Young Eliot (47 page)

After five days, Russell left Vivien in Torquay and Tom, at Russell's expense, joined her there. Tom wrote to Russell expressing great gratitude: he was sure the older man had ‘handled' Vivien ‘in the very best way – better than I'. He felt they owed Russell a huge amount, perhaps even Vivien's life. She was still, however, sick with exhaustion, headache, faintness and stomach problems. Such ills would become central to their married life – frightening for both of them, and hardly conducive to conjugal bliss. Tom knew sex could be exciting, but could also pall; its urges might be controlled or deflected. Observing schoolboys in the classroom, he summarised, with approval and a certain chilled, schoolmasterly clarity, the arguments of A. Clutton Brock's
The Ultimate Belief
:

For the boy whose childhood has been empty of beauty, the boy who has never learned the
detached
curiosity for beauty, the sexual instinct when it is aroused may mean the only possible escape from a prosaic world. Hence a danger which may be followed by a still greater disaster, the passage from a period of violent excitement into a maturity of commonplace. We must learn to love always, to exercise those disinterested passions of the spirit which are inexhaustible and permanently satisfying.
61

This was ‘T. Stearns Eliot', reviewer in the
International Journal of Ethics,
perfecting his magisterial tone; but around the same time in later 1916, writing to Henry about how he felt, he described his year as ‘the most awful nightmare of anxiety that the mind of man could conceive'.
62

As he struggled to write up a revised version of his PhD, his worries were financial, literary and academic, but at the heart of them lay Vivien and her health. When they married he had not known her medical history in detail.
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Now he saw all her difficulties. Early in the year she exhausted herself agonising over an impending visit to the dentist. Toothache and that dentist's mention of ‘a possibility of an abscess' reduced her to a state of ‘shock'. Tom, who thought the dentist lacking in tact, turned to Russell; Vivien was now ‘very ill', suffering ‘very great pain, both neuralgia and stomach'.
64
Russell told Woods at Harvard in early March that Tom, when not schoolteaching at Highgate, spent his spare time looking after his wife ‘with the most amazing devotion and unselfishness'.
65

Having moved out of Bertie's London quarters, the Eliots were now in a rented flat at 3 Culworth House in St John's Wood, a neo-Georgian, mansion-style block about a mile from Vivien's parents. Almost at once they sought alternative accommodation. Vivien was ‘very ill all the winter', Tom told Aiken. No sooner did he suggest she was ‘gradually getting better' in the summer of 1916 than there was another bout of ‘neuralgia' and sinus trouble.
66
In September a doctor told her she was not eating properly. As she put it,

He said I was chiefly starved! The headaches are called hemicranial migraine, and they are really ‘nerve storms' affecting one whole side of me – they make me sick and feverish and they always last 15–24 hours – and I rise up weak and white as if I had been through some long and dreadful illness. He explained that they are caused in me by starvation – I do not eat enough to nourish my nervous system – and brain.
67

On new medication, she hoped to improve, but slowly. It is tempting to speculate that this sounds like an eating disorder, but in early-twentieth-century parlance Vivien's troubles were variously assumed to involve nerves, hysteria, colitis, neuralgia, stomach cramps, migraines and other ailments. Troubled, and never long in remission, she always felt exhausted by her illnesses. So did Tom.

