Young Eliot (63 page)

I don't know whether I think you more complicated than you are – but I have fewer
delusions
about you than you think – but no doubt a great deal of
ignorance.
I certainly don't recognise the portrait you hold up as painted by me. But remember that I am a
metic
– a foreigner, and that I
want
to understand you, and all the background and tradition of you. I shall try to be frank – because the attempt is so very much worthwhile with you – it is very difficult with me – both by inheritance and because of my very suspicious and cowardly disposition. But I may simply prove to be a savage.
81

Inevitably, Tom the
metic
thought of his father when packages arrived from St Louis in early July containing childhood treasures and the paternal bathrobe. When he saw the great ‘care' with which his mother had packed them, he almost wept.
82
He went to Garsington for the weekend of 12–13 July, but Vivien was ‘in bed with cold' both days.
83
The following weekend she and her husband travelled to Eastbourne to stay with the Schiffs. Vivien found this ‘unsatisfactory': the Schiffs were ‘very fatigueing [
sic
] & irritating to me', though ‘Tom got on allright.'
84
It could be hard when her husband was lionised; she took pride in his talent, yet did not welcome being treated as his appendage. Still jobless, she took up an afternoon dressmaking class. ‘Where would I be without my dirty piece of crochet which I have been doing for five years, or my failures of dresses and underclothes?' She went, too, to the Russian Ballet with friends, but, tired much of the time, worried she ‘looked horrible'.
85

Sometimes she felt too ill to go out at all. She took to her bed with a terrible migraine after Lady Ottoline came to tea on 23 July, leaving Tom to head off to the ballet with the Hutchinsons. Yet Tom, too, was ailing. Before visiting the Schiffs, Vivien found him ‘
IM
possible – full of nerves, really not well, very bad cough, very morbid and grumpy'; she complained to Mary Hutchinson, ‘He gets angry and stubborn.'
86
As soon as they returned from Eastbourne Tom went to his doctor, John Robert Whait, whose practise was at 124 Finchley Road in Hampstead and whose interests included neurology.
87
More than once Whait advised Tom to rest. Conscious he needed dental work also, he was in bed ‘several times' in July and August, ‘very much run down'.
88

His writing, however, attracted further admirers. Recently returned from active service, twenty-seven-year-old Richard Aldington, his predecessor as assistant editor at the
Egoist
, wrote to express ‘admiration' and ‘envy' of his gifts as a critic; Aldington, the dashing young officer-poet of
War and Love
, had been struck particularly by Tom's incisiveness in the July
Egoist
article, though he felt obliged to add that he disliked Tom's verse greatly: ‘it is over-intellectual and afraid of those essential emotions which make poetry'.
89
Later, he came to realise Tom's avoidance of sentimentality enhanced poetic power. Yet if some English men of letters praised aspects of Tom's talent, he continued to provoke American objections for transplanting himself. Just after his father's death he had received a letter from President Eliot, formerly of Harvard, asking him about his situation. During the summer, they corresponded further. Justifying residence in England in terms of its practical and intellectual benefits, Tom cited the example of Henry James; perhaps aware that some at Harvard were still hoping to recruit him, President Eliot found it ‘quite unintelligible' that ‘you or any other young American scholar can forego the privilege of living in the genuine American atmosphere – a bright atmosphere of freedom and hope'. It was just such facile optimism that Tom had fled. Where he sought a cosmopolitan, international literature, President Eliot countered that ‘Literature seems to me highly climatic and national as yet; and will it not be long before it becomes independent of these local influences, and addresses itself to an international mind?'
90
This senior Eliot wanted a much more junior Eliot back in his Unitarian home.

Tom was adamant. That summer he considered several ideas of national culture, not just American. Irish literature involved ‘crudity and egoism', though these qualities in some of Yeats's work and in
Ulysses
were exploited ‘to the point of greatness'.
91
Thinking about ‘the Romantic Generation in England', Tom detected ‘decadence' (albeit ‘decadence of genius') in Wordsworth and ‘immaturity of genius' in Keats and Shelley; at least the German Romanticism of Goethe showed a ‘completely awakened intelligence'.
92
‘Scotch literature' had something akin to the book culture of the New England he had left behind: flickering in its achievement, it had become ‘provincial'. ‘Edinburgh in 1800 … is analogous to Boston in America fifty years later'; inevitably, ‘the important men turn to the metropolis' of London. ‘The basis for one literature is one language.' This view saw America, Scotland and Ireland as peripheries nourishing the central tradition of a language rooted in England. The expatriate American cautioned against the ‘intemperate and fanatical spirit' of France's Charles Maurras, who denounced undigested ‘foreign forces' threatening French literature.
93
Tom thought Britain faced no such imminent danger.

These arguments are debatable: the assumption that ‘The basis for one literature is one language' can seem self-evident; but it is equally apparent that the literature of England has been produced in several languages, including Latin, Old French and English, while the literature of Scotland – ranging from Gaelic and Scots to Old Norse – is even more polyglot.
94
Perversely, in ‘Was There a Scottish Literature?' Tom never mentions Robert Burns, Walter Scott or Robert Louis Stevenson. However, he was formulating confidently the thinking on which his own work depended, and England was central to his internationalised view. In his mind, too, at this time were techniques such as Tristan Tzara's Dadaist mixing of French and alien, even on occasion Indic-sounding elements; Tom quotes ‘Bonjour sans cigarette tzantzanza / ganga'. He cites uses of rhetoric in Elizabethan drama, from ‘the furibund fluency of old Hieronymo' to Shakespeare's Cleopatra seen in a consciously dramatic light; he takes words from the famous speech beginning, ‘The barge she sat in…' Unexpected patterns were generated by his panoptic examination of traditions: links, for instance, between ‘Dickens' and Elizabethan drama.
95
All these perceptions, and even particular passages that caught Tom's ear, would be reconfigured in
The Waste Land.

