Young Eliot (62 page)

He had another publication planned: a small edition (250 copies) that poet John Rodker's new Ovid Press would print with artwork by Edward Wadsworth. Initially, the idea was to include Tom's earlier published verse from
Prufrock
, along with the contents of the Hogarth Press pamphlet and several new poems, among them ‘Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar', ‘Sweeney Erect' and ‘Ode'. Tom aimed for the Egoist Press to bring out a cheap edition later, in the spring of 1920. Slyly, he did not consult the Woolfs about the Rodker scheme. They might not have welcomed it, given that his new book would appear long before they had sold out their pamphlet. Disappointed by Knopf and still attempting to find a good American publisher, Tom sought to prove he was flourishing in London. This fresh, expanded collection would help him do so. It would be a further slim volume of verse, but now other publishers' approaches were coming: Sir Algernon Methuen (interested in a collection of essays) and Martin Secker who had been impressed by Tom's thoughts on Stendhal and wondered if he might author a book about that novelist. Eventually the Methuen enquiry resulted in his essay collection,
The Sacred Wood
; the Stendhal proposal came to nothing. Secker was offering just £25.

Tom's evening-class teaching ended on 5 May. Grateful students gifted him
The Oxford Book of English Verse
, but he wrote to his mother, ‘I hope I have done with education; the pay is not bad, but it seems such a waste!'
58
He made sure, however, to let her know he was about to lecture on ‘the younger poets' on 31 May at London University.
59
To his family and himself he wanted to demonstrate success. Yet, touring the provinces, he felt both ‘disdain' for London, and that he was ‘sojourning among the termites'.
60
The fit between his American loyalties and his life in England was repeatedly uneasy. Once again, in mid-June, he had to cancel a Garsington visit at short notice when his former classmate Harold Peters arrived unexpectedly: ‘the oldest and loyalest American friend I have', though Harold shared none of Tom's intellectual interests.
61

Demobilised from mine-sweeping in the Orkney Islands, ‘Pete' was about to sail to the States and had come from Liverpool for a long weekend just to see his Harvard pal. Tom tried his best to behave as if little had altered. Vivien returned from Bosham on Saturday 21 June to find the flat in an ‘awful condition', with Tom entertaining Peters. The three of them went out to dinner, but the Eliots felt worn out, Tom ‘looking very ill'.
62
Nevertheless, on Sunday Tom and Peters went to Greenwich, walking for miles along the Thames by the docks, and through London's East End. Other trips took them to the theatre and the zoo. While Tom was at work in the bank, Peters simply sat nearby, waiting for his trusty companion to emerge. Vivien, who found Peters's attachment to her husband rather comical, complained their visitor had ‘the development of an average boy of ten.
Boring!
'
63
Yet Tom told his mother (who knew Pete) that his former classmate was ‘the most lovable fellow in the world, and I think really devoted to me, and time cannot alter that'.
64

Immediately after Peters sailed home for America, Tom had to settle down to a week of banking and review writing before weekending at Bosham where Vivien, delighted to be back there and free of ‘very boring' Peters, was spending a good deal of time.
65
Tom enjoyed picnicking with her and the Hutchinsons in nearby woods at Itchenor; other Bosham visitors that summer included the Schiffs, who came by car. On a fine summer's day, with Sacheverell Sitwell and Mary Hutchinson the Eliots hired a boat and sailed down Chichester Harbour for lunch at Wittering. This voyage was less adeptly accomplished than Tom's earlier excursions with Peters: the vessel grounded on a sandbank. Vivien, ‘splendid in a boat', took off her stockings, jumped into the water and tried, unsuccessfully, to push.
66
Attempting to sort things, Tom broke a boathook. Eventually he anchored and they all waded ashore on planks across tidal mud. Peters's visit and this nautical fiasco meant sailing was very much in Tom's mind around the time he finished ‘Gerontion', with its mention of seagulls and hazardous Belle Isle.

