Young Eliot (53 page)

Tom thought of Harold Peters and Leon Little, who had been in the United States naval reserve. He knew one of his cousins, George Parker, was in the military. The young poet had some contact with the American Embassy in London. Still, conscious of Vivien's situation, he thought he would not fight unless called up. Coughing, ‘
full
of catarrh', she worried he was overworking. Yet she was proud of his success as lecturer and banker; if Tom were promoted at Lloyds, she explained to his mother on 30 April, ‘there is no reason why he should not obtain through it his greatest ambition: viz: a congenial and
separate
money-making occupation –
of a sort
that will leave his mind and brain fresh enough to produce good literature, and
not to have to depend on writing for money at all
'. She thought him more youthful – more like the ‘boyish' person she had married.
76
With money from St Louis, he ordered a new grey suit.

Published in early June, his book attracted some attention, but not a lot. It sold very slowly. In London's
English Review
Edgar Jepson saw it as ‘new in form' and ‘musical with a new music'. Jepson was right. Here was work by a ‘real' and very American poet: ‘United States of the United States'.
77
Across the Atlantic, however, William Carlos Williams was lukewarm. Grudgingly, he admitted
Prufrock
had elements of attenuated New England merit. The
Literary World
saw Tom as ‘one of those clever young men' – too clever by half; snootily,
The Times Literary Supplement
thought Mr Eliot's ‘observations' were ‘of the very smallest importance to anyone – even to himself'. More helpfully and crustily abusive was Arthur Waugh in the
Quarterly Review
; he likened Tom to a ‘drunken slave' exhibited as a warning in ‘the family hall'. Pound picked up on this with gusto. Alert to the value of publicity, and characteristically spoiling for a fight, he published a substantial piece in the
Egoist
entitled ‘Drunken Helots and Mr. Eliot': ‘And since when have helots taken to reading Dante and Marlowe? Since when have helots made a new music, a new refinement, a new method of turning old phrases into new by their aptness?'
Insightfully, Pound associated Tom with Joyce. May Sinclair, a novelist with interests in idealist philosophy whose work Tom had been encouraging, praised the collection, contending that ‘“The Love Song of Prufrock” is a song that Balzac might have sung if he had been as great a poet as he was a novelist.'
78
Tom was pleased that at least his book was out, but knew it had found few appreciative readers. Four years later, despite the print run of just 500 copies priced at 1 shilling, pristine examples were still for sale.

All around, the war was obscenely unignorable. At Lloyds Bank, Tom was being trained in new duties. During a break, his mentor read aloud a letter from a brother, fighting in France. Then the man was called away from the room. Five minutes later he returned: ‘My brother's been killed.'
79
At home, Vivien, about to have her twenty-ninth birthday, received word that a friend's fiancé was a casualty. Next day, as chill spring turned to hot summer, Tom heard Karl Culpin had been critically wounded. Culpin's weak eyesight had delayed his being sent to the front, but he died, Tom recalled almost half a century later, ‘I think, on his first day in the trenches.'
80
Vivien's brother Maurice, battle-hardened since the age of eighteen, tried to explain to them what it was like. Sometimes sickened by political rhetoric in England and America, Tom recognised powerful writing when he saw it. Concealing the author's identity, he sent one of his brother-in-law's letters to the
Nation
, a publication critical of war policy. It described

a leprous earth, scattered with the swollen and blackening corpses of hundreds of young men. The appalling stench of rotting carrion mingled with the sickening smell of exploded lyddite and ammonal. Mud like porridge, trenches like shallow and sloping cracks in the porridge – porridge that stinks in the sun. Swarms of flies and bluebottles clustering on the pits of offal. Wounded men lying in the shell holes among the decaying corpses: helpless under the scorching sun and bitter nights, under repeated shelling. Men with bowels dropping out, lungs shot away, with blinded, smashed faces, or limbs blown into space. Men screaming and gibbering. Wounded men hanging in agony on the barbed wire, until a friendly spout of liquid fire shrivels them up like a fly in a candle.
81

Tom's sending that letter for publication was a moral act. For several years he had been reading war poems. In Pound's 1915
Catholic Anthology
his work had appeared alongside pieces including T. E. Hulme's ‘Trenches: St Eloi' with its ‘lines' and ‘corridors' and carnage. Tom considered Hulme ‘a really great poet', and perhaps, as George Simmers has suggested, an undated manuscript of Tom's, once possessed by Maurice Haigh-Wood and ending with the smell ‘Of the alleys of death / Of the corridors of death', contains an image of trench warfare; but in 1917 Tom's most powerful reaction to the conflict was what he did with Maurice Haigh-Wood's letter.
82