Constantly worried about her, he now spent his weekdays teaching small boys at the fee-paying Highgate Junior School. Described by him in 1921 as ‘near London', it was a sixteenth-century foundation.
68
The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who had ended his days in Highgate, was buried in the school chapel; another poet Gerard Manley Hopkins had been a pupil in the 1850s. Based in Cholmeley House, the Junior School catered for boys around the age of ten. Tom's immediate boss was E. H. Kelly, a competent teacher with a talent for woodturning. In these war years he impressed Tom by turning ‘crutches beautifully' on a small lathe.
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More forbidding, in mortar board and billowing silk gown, red-faced Dr J. A. H. Johnston, Highgate's scientifically-minded headmaster, was an irate Scottish mathematician. Passing regularly through the school ‘like a tornado', and said to be the victim of a gastric ulcer, Dr Johnston annoyed boarders (who breakfasted on ‘bread and scrape' and lunched on ‘lentil pie') by ostentatiously ‘necking into roast chicken'.
70
A junior teacher under Mr Kelly, Tom could seem quiet and remote, but at least one boy – ten-year-old fledgling poet John Betjeman – remembered ‘The American master, Mr Eliot' as ‘That dear good man'.
71
Tom taught ‘French, Latin, lower mathematics, drawing, swimming, geography, history, and baseball'.
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Vivien and his mother thought he was wasted in the job. However, as with all his adult employments, he gave it his best, and taught at Highgate until the end of 1916. He thought hard about education that year, sympathetic to the idea that ‘Boys should be taught to respect the values of truth, beauty and goodness for their own sake … They should learn
why
knowledge is valuable, apart from purely practical success, the pursuit of which may fail to excite the more independent.'
73

In March the young schoolteacher and his wife dined in Soho with Bertrand Russell, and Ottoline and Philip Morrell. Russell had shown Lady Ottoline the October 1915
Poetry
containing ‘The Boston Evening Transcript', ‘Aunt Helen' and ‘Cousin Nancy'. Thinking these ‘very remarkable', Lady Ottoline welcomed the Eliots into her London circle, which included painters Dorothy Brett and Dora Carrington as well as the novelist Molly MacCarthy. Ottoline was struck by Vivien's refusal to accompany Tom to America ‘as she was afraid of submarines'. In Soho, however, she recalled,

The dinner was not a great success. T. S. Eliot was very formal and polite, and his wife seemed to me of the ‘spoilt kitten'-type, very second-rate and ultra feminine, playful and naïve, anxious to show she ‘possessed' Bertie, when we walked away from the restaurant she headed him off and kept him to herself, walking with him arm-in-arm. I felt rather
froissée
at her bad manners.

Next day I gave a tea-party at Bedford Square. One of the drawing-rooms had been turned into my bedroom. The bed was a large, very high four-poster, with Cardinal-coloured silk curtains, trimmed with silver; it was very lovely looking into that room from the Great Drawing Room. Molly MacCarthy and Dora Sanger, Brett and Carrington and Gertler and Mr. and Mrs. Eliot and Bertie came. It seemed a happy gay tea-party, at least thus I always remember it.
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Conscious Vivien would be too ill to accompany him to America, and did not want to go, Tom aimed to submit his PhD as soon as possible. He worked hard on the new version, ‘The Nature of Objects, with reference to the philosophy of F. H. Bradley'. Drawing heavily on his Oxford work, its first chapter dealt with knowledge of immediate experience.

A toothache, or a violent passion, is not necessarily diminished by our knowledge of its causes, its character, its importance or insignificance. To say that one part of the mind suffers and another part reflects upon the suffering is perhaps to talk in fictions. But we know that those highly-organized beings who are able to objectify their passions, and as passive spectators to contemplate their joys and torments, are also those who suffer and enjoy the most keenly.
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If Vivien and her toothache were in his mind as he wrote, so was Thackeray's manipulative lover Becky Sharp, as well as ideas that would nourish his own aesthetic theory. Discussing imagination and memory, he argued that ‘It is not true that the ideas of a great poet are in any sense arbitrary'; rather, ‘the apparent irrelevance is due to the fact that terms are used with more or other than their normal meaning'.
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Drawing on his earlier work, Tom stressed the importance of ‘relation' and of ‘degrees of reality'; he confronted, too, issues of solipsism. The only poet mentioned is the French Symbolist Mallarmé (defended against being read solely in terms of ‘morbid psychological activity'), and only one poem features – revealingly misquoted. Substituting the word ‘shadows' for ‘visions', Tom altered the first line of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's sonnet 26 from
Sonnets from the Portuguese
, that begins ‘I lived with visions for my company'; the poet thanks her beloved for coming to ‘be' what earlier dreams only ‘seemed'.
77
Though she supported his writing of the thesis, Vivien believed Tom's real bent lay in poetic vision, not philosophical shadow-play. In this, as in other ways, she was the inspiring opposite of his mother. Lottie Eliot explained in a May 1916 letter to Russell that she had ‘absolute faith' in Tom's ‘Philosophy but not in the
vers libres
'.
78
Vivien was in some regards just what her young poet husband needed: ‘Tom is
wonderful
', she assured Henry.
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‘Of course', she added later that year, ‘he has me to shove him – I supply the motive power, and I
do
shove.'
80

