Young Eliot (58 page)

He admired purposeful clarity. Stylised forms, whether in theatre, music hall or painting attracted him. In the visual arts he preferred the strong, distinctive imagination of Vorticist Edward Wadsworth to the crowded artwork of proto-Surrealist Alan Odle. ‘A distinguished aridity' impressed Tom – ‘a single trail of fire', not ‘a shower of sparks'.
64
Truthfulness to complexity demanded single-minded design. As he read poems by contemporaries, he grew convinced that ‘the profession of poetry is fatiguing'; it required ‘toil'.
65
Exerting himself, he had a kleptomaniac ability to adopt or adapt lines and phrases from older writers to nourish his work. These phrases were not always ‘allusions'; often they simply added a sense of resonance, allowing his own verse to tap into deep cultural roots. Struggling to find something good to say about Lancelot Hogben's booklet,
Exiles of the Snow
, he picked out for its effective simplicity the line, ‘When I am old and quite worn out'.
66
He published in the
Egoist
a poem by his recent acquaintance Sacheverell Sitwell (brother of poets Osbert and Edith Sitwell) about a parrot associated with the ‘dry' and ‘immemorably old'.
67
The summer weather Tom found ‘very dry' and conducive to an outbreak of ‘Spanish flu' which was decimating his colleagues at the bank.
68
Exhaustion, dryness and ageing would be at the heart of his poem ‘Gerontion', on which he worked later in 1919; but by then his own sense of ageing had been further intensified by encounters with American military bureaucracy.

On the 4th of July 1918 Tom was underwhelmed by the way the day was (he employed ironic inverted commas) ‘“celebrated”' in London ‘as a very serious act of international courtesy' in wartime. He longed for ‘the hilarious 4th of boyhood', not least ‘the strawberry icecream and the yacht race' he recalled at Gloucester.
69
Whatever else it does, with its mention of ‘Children singing in the orchard', that ‘Ode' dated ‘Independence Day' marks the chasm between him and his lost past.
70
Among his American friends he was still in touch with Harold Peters and Scofield Thayer – people of very different temperaments. Wealthy, bookish Thayer was going to fund and edit the American literary monthly the
Dial
. He wanted both Conrad Aiken and Tom to contribute; Tom wondered about sending ‘Reflections on American Literature, by one NOT on the spot', and Vivien asked him to pass on the (perhaps coded) message to Thayer that she was ‘homesick for America'.
71

Still in love with the sea, Peters had sailed to New Zealand and to South America since he and Tom had last seen one another. After working ‘intermittently' in real estate, he had been called up for active service in March 1917, being ‘in the Massachusetts Naval Militia with the rank of Ensign' on a coastal torpedo boat. Since February 1918 as watch officer and navigator aboard the USS
Lakewood
Peters had played his part in ‘carrying coal to Cuba and mines and mine anchors to Scotland'.
72
He hoped he and Tom might meet up. They had aimed to rendezvous in April, but Peters had got no further than Glasgow; in July, though, the timing was better; Peters managed to get a day off and visit Tom. ‘He seemed not much changed, except matured by responsibility and authority', Tom wrote to his mother, who would have remembered Harold from Gloucester. This American visitor ‘was just as nice as ever, and he and Vivien liked each other very much indeed'.
73

As the English summer's ‘long drought' turned to ‘constant rain for a month' during July, the US Navy and the sea were much in Tom's mind.
74
At Bosham there was a British naval officers' club close to the house where he and Vivien had stayed. Sailors frequented the Anchor pub. Tom had felt again the allure of sailing. Now, with America fighting alongside Britain and her allies in the war, it seemed to him he might be of service to the US Navy. This need not mean voyaging abroad – Vivien was anxious not to be left alone again – but could involve work in England. Polylingual, Tom was, several of his referees pointed out, unusually talented in French. One of his Oxford friends, Willie King, worked for Military Intelligence in London; Tom had ‘seen him occasionally' during a period when he was also in touch with the US Navy there, aiming to join its Intelligence Corps; another friend from Harvard days was attached to the American Embassy.
75

