Young Eliot (44 page)

from that day I do
solemnly promise
you I will never have speech, or correspondence with you, nor will I
ever
look upon your promising-much and fulfilling-little countenance again. Never. I have made up my mind, really. And you will never meet such another as I. & one day, I assure you, you will grind your teeth at the raw, childish
folly
which prevented you distinguishing between a yellow diamond – a white flame – & an ordinary toy of coloured glass. A fool there was, &
she
made her prayer – to a rag & a bone & a hank of hair. Why indeed cast pearls before swine – yellow diamonds & white flames before hide-bound, unawakened limited savages of Wall Street calibre? O God –
WHY
?

Wishing Thayer could write her a letter of matching passion, she told him he ‘should snatch
every hour
in these last days &
try
, try to burn just one of your fingers in the white flame – just for the experience you know'.
145
What Tom admired as Thayer's ‘passionate detachment' annoyed Vivien precisely because Thayer was not attaching himself to ‘little Vivien'.
146

Unable to spur Thayer to take the plunge with her, Vivien in this letter adopts the position of the foolish lover in Kipling's poem ‘The Vampire' who is cast aside after an affair. In Kipling's verse it is a female vampire who jilts a man: ‘A fool there was and he made his prayer/ … / To a rag and a bone and a hank of hair'.
147
Vivien, however, has reversed the gender roles. She makes the scorned lover pointedly a ‘
she
', implying that Thayer has abandoned her. Probably her reference is not simply to Kipling's poem but to its recent, scandalous use to underpin the internationally-popular silent movie
A Fool There Was
, launched in January 1915 and based indirectly on the poem, whose words feature in its captions. Starring femme fatale Theda Bara as the cinema's first ‘vamp', it dealt with the seduction and ruin of a Wall Street lawyer who has sailed from America to England and becomes enthralled by the seductive ‘Vampire'. Playing with references to the vamp, the Wall Street figure and urges to ‘burn' in a ‘white flame', Vivien teases the plutocratic American Thayer after their relationship has failed to reach a passionate consummation. The letter makes clear that Thayer would sail in about two weeks, so she must have sent it on Thursday 3 June.
148

Tom, too, was due to leave for the States that summer. On 23 June the President and Fellows of Harvard had appointed him once more an Assistant in Philosophy for the coming session.
149
Yet, to their surprise, his plans took a very different turn. He sent in his resignation. About ten days after Thayer sailed from England, and without either Vivien or Tom telling their respective parents, on Saturday 26 June they met Lucy Thayer and Vivien's aunt Lillia Symes at Hampstead Register Office. There, not far from Vivien's home and a few miles from where Tom, quit of Oxford now the term had ended, was living at 35 Greek Street in Soho, Vivien and Tom (listed as ‘of no occupation') were married.
150
Almost secret, it was, in its way, a sudden elopement. They got a ‘special licence', which meant that, after they swore to the registrar that there was no legal impediment to the wedding, and once a fee had been paid, advance announcement need not be made. Such marriages were a feature of World War I England where soldiers often wed in haste before setting off for the battle front.

Quick-witted and determined, Vivien was on the rebound. So, in a subtler way, was Tom. He had by no means forgotten Emily Hale. Just as each of them had felt rebuffed, so both he and Vivien were eager for erotic experience. Flirtatious, vivacious Vivien could offer such experience in a way that Emily did not; indeed, part of Vivien's allure was that she might become what Thayer later described to Tom as ‘a wife who is not wifely'.
151
Poetry-loving Vivien, deprived by her mother of her lover Buckle the year before, and now failing to secure her handsome American literary-cum-philosophical beau Thayer, was genuinely attracted by Thayer's striking, even cleverer American friend Tom Eliot. She shared several of Tom's interests, and – encouraged by her own poetic sense and Pound's confidence – believed in what she knew about his gifts as a poet. Marrying Tom, whom she had known for three months, was impulsive, but hardly ridiculous. Becoming his wife, she would rescue him for poetry, for England and, most importantly, for herself: she secured a brilliant, sensitive husband, a fine dancer, an indisputable catch that her mother could not now rob her of.

