Young Eliot (60 page)

A cable arrived on Saturday from his brother: ‘Do not come now plans uncertain mother well.' The next day Tom wrote his mother a short letter. It was all he could manage. Honest, characteristically slightly formal, it was also heartbroken. ‘I do long for you, I wanted you more for my sake than yours – to sing the Little Tailor to me.'
5
Vivien wrote, explaining how for a long time Tom had felt acutely ‘the fearful inadequacy of correspondence'.
6
There was too much to say; now it could hardly be said. He remembered beloved details: the funny little sketches his father sometimes put in letters: a trait Tom had inherited. He longed to frame one; he wanted some of his father's books. He felt guilt at not being in Missouri. His mother, seeking practical things to do, understood: ‘this has been very hard on you – you were so far away'.
7
Bereavement made him feel all the more sharply a wish to prove himself: not just by doing well at the bank (a kind of success his father had valued), but also by publishing a book in his homeland. The Hogarth Press pamphlet was due in the spring, but in New York Knopf eventually turned down his typescript. Even before his father's death, Tom had written to Quinn to explain why ‘for family reasons' he wanted ‘to get something in the way of a book published in America'. Now his desire to do so intensified: ‘my mother is still alive'.
8

Work was a refuge. The bank needed him to stay focused. He composed his weekly lectures – now on Elizabethan lyric poetry. He visited the Woolfs to finalise details of his pamphlet. At Crawford Mansions the Eliots' servant caught pneumonia in February. Collapsing in the flat, she had to be nursed on the sofa for five days before being transported to hospital by ambulance. Taking over housework and disinfecting the premises, Vivien too became ill. She had been consulting her family's doctor, Lewis Albert Smith, at 25 Queen Anne Street. He had treated her since childhood, sometimes prescribing bromide – a sedative then given to women thought nervous or hysterical; but she was ‘losing confidence'. Her meeting with Smith was ‘Not satisfactory'.
9
Tom arranged to see Bertrand Russell, who had been in touch with Vivien again about whether they should go on sharing the rent of the Marlow house, and was complaining she ‘won't reply'.
10
According to Vivien's biographer, Carole Seymour-Jones, she had written to Russell that she ‘disliked fading intimacies, and must therefore break off all friendship'.
11
Sharply, Tom told Russell that Vivien was too unwell to deal with the strain of rental arrangements; they might get rid of the property altogether. Yet Vivien told Tom how much she loved the house in West Street and its garden. Even while the place was sublet, she had gone to check on it. Tom had to backtrack. Next, Russell started requesting the return of his Marlow possessions – a tea table, a coffee grinder – as soon as possible, and asked Tom to give his ‘Love to Vivien. How are your troubles?'
12

However troubled, life went on. Wanting Tom back at Harvard, James Woods wrote at least twice in February, trying to lure him to a new Philosophy post. Attempting to persuade his colleagues, Woods championed Tom's cause: ‘He has shown extraordinary subtlety in writing.' Unfortunately, Professor Hoernlé, now Department Chairman, was being lobbied by his predecessor in favour of someone more ‘solid', more engaged with contemporary issues, less ‘bookish and literary'. Tom's old teacher, G. H. Palmer, argued that, for all his ‘extraordinary' intellectual ‘power and sensitiveness', this unusual alumnus had ‘allowed himself to be turned into weak aestheticism by the influence of certain literary cliques in London'. To counter such arguments, Woods needed Tom to help him. The retired chairman, Ralph Barton Perry, worrying that, judged by ‘his recent poetry', Tom might be ‘a sort of attenuated Santayana', gave the thumbs down.
13
The last thing Tom wanted was to be sucked into Harvard academic politics. He did not answer Woods's letters for almost two months, pleading exhaustion and bereavement. They were genuine excuses, but determinedly he burned his bridges.

