Young Eliot (51 page)

The form of this landmark in the history of poetry is not really
vers libre
. Iambic pentameter is heard in the opening verse paragraph – in ‘Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels', for instance.
25
Nevertheless, the departures from pentameter, like the resistance to poetic diction, are more striking. Simultaneously such departures and resistance both ironise and heighten those moments when (as in the famous title's use of the term ‘Love Song') the poetry invokes the traditionally ‘poetic'. Authoring his manifesto ‘Reflections on
Vers Libre
' (proudly sent to his parents) and contemplating his first collection in the early part of 1917, Tom formulated in his prose and in that book's title an aesthetic which he had originated years earlier in America and during his first visit to Europe.

As he did so, his sense of creativity returned. He contemplated producing an article on ‘Introspective Consciousness'.
26
His interest in that topic, like his wary conviction that ‘individual psychology' could be understood in new ways through ‘psycho-analysis', matched his imaginative use of self-observation as well as observations of people around him.
27
Such perceptions were recast, shaped through artistry, to take them far from autobiography, but the results are all the more impressive for drawing, however indirectly, on Tom's own consciousness and reading. Some topics remained off limits: nothing parental is explored in his early verse, for instance; but there is a continuing, increasingly cutting observation of ways in which the sexes interact.

Having long discussed French poetry with Pound and others, in summer 1916 he had tried to translate more Laforgue. Along with his perusal of Vildrac and Duhamel, this led to an odd experiment that complemented Ottoline Morrell's belief that Tom might release in French what he could not say in English. Attempting to trick his consciousness into allowing him to create poetry again, he chimed French rhymes off each other: ‘Le directeur / Conservateur / Du Spectateur'.
28
The ploy worked, and one of the resulting poems was uncharacteristically autobiographical.

Its title was ‘Mélange Adultère de Tout', and it presented a peripatetic speaker with a variety of professional identities: ‘En Amérique, professeur; / En Angleterre, journaliste' were the first two; others included being a lecturer ‘En Yorkshire' and, in Germany, a philosopher.
29
Drawing on personal experience, Tom, who had kept up his reading in anthropology, also moved disconcertingly beyond it, incorporating a range of attributes and naming several international locations that he had never seen – from Damascus and Omaha to Mozambique. Pulled in many directions, the speaker tells of being a London banker, and of celebrating his feast day at an African oasis, dressed in a giraffe skin. Autobiographical and weirdly imagined elements meld. The poem suggests not only a protean, overstretched existence, but also a disconcerting sense of not feeling at home anywhere. Tom's experience of being a foreigner in England could pay dividends, both in affording him easy access to other foreigners, and in quickening his ability to articulate a sense of displacement profoundly important in modern literature. ‘Mélange Adultère de Tout', written in a foreign language, is one of the first poems in which he explores an imaginative seam whose continued investigation would help make him, in due time, the greatest immigrant poet in Anglophone verse. Meanwhile, declaring itself ‘A Magazine of the Arts, Making No Compromise with the Public Taste', Chicago's
Little Review
had just taken on that other displaced person Ezra Pound as its ‘foreign editor', which is why, in 1917, Tom's new Francophone poems appeared there. Not all this literature of immigrants and emigrants won plaudits. ‘Your magazine is rubbish', complained a New York correspondent in the same issue; nonetheless, the self-exiled Irishman ‘James Joyce, Zurich, Switzerland', had recently praised its ‘many good writers' and hoped to send ‘something very soon'.
30

However English he sounded to Americans, occasionally Tom played up his ‘outsider' status. ‘I am very dependent on such aids', he wrote to Mary Hutchinson at the start of 1917, after she sent him a map of part of London. He had met Mary, a writer, and her lover Clive Bell the previous year. She recalled that the first time she saw Tom was ‘in August, 1916' when he ‘was sitting alone on a sea-wall in the estuary of Chichester Harbour'; he was wearing ‘white flannels and was looking out to sea'. Around this time ‘he used to carry in his pockets a very small Virgil and a very small Dante' which, she believed, he read ‘by the water's edge'. Tom, too, remembered their encounter precisely: Mary was carrying ‘an unusual flower'.
31
Slightly younger than Tom, this Indian-born upper-class woman was married to a radical lawyer, St John (known as Jack) Hutchinson, who was, like Tom, a fan of music-hall stars including George Robey. Mother of two young children, Mary wore bright frocks designed by the avant-garde Omega Workshops; local working-class kids nicknamed her ‘The Queen of Sheba'.
32
She was also a half-cousin of the provocatively camp biographer Lytton Strachey; her lover, the art critic Bell, was married to artist Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf's sister. After painting Mary Hutchinson's portrait in Matisse-like tones in 1915, making her look sly and big-lipped, Vanessa Bell pronounced the picture ‘perfectly hideous … and yet quite recognisable'.
33
Partying with Mary and friends, Tom was received now into the heart of the sometimes spiteful, aesthetically daring Bloomsbury group. He mixed in ‘fast', witty artistic circles whose sexual mores were completely different from those of the St Louis and New England Eliots. In January 1917 he and Mrs Hutchinson had parts in a play written for private performance by Strachey, whose risqué farces sometimes involved cross-dressing. Their acting seems to have involved Tom – as he had once done with Amy de Gozzaldi – giving Mary ‘a prolonged kiss'.
34
Clive Bell exclaimed to her that she was ‘flirting with Eliot!'
35

In such company, with his intellectual acuteness masking the hurts of his private life and his fashionable garb concealing his darned underwear, Tom could shine. Intelligent, handsome, observant, and with a dash of foreign exoticism, he had the ability to quote poetry in several languages and had a taste for words like ‘pococurantism'.
36
His poetry was regarded, even in the Hutchinsons' circle, as provocatively racy. By April 1917 the jealous Clive Bell was complaining half seriously to Mary Hutchinson that she was probably kissing Tom ‘or at least squeezing his hand'. He suggested she ask the American poet to show her how (as Tom put it in ‘Aunt Helen'), ‘the footman sat upon the dining-table / Holding the second housemaid on his knees'.
37

Long afterwards, Vivien's brother claimed Mary Hutchinson had ‘made a pass' at Tom; there does seem to have been a close chemistry between them.
38
Tom would ‘come over on the ferry' frequently from Bosham to the Hutchinsons' country cottage, Eleanor House at West Wittering, a few miles from Itchenor. From Bosham to the ferry was about twenty minutes' walk and people had to call across to the ferryman to sail over; when Tom came Mary ‘would walk to meet him', and they might stroll the four or so miles together from the ferry to Eleanor House; he read her his poetry, and discussed
The Waste Land
with her before it was published, but her children considered his formal manner ‘very tight in'.
39
Yet they liked this American visitor who was happy to stay at Eleanor where there was no electricity and only an earth closet for sanitation. Soon, as a little boy, Mary's son Jeremy grew to find Tom ‘
friendly
, and smiling'. Over the next few years Jeremy and his sister Barbara observed Tom closely. He was both likeable and ‘prim'; in particular he ‘had a prim way of speaking'. Barbara, who would be eleven when
The Waste Land
was published, liked to imitate ‘the Bloomsbury Voice': ‘
What
have you been doing
today? Well … saw
the most
extrAOrdinary
thing!' But when she came to imitate Tom ‘it was “
prim
, rather
prim
”', with a certain over-emphasis on the plosive ‘p' sound and the concluding ‘m' at the end of that word.
40

Prim he may have seemed, but he grew very close to Mary Hutchinson, though there is no conclusive evidence that they became lovers. Indeed, Mary's handwritten recollection of their relationship suggests that, though intimate and tinged with erotic feeling, it remained an unconsummated ‘perhaps'. She writes of how she met Tom

on the sea-wall at Bosham, and after this we walked by the Estuary, arranged to meet for pic-nics (à quatre) and wrote letters to each other. He came to stay with us at Wittering and later took a house nearby. In London he would meet me to dance at the
Hammersmith Palais de Danse
with dinner afterwards at some little restaurant (often in Baker Street) … I imagined that, as I grew to know him, a subtle, poetic, sophisticated character would emerge in tune with his writing.