Nothing could have seemed further from the ‘unreal' War enthusiasms and horrors than
Prufrock and Other Observations
. Tom had a copy mailed to his parents as soon as it appeared. ‘I am lucky to get it printed at all without cost to myself', the young banker told his businessman father, explaining that the cover (whose plain black type on buff-coloured paper might have let the book pass for a bank report) was not quite what he might have chosen: he accepted what he could get.
83
Clive Bell took copies to a Garsington party and handed one to Mary Hutchinson, who told Tom how much she liked it, and invited the Eliots to dinner; others went to the Morrells, to Aldous Huxley and to two further Garsington visitors, John Middleton Murry (an English novelist, editor and poet who had recently published a book on Dostoevsky) and the New Zealand short-story writer Katherine Mansfield with whom Murry had a long, often strained marital relationship. At Garsington Mansfield read ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' aloud – probably the first time it was read in public by a female voice. She came to believe ‘Prufrock' was ‘by far and away the most interesting and the best modern poem'.
84
Intrigued by Tom Eliot, she wrote to Ottoline Morrell in late June about meeting him at a party and walking home with him while ‘a great number of amorous black cats looped across the road'.
85

Later that same Wednesday evening, Tom wrote to his mother. He told her how tired he was and how he had been going to bed ‘very early lately' – though also that the following Saturday he was going to play tennis: doubles with himself and Maurice Haigh-Wood (home from the battlefield) against Pound and a friend.
86
Tom expressed longing for summers at Gloucester, remembering how sometimes he had reached there from Harvard before his parents, then seen them arrive, strolling across the grass and clambering over a break in the stone garden wall at Eastern Point. He recalled with regret his old catboat, the
Elsa
. Vivien, who was continuing with her dancing lessons, wrote to Lottie Eliot next day, emphasising she was doing her best to be frugal with money. Tom seemed ‘always tormented' by overwork.
87

They were living for a spell in Vivien's parents' house, while Mr and Mrs Haigh-Wood were away on holiday, but were discontented. The day after the tennis match Vivien lay indoors (probably in her old bedroom) on ‘my divan' staring at a portrait of Scofield Thayer which stood on ‘my cabinet' and smoking a Gold Flake cigarette.
88
Making him aware of her posture and her ‘half open lips', she wrote teasingly but ruefully to Thayer, whose own recent marriage was in trouble. Not so long ago, he had compared her smile to Mona Lisa's; now, quoting Walter Pater, she compared him in a cleverly allusive but mannered letter to Leonardo's masterpiece. Invoking times they had spent together, she quoted Horace on the loss of a dear friend, and Swinburne on a lost love.
89

Aldous Huxley, who had visited the Eliots about ten days earlier, sensed something of the troubled intensity of relations between Vivien and Tom – though not their full complexity. Annoyed at Russell's interest in Vivien, Ottoline Morrell read a letter from Huxley dated 21 June: ‘I met Mrs. E. for the first time and perceive that it is almost entirely a sexual nexus between Eliot and her: one sees it in the way he looks at her – she's an incarnate provocation – like a character in Anatole France.'
90
Tom, whose piece on
vers libre
that spring had mentioned in passing a novel about a love triangle, had been reading not Anatole France but Paul Bourget's
Lazarine
, about a husband who kills his ‘odiously fascinating' wife, a ‘syren' who has taken a lover. For him this French novel dealt with ‘the struggle between the desire for happiness and the fact of marriage which is something more than merely a Christian dogma'. He picked out as ‘very sound' on ‘the subject of marriage' one character's remarks: ‘de vraies fiancailles … ce n'est pas une ivresse de coeur … c'est le don mutual de toute une vie, de toute cette effrayante longeur de la vie' (real marriage … is not a wildness of heart … it is the mutual gift of a whole life, of all that frightening length of life).
91
The words Tom selected are hardly redolent of married bliss.

