Young Eliot (55 page)

Probably Vivien succeeded too well. Giving Tom's mother on 22 November a detailed ‘account of the money you sent for T.'s underclothing', and mentioning how she and her own mother had gone ‘carefully thro' all Tom's winter underwear', checking what needed replacing, she enclosed receipts to prove she had spent the cash appropriately. She noted, too, that she had bought her husband a quilted satin chest protector to wear under his shirt against the cold. Having shared these impressively wifely details and exclaimed that Tom was ‘very rough with his pyjamas and shirts – tears them unmercifully!', Vivien then proceeded to explain that Bertrand Russell had ‘promised to go shares' in renting a country cottage if they could find one. Though Tom had to be based in London, it would be a ‘refuge' for them.
128

That same evening, working late at the bank, Tom was writing to his father. He was concerned that Vivien, nervous, had had a chill. She had seemed unwell since returning from the farm. Feeling she was healthier in the country, Tom too expressed the hope that they might find a cottage, and asked his father for money. Vivien had been trying to get work in a wartime government office – a plan Tom disapproved of, since he thought her health would not stand it; she had been rejected, apparently because she was married to a foreign national. Matters were difficult, but the solution they adopted brought further complications. In early December Russell took on a five-year lease with the Eliots to share a property at 31 West Street in Marlow, a small Buckinghamshire town on the Thames. Vivien liked the idea, hoping Mary Hutchinson would come and visit her and Tom so ‘we can be just three by ourselves'. They could have a lively party: punting on the river, then dancing. Her letter suggests that, sleeping badly and suffering headaches, she dreamed of recreating something of the circumstances when she and Tom had first met.
129
Russell, however, thought that
he
was going to be the one enjoying Vivien's company. He wrote about his ideas for Mrs Eliot on New Year's Day 1918 to Constance Malleson:

I am not in love with her, & I do not care whether I have a physical relation with her or not. But I am happy in talking to her and going about with her. She has a very unselfish affection for me, and but for her I don't know how I should have lived through the unhappiness of these last months. I am intensely grateful to her, and I expect that she will be an essential part of my life for some time to come.
130

As for Tom, whatever Vivien did or did not tell, and however much he tried to make himself ‘a machine' in order to cope with the insistent routines of banking, lecturing, editing and writing, as well as marital difficulties, his poetry and his body signalled that things were wrong. While 1917 drew to a close, he became ill, struggling to cope. He was invited by well-connected Lalla Vandervelde, wife of a Belgian politician, to join Osbert and Edith Sitwell, Robert Graves and others in giving a poetry reading for charity at the grand house of Lady Sibyl Colefax in London's Onslow Square on 12 December. Since it was a weekday evening, Tom hurried there straight from the bank. For his late arrival he was ‘rebuked publicly' in front of the audience of about one hundred and fifty people by the influential man of letters Sir Edmund Gosse. Hiding his tiredness, he then caused a stir by reading ‘light satirical stuff', including ‘The Hippopotamus'. Some ‘didn't know what to make of it', but Arnold Bennett thought it the best poem read all evening.
131

At mating time the hippo's voice

Betrays inflexions hoarse and odd,

But every week we hear rejoice

The Church, at being one with God.
132

Soon Tom was unwell. There had been minor signs of trouble over the last few months: he had forgotten to write to his mother on her seventy-fourth birthday on 22 October, and apologised afterwards. In one frame of mind, he confessed to his brother, he might never want ‘to see America again'.
133
Yet, conflictedly, he missed his American family intensely: ‘I have parents whom I can be so convincedly proud of, who represent to me absolutely the best that America can produce', he told his mother in November.
134
Vivien, who
had
written to Lottie Eliot on 22 October (though, with other things on her mind, she had forgotten it was her mother-in-law's birthday), also apologised in November; later, when Tom's parents, anxious about their son's marriage, seemed concerned that she had spent a long time away from her husband, she explained it had only been a fortnight, ‘and Tom came for both weekends'.
135
She said she would send Lottie for Christmas a small piece of crochet lace she had made ‘– I am afraid it is rather useless – '.
136
With ‘infinite love' Tom, who did his best to make Vivien sound appropriately wifely to his parents, sent his mother as a Christmas gift a book on American history that he had reviewed.
137
He was feeling very, very weary.

