contrasts. He assured Eleanor that this cinematic spoof whose characters included ‘SEEDY SAM, the blackmailer' would be set partly in Medicine Hat among ‘the mountains of Wyoming', partly in England at ‘the stately manor' of ‘Gwendoline, Lady Chomleyumley' and partly in imperial Kashmeer.
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Involving abduction, a man-eating tiger, a fakir and a German spy, Tom's ten-reel extravaganza shows his taste for vaudeville now extended to silent cinema. Well informed, he developed this parody over several months in transatlantic letters. For Amy de Gozzaldi he created the part of Mexican dancer Paprika, ‘one of our best eye-rollers'.
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Early in Oxford's Lent term, Tom's friend Culpin had fun in a 25 January debate. The motion deplored American attitudes towards British naval policy: ‘Mr Culpin attacked the American attitude with the greatest gusto, inspired to an unwarranted height by various specimens of the objectionable genus which he saw before him.' John Bulmer joined in, ‘audacious enough to think America was not all hopeless; many of the people were reported to have reached real respectability; only their government was a tragedy'. Culpin was handed a bouquet for his efforts; the motion was carried convincingly.
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If light-heartedness energised the college, there was also grim uncertainty. Tom stared across soggy Christ Church Meadow, hearing news of commissions and casualties. Winter brought endless rain. Several Merton students were being called up to fight. London was experiencing Zeppelin raids. Self-evidently, Tom was a resident alien, a young non-combatant foreigner.

No mere intellectual game, his hard thinking at Oxford revealed aspects of his deepest beliefs. He perceived a division between carefully articulated philosophical accounts of behaviour, and the necessarily more instinctive conduct of day-to-day existence. ‘In a sense, of course', he told Norbert Wiener in January 1915, ‘all philosophising is a perversion of reality; for, in a sense, no philosophic theory makes any difference to practice.' Tom saw how philosophical theories claiming ‘completeness' teetered into preposterousness. They made ‘the world appear as strange as Bottom in his ass's head'. Tellingly, just days after writing to Aiken about sexual frustrations, he used this image of one of Shakespeare's most grotesque frustrated lovers. Admitting that ‘one cannot avoid metaphysics altogether', he looked to a great poet to put philosophy in its place.
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During this period, no philosopher came closer to his thinking than Norbert Wiener. Like Tom, Wiener had engaged profoundly and sceptically with Harvard intellectuals including Royce and James; also with Bergson, with Bradley and with Russell's mathematical logic. A fellow Sheldon Fellow in philosophy and occasional poet, Wiener had come from Harvard to Cambridge via Göttingen, at the same time as Tom had reached Oxford via Marburg. There was intellectual respect between them, but also awkwardness. Sharp-tongued, Wiener was socially clumsy. For all his usually impeccable manners, Tom, too, could be viperish; perhaps his view of Wiener was conditioned by familial anti-Semitism. Yet when, days after they shared Christmas dinner, Tom described Wiener to Aiken as ‘like a great wonderful fat toad bloated with wisdom', those mocking words ‘fat toad' were more than countered by ‘wonderful' and ‘wisdom'.
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Wiener's recent paper on ‘Relativism' struck a chord. Tom wrote to its author with unusual enthusiasm. Clearly the two were used to exchanging philosophical ideas face to face: