Young Eliot (59 page)

Though Leonard Woolf wrote to Tom, it was Virginia who had made sure to discover his address; she had contacted Clive Bell in September, asking him to get Mary Hutchinson to send it on since she had lost it. Tom took about a week before replying to Leonard's letter. Virginia Woolf noted on 28 October 1918 that he was ‘asking to come & see us'.
94
She encouraged him. On Monday 11 November, a cloudy, still day in London, Tom, hard at work (Lloyds Bank had taken him back, promising a pay rise), heard guns firing, announcing peace. Sirens hooted on the grey, oily Thames. The Great War had ended. Armistice Day bells rang in churches, bands paraded, crowds cheered. Working late that night, he could not celebrate with Vivien because she was in the country, but she returned to be with him two days later. Then, on Friday evening, he first met Virginia Woolf.

She was scribbling in her diary when he arrived after work, at the imposing front door of Hogarth House. Henry James was on Woolf's mind, but she broke off to go and join her dinner guest along with her husband. Six years Tom's senior, Mrs Woolf found this foreign visitor ‘a strange young man'. His enthusiasm for James Joyce she could just about agree with, but not his championing of the ‘humbug' of Pound.
95
Returning to her diary soon afterwards, she set down a penetrating impression:

Mr Eliot is well expressed by his name – a polished, cultivated, elaborate young American, talking so slow, that each word seems to have special finish allotted it. But beneath the surface, it is fairly evident that he is very intellectual, intolerant, with strong views of his own, & a poetic creed. I'm sorry to say that this sets up Ezra Pound & Wyndham Lewis as great poets, or in the current phrase ‘very interesting' writers. He admires Mr Joyce immensely. He produced 3 or 4 poems for us to look at – the fruit of two years, since he works all day in a Bank, & in his reasonable way thinks regular work good for people of nervous constitutions. I became more or less conscious of a very intricate & highly organised framework of poetic belief; owing to his caution, & his excessive care in the use of language we did not discover much about it. I think he believes in ‘living phrases' & their difference from dead ones; in writing with extreme care, in observing all syntax and grammar; & so making this new poetry flower on the stem of the oldest.
96

As writers – especially male ones – often do, the ‘young American', who had just published an article on ‘dead language' versus expression that was ‘alive', and whose ideas derived from French Symbolist Rémy de Gourmont's 1900
Le Problème du style
, fell back in conversation on what he had just been writing about.
97
He intrigued Mrs Woolf. She found herself talking about him next day to Desmond McCarthy, an Old Etonian friend as upper-class and English as she was. McCarthy, too, knew Tom. He told Virginia he had asked the poet about one of his clearly American productions, ‘The Boston Evening Transcript'. With an exclamation mark that denoted her bemusement, Woolf recorded how, when asked about that poem's juxtaposition of La Rochefoucauld and a long street, ‘Eliot replied that they were a recollection of Dante's Purgatorio!'
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This American poet was hard to read as a person. His poems could be equally complicated; but they impressed. Woolf thought they made readers fetch up thoughts ‘from the depths of silence'.
99
Within four months she would handset some of his lines of verse for her printing press, then print and bind by hand his small pamphlet, entitled simply
Poems
.

Presenting himself to the Woolfs, Tom confirmed his editorial astuteness. He had written more than four poems in the preceding two years, but, as he had done when assembling
Prufrock
, he suppressed all but the best. From early on he knew he would make his mark most effectively by releasing tiny amounts of utterly first-rate work to a discerning audience. The poems he gave the Woolfs were ‘Sweeney Among the Nightingales', ‘The Hippopotamus', ‘Mr Eliot's Sunday Morning Service' and ‘Whispers of Immortality'; to these he added three others in French: ‘Le Spectateur' (later retitled ‘Le Directeur'), ‘Mélange Adultère de Tout' and ‘Lune de Miel'. If his poems' quality and editing were high, the proofreading of them was patchy. Two mistakes in French were corrected during the Woolfs' small, early 1919 print run – about 250 copies; other errors slipped through. In the year of publication, Tom's sixteen-page pamphlet gleaned very, very few reviews: the anonymous critics seem to have known the author.
The Times Literary Supplement
warned him he was ‘fatally handicapping himself with his own inhibitions', and risked ‘becoming silly'.
100

