Young Eliot (43 page)

Then he knew that he had been a fish

With slippery white belly held tight in
his
own fingers,

Writhing in his own clutch, his ancient beauty

Caught fast in the pink tips of his new beauty.

Seeming to partake of both male and female experience, this man is entranced yet horrified by his ecstatic eroticism. He becomes ‘a dancer to God', his flesh, Sebastian-like, ‘in love with the burning arrows'.
121

Not long before, Tom had walked by the high cliffs near Swanage, as well as over Oxford's meadows; he had experienced a recurrence of his ‘nervous sexual attacks' in London. However, while perhaps spurred by his own anxieties, his poem is not confessional. Its cliffs and meadows could be anywhere; its city is named ‘Carthage', the place where that keen student of Plotinus, St Augustine, had spent his licentious youth in sexual ‘burning'. This poem about a man ‘stifled and soothed by his own rhythm' who seems in the city ‘to tread on faces, convulsive thighs and knees' powerfully mixes desire and ‘horror'.
122
Its narcissistic anxiety appears in part homoerotic, in part heterosexual. It dramatises intense, confused eroticism. On 2 February Tom sent another poem to Pound. In ‘Suppressed Complex' a woman is seen lying still in bed; the speaker dances ‘joyously in the firelight' and, eventually, as the woman clutches the blanket, passes ‘out through the window'.
123
Sexual experience is implied rather than stated in this other poem of clutching fingers. Conscious at once of powerful desire and suppression (our word might be ‘repression'), these works articulate a sense of compulsion and control which, during that term, featured, far more tamely, in Tom's philosophy classes.

As winter turned to spring, he made sure to tell Eleanor Hinkley he had met several young women. At Oxford he had dined with the polite daughters of Sir John Rhys, principal of Jesus College. In London, where he spent the Easter vacation and took a keen interest in work by Jacob Epstein, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Wyndham Lewis and especially Edward Wadsworth in the Vorticist-dominated Second London Group Exhibition at the Goupil Gallery, Tom had encountered ‘delightful' red-haired Sheila Cook from New Zealand; also ‘very pretty Miss Cobb' with her oppressively genteel Bostonian mama, and three young sisters whose surname was Petersen, the youngest (sixteen) ‘very beautiful indeed … I shall have to take her punting next term.' Miss Petersen confirmed his frustrated sense that ‘English girls' were ‘completely managed by their mothers – but perhaps it is merely that the ones I have met have been rather young'.
124

Compared to Conrad Aiken, whose second son died at birth on 11 February, Tom, at twenty-six, was himself in some ways ‘rather young'. He felt frustrated and under the weather, but, as often for him, such sensations were conducive to poetry. Coping with ‘indigestion, constipation, and colds constantly', he was gathering together some verse.
125
By early April, Pound, eager to foment an American-led ‘Renaissance' of which Tom approved, was planning to feature his work as part of a ‘small anthology in the autumn'.
126
Eventually published in London in November, it would be called
Catholic Anthology
, would sell badly, and would mark the first appearance of Tom's poetry in a book. As spring turned towards summer, Pound ‘was enthusiastic about my poems, and gave me such praise and encouragement as I had long since ceased to hope for'.
127

Happily married to a young Englishwoman of literary tastes, Pound urged Tom to stay in England too. Assembling poems including ‘Aunt Helen' and ‘Mr. Apollinax' that April, Tom denounced what he saw as characteristically stifling American phenomena.
128
These included ‘the Maiden Aunt and the Social Worker': his mother and at least one sister fit this last description.
129
In works written against Bostonian repression, including ‘The Boston Evening Transcript', he chafed against the confinements of a way of life he had aspired to escape:

When evening quickens faintly in the street,

Wakening the appetites of life in some

And to others bringing the
Boston Evening Transcript
130

‘Something might be said', he added to Pound in April, ‘about the Evil Influence of Virginity on American Civilization'.
131

Tom knew about Vorticist art and avant-garde poetry, but didn't know what to do. He imagined marrying (not that he had anyone to marry yet), having a family (he seems to have taken it for granted that he would become a father) and living in America, buttoning his lip and forfeiting his ‘independence for the sake of my children's future'. Alternatively, he considered saving hard, then retiring to France at the age of fifty, watching the world go by as he sipped his ‘aperitif at 5 p. m.' Neither possibility compelled him, but a crisis was coming: he had to decide whether or not to accept a renewal of his Sheldon Fellowship. ‘The great need is to know one's mind, and I don't know that.' He wrote respectfully to J. H. Woods, postponing his decision. More vividly and a touch melodramatically he presented to Aiken, ‘The idea of a submarine world of clear green light – one would be attached to a rock and swayed in two directions – would one be happiest or most wretched at the turn of the tide?'
132