Anxiously eager to lose his virginity and his ‘suppression', Tom had long been uncertain whether he could put his commitment to poetry before his predicted career as a philosopher; he had wondered about staying in England rather than returning to be immured in American academia. In marrying Vivien, he cut through all his problems at a single stroke – or so it seemed. Later he wrote,

I think that all I wanted of Vivienne was a flirtation or a mild affair: I was too shy and unpractised to achieve either with anybody. I believe that I came to persuade myself that I was in love with her simply because I wanted to burn my boats and commit myself to staying in England. And she persuaded herself (also under the influence of Pound) that she would save the poet by keeping him in England.

When he wrote these words almost half a century afterwards, he knew it had all been a disastrous mistake – not only for himself. ‘To her the marriage brought no happiness', he recorded in one of the bleakest accounts of any union. From one perspective, Pound had been right to encourage Vivien and Tom to throw in their lot together; from another, he had been wildly wrong. ‘To me', Tom wrote in this same account of their relationship, ‘it brought the state of mind out of which came
The Waste Land
'.
152

 

10

V. S. Eliot

N
O
sooner were they married than Vivien was ill. Keeping plans secret from her parents could not have been easy; her brother had to set off for the battle front on the wedding day itself; a combination of Tom's sexual inexperience and Vivien's worries probably made their nights together at least as problematic as delightful. About three years later Tom published a poem (soon suppressed) called ‘Ode on Independence Day, July 4th 1918'. Dealing with a wedding night, it contains three one-word-long verse paragraphs – ‘Tired', ‘Tortured' and ‘Tortuous'. The bride appears a disembowelled female sexual demon; the bridegroom smooths his hair; there is blood on the bed. An epigraph to the published version conjures up Shakespeare's Coriolanus. That lonely, proud Roman, accused of betraying his country, and suffering from having his career manipulated by his mother, came to fascinate Tom.
1
As usual with his poems, this one deflects autobiographical readings: he was not a bridegroom on 4 July 1918. Yet often his verse was conditioned by his ability to draw on his own sensations and emotions, cladding these in allusion, refraction and ironic distancing to produce devastating observations and to face the worst. His ‘Ode' presents the most disastrous wedding-night consummation in literature.

‘Eliot has suddenly married a very charming young woman', wrote Ezra Pound to his parents on 30 June 1915, four days after the event.
2
Friends liked both Tom and Vivien. Excitedly, the newlyweds did their best to put a brave face on things. On 30 June a conventional announcement appeared under ‘MARRIAGES' in the London
Times
. It reads as a demonstration of unity. Just as her surname was the double-barrelled, rather upper-class English-sounding ‘Haigh-Wood', so his became the double-barrelled ‘Stearns-Eliot'. Perhaps confused by complex instructions, the typesetter gave the bride, ‘Vivienne', an additional middle name:

STEARNS-ELIOT: HAIGH-WOOD. On the 26th June, by special licence, THOMAS STEARNS-ELIOT, youngest son of Mr. and Mrs. Henry Ware Eliot, of St Louis, Missouri, U.S.A., to VIVIENNE HAIGH HAIGH-WOOD, only daughter of Mr. and Mrs. C. H. Haigh-Wood, of 3, Compayne Gardens, Hampstead.
3

Mentioning ‘unusual preoccupations', Tom signed himself ‘T. Stearns-Eliot' when he thanked Harriet Monroe ten days later for payment for the publication of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'. It had appeared, appropriately or otherwise, in the issue of
Poetry
that coincided with its author's wedding. Though he soon dropped the hyphen, he went on calling himself ‘Stearns Eliot' in formal letters for the next eighteen months or more. When signing more than just her first name, Vivien styled herself variously to Tom's family and to Scofield ‘Vivien S. Eliot', ‘Vivien S-E.' and ‘V. S. E.' The young couple wanted to rhyme.