Gathering testimonials, Tom was aided by Osbert Sitwell who approached Lady Nancy Cunard, the wealthy, American-born London hostess, for her backing. Colonel Jacob Schick, commanding the US Navy's London Division of Intelligence and Criminal Investigation, met and encouraged Tom. Undergoing a military medical examination, he hoped to pass but be graded ‘low', so that he would not be sent into combat but could be enlisted nevertheless.
76
Eventually, though his doctor emphasised the examinee's poor health, he was graded by the official medical examiners more highly than he had expected. Taking his ‘hernia and tachycardia' into account, they passed him as ‘fit for
limited
service'.
77
In mid-August, all Americans in England were called up. Tom filled out an official US military Registration Card. Describing himself as a brown-haired, hazel-eyed ‘Clerk' of medium build, he applied for ‘exemption from draft', since he had a ‘dependent wife'. Approved by the London Consul, his form was sent to his ‘Local Board' in St Louis, where it was countersigned on 14 September.
78
Vivien grew terrified of the outcome. She pleaded with Mary and Jack Hutchinson to help rescue her husband: ‘If he goes to America he will not be able to come back while the war lasts. That means years. If he stays here he will be killed, or as good as. If we don't save him he'll never write again.'
79
When it came to dealings with the military, Vivien maintained Tom could never be trusted to be ‘worldly wise' and say the right thing at the right time. Writing out for him points she thought he should make in interviews, she was exasperated when he was thrown ‘off balance' and did not stick to her script. She became ‘Iller and iller all summer', intensifying both their anxieties.
80
A specialist gave her detailed advice, to which she paid little heed.

Trying to secure war work, Tom worried that if he were given the rank of private then he would struggle on a much reduced income. He described Vivien to his brother that August as ‘an invalid dependent wife'.
81
Henry continued sending money. Complaining of ‘incessant strain', Tom obtained references from the great and good including Arnold Bennett, soon Director of Propaganda at Britain's Ministry of Information.
82
Tom's plans involved moving back to the London flat, which he and Vivien had sublet while in the country. She proposed to stay in Marlow.

September saw him in contact with an American colonel, J. B. Mitchell, to whom Russell's lover Constance Malleson had introduced him. Nothing came of this, but Tom spoke also to a London-based St Louisan, Major Turner of US Intelligence. Initially, the US Navy had explained that he could only qualify for Intelligence work by enlisting as a seaman, then taking a laborious examination in several subjects. Changing tack, and armed with sixteen testimonials from everyone from the Dean of Merton to Jack Hutchinson, he had been encouraged to join the Quartermaster Corps, but was approached instead by an American lieutenant aiming to start up a new political intelligence section; eventually, its establishment was vetoed from Washington.

Next, Major Turner thought he could help get Tom a commission in US Army Intelligence, so long as he had three strong references from America to add to his English testimonials. His father helped him secure referees including Emeritus President Charles W. Eliot from Harvard: Tom had been ‘an excellent student in all respects'.
83
Cables and letters criss-crossed the Atlantic. In a surprising development, he was summoned by US Navy Intelligence. Their London Commander told him he was just the man for them. If he enrolled as a chief yeoman locally, then they would try to get him a commission soon. On the strength of this, he was released from Lloyds Bank, which generously offered to rehire him when the war was over.

This naval appointment required Washington approval. Delays ensued. Eventually he received a Navy cable: ‘Appointment received as requested – no further difficulty.'
84
However, the Navy's London office had assumed wrongly that he was not already registered for service. Tom pointed out that legally he had been required to register as an American in England, otherwise he would have been liable for British Army call-up. The US Navy consulted the US Army. No clarification came. There would have to be further exchanges of cables; the matter must be referred upwards to the provost marshal general in Washington. Angry, Tom, backed by Lady Cunard, tried to lay his case before the American admiral in London. He secured a meeting with the chief of staff, who was called away just as Tom was due to speak with him. The head of personnel stepped in at this point, explaining he could do nothing without explicit instructions from Washington. Meanwhile, official paperwork arrived from St Louis, requiring Tom to explain his situation at once with regard to military call-up.