‘I have simply had a sort of collapse', he explained to his brother on 27 February. ‘I slept almost continuously for two days, and now I am up, I feel very weak and easily exhausted.'
14
As had happened before, illness helped him release poetry on which he had been brooding. Substantial and different from his quatrain poems, this new work would draw on worries about a wasted life, which his father's death intensifed; it was fed, too, by failure to fight in war; by a sense of utter exhaustion; by trepidation about how the peace might turn out; by ongoing anxieties about sex, religion and death. It involved everything from hot, dry weather (like that of the previous summer) to Tom's absorption in Elizabethan, Victorian and American literature: even texts for his evening classes and his reviewing activities were raided with heightened magpie alertness to fuel this poem which he completed during summer 1919.

Initially it was called ‘Gerousia'. Used by Aristotle, this noun denoted an ancient Council of Elders. Soon the title became ‘Gerontion', a term used by Aristophanes and Xenophon, meaning ‘little old man'. In English the title conjures up words such as ‘geriatric' and ‘Gerontius' – a name from Tom's childhood when Elgar's ‘Dream of Gerontius' had had its St Louis premiere. Typed out not so long after his Greek-loving father's interment, ‘Gerontion' carried two epigraphs – one from a speech about death in Shakespeare's
Measure for Measure
, and the other (which Tom abandoned) from Dante's
Inferno
where a spirit replies to an interlocutor surprised to see him dead, ‘How my body stands in the world above, I have no knowledge'.
15
‘Gerontion' announces its sense of witheredness right from the start:

Here I am, an old man in a dry month,

Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.

That rain never seems to come. The poem ends with ‘a dry brain in a dry season'. It is an anatomy of exhaustion. Its speaker is oppressed by a consciousness of not having ‘fought', of coughing, sneezing, feeling ‘old' and ‘dull' in a ‘rented house' associated with ‘lost … passion' and the ‘adulterated'. Waste, wastedness and wasting predominate:

I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch:

How should I use them for your closer contact?

Later Tom considered ‘Gerontion' with its uneasy references to ‘the Jew', to displaced people, to ‘fractured atoms', extinction and drought, as a possible prelude to
The Waste Land.
16
As it developed, he showed his draft typescript to several people, including his Jewish friends Violet and Sydney Schiff. They sent him a critique after ‘analysing' it ‘carefully', but apparently expressed no horror at anti-Semitism.
17
Twenty years older than Tom, Sydney Schiff was a wealthy Englishman who had worked in America and who wrote fiction. He and his intelligent, musically gifted wife Violet, then in her forties, liked to encourage writers and artists, including John Middleton Murry, Katherine Mansfield and Wyndham Lewis who painted Violet's portrait in the 1920s. In such company Tom could relax, chatting about life and art; he was sustained by the Schiffs' undemanding, shrewd affability.

In due course, circulating his work among his closest literary friends, Tom also passed his new poem to Pound, and sought to give it its final form. He was uncertain, for instance, whether or not to mention ‘the windy straits / Of Belle Isle' – a nod towards those waters off the north-eastern United States where he had once sailed. This detail was in lines Tom added, and Pound emended. His poem's sense of exhaustion extends spectacularly from the deflected, masked and displaced personal origins of its immigrant author to the whole course of ‘History', but its awareness of ‘reconsidered passion' is not directly autobiographical.
18
‘Gerontion' incorporates reworkings of Renaissance divine Lancelot Andrewes's ‘
Christ is no wild-cat
' – a phrase Tom quoted in an April 1919 review – and material from the autobiography of ‘a cousin', Boston Unitarian sceptic Henry Adams; Tom reviewed Adams's
Autobiography
that spring, recommending it to his mother as ‘very interesting'.
19
Yet ‘Gerontion' also focused his personal troubles, distancing them and letting them resonate widely through manifold echoes, dislocations and shifts of tone, transmuting them into unflinchingly crafted art.

Tom remembered the long-ago sound of his father's flute-playing. He stared with pleasure at two of Hal's drawings of cats. His mother was thinking of moving to Cambridge – nearer her daughters in Massachusetts. Tom supported that idea, though it meant a further sundering from the St Louis he remembered. Not all the family library could be ‘saved', but he hoped his mother might take with her volumes epitomising ‘New England civilisation', including Andrew Eliot's sermons, and works by or related to Emerson. He told her he had ‘an idea that such of these things as you could save would be of use to me eventually'.
20
Consciousness of unavoidable breakage made him determined to maintain some semblance of old links. Gladly he accepted a selection of his father's Greek and Latin texts. Intuiting how Tom felt, his mother sent him a packet of letters saved from twenty years back. Her husband had written them lovingly to his younger son. Tom urged his mother to settle in Cambridge and look ahead. ‘I shall come to visit you and bring you back with me.'
21
However, Vivien, used to her mother-in-law being kept at a distance, was keener for Tom to holiday in Europe.