None of this ‘Stearns-Eliot' stuff cut much ice in America. There, on the front page of the
St Louis Globe-Democrat
, above a story headed ‘SLAYS GIRL AND KILLS HIMSELF', appeared an item, ‘THOMAS ELIOT OF ST. LOUIS WEDS ABROAD'.
4
His family were summering as usual at Gloucester, and probably hoping that their younger son, like his friend Scofield Thayer, would soon be home. Tom did his best to manage how they received the news. Though his own announcement to his parents does not survive, they took it badly. Conscious they would think he was throwing everything away, Tom had lined up Pound (whose own father was closely involved in his son's literary life) to send a long, reasoned epistle to Henry Ware Eliot, Sr, setting out what one might call the ‘business case' for Tom's remaining in London to pursue a literary career.

Sent on 28 June, Pound's arguments were in many ways shrewd, if as much about himself as about Tom. However, they were unlikely to go down well with the bridegroom's father. For one thing, they revealed that Tom had discussed his personal plans – financial and otherwise – in considerable detail with this obscure, eccentric young poet in London whom Lottie and Hal had never met, while not even breathing a word to his own parents about his impending marriage. Disquisitioning on everyone and everything from Theocritus and Rihaku to Imagism and the
Mercure de France
, Pound focused on literary and commercial arguments. His line of pleading was not always geared to encourage a sympathetic reception:

As to his coming to London, anything else is a waste of time and energy. No one in London cares a hang what is written in America. After getting an American audience a man has to begin all over again here if he plans for an international hearing. He even begins at a disadvantage. London likes discovering her own gods. Again in a literary career mediocrity is worse than useless. Either a man goes in to go the whole hog or he had better take to selling soap and gents furnishings. The situation has been very well summed up in the sentence: ‘Henry James stayed in Paris and read Turgenev and Flaubert, Mr Howells returned to America and read Henry James.'
5

Henry Ware Eliot, Sr, did not sell gents' furnishings; his company sold bricks. He had never been to Paris. He knew how little his wife had wanted Tom to go there in the first place. His father loved Tom, but had little love for what he saw as the insanity of
Blast
and London's avant-garde. The fact that Tom's peculiar poem ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' had appeared in
Poetry
(tucked away towards the back because the editor did not greatly care for it) was unlikely to mollify him. Did Tom think his father would welcome this Mr Pound's letter which concluded with advice hinting at how much money he, Henry Ware Eliot, Sr, should give his own son?

It was almost three weeks before the marriage of ‘Oxford student' Tom to his English bride was announced in his home city. This suggests that the family, in shock, bottled things up as they tried to work out how best to manage the situation. It was not Tom's parents but his brother who stated awkwardly to the inquisitive St Louis press on 15 July:

that he had been notified of his brother's marriage, through his mother. He said that Thomas Eliot had been in London taking a year's course in philosophy at the Oxford University. He said he knew little of Miss Haigh-Wood, but understood that she was a daughter of a member of the Royal Academy of Arts.
6

Tom had been trying to stress Vivien's respectability. Yet St Louis readers who read between the lines might conclude that there was something suspect about this hasty marriage. That was what Tom's parents thought too. His niece, Theodora, eleven that summer, remembered the family ‘row'. The consensus was that Tom had been ‘caught' by Vivien.
7
Having contacted his father and mother, on 2 July (using Vivien's parents' address), Tom wrote to his brother, telling him: ‘I feel more alive than I ever have before.' His letter suggests that with Henry he had discussed in the past a general wish to marry, to commit himself to literature and to escape the milieu of the
Boston Evening Transcript.
Loyal, hard-working Henry, a single man who liked writing and had some similar aspirations, was sympathetic. Tom hoped that, to a degree, the family might be ‘prepared for my decision'. Mentioning that his bride, just days after the wedding, ‘is not very well at present', he told Henry how much he and Vivien appreciated his kindness.

Dear Henry,

You will have heard by this time of the surprising changes in my plans. You know, however, what I always wanted, and I am sure that it will seem natural enough to you. The only really surprising thing is that I should have had the force to attempt it, and when you know Vivien, I am sure that you will not be surprised at that either. I know that you will agree that the responsibility and independent action has been and will be just what I needed. Now my only concern is how I can make her perfectly happy, and I think I can do that by being myself more fully than I ever have been. I am much less suppressed, and much more confident, than I ever have been.
8