An unnamed reviewer in the
Athenaeum
, on the other hand, maintained that ‘The poetry of the dead is in his bones and at the tips of his fingers: he has the rare gift of being able to weave, delicately and delightfully, an echo or even a line of the past into the pattern of his own poem.'
101
This was spot on, and might almost have been dictated by Tom; he had published a piece on Pound the previous September emphasising the need for the poet to cultivate ‘the historical sense, of perception of our position relative to the past, and in particular of the poet's relation to poets of the past'. Effortfully relativist, here was a demanding manifesto: ‘this perception of relation involves an organized view of the whole of European poetry from Homer'. Tom would develop such ideas and phrasing during 1919 in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent'. In his 1918 piece on Pound he praised the way ‘James Joyce, another very learned literary artist, uses allusions suddenly and with great speed, part of the effect being the extent of the vista opened to the imagination by the very lightest touch.'
102
These techniques, on which Tom would continue to build, characterised his quatrain poems and other verse published by the Woolfs. Tom the Harvard-trained critic had praised ‘laboratory work' and the way science was ‘internationalized'; he wanted ‘persons of equivalent capacity' in literature.
103
Yet the
Athenaeum
reviewer of his poems warned him against the mere
jeu d'esprit
; seen as a would-be ‘scientist' of verse, he would have to work hard, this shrewd commentator warned, to remove the suspicion ‘that he is a product of a Silver Age'.
104

America was seldom far from his thoughts. He was contemplating going back there, at least to visit. With plans to apply for unpaid leave from the bank, probably that summer or autumn, he might try to visit his parents every future summer. This was part of a recurrent pattern: he longed for aspects of the United States, especially his family; yet he kept his distance. In late November he wrote to Woods, asking for news of Professor Lanman. Tom had not forgotten his years studying Sanskrit and Pali. Reviewing books on Indian ideas had brought back memories of that facet of his American education. As he pondered crossing the Atlantic, Vivien was less sure. She told Tom's brother she felt she ‘
really must … ought to
, go to America', but feared she never would.
105
Her health was dire: more dental work – ‘I scream the whole time!' Writing up their major and minor health worries, she blamed Tom for passing on colds and influenza. He had to have his ears syringed to clear them of wax; the doctor was recommending he had one side of his nose cauterised because he seemed so prone to colds. Tom had shared her anxieties over the war and cash: ‘We were off our heads all the summer.'
106

Yet immediately the pressure seemed off as regards military service and finance, his health slumped. His bank salary was now £360 per annum – three times what it had been when he started the previous year – so, he told his mother, ‘I ought to be practically self-supporting.' Unfortunately, he was getting splitting headaches, and had had to postpone some evening lecturing (one of his courses appears to have ended); he had been told by his physician to rest, ease up on moonlighting for the
Egoist
and read rather than write.
107
Vivien couldn't sleep. He fretted about her. She reciprocated: he must take cod liver oil and a daily walk. They argued. He had an attack of sciatica; she suffered from migraines – a deepening problem – whenever she felt mental or physical strain. ‘I do not understand it, and it worries me', Tom told his mother.
108

Eventually, anxious about her husband's mental and physical health, Vivien got Tom to sign a written agreement not to do ‘writing of any kind, except what is necessary for the one lecture a week which he has to give, and no reading, except poetry and novels and such reading as is necessary for the lectures, for three months'.
109
Tom had been reading voraciously for his lectures. An overdose of verbose literary criticism had made him ratty. J. A. Symonds's six-hundred-page
Shakspere's Predecessors in the English Drama
was ‘absurdly long'; Felix E. Schelling's seven-hundred-page
Elizabethan Drama
was ‘painful'.
110
What he liked was criticism by practitioners – ‘the workmen's notes on the work' – though he added testily, ‘Very few creative writers have anything interesting to say about writing.' Still, ‘they ought to have the sense of what is actually important in older works'.
111
He had been using his compendious reading for his own ends as well as to benefit his students. He trained himself continually; but it was too much. Vivien realised that, and Tom paid heed. For about four months he published nothing. At last, emerging from this self-imposed embargo, he produced some of his most brilliant criticism.