The London Eliots needed cheering up. On Sunday 2 March, having gone to a dance with some acquaintances, Vivien was pleased to be ‘Picked up by 3 Canadian flying men, all exquisite dancers', and felt she had ‘danced as I never have since before the war'.
22
Next day she was exhausted, and feared Tom was ‘not fit'.
23
When she told him she was lunching with Mary Hutchinson in early March, he invited Mary to an early evening dance the same day: he wanted to learn new dance steps, and to see Mary. There was also the possibility of a new job in literary journalism. His intelligent but hasty friend Middleton Murry had been appointed editor of the revamped
Athenaeum
. While Woods sought to bring Tom back to Harvard, Murry tried to hire him as assistant editor for a salary of £500. Eventually, Tom turned this down.

Restless and ambitious, at the start of the decade the stern-faced, chain-smoking Murry had made his name as editor of
Rhythm
, an avant-garde magazine whose contributors ranged from D. H. Lawrence to Picasso. Now, at the start of his thirties, he was among London's most sophisticated men of letters. His showily emotional poetry was very different from Tom's. Sometimes the two disagreed vehemently, but, if they could be rivals, they were bonded, too, by shared concerns. Each enjoyed editing; they had friends in common; their wives (Mansfield had tuberculosis) knew the burden of long-term illness. Still, Murry's
Athenaeum
was not for Tom. He had fresh, confidential duties at Lloyds, heading a research department working with an official from the British Foreign Office: with this came more lucrative, secure prospects. He liked the bank work because he could compartmentalise it; a full-time literary day-job with Murry as his boss was more likely to drain off his creative energy, and might be chancy. ‘If one has to earn a living', he explained to Woods, ‘the safest occupation is that most remote from the arts'.
24
Confidently advancing at the bank, he splashed out on a landscape picture by Edward Wadsworth.

Additionally, as bereaved people sometimes do, he got a dog. This ‘very small Yorkshire terrier' was acquired by accident.
25
Apparently abandoned, though well trained, she followed Tom home in the street one day. Vivien welcomed her company. They named her Dinah Brooks, and Dinah soon regarded their three-room flat as her territory. When April brought fears of a rabies outbreak, Tom had to buy the dog a muzzle. It was the wrong size. Painstakingly, he managed to adapt it, using a specially purchased file and pincers. The dog's needs were a distraction, which was good for him.

In the wake of his father's death he took stock of his position, analysing it with his ambitious intelligence. This strengthened his resolve to prove to his mother that he was prospering. ‘There is a small and select public', he wrote to her in late March, ‘which regards me as the best living critic, as well as the best living poet, in England'. If true, such an achievement was individual, but also important in terms of his background: ‘I really think that I have far more
influence
on English letters than any other American ever has had, unless it be Henry James. I know a great many people, but there are many more who would like to know me, and I can remain isolated and detached.'
26

Increasingly, as emotional exhaustion took its toll, Tom idealised detached isolation. Hawthorne, he contended that April in a piece entitled ‘American Literature', had ‘the true coldness, the hard coldness of the genuine artist', something ‘no one else in Boston had'. This was an accomplishment. Hawthorne had ‘sucked every germ of nourishment out of his granite soil', but England's cultural loam was more fructifying.
27
Here, as in his use of Henry Adams in ‘Gerontion', Tom continued to skewer Boston even as he encouraged his mother to move to Massachusetts. For himself, he implied that to pursue an artistic vocation was almost like following Christ: ‘The Arts insist that a man shall dispose of all that he has, even of his family tree, and follow art alone. For they require that a man be not a member of a family or of a caste or of a party or of a coterie, but simply and solely himself.' In England Tom's goal now was to be an ‘Individual'.
28
He sought to achieve uniqueness and to find a tradition that would help.