Young Eliot (48 page)

At Harvard Tom's doctoral thesis was extremely well received, even though its author was absent. Royce considered it ‘the work of an expert', Hoernlé ‘a most valuable piece of work'. Asking Tom to confirm that his interest in philosophy was as strong as ever, Professor Woods hinted at the possibility of a Harvard appointment.
91
This was just what Tom's mother hoped for, and what Vivien sought to avoid. Tom strove to keep options open. Continuing to be solicitous, Russell had put him in touch with Philip Jourdain, a mathematician assembling a special feature on Leibniz for the October issue of Chicago's prestigious philosophy journal the
Monist
. Jourdain was the magazine's editor in England. As a result, two academic articles by Tom appeared in the issue, though one, drawing very substantially on his Oxford work, was more about Aristotle than Leibniz. Tom told Aiken that autumn ‘I am still a relativist.'
92
Presenting Aristotle's account of matter as ‘relativistic', he continued to explore, as he had done for years, the relationship between soul and body.
93

‘Our interest in art cannot be isolated from the other interests in life, among them interests in philosophy and religion', he had written in late 1915, deprecating both ‘a distorted puritanism' (which he hoped he had escaped) and ‘an orgiastic mysticism', which he had read much about.
94
Yet in 1916, though Pound helped him ‘select the poems for his first volume' in April and urged London publisher Elkin Matthews (who had published some of Pound's own early collections) to bring it out, Tom's poetic output was in decline.
95
Instead, in the hope he could give up schoolteaching, he was taking on reviewing. Sydney Waterlow, an editor of the
International Journal of Ethics
, had put him on to literary editors at the
New Statesman
,
Manchester Guardian
and
Westminster Gazette.
For these general-interest publications the books he reviewed were often related to America, India or France: he was, after all, a Francophile American who had studied Sanskrit. Cloaked in the confidence of anonymous reviewing – which ensured none of his Harvard teachers would identify him – he relished what he saw as an accurate picture of ‘the essential faults of American education' and ‘some of the reasons for the insolvency of American literature'. The Canadian humourist Stephen Leacock highlighted ‘the sterility of American literature' when compared with British work.
96
Tom enjoyed reading Leacock on the life of a schoolmaster, and even more on the slog of writing a PhD. ‘Mr Leacock', he wrote,

draws a truthful picture of the American graduate student, the prospective Doctor of Philosophy: his specialisation in knowledge, his expansion in ignorance, his laborious dullness, his years of labour and his crowning achievement – the Thesis.

Now it is not to be thought that this post-graduate work upon the preparation of a thesis, this so-called original scholarship, is difficult. It is pretentious, plausible, esoteric, cryptographic, occult if you will, but difficult it is not.

This labour is fatal to the development of intellectual powers. It crushes originality, it kills style. Few, very few, of these ‘original contributions' are well written or even readable.
97

These words hardly suggest someone eager for an academic career.

Initially naïve about reviewing, he was convinced he could earn significant money by doing vast amounts: ‘I crave a new book every few days.'
98
He received volumes ranging from philosophical and critical works on topics with which he was familiar (Durkheim, Bergson, theories of religion) to new poetry by Edgar Lee Masters and adventure fiction by Henry de Vere Stacpoole about hunting for gold among the New Guinea Dyaks. To his mother he explained that ‘the editress' of the
Saturday Westminster Gazette
‘told me that she could read and review
six
novels in an evening!' and advised him to do the same: short appraisals of eight novels would earn £1; then the books could be sold to a second-hand shop for 2 shillings each. ‘Vivien can do some of them for me', he added, taking care to show his mother how carefully he was calculating their household finances, and that his wife was readily supportive.
99
Perhaps, even if Tom wrote it, the
Westminster
's verdict that in
The Reef of Stars
Stacpoole's account of a mad New Guinea gold-hunter ‘leaves us in a state of complete exhaustion' owes something to Vivien's predicament.
100
Or maybe it was just Tom's own sense of being ‘worried and nervous'.
101