Though he may have revised it after his return, he seems to have been composing at least the first part of ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent' before, on 9 August 1919, he set off for a French holiday. Following his July letter to Mary Hutchinson discussing ‘tradition' and the ‘impersonal', a 6 August letter to her (requesting the return of a draft of ‘Gerontion') considers relations between ‘individuals' and ‘groups'.
96
Published in the September
Egoist
, his essay continued to contemplate national literatures: ‘Every nation, every race, has not only its own creative, but its own critical turn of mind.' He also cautioned against looking for those aspects of a poet's oeuvre which least resemble the productions of other poets; instead, ‘the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously'. This is what it means to be part of a tradition. Yet the essay glides away from ideas of national traditions to a wider concept of what tradition might signify. Indeed, probably spurred by his reaction against his own national tradition – though not mentioning America – he asserts counter-intuitively that tradition ‘cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour'. To do so involves acquiring ‘the historical sense' (he repeats the phrase he had used to Mary Hutchinson), which brings with it awareness ‘not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence'. This sense compels the poet to write with a deep awareness of his own time; he needs, too, a feeling that the ‘whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order'.
97
The historical sense makes a writer simultaneously traditional and contemporary.

Eurocentric, taking in England and its literature, but also internationally-minded, this essay was Tom's greatest manifesto, his ‘programme for the
métier
of poetry'. No poet or artist could be appreciated alone; each must be set alongside the dead poets of many earlier generations. Only then could significance be assessed. There are some parallels between such a way of thinking and J. G. Frazer's comparative method in anthropology – invoked, perhaps, in Tom's later book title,
The Sacred Wood.
Yet if this project seemed to place a poet in conformity with the dead, it entailed, too, disruption.

The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the
whole
existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.

Writing this, Tom set out to achieve what he believed his fellow American Henry James had accomplished: to become fully European. In the twenty-first century that may sound odd, presumptuous, too Eurocentric. Yet for Tom it was a move beyond the limitations of national sensibilities that was enabled by being a ‘
metic
', by discovering that there was a ‘mind of Europe' and accepting this as ‘the mind of his own country' – ‘more important than his own private mind'. Such an overarching ‘mind' to which the poet had his crucial relationship might change and develop, but did not improve. Neither Homer nor the prehistoric rock art of ‘the Magdalenian draughtsmen' nor Shakespeare went out of date. Requiring ‘learning', and depending on ‘relations', Tom's aesthetic may owe something to his philosophical training – and not least to his interest in ‘relativism' and anthropology – as well as to his upbringing and poetic gift.
98
This way of thinking about literature across great swathes of cultures was something encouraged by Rémy de Gourmont's 1902
Le Problème du style.
De Gourmont ranged from Homer and the Vedas to modern fiction and poetry; he admired and wrote about Laforgue and the Symbolists. Like Pound, Tom thought him a ‘great critic'.
99
The ‘knowledge' that mattered to poets, Tom argued, was not simply that of ‘examinations'. It was something better: a sense of tradition to which the poet must continually ‘surrender'. As a result, ‘The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.'
100

Such ‘self-sacrifice' sounds tinged with the religion and family values of his childhood. He presents poetry as a demanding calling, and tradition as a form of communion linking the living to the dead. Yet his talk of ‘extinction' also hints that poetry can offer a way out of dilemmas in personal life. The artistic process purges away irrelevant quirks of ‘personality' in an art that may ‘approach the condition of science' in its ‘depersonalisation'. As Tom explained things a month or two later, ‘In the man of scientific or artistic temper the personality is distilled into the work, it loses its accidents.' It becomes ‘a permanent point of view, a phase in the history of mind'.
101

Tom left his readers – and one wonders how many were able to do so – contemplating what happens when ‘a bit of finely filiated platinum is introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide'.
102
Like so many of his most striking pieces of writing, this one was produced when he was feeling unwell. Once again, it was as if illness let him release material that had been building up, but which he could not otherwise let out. Making sure the piece was ready to appear in the September
Egoist
, he then set off without Vivien but with the draft of ‘Gerontion', for his French holiday. ‘Perhaps', he exclaimed to Mary Hutchinson in a letter, ‘I won't ever come back!'
103

On 9 August, a very hot Saturday, Vivien saw Tom off at 5 p.m. at London's Waterloo station. She was going to Eastbourne for a fortnight with the Schiffs, taking her dressmaking with her; he was catching an overnight boat train which would reach Le Havre at 8 a.m. on Sunday morning. Having crossed the Channel for the first time since the war had ended, he soon got into conversation with a French couple. He sailed with them for an hour on a small steamer from Le Havre across the mouth of the Seine to Trouville, a pretty resort town frequently depicted in its airy brightness by the painter Eugène Boudin. Tom delighted in the ‘blazing bright August day, the boat crowded with people going to the races, and men with violins and singers passing their hats'. Out of England, he became elated: ‘It was all so French and so sudden that I was dazed by it.'
104
Then he boarded a train from Trouville to Paris. A taxi via the place de la Concorde let him catch another train south. Slightly embarrassed because he had forgotten how to recognise some of the French coins, he had counted out his money slowly for the taxi driver, whose honesty was impressive. ‘“That's enough”', the man said, ‘indicating a small tip'. Happy, Tom insisted on giving him more: ‘“That's because I have not been in Paris for eight years.”'
105
The driver roared with laughter, waving as he sped off. Tom travelled overnight south to Limoges, then changed trains, heading into the Dordogne at the start of his three-week vacation.