As he often did when times were hard, Tom flexed his sense of humour. The December
Egoist
filled a spare half page with his spoof letters from a variety of English places real and imaginary – Hampstead, Thridlingston Grammar School, The Carlton Club – deftly parodying a variety of ever-so-English tones (‘my old Oxford tutor'; ‘our brave boys in the trenches'), and rejoicing in his genius for invented names: Helen B. Trundlett, Charles Augustus Conybeare.
138
Yet in a revealing letter to his father, reflecting on life and the war, he wrote that ‘everyone's individual lives are so swallowed up in one great tragedy, that one almost ceases to have personal experiences or emotions, and such as one has seem so unimportant!'
139
If this made it sound as if he was hiding from his own emotions, he sensed, though he gave no details, that something might emerge sooner or later in his literary work: ‘I have a lot of things to write about if the time ever comes when people will attend to them.'
140

Meanwhile, Vivien had been hoping to accompany him to a party with Mary Hutchinson, and was excited about what she called ‘my new house' at Marlow, but she worried Tom might not be well enough to dance.
141
He had a two-day holiday from the bank on 25 and 26 December, and no lectures for three weeks. A sense of ‘nervous strain' oppressed him; he felt it would be ‘a sad Christmas'.
142
Vivien told Mary he was ‘overworked and tired of living'.
143
On Christmas Day when they opened their presents, he found his brother had sent him a portfolio of family photographs and familiar American scenes. Tom pored over them intently, as he confessed to Henry, with ‘a lot of pleasure, some of it of a pathetic (but pleasant) sort'.
144
Christmas lunch was spent with Vivien's parents at their Hampstead home; Vivien would have preferred dinner in the evening, but a full moon made air raids more likely: after lunch she and Tom headed for the country before work at the bank resumed. As they both coughed, nursing colds in the December English weather, they felt miserable. Her sympathy tinged with a dash of spite, Vivien expressed a wish that Tom ‘could break his leg, it is the only way out of this that I can think of'.
145

 

12

American

A
S
the war continued, Tom's thoughts focused more intently on American relations with Europe. Justifying his commitment to a literary career in England, he began to articulate views that would become among his best known. Soon, trying to enrol for military service, he had to confront in new contexts the consequences of being an American. As it had done when he lived there, his native land frustrated and even infuriated him; but it also defined him. His Americanness both excited and annoyed Vivien.

He was preparing a special issue of the
Egoist
memorialising an exemplary novelist from the United States. Henry James had died in early 1916. The previous year, partly in protest against America's refusal to declare war against the Kaiser, James had become a British subject, but to Tom he mattered most as a literary artist
.
Though Pound and others contributed to this special issue, published in January 1918, it was Tom's idea, emerging from his ‘great admiration' for James's combination of the creative and the critical.
1
He agreed with most of James's criticism of New England life; whether considering James or Turgenev (another émigré writer he admired), he argued for ‘the benefits of transplantation'. Tom sought examples of ‘how to maintain the role of foreigner with integrity'; yet at the same time, in language that now seems problematic, he asserted ‘a writer's art must be racial – which means, in plain words, that it must be based on the accumulated sensations of the first twenty-one years'.
2
Apart from his boyhood visit to Quebec, his own first twenty-one years had been spent wholly in the United States.

