Young Eliot (49 page)

Editors hardly rushed to publish his verse, but at least it was appearing. In August 1916, composing on the typewriter, he wrote a review (published that October in the
New Statesman
)
of a volume memorialising French poet Charles Péguy. Tom had read Péguy's work during his student year in Paris. Now he saw Péguy as ‘a witness to the eternal fertility of the French soil'. That phrasing is unusually fulsome; the book moved him: ‘It is like the account of the death of a friend.'
122
Less than a year had passed since he had heard of the death of his own friend Verdenal, and from Vivien's young brother Maurice (invalided home from the front suffering from insomnia, and spending his nineteenth birthday sailing with them at Bosham) came accounts of battlefield horrors. ‘WORN OUT' and prematurely aged, Maurice spoke about seeing scattered body parts and spending sleepless nights shooting trench rats with a revolver.
123
Increasingly, the war spoiled life in London, and threatened artistic endeavours. From editing
Blast
Wyndham Lewis had gone to be a gunner in the army; Lewis's friend and fellow Vorticist Edward Wadsworth was now in the Royal Navy; England's philosopher-poet T. E. Hulme, whose championing of Classicism and whose poetry mattered to Pound and to Tom, had been sent home wounded in 1915, but had returned to combat and would soon be killed. Conscious that he was far from such battlefield ordeals, the little known American philosopher-poet ‘T. R. Eliot' (as
Poetry
termed him that September) felt ‘comparatively immature'.
124

To bring in more cash he took on lecturing for the Oxford University Extension Delegacy, a form of academic outreach. Apparently he applied to this body while teaching at High Wycombe. He offered six different courses on French literature – from ‘French Literary Criticism' to ‘Contemporary French Poets and Novelists' – but the bureaucracy moved slowly; only one course was requested. It was to run on Tuesday afternoons from 3 October until 12 December in Ilkley, a town on the West Yorkshire moors, about two hundred miles north of London. Tom must have had to negotiate time off school – even today the rail journey takes three hours. Covering topics from the egotistical spontaneity of Rousseauistic Romanticism to modern French literary nationalism, royalism, socialism and Catholicism, the lectures culminated with an account of Bergson. The young, less than happily married ‘T. Stearns Eliot, M.A. (Harvard)' stressed that ‘The beginning of the twentieth century has witnessed a return to the ideals of classicism' whose ‘point of view has been defined as essentially a belief in Original Sin – the necessity for austere discipline'. Belonging to no church, he was particularly scathing about those who made religion sound easy. With his familial ‘Unitarianism' in mind, he published a review that October containing a sentence etched with irony: ‘Certain saints found the following of Christ very hard, but modern methods have facilitated everything.'
125

Deep down, religion continued to trouble him. His reading of Durkheim helped convince him that ‘the struggle of “liberal” against “orthodox” faith is out of date. The present conflict is far more momentous than that.'
126
His relativism and scepticism continued; yet he inclined in a direction encouraged by his time in Paris. Once, while at Harvard, he had written of a wish to overturn ‘romantic irritations' by ‘classical convictions'.
127
Now his Ilkley lectures on modern French literature stressed the need for form and restraint. ‘A classicist in art and literature will therefore be likely to adhere to a monarchical form of government, and to the Catholic Church.'
128
If this sounds a surprising attitude for an American to propagate, it had been encouraged not only by Tom's study with Babbitt but also by his reading of
The Drift of Romanticism
(1913) and
Aristocracy and Justice
(1916). In these books the conservative Paul Elmer More argued, as Tom put it during that World War I summer, that ‘At the bottom of man's heart there is always the beast', and that ‘man requires an askesis'.
129

