Young Eliot (57 page)

‘Sweeney' was a name associated with manliness in Dr F. L. Sweany's St Louis and boosted by Tom's knowledge of the Irish-accented Boston where as a Harvard student he had gone for boxing lessons. His Sweeney represents a wild maleness overlapping with the bestial. In ‘Sweeney Among the Nightingales' the protagonist is described as ‘Apeneck', and associated with ‘zebra' and ‘giraffe'; a woman he is involved with – probably in a brothel – tries to sit on his knees but falls off and, ‘Reorganised upon the floor', starts to yawn, then ‘draws a stocking up'. Rather reminiscent of Mary Hutchinson's panther-like female, the women here can seem almost as bestial; and, just as Quinn, Vivien, Pound, Tom and his mother and father could share a scorn for Jews, so in this poem it is hard not to detect a designed aversion as ‘Rachel
née
Rabinovitch / Tears at the grapes with murderous paws'. Sex comes across as seedy, animalistic, horrible; it involves a rapacious violence heightened when the poem concludes with complexly compacted imagery that juxtaposes Catholic religious orthodoxy – ‘The Convent of the Sacred Heart' – with ancient rituals of violence and a strangely elegant image of bird shit as ‘liquid siftings'. Some of the final, carefully chosen words, such as ‘stiff' and ‘bloody', are freighted with further hints of sex and death.
39

Other poems from the same time or a little later, including ‘Sweeney Erect', have related resonances. Analysing the paper on which it is typed, Lawrence Rainey dates ‘Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service' to between March and August 1918.
40
Its title invites us to relate it to its author. Drawing on Tom's reading in Plotinus and in theology, as well as on other preoccupations including art history and Renaissance drama, it juxtaposes money with churchiness, sexuality with philosophy in a style both elaborately knotted and unsettling. Probably the most shocking of the year's poems, the honeymoon ‘Ode' bearing the date ‘Independence Day, July 4th 1918' once more shows sex as anguished.
41
As well as registering erotic disturbance, in deploying the poet's surname and the date ‘July 4th', these poems show, however ironically, a tenacious engagement with the writer's sense not just of what it meant to be an Eliot but of what it meant to be American.

Writing to fill a small gap on a page in the March
Egoist
, Tom employed the spoof address ‘Little Tichester' to make clear ‘in response to numerous inquiries' that Captain Arthur Eliot, who had co-scripted a London music-hall hit featuring a soldier suspected of betrayal, was ‘not, roughly speaking, a member of my family'.
42
This was the light-hearted flip side of such concerns about identity. It also hinted that his earlier fondness for music-hall entertainers had been transferred from American theatres to the London of popular stars like Little Tich. If Little Tich was ‘an orgy of parody of the human race,' then so was Sweeney.
43
With wildness, formality and precision, Tom too ridiculed humanity in poems written between 1917 and 1919; but, usually with great indirectness, he also probed his deepest worries.

His worries surfaced, too, in his lectures and reviews. Reading George Eliot (almost all of whose work he disliked) for his evening lectures, he picked out what he saw as her ‘one great story': ‘Amos Barton' deals with a broken man; its plot includes a marriage viewed by a family as unacceptable, and a suspected adultery. When Tom came to Thackeray, more than once in early 1918 he singled out as excellent ‘the Steyne part' of
Vanity Fair
where the artist's daughter, manipulative seductress Becky Sharp, apparently betrays her estranged husband with the older philanderer Lord Steyne. That aristocrat has provided introductions into high society, has helped finance Becky's household and has plied her with presents.
44
She protests her innocence and Lord Steyne backs off, but her husband is left with torturing questions: ‘What
had
happened? Was she guilty or not?'
45

