Young Eliot (65 page)

Within the time of a brief generation it has become evident that some smattering of anthropology is as essential to culture as Rollin's Universal History. Just as it is necessary to know something about Freud and something about [the entomologist] Fabre, so it is necessary to know something about the medicine-man and his works. Not necessary, perhaps not even desirable, to know all the theories about him, to peruse all the works of Miss Harrison, Cooke, Rendel Harris, Lévy-Bruhl or Durkheim. But one ought, surely, to have read at least one book such as those of Spencer and Gillen on the Australians, or Codrington on the Melanesians. And as it is certain that some study of primitive man furthers our understanding of civilized man, so it is certain that primitive art and poetry help our understanding of civilized art and poetry. Primitive art and poetry can even, through the studies and experiments of the artist or poet, revivify the contemporary activities. The maxim, Return to the sources, is a good one. More intelligibly put, it is that the poet should know everything that has been accomplished in poetry (accomplished, not merely produced) since its beginnings – in order to know what he is doing himself. He should be aware of all the metamorphoses of poetry that illustrate the stratifications of history that cover savagery. For the artist is, in an impersonal sense, the most conscious of men; he is therefore the most and the least civilized and civilizable; he is the most competent to understand both civilized and primitive.

More than once in this piece Tom links ‘the poet and the anthropologist', but he also connects poet and ‘savage'.
135

He sought to develop what he admired in Pound's new collection
Quia Pauper Amavi
(published by the Egoist Press that October): ‘a constant aim with a deliberate and conscious method'. Yet pursuing such a course in poetry would involve him in tapping into his own hidden convulsions and compulsions. His verse in
The Waste Land
would carry a lancing sense of pain that surpassed Pound's sometimes lacquered bookishness. However, Tom saw that Pound, drawing on aspects of Browning's oeuvre, had found a new way to write poetry.

As the present is no more than the present existence, the present significance, of the entire past, Mr Pound proceeds by acquiring the entire past; and when the entire past is acquired, the constituents fall into place and the present is revealed. Such a method involves immense capacities of learning and of dominating one's learning, and the peculiarity of expressing oneself through historical masks.
136

Though he associated his friend with translations and versions of older poems, including several from the Provençal, Tom was fascinated by Pound's recreation of a two-thousand-year-old erotic voice in ‘Homage to Sextus Propertius'. In this sequence Latin poetry, rendered into English, had been spliced, concentrated, quoted in snippets and rearranged so that ancient and modern were inextricable. Here was ‘a final concentration of the entire past upon the present'.
137
Tom was struck, too, by Pound's new ‘Cantos'. Ranging from an account of a Classical rape to details of present-day sounds and sights, they brought together a ‘rag-bag' of quotations, allusions and historical parallels in an ambitious attempt to convey universalism.
138
Pound could make this function in a way ‘no other poet living' could do.
139
Preoccupied with something similar in Joyce's recent prose, Tom would strive to better these achievements.

A year that had begun with one family death drew to its close with others. Vivien's Aunt Emily died in October. Accompanying her brother to the funeral, Vivien found the experience ‘terrible'.
140
In November her beloved aunt Lillia Symes, the only family member present at the Eliots' wedding, passed away suddenly in her flat in Eastbourne. Again, Vivien was deeply distressed. Reminding Tom of his father's demise, further packages of books arrived from St Louis. With the works of Thomas Jefferson lined up in his bookcase, just as once they had been arranged at 2635 Locust Street, he worked on several essays, including his first leading article for
The Times Literary Supplement
.

Determinedly, he stayed up until 3 a.m. one morning to finish it. If it was hard to find time to write such pieces, it was difficult, also, to research them. The British Museum reading room, a wonderful resource, was ‘useless', Tom complained, to most people with day jobs since it did not open in the evenings or on Sundays. Instead, he subscribed to the London Library, ‘its terms … generous and its manners gracious'.
141
Registering there first as a ‘journalist', he would be a lifelong supporter of this institution.
142
Today it boasts a wing named after him.

In late November he read the proofs of his books that Rodker and Knopf were soon to publish. He was now a poet with a small but substantial body of work exhibiting both consistency and variety; he had, too, a clear poetic stance. The second part of ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent', published in December in the final
Egoist,
confirmed that. ‘Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation' were to be ‘directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry'. This ‘impersonal theory of poetry' made clear it was not what the poet had in him to say that mattered; it was how he said it. There was a crucial difference between personal experience and poetic craftsmanship. Tom was fascinated, he made evident elsewhere at this time, by something in Donne's work: ‘the sense of the artist as an Eye curiously, patiently watching himself as a man'.
143

For the reader, and the poetry, however, it was the crafting that mattered. ‘The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material.' Yet revealingly, even in writing those words, Tom selected the verb ‘suffers', rather than, say, ‘loves', ‘exults' or ‘experiences'; and he chose to equate poetry with a corrosive, damaging material – sulphurous acid. The verse he was authoring now was a poetry of suffering (‘Gerontion' is a poem of human corrosion); the last thing he wanted was for this to result in painful invasions of his rigorously guarded privacy. The more, as a poetic ‘Eye', he watched his own hurts, the more he stressed impersonality. Instead of presenting poetry as soul-baring, he set it forth as a scientific operation, likening it to the making of sulphurous acid out of two gases, oxygen and sulphur dioxide; only when platinum was present would the gases combine, yet the platinum stayed seemingly ‘unaffected'; it remained ‘inert, passive, and unchanged'.
144