He seemed ‘difficult'; a slow and painstaking dancer, often a silent tongue-tied companion. This filled me with dread for I felt I was failing in understanding and communication. I did not know then that people are often ‘not of a piece'; that there can be strange opposites in their natures. Later I realised that in personal relationships [he] was far from being subtle and sophisticated; he was simple, inexperienced and even unimaginative. Had I seen clearly I could have been bolder perhaps, stimulated his imagination perhaps, given him experience perhaps!
41

Mary at that time was ‘overwhelmed' by reading Proust, and ‘stirred by Rousseau's account in the
Confessions
of his gentle seduction by Madame de Warens, by the life and letters of Byron and Benjamin Constant, by the novels of Turgueniev [
sic
], Tolstoy, Mérimée and Flaubert, by
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
'.
42
Unseen by Eliot's earlier biographers, her handwritten account of her relationship with Tom includes several quotations from these writers, all of which signal sexual desire. She encouraged him to read Flaubert as well as Keats's letters, while he ‘wanted me to read the poems of Ezra Pound and Hulme, and the stories of Henry James, particularly
The Finer Grain
and
The Ambassadors
. We read each other's suggestions and quarrelled over them. He was the first to tell me about Joyce.'
43
In her manuscript memoir, after citing several quotations (mostly in French and copied from her private notebook) that deal with intimate sexual liaisons and the wish for them, Mary wrote ‘These were my apéritifs for living and loving – far away surely from the tastes of Boston and Harvard?'
44
Yet Tom's tastes, too, were Francophile and open to literature that was frank about sex; in his writing he was a connoisseur of unconsummated intimacies, as
The Waste Land
's ‘hyacinth girl' episode, or those words ‘your heart would have responded' suggest.
45

For a time, he and Mary were intensely close, reading each other's work in draft and taking part in what she called ‘a moving enquiry into one another's nature, frustrated by ignorance and hesitation'.
46
It was so intimate that it was probably what he had in mind when, later, he confessed to having known at least some of those ‘minor pleasures' of ‘adultery'.
47
After a while, Mary recalled, their relationship ‘drifted towards a calm loyal friendship that lasted for nearly fifty years'; but she thought wistfully about its ‘perhaps', and seems to have regarded herself as a subtler confidante than Vivien, whom she remembered as ‘very lively, pretty, and direct, and it almost seemed that she could “bring him out”, but she was too roughly impetuous, in a sense “common” and insensitive ever to have seduced him away from his natural path. Instead she exasperated and shocked him into rage and despair.'
48
If Vivien sensed Tom's temper and his desperation, sometimes finding them as hard to cope with as he found her behaviour difficult to bear, she, too, confided in Mary on occasion, and enjoyed those picnics ‘à quatre' when she and Tom and Mary and Jack Hutchinson lunched together in the West Sussex countryside. Sometimes, if not always, Vivien accompanied Tom to Mary's and other avant-garde parties; but, however much she could attract Bertrand Russell, in general at such events it was her husband who exercised more fascination. Vivien, more than once, felt insecure.

Russell had published recently
Principles of Social Reconstruction
, his manifesto for post-war intellectual life. Advocating ‘mental adventure' as well as greater sexual freedom, rather windily he presented ‘thought' as ‘anarchic and lawless'.
49
Predictably, Tom disagreed. Attempting an article in response, he showed it to Russell, but neither man liked it. Tom wanted to write about ‘Authority and Reverence', expressing his conviction that ‘there is something beneath Authority in its historical forms which needs to be asserted clearly without reasserting impossible forms of political and religious organisation which have become impossible'. Yet, as even his awkward repetition of ‘impossible' here hints, Tom could not complete this piece satisfactorily. Complaining to Russell about lack of peace of mind, he craved ‘better nerves and more conviction in regard to my future'.
50
Tom may have thought Russell's book ‘very weak', but where the older man had the confidence to set forth his vision and to seduce Vivien, Tom, even as he began writing poetry again and setting out his writerly credo, did not feel able to compete.
51