Tom's Yorkshire lectures were probably ill-suited to their audience. To buy all the set texts alone cost almost £5. Attendees used a wartime local library as best they could. Almost sixty turned up – mainly women – but only a quarter of them stayed on for the ensuing discussion classes. The subject matter was so unfamiliar that he had to admit there was no ‘discussion of an argumentative nature' at all.
130
The students thought ‘he seemed a nice young man but he would fiddle with his watchchain'.
131
Nervously, he over-prepared. Scripting his first hour-long lecture in full, he had attempted to memorise it, but he realised his oration was in danger of lasting two hours. Undaunted, he had also applied to the University of London Extension Board to deliver another course, this time on better-known material. The former Oxford Classics don Alfred Zimmern had mentioned Tom's name to an official of the Workers' Educational Association; in October London University's Joint Committee for the Promotion of Higher Education for Working People agreed this young American could be a tutor in Southall, London, ‘provided that there is satisfactory evidence that he will be remaining in England for a reasonable period'.
132

Tom started not long afterwards giving a twenty-four-week course of lectures on ‘Modern English Literature'. It began with Tennyson, the Brownings, Carlyle, Newman and Dickens, then continued through Thackeray, George Eliot, Arnold and the Brontës, before concluding with George Borrow, Ruskin, Edward Fitzgerald and George Meredith. Given that for Tennyson alone students were recommended to read
Maud
,
In Memoriam, The Idylls of the King
and a range of shorter poems, this was again very demanding. Lectures were on Monday evenings. The Ilkley series was not yet over. So in some weeks Tom had to speak for an hour in Southall, then give a follow-up tutorial in the ensuing hour, then be in Yorkshire for the Tuesday afternoon's lecture and discussion class, before heading back to complete his curtailed week's teaching at Highgate School. He was also working on reviews and articles. Vivien, complaining of her own ‘nerve storms' in October, noted that Tom felt ‘
dried up
' as a poet.
133
By around the end of October 1916 he had decided to give up his work at Highgate completely.

He got better at the lecturing, and enjoyed it. This seemed a more promising way to make money. Bertrand Russell, a seasoned orator, was giving a series of public lectures on such topics as ‘Political Ideals' in Manchester from 16 October.
134
Perhaps coincidentally, Vivien decided she was well enough to go to Lancashire to stay outside Manchester with an old girlfriend for ten days or so from 11 October. Ten days later Russell, with Vivien on his mind, was writing to one of his current lovers, the aristocratic actress ‘Colette O'Niel' (Lady Constance Malleson, whose husband Miles, active in the No-Conscription Fellowship, was one of Russell's admirers) about how he had become ‘enmeshed'. Protesting his ‘very great affection' for both Tom and Vivien, he confessed that ‘my relation to her especially is very intimate'; he thought Lady Constance would ‘think her a common little thing, quite insignificant', but made it clear how much he cared about her.
135
Aware that Vivien had been hurt emotionally in two earlier relationships, Russell presented his own emotional involvement with her as altruistically benign, though he admitted they had had ‘a long disagreement':

The root of the matter is that she had become filled with fear through having been hurt, and out of defiance had become harsh to everyone including her husband, who is my friend, whom I love, and who is dependent on her for his happiness. If I fail her, she will punish him, and be morally ruined. During the disagreement, I thought this had happened, but it turns out that it hasn't. I am really vitally needed there, and one can't ignore that.
136

Not mentioning Russell or their disagreement, and hardly short of snobberies of her own (in which she encouraged Tom), Vivien complained, part jokingly, in a letter to Tom's brother that her friends in Lancashire and North Wales were ‘most dreadful people' who were ‘so provincial that my American friends tell me they are very much like Americans!' Lecturing in Ilkley, Tom had been struck ‘how much more like Americans' the people in Yorkshire were ‘than the South of England people', but he didn't seem to mind.
137
His forthright friend Karl Culpin had come from Yorkshire, and Tom, unlike Vivien, developed a lasting fondness for such northerners.