He lost his temper. ‘You
sent
for me, asked me to come as soon as possible', he told the Navy in London.
85
He had given up his job. Vivien's health seemed even worse. He had put his elderly father to the trouble of soliciting references from people who hardly knew him. He had spent a small fortune on cables. He might end up bankrupt. ‘I feel years older than I did in July!' he exclaimed in a November letter to his ‘dearest father', who, not in good health, was probably feeling that way too.
86
‘Very sore', in the second month of his thirtieth year, Tom confided to his brother that ‘Three months of trying for a job, and for a month or so expecting to get it any day, has told on my nerves; and I feel very old at present, and mentally quite exhausted.'
87

Had he been more stolidly thick-skinned, or more phlegmatically accustomed to military bureaucracy, he might have fared better; he was lucky that the bank renewed his employment, but his nerves got to him: ‘this ends my patriotic endeavours', he declared to Jack Hutchinson in November.
88
Accustomed to thinking in terms of ‘us (Americans)', he did not cease to care about his homeland, but it did annoy him.
89
‘As an American of some years' residence in this country', he wrote a long public letter published in the
Nation
that November. It offered a critique of the politics of Republican Henry Cabot Lodge, a man with ‘the best connexions in Boston society'. Backing the ideals of Democratic President Woodrow Wilson who advocated American participation in the League of Nations, Tom argued, ‘It would mean universal disaster if the participation of America in the war does not lead to closer friendships and understanding, to freer intercourse of ideas, between America and England.'
90
If in public his convictions showed him still engaged with American ideals, in private his battling with American bureaucracy had taken its toll. ‘This has been the most terribly exhausting year I have ever known, and one unfortunate event has crowded another.'
91
He craved ‘Peace and peace of mind and freedom'.
92

In the midst of all this, he had written to John Quinn explaining that he had a book typescript: containing prose criticism, verse from his first collection and more recent poems, it was ready to send to Knopf in New York. Despite Quinn's help, Knopf held off. But in London Tom received an important letter. It came from an English novelist in his thirties with a talent for satire, Leonard Woolf. With his wife Virginia, he had established the previous year a small press based at their three-storey red-brick home, Hogarth House, in Richmond, south-west London. Thin-faced and intellectually intense, the Woolfs were leaders of the Bloomsbury group of writers and artists. Leonard, a socialist of Jewish descent and a former colonial administrator, was eight years older than Tom. An alumnus of Trinity College, Cambridge, he knew Bertrand Russell. The Woolfs' friend Roger Fry had mentioned to them that Tom was seeking a publisher for some poems. Leonard and Virginia had brought out some of their own writings as well as a pamphlet by Katherine Mansfield. They had ‘very much liked'
Prufrock
.
93
Would Tom allow them to look at his new poems with a view to having them published by the Hogarth Press?

Like writer and publisher John Rodker, some of whose work Tom welcomed to the
Egoist
, the Woolfs were part of that literary London in which he was learning to manoeuvre with a suavity that contrasted sharply with his inability to navigate the choppy waters of America's military bureaucracy. Leonard Woolf was compulsively hard-working. Affectionate, but childless, the Woolfs' marriage of six years was troubled by sexual difficulties. Nursed by her husband through more than one breakdown, Virginia Woolf had published a novel,
The Voyage Out
, in 1915. Tom had not met her, and knew little of her work. Interestingly, they shared several tastes, including a childhood fondness for Hawthorne and an admiration for Henry James. Independent-minded and brilliantly perceptive, Virginia, like Tom, came from a high-caste, markedly bookish family; socially, she seemed to have married beneath her; for a time she too had taught working-class students in evening classes. She had about as few readers as the author of
Prufrock
.