As he discovered the longstanding nature of Vivien's illnesses, she told him that, ‘afflicted with tuberculosis of the bones', she had endured ‘so many operations before she was seven, that she was able to recall nothing until she reached that age'.
102
Later, doctors came to describe her to him as ‘extraordinarily undeveloped' as if she were in a state of ‘extreme youth and almost childishness'.
103
Sometimes she dreamed of having children; more often she expressed a horror at passing on ‘something of yourself'.
104
Not so long before, Tom had envisaged becoming a father. Vivien's dancing, her intellectual and physical brightness, her prettiness and rushes of energy had drawn him to her. Other men, she knew, sensed these too. Yet more than thirty years after they met, reflecting that no one was ever wholly a success or a failure, he described marriage as a continuous learning: ‘married people must always regard each other as a mysterious person whom they are gradually getting to know, in a process which must go on to the end of the life of one or the other'.
105
This use of ‘must' makes the process sound somewhat gruelling. Sometimes Vivien's quirks were simply a nuisance: back in London from the countryside for a day to work in the library of the British Museum, Tom could not access his own books in a locked bookcase in their flat because she had hung on to the key. But her constant ill-health was an ongoing ordeal for them both.

In summer 1916, during the school holidays, he had a new photograph taken for his wartime Identity Book. This document meant he and Vivien could move freely beyond London. They spent several weeks ‘vegetating and gaining health' in the attractive historic village of Bosham. Pronounced ‘Bozzum' by locals, it lies on the south coast of England near Portsmouth, conveniently accessible from London by train. Bosham's lowest street was (and still is) submerged at high tide. Its cottages, ancient church and sailors' pub looked out on the sunlit sea. Like Gloucester, Massachusetts, Bosham offered ‘bathing, boating and bicycling'.
106
Accommodated and well fed by their ‘bouncing kindly landlady' Kate Smith, and conscious of other vacationers such as Gilbert Cannan, art critic Roger Fry and Bloomsbury-affiliated writer Mary Hutchinson, the Eliots went on learning about each other, relishing the seaside.
107
Relaxing in shirt and flannel trousers, Tom walked with Vivien to a farmhouse where they bought mushrooms. They cherished small pleasures, but things went wrong. Their lodgings were damp: Vivien experienced prolonged neuralgia as well as rheumatism in her feet (‘nearer to gout'); Tom got mild rheumatism in his left leg.
108
The two twenty-eight-year-olds tried to cheer up, yet sometimes, in pain and under the weather, they felt acutely miserable.

At Bosham they had a familiar visitor, also unhappy. Convicted for impeding British military recruitment, Bertrand Russell had been sacked from Trinity College in June. Vigorously he supported the No-Conscription Fellowship. Though the philosopher was ordered to pay a £100 fine, Tom ‘rejoiced' to hear accounts of his spirited courtroom defence; Russell had dined with Vivien soon after his trial, and they had ‘discussed money'.
109
The sacked don had been assisting the Eliots financially with their household expenditure, as well as funding Vivien's dancing lessons. He realised, as he put it to Lady Ottoline, that ‘it would save my pocket if her husband got better-paid work'.
110

Impressed with what he knew of Tom's reviewing, Russell suggested to Ottoline that Tom might send her samples of his writing, so she might ask the influential critic Desmond McCarthy (a frequent Garsington guest) to help him out – maybe with regular work for the
New Statesman
or
Guardian
, for both of which, occasionally, Tom had written.
Economising, Russell had rented out his London flat. He flitted now among several bolt-holes, writing public lectures for the No-Conscription Fellowship to be delivered that autumn. Among his places of refuge were Garsington, and Bosham – where Vivien more than Tom seems to have been the attraction. Lady Ottoline was fed up with her lover's apparent infatuation with Vivien:

I had a long talk with Bertie about Mrs. Eliot. I don't really understand her influence over him. It seems odd that such a frivolous, silly, little woman should affect him so much, but I think he likes to feel that she depends on him, and she looks up to him as a rich god, for he lavishes presents on her of silk underclothes and all sorts of silly things, and pays for her dancing lessons. It takes all his money and now he expects us to raise a fund to pay the £100 fine.
111