Like his mother, Vivien saw Tom's potential; but each woman regarded that potential differently. Vivien shoved, but held Tom back too. As the time drew near for him to sail to the States on 1 April 1916 to sit his doctoral examinations, Tom was urged by Pound to take an extra trunk filled with Vorticist paintings for a planned New York exhibition. Wyndham Lewis did not want all his pictures sunk ‘in these torpedoing times': sending half with Tom and the rest in a different vessel should reduce the risk.
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Vivien, more anxious about her new husband than about any paintings, grew increasingly worried Tom's ship would be vulnerable. Foul weather hardly helped. Aware on 29 March that her nerves were ‘all to pieces', Russell contacted Tom's father, strongly advising him to cable Tom not to make the trip unless his doctorate was worth risking his life.
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Next day Tom cabled to say he was not coming. He and Vivien had just moved flats; the strain was telling on them both.

To give him a change of scene, in early April Russell took him on his first visit to Garsington. ‘Rather lonely, and very lovable', Tom (Russell assured Ottoline Morrell) had ‘an
intense
desire to see you again'.
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Tom did not shine. A disappointed Lady Ottoline, conscious of the attraction between Russell and his former student's wife, nicknamed the young poet ‘The Undertaker' and described his tense, guarded demeanour in her journal, adding further reflections later.

I never feel my best with Bertie. I cannot tell why. He always quenches my light-headedness and gaiety and puts a blight on me. T. S. Eliot, his American poet friend came with him. I was very excited that T. S. Eliot was coming with him, but I found him dull, dull, dull. He never moves his lips but speaks in an even and monotonous voice, and I felt him monotonous without and within. Where does his queer neurasthenic poetry come from, I wonder? From his New England, Puritan inheritance and upbringing? I think he has lost all spontaneity and can only break through his conventionality by stimulants or violent emotions. He is obviously very ignorant of England and imagines that it is essential to be highly polite and conventional and decorous, and meticulous. I tried to get him to talk more freely by talking French to him, as I thought he might feel freer doing so, but I don't think it was a great success, although better than English. He speaks French very perfectly, slowly and correctly. As I remember this I feel how odd it was, but it shows how very foreign Eliot seemed to me then; but I generally found that Americans are as foreign to us as Germans are.
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Socially, maritally and professionally, Tom was struggling, even if Russell thought Vivien ‘all right again'.
85
‘In a state of mental confusion', Tom told Woods at Harvard that his ship's departure had been postponed for five days at the last minute, but assured his former professor he would come ‘
at the first opportunity
'.
86

The new London flat, ‘nearly a top one' and overlooking a courtyard, was at 18 Crawford Mansions, a newly built, five-storey red-brick neo-Georgian building on the corner of Crawford Street and Homer Lane, Marylebone.
87
Five pale stone steps led to a handsome communal front door whose panels included art nouveau ironwork. Vivien liked it. Though there were pubs, ‘slums and low streets and poor shops close around us', tantalisingly near were expensive, fashionable squares.
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Noise came from neighbours' gramophones, but the plumbing was good – constant hot water and ‘every modern convenience' – even if by Vivien's standards the apartment was small. There was a hall, dining room (which doubled as Tom's dressing room and study), drawing room, substantial bedroom, kitchen and a good bathroom. Vivien chose fashionable decor: orange wallpaper in the dining room, black-and-white stripes in the hall. For all her illnesses, she still liked to excite. Signing herself ‘the most fervent Vivien S-E', she wrote to Scofield Thayer, who had announced he too was getting married. She urged him to ‘Try black silk sheets and pillow covers – they are extraordinarily effective – so long as you are willing to sacrifice
yourself.
'
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But not long afterwards she was ‘very ill in the night', Tom told Russell anxiously. ‘She seems very overdone.'
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