Metallic, the poet's mind was that piece of platinum. This arresting analogy fits with Tom's later description of his having had to harden himself ‘into a
machine
' so as ‘to endure'.
145
Registering and combining materials in striking new ways, the poet's intelligence seems of necessity detached. It is not, this essay explains, ‘the intensity, of the emotions' that matters in the making of a poem, but ‘the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place'. No good poet expresses what journalists call a ‘“personality”'. Poets present a medium: poetry. There is deep, clarifying insight in this separation of ‘personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in his [the poet's] life' from the ‘emotion in his poetry', and in this emphasis on ‘the emotion of art' as ‘impersonal'. Yet, revealingly, the passages of verse Tom cites as examples often feature reactions to recent death or adultery, whether they come from Dante,
Othello
or Aeschylus. ‘Only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.'
146

Tom's thinking may have been sharpened by the discussion of ‘personnalité' in Rémy de Gourmont's essay on style. However, that French writer's presentation of the Flaubert who ‘transvasait goutte à goutte' (decanted drop by drop) his sensibility into his work – an idea that fascinated Tom – is not quite the same as this theory of impersonality.
147
Transmuting personal sufferings into art might be a way of transcending them while fashioning something worthwhile out of the damage. ‘The ways in which the passions and desires of the creator may be satisfied in the work of art are complex and devious.'
148
In one of the finest of all essays about poetry, Tom both concealed and revealed. He gave a superb account of how ‘The poet's mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.'
149
That is how
The Waste Land
would come into being. It is how most poems are made. His 1919 account in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent' is hard to better, even if, with a necessary instinct for self-protection, it hides underlying pain.

For all his consciousness and self-consciousness, Tom's poetry came together by accident as well as strategy. On 19 November 1919, Vivien enjoyed a London concert by African American musicians of the Southern ‘Syncopated Orchestra', whose players included Sidney Bechet; such syncopations reconnected Tom with sounds from his St Louis childhood.
150
His reviewing and evening lectures brought back to him material encountered at Harvard and elsewhere – from the Buddha's Fire Sermon to ‘Petronius' – adding to it and keeping it fresh.
151
Inevitably, over the years some phrases, images and sensations had stuck. Now, mixed up with experiences from his recent life, they were almost ready to combust.

Here he was in another country, still receiving packages of his dead father's belongings. Tormented in his marriage, he remained close to Vivien and valued her – as she did him; yet their divergent experiences and behaviours kept them apart. Problematically insistent, too, was his intense link to his ageing mother. At the start of December he wrote, ‘I should love to have pyjamas made by you.'
152
He was responding to her offer – sensing it as a gesture of nearness.

He missed the dead: not only his father (to whom he would dedicate his first book of essays), and Jean Verdenal (to whom he dedicated the Knopf edition of his
Poems
), but also others, including Karl Culpin and dead poets to whom he felt at times a preternatural closeness. ‘
Tu sei ombra
ed ombra vedi'
(thou art a shade and a shade thou seest) was a fragment of a ghostly meeting from Dante's
Purgatorio
that appeared unexpectedly in his first
Times Literary Supplement
leader – on Ben Jonson – published that November.
153
Haunted by the literary and unliterary dead, when he wrote about Jonson he argued that we must put ‘ourselves into seventeenth-century London' and find a way of ‘setting Jonson in our London' to appreciate him not just as a respected dead poet but also as ‘a contemporary'. Tom quoted ‘the learned, but also the creative' Jonson's soliloquy of a ‘ghost' on Rome, with its imagined earthquake-shaken ‘towers', its ‘ruin', its river and its famous topography. Eventually
The Waste Land
would populate London with the dead as well as the living. It would move present-day urban scenes into the past, into Dante and elsewhere, fusing them in a haunted, often hallucinatory panorama. Tom's technical skill, hoard of learning and profound sense of loss would unite to animate his poem. ‘Every creator is also a critic', he argued. As he articulated his thinking in commanding criticism he created a grounding for poetry to come.
154

His sense of being loss-haunted was hardly unique. Having lived in England throughout World War I, he had a profound experience of desolation unfamiliar to most American contemporaries. Almost a million British men had been killed in action; German and other losses were even higher. Richard Aldington and all former soldiers shared this oppressive sense of wasted lives, but non-combatants like Pound had it too. Pound and his wife came to dinner at Crawford Mansions on 17 November 1919, then the Eliots dined with them six days later before going to see
The Duchess of Malfi
. In ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley' (written in early 1920), Pound articulated how ‘There died a myriad' among ‘wastage as never before'.
155
Tom, used to seeing Pound's poems in draft, knew the battlefield horrors of the front only at second hand but had heard distressing accounts from his brother-in-law and others. Impressed by the pessimism of his brilliant acquaintance John Maynard Keynes's 1919
Economic Consequences of the Peace
, he was struck during the aftermath of the war by the ‘destitution' and ‘starvation in Vienna' amid ‘the “Balkanisation” of Europe'.
156

All too aware of a Europe-wide post-war malaise, in his personal life Tom had experienced bereavement and intimate suffering. He may have been thirty-one in late 1919, but he felt like an old man. Bedridden for a time in mid-December, he was told by his physician ‘not to think of going out' for several days more.
157
Dr Whait, whom Vivien summoned, gave him a special spray for his nose, warning him again he might have ‘to have the membrane cauterized'. Telling his seventy-six-year-old mother that he always slept on his left side ‘because I breathe more easily', he suggested that his ailment was similar to one she had suffered from. In this prematurely aged condition, he was also, he informed her, harbouring a ‘New Year's Resolution'. It was ‘“to write a long poem I have had on my mind for a long time and to prepare a small prose book from my lecture on poetry”'.
158
That poem would become
The Waste Land.