Proclaiming itself ‘the most notable magazine of its kind in the world', London's
Poetry Review
had paid no attention to
Prufrock
. Instead, in 1917 it had featured ‘Alan Seeger: America's Soldier Poet', killed in France on 4 July 1916.
3
Tom, to whom Seeger's work was so manifestly ‘out of date', thought his former classmate's poems ‘not unworthy of the attraction they have attracted'; but the future was Jamesian.
4
Seeing James's friend Edith Wharton as ‘the satirist's satirist', Tom praised her New England novel of sexual betrayal and unhappy marriage,
Summer
, in the January 1918
Egoist
, interested both in its attack on sentimental localism and in its ‘suppressing all evidence of European culture'.
5
James himself was even better: he had taken on Europe and triumphed. ‘I do not suppose that any one who is not an American can
properly
appreciate James', Tom wrote. ‘It is the final perfection, the consummation of an American to become, not an Englishman, but a European – something which no born European, no person of any European nationality, can become.'
6

As Europe's warring nationalities tore the Continent apart, this insolent argument made a kind of sense. It may have goaded both English and American readers, but it let Tom follow in James's wake by turning his perceived New England provincialism into an asset. Bringing with him American perspectives to which he had added French, some German and English ones, he argued that the literature of England was too provincial. England's Georgian poets seemed weakened by lack of engagement with French verse. James, the transplanted American, had relatively few readers who understood him; but for Tom, who had even fewer, he was an inspiration:

The fact of being everywhere a foreigner was probably an assistance to his native wit. Since Byron and Landor, no Englishman appears to have profited much from living abroad. We have had Birmingham seen from Chelsea, but not Chelsea seen (really
seen
) from Baden or Rome. There are advantages, indeed, in coming from a large flat country which no one wants to visit: advantages which both Turgenev and James enjoyed.
7

Tom loved the way James refused to present Americans as ‘commercial buccaneers'; instead, rejecting stereotypes that even Americans relished, James exemplified nuance. Tom had read with interest Frank Norris's 1903 novel,
The Pit
, which (as would
The Waste Land
) juxtaposed snatches of opera with urban commercial life; its artistic St Louisan, Corthell, falls in love with Laura but, despite her ‘married life' being ‘intolerable', and despite her ‘affair' conducted with Corthell in richly ornate, plutocratic rooms, she remains with her businessman husband.
8
Norris's narrative came into Tom's mind in early 1918, convincing him James's work was much subtler in its psychology and sense of Americans. James's ‘superior intelligence' could make both America and England so uncomfortable that this writer's death, if properly understood, might have ‘cemented the Anglo-American Entente'.
9

Resistant to the ‘all-American propaganda' of Amy Lowell, Tom brooded on what it meant to be an American author, while contending that ‘Literature must be judged by language, not by place.' ‘Provinciality of material may be a virtue', but ‘provinciality of point of view' was ‘a vice'.
10
He had been thinking more widely, too, about tradition and theology. To innovate, he argued, required consciousness of tradition, even if only to avoid repeating what had been accomplished already. Yet ‘Tradition' with a capital T could be a mere repository of unexamined practices. Strikingly, when reflecting on contemporary poetry in late 1917, he had suggested that ‘for an authoritative condemnation of theories attaching extreme importance to tradition as a criterion of truth' readers should consult a nineteenth-century papal encyclical.
11
Few perusers of the
Egoist
are likely to have done so, but Tom's commitment to avant-garde work by Joyce and Wyndham Lewis accompanied his reading of Catholic theologically-minded philosophers including Father John Rickaby, Cardinal Joseph Mercier (whose
Manual of Modern Scholastic Philosophy
was published in English in 1917) and Father Peter Coffey on interpretation of the tradition of ‘modern Catholic thought'. Tom belonged to no church. Yet, visiting Anglo-Catholic City churches in his lunch hours, he was conscious of Catholicism as ‘the only Church which can even pretend to maintain a philosophy of its own, a philosophy, as we are increasingly aware, which is succeeding in establishing a claim to be taken quite seriously'.
12
Despite mocking the ‘True Church' in ‘The Hippopotamus', as he continued reading philosophy and anthropology, he went on pondering literature side by side with religion.