Again he pondered being American in England. On the whole he loved having escaped his homeland's ‘gregariousness'. In London he could be ‘an individual', finding more easily the contemplative solitariness he needed as a writer, yet, when he wanted it, enjoying ready access to like-minded literary friends. If Vivien thought Peters too boyish, Tom found himself reflecting now that not just his ‘American friends' but ‘any American I meet' manifested ‘
immaturity of feeling
, childishness'. He discerned a maturity in English society, yet never quite felt part of it. As he wrote to Henry, ‘Don't think that I find it easy to live over here. It is damned hard work to live with a foreign nation and cope with them – one is always coming up against differences of feeling that make one feel humiliated and lonely. One remains always a foreigner – only the lower classes can assimilate. It is like being always on dress parade – one can never relax. It is a great strain.'
67
Yet he liked being valued for his particular talents in a literary metropolis. Being a foreigner in England was ‘never dull'.
68
‘America outstrips the world in the development of the text-book', he wrote that summer, well aware that it was imaginative writing, not textbooks, that compelled him.
69

Hints in his poetry and prose register deeper disturbance. ‘We may not be great lovers; but if we had a genuine affair', Tom wrote in the
Egoist
, ‘with a real poet of any degree we have acquired a monitor to avert us when we are not in love'. He was writing about poetry here, not about his personal life, yet his imagery and preoccupation with the ‘close analogy between the sort of experience which develops a man and the sort of experience which develops a writer' are striking, given what was happening in his marriage. Published during July, the piece considers how literary development can become advanced in ‘a soul left immature in living' and on how ‘difficult' it is for a writer ‘to mature in America'; it must have been written around the time of the visit of the supposedly childish Peters.
70
Perhaps the way Tom describes Peters to his mother as ‘the most lovable fellow in the world', as ‘really devoted to me' and ‘devoted to his mother', reveals a shared, tacit acknowledgement that Peters may have been gay.
71

Like most people, Tom was alert to a spectrum of sexual experience. This alertness powers some of his shrewdest work. In summer 1919 he wrote, for instance, of the ‘passion' involved in being ‘intimate' with another writer, and of how perhaps ‘not one man in each generation is great enough to be intimate with Shakespeare'. The language of love here describes relations between male writers, and there is a shifting between procreative sexuality and the implied homoerotic. ‘Experience in living may leave the literary embryo still dormant', Tom contends, whereas there is an important relationship that one can have with another author which is undeniably quickening. Probably uppermost in his mind was his own transformational relationship with Laforgue, or, perhaps, with John Donne, about whose ‘experience' and ability to ‘penetrate' he had written in his poem ‘Whispers of Immortality'. Pondering such relationships, he continued:

This relation is a feeling of profound kinship, or rather of a peculiar personal intimacy, with another, probably a dead author. It may overcome us suddenly, on first or after long acquaintance; it is certainly a crisis; and when a young writer is seized with his first passion of this sort he may be changed, metamorphosed almost, within a few weeks even, from a bundle of second-hand sentiments into a person. The imperative intimacy arouses for the first time a real, an unshakeable confidence. That you possess this secret knowledge, this intimacy, with the dead man, that after few or many years or centuries you should have appeared, with this indubitable claim to distinction; who can penetrate at once the thick and dusty circumlocutions about his reputation, can call yourself alone his friend: it is something more than
encouragement
to you. It is a cause of development, like personal relations in life. Like personal intimacies in life, it may and probably will pass, but it will be ineffaceable.
72

Daringly but perceptively, Tom applies erotic language to the experience of a writer's empowering reading of another author. Since most of the poets he read were male, and since, at the start of this piece, he presents the writer as ‘a man', the homoerotic element in the imagery is inevitable; but his use of it seems at least partly conscious. When he goes on to talk of ‘lovers' and ‘friendship', he is overt and alert. To a degree he is being provocative, but he is also drawing on gay mores familiar to him in Bloomsbury, at Garsington and elsewhere. Not just Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf (who idealised androgyny in literature) enjoyed same-sex relationships and flirtations; Vivien felt a teasing attraction to the apparently bisexual Mary Hutchinson whom she called ‘little cat' later in 1919, signing off a letter, ‘Goodnight my dear. When may I come and spend the night? I embrace you. V.'
73