None of this stopped Russell arriving in Bosham on more than one occasion that August. Following his ‘long talk' with Lady Ottoline, he promised to disengage from Vivien, but feared ‘the result will be a violent quarrel'.
112
He felt he could not immediately axe his financial support. ‘It will be difficult to do anything sudden', Russell prevaricated, ‘&
really
', he told her ladyship on 4 August,
‘the whole thing is not as bad as you think'.
113

By 20 August, away from Bosham, Russell was writing to Ottoline about how Vivien cared for him. He felt ‘affection' for her; he worried her ‘faults' sprang from ‘a root of despair'.
114
He could not break with her immediately and felt awkward. Writing to Aiken on 21 August, Tom listed various Bosham visitors, but not Russell; nor, though she knew him, did he mention the philosopher to Eleanor Hinkley on 5 September when he wrote from London, giving her an account of Bosham and ‘friends' they had seen there.
115
On 31 August Russell and Tom had discussed Vivien, who was then ill and whom Russell did not see. No detailed account of their conversation survives, but Russell conveyed the gist to Lady Ottoline:

It was rather gloomy, but I got quite clear as to what must be done, so I shan't worry any more. It is fixed that I go to Bosham Monday to Friday; then I don't expect to see her during the winter. Seeing her is worrying, and takes up my time and money and her health. I shall go on doing what I have done in the way of money during the winter, but beyond that I have said I can't foresee what will be possible. I can't now decide anything beyond this winter.

Conscious that his behaviour could be regarded as shabby, Russell told Lady Ottoline he would like to come to Garsington after his week at Bosham with Vivien while Tom was in London. ‘Matters with Mrs. E. will be decided then. I never contemplated risking my reputation with her, & I never risked it as far as I can judge.'
116
On 4 September Russell was served with a banning order by the authorities, prohibiting him from visiting any coastal areas or other militarily sensitive sites. Vivien remained in Bosham alone; Tom stayed in London.

‘Tell me how Emily is', he wrote the next day to Eleanor.
117
This short sentence occurs as part of a much longer letter, composed with a determined lightness, in which he describes life in Bosham. The words about Emily Hale conceal much more than they reveal. In June Tom and Vivien had had their first wedding anniversary. Yet, recalling his 1915 marriage, he wrote as an old man, ‘I was still, as I came to believe a year later, in love with Miss Hale.'
118

As far as he could, he suppressed that thought. He did not write to Emily. He knew he had burned his boats. Yet his time in Bosham with Vivien made him think of Massachusetts. ‘The villagers', he told his mother, ‘are very much like New England fishing people, but rather more complete in their way'.
119
Even as New England came into his mind, he sounded a note of admiration for old England: a reminder he was staying put. His father seems never to have accepted his decision, but Tom went on playing chess with him by post. Transatlantic family relations were generally improved, and he strove to keep them so, thanking his mother profusely for offers of help and his father for ongoing financial support. From time to time Henry too sent money. English friends including Russell and Ottoline Morrell, not to mention Pound and his many contacts, were encouraging the publication and reception of his work in England and America. Sent to
Poetry
by Pound in May,
four poems (‘Conversation Galante', ‘La Figlia Che Piange', ‘Mr. Apollinax', and ‘Morning at the Window' – none of them new) appeared in the September issue of that Chicago journal under the collective title, ‘Observations'. This term, cool and distancing, would linger in Tom's mind.

While determined to stay in England, he remained an American. To his brother he confessed his fear ‘that “J.A.P.” is a swan song'. Nonetheless he had hopes to publish his first collection that autumn in New York: ‘a small volume', but a personal milestone.
120
Instead, when this aspiration came to nothing, he had to content himself with reading Conrad Aiken's second collection,
Turns and Movies
. Published in Boston and New York, it was filled with vignettes of dancers and theatre performers such as those he and Aiken had watched as students. Tom found a certain power in the work. Continuing to review books on primitive religions, he could still joke with his friend in verbally inventive, quasi-Bolovian fashion about ‘the sacred ritual of the rpat'; but as he read Aiken's poems he felt a ‘nausea with life'.
121