No sooner had he developed his journalistic contacts than Vivien (who saw how successful Russell's lectures could be) was encouraging her husband to change direction: ‘I feel
very
strongly that Journalism is bad for Tom. It is. If he was not a poet it would be excellent for him. He loves it. But I am sure and certain that it will be the
ruin
of his poetry – if it goes on. For him – he ought never
to
have to write.
' She wanted him to take on more lecturing: the Southall lectures paid £60 plus a £3 expenses allowance, and ‘directly Tom gets sufficient lectures to keep us, he will do no more
journalism
'. Vivien's tone in this letter to Tom's brother Henry is confidently directorial, but, unlike his parents (and perhaps quickened by their scepticism), she had an insightful, brave and absolute faith in his verse: ‘I
do
think he is made to be a great writer –
a
poet. His prose is very good – but I think it will never be
so
good as his poetry.'
138

This was Vivien at her most inspiring. Incited by her, Tom sought further lecturing opportunities; but, frightened not least by her erratic health, he felt unable to abandon journalism. His hope in November 1916 was to become self-supporting, relying on lecturing, literary contacts and several kinds of writing. Henry sent money; his parents were also supportive. Tom felt ‘proud of my family' as they rallied round.
139
Along with Vivien he urged his brother to take the plunge and come to London too in order to pursue literary work. Partly reflecting on his own circumstances, he set forth to Henry an ideal of risk and commitment: ‘I do think that if one makes up one's mind what one wants, then sooner or later an occasion will come when it is possible to seize it, for I think everybody gets the kind of life he wants, and that if he doesn't know, or doesn't want strongly enough, he will never get anything satisfactory.'
140
The sole recklessness, he added, lay in taking a risk without sufficient willpower to carry it through. However awkward their circumstances, that was where Vivien helped.

Yet still he worried. He was coming to have a sense of what he called ‘the deeper reality behind ordinary superstition'. Conscious of war, financial anxieties and dangers of overwork, he wondered what would happen to Vivien if he died. ‘I want her to seem quite real to you', he wrote to his brother, ‘literally one of my own family, and I should not trust her care to anyone but one of my own family.' He repeated the point in a postscript, asking Henry explicitly if he would be responsible for Vivien in the event of his death: ‘
Will you do that?
' There was no time for a longer letter. Tom very rarely underlined words in his correspondence, but towards the end of this handwritten missive he underscored six separate words and phrases – a habit characteristic of Vivien's notes. He added yet another postscript: ‘I want
all
of my family to take the sort of interest in her which would persist after my death; but I depend
especially
on you.'
141

 

11

Observations

W
HEN
Vivien first slept with Bertrand Russell is uncertain. It may have been as early as mid-1915 when she boasted that he was ‘all over me'.
1
However, it seems unlikely that after only weeks of marriage she would announce her infidelity. Charismatic rather than handsome, poetry-loving Russell was an older man who could seem to exude confidence. A powerful orator, an intellectual star, a Fellow of the Royal Society and the son of an English viscount, he lived among England's social elites. Witty, self-obsessed, orphaned at an early age and haunted by dark family secrets, Russell had a powerful, problematic allure that attracted many women. Seen by some as a feminist, by others as a libertine, in 1916 he advocated ‘advanced' views on sex, marriage and adultery: ‘A rather small section of the public genuinely believes that sexual relations outside marriage are wicked … and a very rapidly increasing number of women … do not believe the conventional code.'
2
The poem ‘Mr. Apollinax' (which Russell liked) certainly recognises its subject's associations with bold sexuality.
3
Tom's poetic intuition was eerily perceptive.

Russell's use of the word ‘intimate' usually denoted sexual relations. Decades later, he assured one of Tom's acquaintances that ‘I never had intimate sexual relations with Vivienne.'
4
This conflicts with Russell's having told Constance Malleson that his ‘relation to' Tom's wife was ‘very intimate'.
5
Russell's biographer, Ray Monk, demonstrates that his denial was a lie: by 28 September 1917, Lady Malleson was describing Russell as a ‘lover' of Vivien. Asked about ‘the idea that Vivien and Russell had sexual relations', she recalled, ‘“I always took it for granted that they had; & when I wrote so to BR he never contradicted me … He once appeared in my bedroom wearing black pyjamas, saying that VSE likes them.”'
6
Nicholas Griffin, the twenty-first-century editor of Russell's letters, thinks it was ‘At some point in 1916' that Russell and Vivien, who had become increasingly close, ‘began an affair'.
7
Certainly by 30 October 1917, Russell, writing to Malleson to emphasise that he still loved
her
, made it quite clear what had been going on: