Young Eliot (64 page)

With a rucksack on his back, stepping off the train at Périgueux at 7.30 a.m. and looking for breakfast, he remembered being there before as a student in January 1911. Ahead of him now lay a walking tour through the Dordgone and Corrèze regions, a part of France Ezra Pound had written about a few years earlier in his poem ‘Near Perigord' – all medieval castles, pine trees, poplars and rivers ‘filled with water-lilies'.
106
Tom found it ‘beautiful', and there to meet him on his arrival was Pound himself.
107
Tom's delight was no less for the wave of tiredness that hit him: as soon as they reached the hotel, he went to bed and slept till lunchtime. Then, ‘I stuffed myself with good French food.'
108

They spent several days together in Excideuil, the village where Pound and his wife Dorothy were holidaying from Toulouse. With its narrow streets, pale stone dwellings, castle associated with troubadour poetry and ruined tenth-century monastery, Excideuil was a fine place in which to recharge. Sunburnt, Tom savoured the taste of fresh melons, mushrooms called ceps, free-range country eggs, truffles, and, as he put it, ‘good wine and good cheese and cheerful people'.
109
Lloyds Bank this was not; he loved it. He feasted too on ‘Roman ruins, and tall white houses, and gorgeous southern shrubs, and warm smells of garlic – donkeys – ox carts'.
110
Leaving Dorothy sketching, he and Pound hiked together through the small, picturesque medieval towns of Thivier (proud of its foie gras and set between the Rivers Cole and Touroulet) and Brantôme on the Cole with its beautiful abbey and historic bell tower, said to be among the oldest in France. Occasionally, Tom postcarded Vivien. Pound informed Dorothy, ‘T. has 7 blisters.'
111
When Tom showed him ‘Gerontion', his friend scribbled suggestions on it; if Pound's poetry is a trustworthy record, Tom also revealed something of his ongoing wrestling with religion: ‘I am afraid of the life after death.' Then he paused and added with satisfaction that at last he had managed to shock his companion.
112
Even in the French sunshine a dark substratum of religious anxiety continued to perturb him, filling him at times with a sense of dispossession, of emptiness, though usually he hid this from his friends.

After Pound headed back to rejoin his wife, Tom walked on alone to see the Magdalenian prehistoric art of the grottoes at Font de Gaume and Les Eyzies, south of Périgueux. His mention of ‘Magdalenian draughtsmen' in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent' suggests that he had those places in mind when he wrote the essay, but, given that it had to be typeset for publication in the September
Egoist
, and that Tom got back from France on 31 August, he may have been anticipating his trip when he wrote it. On Tom's return, his wife was surprised to see he had ‘begun to grow a beard'; Pound was bearded, but for Tom this was an unusual look.
113
Though she had not told him when she wrote to him in France, Vivien had felt ill during his absence, as had the dog Dinah. Tom's return was ‘Very nice at first', but in her diary Vivien added the words ‘depressed in evening'.
114
Later that week, Dinah grew worse: Tom accompanied Vivien in a taxi to take the dog to the vet, who ‘put her to death at once'.
115

The next day Vivien felt dreadful, but spent the morning packing. She and Tom were off to the coast, to Bosham. The weather was good, and there was a pleasant picnic with the Hutchinsons. Vivien stayed in Bosham for several weeks; Tom came down from the bank at weekends. Sometimes she felt ‘very very nervous'.
116
She had a pain in her side and, though she enjoyed sea bathing, sketching and long talks with Mary, her exhaustion returned; she complained of neuralgia. Meanwhile, in London, Tom's new Lloyds Bank Information Department had been set up, giving him a ‘fine impressive room' one floor above the entry level at 75 Lombard Street. Here, at the heart of British imperial finance, he could work at a table beside a large south-facing window looking out ‘over the square toward the Mansion House'.
117
Bearded, he was a rarity in the City, and might well make a bad impression. The clean-shaven young ex-army officer Aldington feared as much when he arranged for the hirsute banker to meet the considerably older editor of
The Times Literary Supplement
, Bruce Richmond, on 29 September. Richmond wanted to know if Tom would write for the paper. In ‘derby hat and an Uncle Sam Beard', Tom, thought Aldington, ‘looked perfectly awful, like one of those comic-strip caricatures of Southern hicks'.
118
Richmond, whose reviewers had damned Tom's earlier work, was not deterred, but wary. He published just two pieces by this young American during the next twelve months.

France had refreshed Tom, and he knew it. Hoping to go to Italy the following year, he was wondering if, instead of his travelling to America, his mother might visit him. He tried to convince his brother that this plan would give their mother ‘the chance to rest that she badly needs' after her bereavement and her proposed removal to Massachusetts.
119
For the moment, because Murry had gone to the Riviera with Katherine Mansfield whose tuberculosis was worsening, Tom had extra commissions for the
Athenaeum
. He was writing several reviews, including what became his celebrated piece on
Hamlet
– ‘the “Mona Lisa” of literature', but a ‘failure'.
120
Convinced that ‘the notes upon poets by a poet' were worth reading, he was willing to risk unusual and provocative judgements: George Chapman (whose work he used in ‘Gerontion') was a ‘great poet', fit to set beside Donne.
121
The ‘failure' of
Hamlet
, this play about ‘the “guilt of a mother”', came from the fact that, ‘like the sonnets', it was ‘full of some stuff that the writer could not drag to light, contemplate, or manipulate into art'.
122

As he considered embarking on a new, long poem of his own which would deal with, among other things, problems of sexual relations and religion, Tom attributed to Shakespeare difficulties that he was having to face himself. He was fascinated by
Hamlet
as ‘a stratification': it ‘represents the efforts of a series of men, each making what he could out of the work of his predecessors'. This makes Shakespeare's play sound a little like a repeated ritual of the sort Tom had considered at Harvard; it conjures up, too, his own poems where, through quotation and allusion, he builds on, alters and recontextualises the work of earlier poets. Consideration of
Hamlet
led him to confront another challenge essential to his poetry: how to express emotion. He did not emote as, say, Murry did. Several critics censured Tom's verse as unfeeling. Instead, he argued,

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative'; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that
particular
emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.
123

This assumption that great art finds an ‘exact equivalence' for emotion, so that the precise emotion can be recreated in the reader, seems too neat. It rather assumes all readers can be controlled in an identical manner. Yet finding a way to eschew sentimentality while profoundly moving the reader's feelings was of fundamental importance.

Hamlet, Tom argues, experiences a ‘disgust' provoked by his mother's conduct, a disgust that is excessive and goes far beyond that behaviour: ‘It is thus a feeling which he cannot understand; he cannot objectify it, and it therefore remains to poison life and obstruct action.' Tom's writing about this resonates more generally in ways that include not just his literary audience but also himself.

The intense feeling, ecstatic or terrible, without an object or exceeding its object, is something which every person of sensibility has known; it is doubtless a study to pathologists. It often occurs in adolescence: the ordinary person puts these feelings to sleep, or trims down his feeling to fit the business world; the artist keeps it alive by his ability to intensify the world to his emotions.
124

In another piece written around this time, Tom saw contemporary poets as divided between struggles to convey ‘pure feeling for which there is no equivalent in the visible world' and perhaps less ambitious attempts to write according to the doctrine of ‘the Image'.
125
He sought in his own poetry to negotiate between these, yet was preoccupied, too, by something deeply bottled up.

The most profound disturbances in his own adolescence would seem to have been around sex and his insistent shyness, and around the religion linked to his mother and father. Marriage to Vivien, sexual difficulties and living with adultery had only heightened his discomfort; philosophical investigations had quickened both his scepticism and a confused religious hunger. Later in 1919, considering the sermon as ‘perhaps the most difficult form of art', his poet's imagination would do what no one had done before: connect the Church of England sermons of Donne and Lancelot Andrewes with ‘the Fire-Sermon preached by the Buddha'.
126
Tom's complex knot of feelings and thoughts about loss, sex and religion had not yet found full expression, even if ‘Gerontion' was a crafted groan of despair. Reviewing recent work by Aiken (which, yet again, contained inferior echoes of his own) he saw a failed but ‘consistent direction' which was ‘to express the inexpressible by expressing the impossibility of expression'.
127

As so often in his life, success and hurtful failure intersected awkwardly. He felt physically healthy again. His career at the bank was taking off; he looked prosperous: for the winter, with Vivien's encouragement, he bought a 10-guinea coat of ‘the best cloth, and lined with wool'.
128
With luck, in early 1920 London would see two volumes of his essays – one on the art of poetry, expected from the Egoist Press after the demise of the
Egoist
magazine, and the other on Renaissance drama due from the elegant publisher Richard Cobden-Sanderson, son of Bertrand Russell's godfather. Thanks to Quinn's outstanding drive and efficiency, Knopf would be publishing his poetry in New York in the spring. Yet Tom's marriage was freighted with pain, and his sense of religion, occasioning his use of a ferocious tiger image in ‘Gerontion', involved distress but little consolation.

On his thirty-first birthday, a Friday, he was in London; Vivien remained at Bosham. She wished she had gone back to be with him, but she had her period and a migraine. Aching, her face grew slightly swollen, but she packed her things to travel to London on the chilly Saturday, only to find a railway strike meant she could not go. Wretched, eventually she paid 30 shillings for a seat in a car leaving Chichester on Monday. She rose at 6 a.m. and wired Tom to say she was coming, but there was a mix-up. In London Vivien waited, exhausted, at Putney Bridge with a hamper and blackberries she had picked to make jam, expecting her husband to arrive; but Tom had gone to London Bridge instead. After two hours and no lunch she abandoned her luggage and managed to get home. Where was Tom? He came back at 7 p.m., having hung on for nearly four hours at London Bridge. They ‘wept'.
129

For society as a whole, these were testing times. As in the United States, so in post-war Britain social unrest led in 1919 to several large-scale strikes. Tom now defined himself as ‘Liberal' in politics, but was not in sympathy with the coalition government led by Liberal Prime Minister Lloyd George.
130
Thanks to stoppages, for several days that September he had to walk the four miles to work. However, fresh from hiking greater distances in France, he coped. He was above such things, and, while he might feel distressed in private, could appear loftily elitist. For his new book of poems, the small one (opening with ‘Gerontion') to be published in London by Rodker, he chose the title ‘Ara Vus Prec', a quotation from Dante meaning ‘Now I pray you'. It seemed to him ‘non-committal' and ‘unintelligible to most people'.
131
He approved of ‘the individual against the mob', but this
de haut en bas
tone got him his comeuppance.
132
It turned out that, not knowing Provençal and following a faulty edition of Dante, he had got the quotation wrong. That is why, embarrassingly, the book appeared in December with
Ara Vus Prec
on the title page, but
Ara Vos Prec
on labels pasted outside.

Tom made sure to tell his mother he had been invited to write for
The Times Literary Supplement,
and might be producing ‘the Leading Article from time to time. This is the highest honour possible in the critical world of literature.'
133
He also told her he expected to have ‘three and possibly four books out next year': new editions of his poems in London and New York, as well as the two planned books of essays. When, in October at the Conference Hall, Westminster, he addressed the Arts League of Service on modern poetry, he reported the size of the audience (three hundred): ‘My lecture was said to be a great success.'
134
His need to impress his family remained strong; he was in correspondence, too, with his siblings.

Yet, at a deeper level, his imaginative work was developing. Where his relatively short quatrain poems had stacked allusions to earlier texts and myths in variegated strata, now he was fascinated by ways of doing so, as
Ulysses
did, on a larger scale – one hinted at when ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent' ranged from the prehistoric to the contemporary. Reviewing an anthology of Native American chants for the
Athenaeum
, he had no time for these as drawing-room exotica. They did, though, rekindle his sense of the importance of anthropology, that subject whose influence seemed inescapable.