While both Tom and Vivien could be teasing on occasion with members of their own sex, that teasing seems to have gone no further than play. Vivien thought ‘the sex business' made ‘a vast difference' between her and Mary Hutchinson, even if ‘we are very much alike'.
74
If what Tom writes about ‘intimacy' between writers is conditioned by what he had sensed in Peters, or (some might argue) in Jean Verdenal, to suggest this is not to assert either that he slept with those men or even that he wanted to. The ‘affair' he was closest to was that of his wife; when he wrote in July's
Egoist
, ‘We may not be great lovers', those words might relate to his own marital predicament. Yet what this piece (whose use of quotations drawn on in ‘Gerontion' indicates its closeness to his poetic imaginings) does indicate is that, as with the figure of Tiresias in
The Waste Land
, so here Tom's literary imagination passes readily and fearlessly across a wide sexual spectrum. This strengthened him as a writer. He composed his contribution to the
Egoist
when he was considering embarking on another long poem to set beside ‘Gerontion', and when, having just read new work by Conrad Aiken, he was pondering links between writing, ‘psycho-analysis' and the ‘borderline of the subliminal'.
75
In his poetry, as in his prose, he investigated such territory with daring, but also with a subtlety that some critics belie when, lacking clear evidence, they attempt to read back too crudely from his writings into his conduct in life or to conscript, for whatever cause, his sexuality. His imagination was polymorphous; his mind did not run on one track.

One thing that obsessed him, however, was tradition. He was coming to see the poet as a tradition bearer; in this context, not least, his imaging of poets as passionately overwhelmed by their reading should be understood. ‘We do not imitate, we are changed; and our work is the work of the changed man; we have not borrowed, we have been quickened, and we become bearers of a tradition.'
76
Using rather different imagery, he would restate this perception a few months later in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent'.

From Aiken's ‘Senlin: A Biography', which Tom discussed briefly in print in June 1919, he filched (or stole back) some elements. Aiken had written of how ‘The city dissolves about us'; conscious of Tom's earlier work, he had sought to fuse individual and urban consciousness in a metropolis ‘Dumbly observing the burial of its dead'. In ‘The Burial of the Dead' and elsewhere in
The Waste Land
Tom would mix familiar urban with other, more dreamlike images, from a violin and horns to bells and lilacs – all present in ‘Senlin'.
77
He thought Aiken in that poem ‘oversensitive and worried'.
78
Tom, who had his own worries, sought not to imitate his friend, but to outdo him now in the long poem he was planning. Its gestation would be painfully slow.

Vivien shared some of her husband's preoccupations. They were both ‘carried away' by
Ulysses
, though Tom realised that few other people in London were; sadly, by the publication of the thigh-smacking, panting and sweating Blazes Boylan episode in the
Little Review,
Vivien began to find Joyce ‘abominable'.
79
Threats of prosecution had halted serialisation of
Ulysses
in both the
Egoist
and the
Little Review
. Harriet Weaver and Dora Marsden decided to suspend publication of the
Egoist
, but before they did so Tom prepared to publish his most significant essay there. He was conceptualising ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent' in early July when he wrote to Mary Hutchinson (whom more and more he had enjoyed visiting, and to whom he had recently sent Pound's
Personae
) about the need for ‘civilisation which is impersonal, traditional' and ‘which forms people unconsciously'. A transposed American, he explained that by ‘tradition' he did not mean simply ‘stopping in the same place'; deliberately, one had to develop a ‘
historical
sense
'.
80

Tom's essay would appear in two parts, printed in the
Egoist
's final two issues. In part one he wrote, also, of contemporary literature's relationship with the dead, but did not deploy the imagery of lovers. When he first set out his ideas to Mary Hutchinson, however, there were hints of flirtatiousness: writing of ‘you', Tom seems to mean Mary herself (whom Vivien admired as ‘such a “
civilised
” rebel'), though she may have represented, too, an English culture which remained sometimes hard for him to read.