That spring he had written in French the first of his two poems about terrible honeymoons. In ‘Lune de Miel' (Honeymoon) an American couple in Ravenna, Italy, lie awake on a hot night, scratching their bedbug bites in an atmosphere of summer sweat and ‘une forte odeur de chienne' (a strong smell of bitch); the man's concerns about budgeting and modern European travels are set against a sense of Ravenna's early Christian basilica of St Apollinaire which, ‘raide et ascétique' (perpendicular [or stiff] and ascetic), still holds in its crumbling stones the precise form of Byzantium.
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This is not a poem about Tom and Vivien's honeymoon; it is determinedly detached. At times Tom sought detachment as if his sanity – and the life of his verse – depended on it. That year, reviewing the French poems of Jean de Bosschère, he located in them ‘an intense frigidity which I find altogether admirable', though he could also admire in John Davidson's poetry ‘an occasional passionate flash of exact vision'.
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In his own work he mixed both, each reinforcing the other. Yet, however distanced, as an American who had travelled in northern Italy looking at churches, who had money worries and who (encouraged by the sense of ‘l'odeur de femme' in the work of Tristan Corbière) had a pronounced awareness of ‘female smells' long before he met Vivien, he incorporated into this unsettling piece at least some aspects of his experience.
94

Other poems from 1917 and the ensuing years repeatedly present troubled couples and couplings. Scarcely new to his verse, this theme intensified. Sometimes, as bombs fell and he laboured in the bank while continuing to review books on religion, it was juxtaposed with stinging irony beside religious and financial imagery as well as against impending mortality. In ‘la saison de rut' (the rutting season), aware during Lent of ‘une odeur fémelle', the protagonist of ‘Petit Epître' (Short Epistle) – a poem Tom never published – speaks to a priest and dreams of a paradise where good things are shared; but this is attacked as ‘promiscuité' and the speaker is condemned by outraged judgmental voices.
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‘At mating time' the rutting sounds of a hoarse hippopotamus are set against the singing of the well-off ‘True Church', rejoicing smugly with God at weekly worship; in ‘The Hippopotamus' the hippo, not the Church, reaches Paradise.
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Heaven is imagined as a place of money and scandalous sex in ‘A Cooking Egg', where the speaker will ‘lie together' with wealthy Jewish financier Sir Alfred Mond and wed exotic, highly sexed Lucretia Borgia, rather than remaining with the markedly less experienced ‘Pipit' – associated with a ‘penny world' of polite Englishness.
97
In ‘Whispers of Immortality', a poem of death, ‘lusts and luxuries' that Tom revised repeatedly, Pipit was set initially against the more overtly sexual Russian ‘Grishkin' whose ‘friendly bust' when ‘Uncorseted' affords ‘promise of pneumatic bliss'.
98

Despite that ironically fantasised pleasure, sex in these poems by a young married man who that summer enjoyed dancing with his wife remains deeply problematic: there are no happy couples. Writing in French or else, encouraged by Pound, imitating Francophone poets including Théophile Gautier, Tom interlaced the transgressive with the formal. ‘I have been living in one of Dostoyevsky's novels, you see, not in one of Jane Austen's', he wrote to Eleanor Hinkley in July. Though, ostensibly, when he typed these words he had the war in mind (‘I have signed a cheque for £200,000 while bombs fell about me'), they signal a wider, profound disturbance.
99
Odd, and under-appreciated, the poems he was writing at this time are brave in the forthrightly anti-romantic way they confront sexuality: in them the most disturbing male sexual imaginings are anatomised.

‘Dans le Restaurant' features a waiter in a stained waistcoat, whom the narrator regards as a ‘vieux lubrique' (a dirty old man), recalling how as a boy of seven he gave a little girl flowers (‘primevères'), then tickled her, experiencing a moment of power and delirium, before being stopped from going further by the pawing of a big dog. ‘De quel droit payes-tu des expériences comme moi?' asks the disgusted narrator – by what right do you have experiences like me?
100
Underlying part of ‘A Cooking Egg' is a passage about middle-aged John Ruskin's fixation on a little girl; ‘Pédéraste' is one of the charges levelled against the speaker of ‘Petit Epître'.
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Troubled in his own sex life, Tom was no pederast, but, through refraction and the artifice of art he faced up to the sometimes vertiginous nature of sexuality, and knew that this was unsettling. Just as he presented astonished comments provoked by ‘Mr. Apollinax', so in ‘Petit Epître' he supplied a litany of affronted, sometimes conflicting reactions. Some, but not all, might have been occasioned by his own life and work.