For Christmas 1918 more money came from his parents, but also sad news. Tom's Aunt Marian Stearns in Cambridge, Massachusetts, had died. He remembered being visited by her during his student days in Paris. Slowly his American family was changing. His English in-laws came to Christmas dinner, but the next day – ‘“Boxing Day”, the day after Christmas (a holiday here)', as he explained to his distant parents – Tom went with Vivien to see his president. They stood for more than two hours among cheering crowds in central London's streets, waiting to catch a glimpse of Woodrow Wilson. He had reached England on a European tour, celebrating the end of the war, and promoting his ideal of ‘a just and lasting peace.'
112

No serving United States President had ever visited Britain. It was only about a century since British troops had burned down Washington DC. Now London's streets were festooned with American flags. Church bells rang out. Artillery fired ceremonial salutes. Decorously, the British capital went wild. When President Wilson's train arrived from Dover at Charing Cross Station on a bright winter's day, it was met by King George V, Queen Mary, Prime Minister Lloyd George and assembled dignatories from Britain and America. Escorted by the Household Cavalry in ceremonial uniform, president and king rode together along the Strand in the first of a procession of horse-drawn royal carriages. Passing Trafalgar Square, they headed on by Pall Mall and Piccadilly to Buckingham Palace. ‘It was', wrote Tom, who felt ‘very pessimistic' about the ‘chaos' of contemporary British politics, ‘an extraordinary and inspiring occasion'.
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With about thirty rows of people in front of them, Vivien, considerably shorter than her husband, could make out nothing as the procession approached. Then, just as the first carriage passed near them, Tom lifted her up. She glimpsed President Wilson: ‘It was a most moving and wonderful sight to see him sitting next the King, and having such a glorious welcome.'
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Vivien cherished her most American moment, but it soon passed. Later, Tom decided the Paris Peace Conference and the ensuing Versailles treaty, which drew up several new European national boundaries, marked ‘a bad peace'. Wilson had ‘made a grave mistake in coming to Europe'.
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Vivien's immediate worries were more familial. She had been too ill to get Christmas presents sent to St Louis in time, but wrote to Tom's parents on 30 December wishing them a happy New Year. A few days before her letter was received, Tom's father, now aged seventy-five, had been writing about money matters to his brother in Oregon. Hal complained about deafness, but expressed some pride in his sometimes exasperating younger son: ‘My Tom is getting along now and has been advanced at the bank so that he is independent of me.' Independence, that most American of virtues, was something Henry Ware Eliot, Sr, prized in finance. He added, honestly but stingingly, ‘Wish I liked his wife, but I don't.'
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13

Old Man

O
N
Tuesday 7 January 1919, Tom's father died. Vivien received a cable around noon on Wednesday. Wisely, she kept the news to herself until Tom got home from the bank. When she told him, he felt poleaxed. ‘
Most terrible
', her diary records; ‘a fearful day and evening'. He stayed at home the following day, and she consulted her doctor. Afterwards she thought Tom ‘very wonderful'; on Friday Aldous Huxley came to dinner: a ‘nice evening'; but for several ‘awful' days Tom was unable ‘to feel as if anything was real'. He seemed to himself a restless sleeper in a nightmare, anxious lest he ‘wake up and find the pain intolerable'.
1

That Thursday in St Louis the funeral was held at the Church of the Messiah. The old man was laid to rest in Bellefontaine Cemetery. Tom's brother was there to support his mother: ‘Men of every station crowded to do honour' to a well-known figure regarded as consistently conservative and loved as a pillar of the community. ‘Not only his peers, but men of toil in every walk of life grieved to lose a true friend.' At the Eliots' church the Sunday sermon included a tribute to Henry Ware Eliot, Sr's ‘modest character, and to the distinction he gave to citizenship'.
2
Tom had not seen him for over three years. The last time they had met, his father had reproached him. Tom's mind flooded with images of his boyhood, his cultured, strong-willed parents, St Louis and Gloucester: ‘I have been all over my childhood.'
3
Tom believed his generous father thought of him as having ‘made a mess' of his life.
4