Tom seems never to have gone punting in Oxford with sixteen-year-old Miss Petersen. Instead he punted and danced there with vivacious twenty-six-year-old Vivien Haigh-Wood. Born in 1888, she was a young woman exactly the same age as himself. They met in March at a lunch party in Scofield Thayer's Magdalen College rooms. Punts were moored at the adjacent Magdalen Bridge: one thing led to another. Slim, dark-haired Miss Haigh-Wood was a talented artist; one of her most lovingly detailed sketches, made around this time, is of an empty punt by the grassy bank of Oxford's River Cherwell, which flows under Magdalen Bridge.
133
Tom took pride in how ‘from one virginal punt' he and Thayer could glide along ‘charming the eyes and ears of Char-flappers' (coquettish young women on the Cherwell), even though he remembered himself as excelling in his ‘voracity for bread and butter' rather than in flirtatious eloquence; it was Thayer who spouted ‘Sidneian showers of discourse upon Art, Life, Sex and Philosophy'.
134
Anyhow, this exciting day finished with dancing. Vivien was pretty, and an eager, excellent dancer.

Born in the northern town of Bury, Lancashire – which she loathed as provincial – this young Englishwoman had grown up in sophisticated London. She had known Thayer's unstable, lively cousin Lucy since 1908: they had met on holiday in the Alps. Clever, artistic, Francophile, Vivien Haigh-Wood, like Tom, savoured poetry, sailing and acting. Having topped up his St Louis terpsichorean skills with those extra Harvard dancing lessons, Tom was attracted to this lively, petite companion. Soon on Saturday nights he was spending time in London where one could go to dance parties in big hotels.

Vivien, Tom recalled, had ‘a genius for dancing'.
135
At first neither he nor she enjoyed each other's exclusive attention. To his delight he found his American style of dancing gave him an almost dangerous appeal: ‘I terrified one poor girl (she is Spanish at that) by starting to dip in my one-step', he informed Eleanor Hinkley, mentioning also two other women – ‘very good dancers' who, with his help, ‘caught the American style very quickly'. By no means the reserved young ladies of Boston Unitarianism, such women excited him all the more for that.

As they are emancipated Londoners I have been out to tea or dinner with them several times, and find them quite different from anything I have known at home or here. (I fear my previous generalisations were misleading – they do not seem to apply to London girls over twenty-five.) They are charmingly sophisticated (even ‘disillusioned') without being hardened; and I confess to taking great pleasure in seeing women smoke, though for that matter I do not know any English girls who do not. These English girls have such amusing names – I have met two named ‘Phyllis' – and one named ‘Vivien'.
136

To Tom ‘Vivien' was an exotic English name. Vivien was the famous, gossipy seductress who enthralled Merlin in Tennyson's
Idylls of the King.
Lithe Miss Haigh-Wood, who shopped at London's Poetry Bookshop and had worked as a Cambridge governess in the winter of 1914–15, was not
that
Vivien, but she did enjoy attracting clever men; pleased he could impress her, Tom relished her vivacity. She was Scofield Thayer's friend when he met her at Magdalen, and Thayer knew more than Tom about her background. Thayer had been in touch with her in February about his and Tom's American poet friend Butler-Thwing whom Vivien's brother was going to contact; she had invited Thayer to a dance. When he did not go, Vivien made sure to tell him what a wonderful experience he had missed. Impressed he was a philosopher, she teased him about his studies and urged him to visit her at her parents' substantial home, 3 Compayne Gardens in Hampstead: ‘I need cheering up badly –
awfully –
just now. You'd better come & do it!'
137

In childhood Vivien (or ‘Vivienne' as she sometimes styled herself) had had a ‘terror of loneliness'.
138
Her artist father was distinguished enough to be elected to the Royal Academy. Vivien was his favourite model. He had painted her with her younger brother Maurice in a picture originally entitled
Small Girl Sulking
, ‘an early indication', her biographer Carole Seymour-Jones points out, ‘of the moods from which Vivienne suffered increasingly from the age of twelve'.
139
Vivien had painful (possibly menstrual) problems for which, from her sixteenth year, she took various drugs. As Scofield and Lucy Thayer knew, she had become engaged to a London schoolteacher Charles Buckle. Her best friend married in 1914, and Vivien hoped to emulate her. However, familiar with Vivien's disturbing mood swings and apparent hysteria, and sure she suffered from ‘moral insanity', her mother ‘warned CB off', as Maurice put it.
140
The engagement – a sexual relationship Maurice termed ‘a
real
affair' – was broken.
141
Vivien went on seeing at least one specialist doctor.