Vivien, now that Russell was in jail, hoped to devote herself to the not insubstantial garden at the back of the red-brick three-storey house in Marlow. These days she was spending more time there with Tom. Though in the April
Egoist
he had shown interest in novelist Gilbert Cannan's understanding of ‘domestic warfare', his life with Vivien was by no means all dreadful.
46
An attractive place, Marlow boasted medieval and fine, red-brick, Harvard-style Georgian buildings: ‘a charming old little town', Tom called it.
47
Percy Bysshe and Mary Shelley had resided not far along West Street, and had boated on the Thames; in 1918 the philosophically-minded, India-obsessed English novelist L. H. Myers lived with his American wife just a short walk away, commuting to work in London; about a quarter of a century before Tom and Vivien moved to Marlow Jerome K. Jerome (who dwelt nearby while the Eliots were resident) had presented the place in
Three Men in a Boat
as a ‘bustling and lively' location for sailing, ‘one of the pleasantest river towns I know of'.
48
Today the riverside Compleat Angler
Hotel still boasts that T. S. Eliot was among its several literary diners, and Jerome's description of Marlow, site of regattas and the occasional summer ‘river concert' even during World War I, remains true: ‘There is lovely country round about it, too, if, after boating, you are fond of a walk, while the river itself is at its best here.'
49
Tom liked the area, especially in summer when, he told his mother, ‘the gardens of Marlow' were ‘brilliant with hollyhocks, which start after the foxgloves and lupins and larkspur'.
50

Then as now, 31 West Street was situated beside a quaint narrow alley. That summer in its secluded garden roses were in full bloom. Two grocers and a baker's shop stood a few doors away, so shopping was easy. When Tom's literary friends Sydney and Violet Schiff came to visit, there was a fresh, uncut loaf on the table in the small, plain dining room, along with manuscripts and pale china teacups.
51
Outside, though West Street was relatively busy, the garden was peaceful. By May Tom was travelling frequently between Marlow and London, thirty miles away. The Buckinghamshire town, its population around 6,000, was ‘the terminus of a branch line of the Great Western Railway' and had ‘an excellent train service'.
52
Finding the journey ‘restful', he bought a season ticket so he could commute daily.
53
Though it was frustrating to have ‘our chances of seeing anyone' in London limited, he kept in touch with Pound and newer friends such as May Sinclair and American actress Elizabeth Robbins, then in her fifties, who had corresponded with Henry James.
54

In Marlow, sometimes at least, the Eliots felt healthier. June was hot. Temperatures in Buckinghamshire reached the 70s Fahrenheit (low 20s Centigrade) and London's sultriness reminded Tom of St Louis – but he felt he thrived on heat, and relished it after the winter. Both he and Vivien had been consulting doctors. Tom's had suggested country air would benefit him. Sitting out in the walled back garden all day on a blazing Sunday in early June, he thought the roses ‘wonderful', and wrote of how in Henry James ‘the soil of his origin contributed a flavour discriminable after transplantation in his latest fruit'.
55

In this Marlow garden, thinking of the shade of ‘the Harvard elms', Tom felt a strong sense of something both he and his native culture seemed too often to lack: leisure. ‘There seems', he wrote, ‘no easy reason why Emerson or Thoreau or Hawthorne should have been men of leisure; it seems odd that the New England conscience should have allowed them leisure; yet they
would
have it, sooner or later'. Admiring that, he set it against present-day American drives to ‘at any price avoid leisure'. Those earlier American writers had been denied ‘leisure in a metropolis', but had taken it under the best conditions they could achieve. While he sniped at Boston (‘quite uncivilized but refined beyond the point of civilization'), he admired that dignified, rather aristocratic leisure which some nineteenth-century American authors had found, and which (though he did not say so explicitly) he could not. However, his principal interest in Henry James was that he had learned from French culture and from a sense of ‘deeper psychology' in Hawthorne. Leaving relatively young, James had managed to escape the New England oppressiveness which defined Hawthorne. Unusually, Tom wrote that ‘gentleness' was needed when criticising Hawthorne; for ‘the soil which produced him with its essential flavour is the soil which produced, just as inevitably, the environment which stunted him'. Brooding on these Americans' ‘sense of the past' was again a way of thinking about tradition and identity with a particularly New England inflection. As in sunny Marlow he read James on Hawthorne's sense of ‘the shadow of the elms' on a Massachusetts summer's day, and on ‘the “shrinkage and extinction of a family”', he thought about America, and about his own kin there.
56
He wanted his parents to know he was writing this American-accented piece, and hoped his mother might look up Marlow ‘on the map' of England.
57
He was close, but very far away.