Summoned to cheer her up, Scofield Thayer went. Through Lucy he had first met Vivien in spring 1914 while she was going out with Buckle. Vivien had felt attracted to the young American philosophy student Thayer. Now, visiting her at her parents' house on Thursday 25 February 1915, and telling her she looked radiant, he compared her with Mona Lisa. They chatted. She showed him Buckle's photograph. No sooner had Thayer left than Buckle phoned up. Home from the army on leave, he called for Vivien at 10 p.m. and, though she had a high temperature, took her dancing to the Savoy. Mrs Haigh-Wood was annoyed. Immediately, Vivien fell ill with influenza. ‘Please excuse pencil, I am in bed', she wrote to Thayer in a letter sent on 3 March in which she complained of ‘a good deal of mental, as well as physical distress & depression'. She felt boxed in. Thinking of his likening her to Leonardo's
Mona Lisa
(which thieves had carried off in Paris in 1911), she told Thayer she wished someone would cut her out of her frame. She asked if he liked some of the poems she had been reading in Ezra Pound's
Ripostes
, especially ‘A Girl', and other erotic pieces including ‘An Immorality' and ‘Virginal', as well as T. E. Hulme's poem of sexual indiscretion, ‘Conversion'. She made it clear she wanted Thayer to move to an opulent London bachelor's flat – much closer than Oxford. Would he be willing to teach her Italian in the Easter vacation?
142
She tried, too hard, to attract him.

Tom got to know Vivien better in April, May and June. In Oxford he was attending demanding, inspiring lectures on Aristotle. Harold Joachim was discussing pleasure and control of the passions – largely among men. In late April Tom heard a long discussion of ‘attraction'; by 13 May the topic was ‘reciprocal affection'; on 27 May Joachim outlined Aristotle's idea that ‘pleasure is an
energeia
' – an energetic force – both ‘timeless' and sudden. ‘Whatever we may say about the conditions of pl[easure] it is not gradually produced – it has no history.' Aristotle encouraged a ‘comparison of pleasure to the bloom of youth'. It was, Joachim explained on 1 June, ‘in many cases due to novelty'. He spoke of the headiness of hedonism. He said other things too, but these points were to the fore in what Tom, who was seeing more and more of Vivien by then, chose to write down in his notebook. At the end of the course, though Joachim spoke about knowledge, his summation on 8 June was that ‘Knowledge in all its forms is the activity of a mind grasping a real. This relation presupposes a fundamental identity. What we really have is not two actualities in relation, but a single
energeia.
' Now Tom, closer to ‘the bloom of youth' than his professor, was about to ‘grasp a real', and to exchange his sense of ‘two actualities in relation' for that of ‘a single
energeia
'.
143

Maurice Haigh-Wood and Ezra Pound perceived that Vivien and Thayer were ‘going out' together.
144
They visited each other, they danced; he bought her a lavish dinner at the Savoy. Yet their relationship was problematic: she was keener than he to take things further. A couple of weeks before he was due to return to America (the Oxford term stopped in June), Vivien grew annoyed. She felt she had been stood up on what sounds like a double date involving herself and Thayer as well as Tom and Thayer's cousin Lucy. Staying at her family's holiday house, Thyme Cottage at Upper Bourne End near Marlow in Buckinghamshire (about halfway between Oxford and London), Vivien complained to Thayer, ‘Re our visit to Oxford, Lucy & I were both given to understand by Eliot & you, severally and definitely, that we were to keep both Saturday & Sunday free, & that if Sat. was wet, we should be expected to come on Sunday.' Vivien had turned down an attractive dance invitation to keep herself available. Thayer had then cancelled at short notice – on that very day, ‘Thursday'. Vivien suggested to him with an element of moral blackmail that his behaviour could adversely affect her mental health: ‘Remember the specialist's words, Scofield, & do not be the instrument of pushing me more quickly than is necessary into an untimely melancholia, or else, as he also prophesied, an early grave.' What she wanted was for Thayer to ‘come to me in London'. He would enjoy having, as she put it, ‘little Vivien to jog along beside you & gaze longingly upon you with her golden eyes'. She told him he was a fool for returning to the ‘savage land' of America. Once he left,