Marlow was a ‘relief' after London.
58
Aldous Huxley, teaching at nearby Eton, visited the Eliots there on Saturday 22 June. Loftily, he found Vivien ‘vulgar' but without snobbery since she made ‘no attempt to conceal her vulgarity'. He thought ‘Eliot in excellent form and his wife too'.
59
Yet the short-sighted Huxley missed some worrying signs. Both the Eliots remained vulnerable. Tom was thin: his weight had fallen by over a stone since he had left Oxford. Vivien, ever fearful of dentists, had been suffering from dizziness and migraine after ‘very painful' dental work; she was also having eye problems. ‘We feel sometimes as if we were going to pieces and just being patched up from time to time', Tom wrote to his mother the day after Huxley visited.
60
Tom knew his parents were struggling too. The Brick Company was in financial difficulties and his father's health poor. Lottie and Hal Eliot had decided to stay in St Louis that summer, rather than making their customary trip to Gloucester. Tom worried about them, but worry was all he could do. He knew, too, that they were anxious about him.

Yet in literature at least he was resolute. ‘Every writer', he wrote in the
Egoist
, ‘who does not help to develop the language is to the extent to which he is read a positive agent of deterioration'. Poets had to know their duty. ‘England', wrote this banker, ‘puts her great Writers away securely in a Safe Deposit Vault'. This led to them going ‘rotten'. As a result, the great Romantic poets returned, like the undead, to ‘punish us from their graves with the annual scourge of the Georgian Anthology'. Standing against such ‘forces of death' were Pound, Joyce, Lewis and (in French) Jean de Bosschère, as well as ‘probably' someone Tom had never met but who had published alongside him in Alfred Kreymborg's New York anthology
Others
: ‘Miss Marianne Moore'. He saw her poetry as sharing qualities with that of Laforgue. ‘Being an American has perhaps aided her to avoid the diet of nineteenth century English poetry. (Mr. Henry James and Mr. Conrad were also foreigners.)'
61
Such vitally disruptive foreigners could let the English language live in new ways. Tom aspired to be among their number.

Taken together, several prose pieces he published in summer 1918 constitute a manifesto. With a dash of that New England Puritanism which, despite his admiration for leisure, he could never throw off, he emphasised that poets had to work hard and be professional about their labours. Like scientists, they were ‘contributing toward the organic development of culture'. To attack writers such as Joyce and Lewis for ‘“cleverness”' was a typically English mistake: the English loved the idea of the ‘Inspired Bard', but poets needed intelligence and critical acumen as well as inspiration. Academically trained and now honing his skills as an editor, Tom sought to develop such a combination in himself, and demanded it of others. He was enthusiastic, too, about learning from prose: reading the serialised
Ulysses
, he found it stimulatingly ‘volatile and heady'; it was ‘immeasurably an advance upon the
Portrait
'. Pleasingly, ‘Sweeney Among the Nightingales' and some of Tom's other recent poems appeared alongside ‘Episode VI' of
Ulysses
in September's
Little Review
, helping to make that periodical one of the greatest of America's literary magazines.

Among his contemporaries James Joyce was certainly the prose writer from whom he learned most in ways that benefited his poetry. Joyce's use of literary allusion parallelled what Tom was perfecting in poems including ‘Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar'. Published the following year, its epigraph is a tessellation of quotations from other works, relying on allusion and resonance to establish milieu. In Lewis's ‘thick and suety', sometimes Dostoevskian novel
Tarr
, which Tom described in terms that sound close to his animalistic Sweeney poems, he found that deep wildness he liked, fused with intelligence: ‘
Tarr
is a commentary on a part of modern civilization: now it is like our civilization criticized, our acrobatics animadverted upon adversely, by an orang-outang of genius, Tarzan of the Apes.'
62
Tarr
, especially in its treatment of ‘Humiliation … one of the most important elements in human life', was a book that helped clarify his thinking about art: ‘The artist, I believe, is more
primitive
, as well as more civilized, than his contemporaries, his experience is deeper than civilization, and he only uses the phenomena of civilization in expressing it.'
63
Tom's sense of underlying primitive wildness was, if anything, strengthened by his dedicated formality. He may have been a dapper, dark-suited banker, but was also the poet of ‘Apeneck Sweeney'.