Young Eliot (69 page)

For some time Tom had been hoping to turn again to poetry. To Edgar Jepson, who had praised his work along with that of Pound, he mentioned before going to France that ‘perhaps I shall try some verse now'.
72
Returned, he told Schiff he aimed soon ‘to show you what I hope to have written'.
73
Yet the material did not come as desired. Complaining of ‘the spiritual decadence of England', he was grumpy.
74
‘As the world becomes worse to live in, every month', he wrote despondently to his brother in mid-September, ‘so the minutiae of existence seem to consume more time and energy'. He and Vivien were once more seeking a new apartment, while still aspiring to maintain a place ‘in the country'.
75
At the same time ‘younger men' were constantly after him for literary advice. Blighted by war, they seemed an ‘unfortunate generation'.
76
Tom felt afflicted by a keen sense of ‘the horrible waste of time, energy, life, of the struggle with post-war machinery of life'.
77

In September 1920, just as they thought they had secured a new flat, and while Tom, with a view to moving in mid-October, was negotiating about alterations, the proofs of
The Sacred Wood
arrived. Methuen wanted to publish in October. Ezra and Dorothy Pound helped Tom proofread, correcting mistakes not least in quotations. His prose sorted, verse pressed in on him. ‘I feel maddened now', he wrote on 26 September, ‘because I want to get settled quietly and write some poetry; there seems no likelihood of it for some weeks at best'.
78
Henry wrote about selling St Louis Hydraulic-Press Brick Company stock left to Tom by his father. Turning his professional banker's brain to the matter, Tom calculated that interest from the sale of the stock could give him additional income of at least £100 a year. While not a huge fortune, added to his salary it was a marked help. Money from the United States continued to boost his London household finances, but never seemed quite enough. The new flat would cost more, and it looked as if moving would eat up time in October when Tom had hoped to ‘take Vivien away'.
79
It might be November before he could settle to verse.

He couldn't find time. ‘I want a period of tranquility to do a poem that I have in mind', he told his mother on 20 September, just as she was completing her own move to a new house in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
80
‘Am I writing much? Only signing my name to leases and agreements', he complained to Mary Hutchinson, adding that he was ‘about to have an operation'.
81
This, he later explained to Leonard Woolf, was ‘on my Nose'.
82
Probably he was having it cauterised: hardly a cheering prospect. Barbara and Jeremy, Mary Hutchinson's children, nicknamed him ‘The Eagle' because of the size of his nose.
83
Aggravations multiplied. By mid-October he complained to Lewis he was ‘in almost hourly consultation with somebody or other about the flat which I am trying to take from an insane she-hyena.'
84
This woman insisted Tom pay all her ‘solicitors' fees' as well as his own.
85
His temper was not improved by having read Aiken's derivative new book of poems,
The House of Dust
, which, once again, seemed unduly indebted to ‘myself'.
86
Struggling with his commitments, he asked Lewis to help with the removal.

His imagination flooded with ideas and images, including some from his past and from his reading as a student. Earlier in 1920 he had gone to see a performance of Euripides'
Medea
starring Sybil Thorndyke at London's Holborn Empire theatre. The verse translation of this play about a fearsomely strong mother was by Gilbert Murray. Though Tom thought Murray's poetry poor, he recognised him as a major Hellenist. Thinking about Murray's work led him to go over in his mind the way literature, anthropology and psychology had converged over the last few decades: something which his Harvard education and some of his recent reviewing had brought home to him. Having written a few years before about the interpretation of primitive ritual, Tom could treat this scholarship with a certain mockery in
Art and Letters
. Nonetheless he sensed in it a new intellectual dawn.

This day began, in a sense, with Tylor and a few German anthropologists; since then we have acquired sociology and social psychology, we have watched the clinics of Ribot and Janet, we have read books from Vienna and heard a discourse of Bergson; a philosophy arose at Cambridge; social emancipation crawled abroad; our historical knowledge has of course increased; and we have a curious Freudian-social-mystical-rationalistic-higher-critical interpretation of the Classics and what used to be called the Scriptures. I do not deny the very great value of all works by scientists in their own departments, the great interest also of this work in detail and in its consequences. Few books are more fascinating than those of Miss [Jane] Harrison, or Mr. [F. M.] Cornford, or Mr. Cooke, when they burrow in the origins of Greek myths and rites; M. Durkheim, with his social consciousness, and M. Lévy-Bruhl, with his Bororo Indians who convince themselves that they are parroquets, are delightful writers. A number of sciences have sprung up in an almost tropical exuberance which undoubtedly excites our imagination, and the garden, not unnaturally, has come to resemble a jungle. Such men as Tylor, and Robertson Smith, and Wilhelm Wundt, who early fertilised the soil, would hardly recognize the resulting vegetation; and indeed poor
Wundt's Völkerpsychologie
was a musty relic before it was translated.
87

Reviewing all this, and writing about scholarship on primitive fertility rituals as if it was itself a form of fertile ‘vegetation', Tom concluded what was needed was to fuse this intellectual material with the poetry practised by ‘such as Mr. Pound'. Murray lacked ‘creative instinct'.
88
Pound's close friend and fellow poet did not.

Later in 1920, visiting them in the country for the weekend of 18–19 September, Tom told the Woolfs he wanted ‘to write a verse play in which the 4 characters of Sweeny act the parts'. It would concentrate, tellingly but revealingly, on ‘externals'.
89
Drawing especially on the anthropologically-informed classical scholarship of F. M. Cornford, eventually this would become ‘Sweeney Agonistes'. Yet, quite apart from ‘Sweeney Agonistes', producing his new, long poem was also part of Tom's plans. That poem, too, might draw on a melange of literature and anthropological lore. Yet, frustratingly, as 1920 drew towards its close, he felt he could not quite bring this idea to fruition. Like Pound, he had grown used to incorporating into his work material lifted from earlier poems. In 1920 he foregrounded such a technique as a plus point. Writing in
The Times Literary Supplement
about the dark Jacobean dramas of Philip Massinger, he contended,

One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.
90

Though in this piece, published in late May, Tom had gone on to mention George Chapman's seventeenth-century borrowings from Seneca, and the way Shakespeare and Jacobean dramatist Cyril Tourneur had filched from the French of Montaigne, in effect he was setting out the method that would underlie the still embryonic
Waste Land.
His lecturing and his deep grounding in philosophy let him articulate theories about poetry that nourished his own verse to a degree unusual among poets. So, for instance, using a German word employed by Schopenhauer, he argued that in the best Jacobean drama could be found ‘that perpetual slight alteration of language, words perpetually juxtaposed in new and sudden combinations, meanings perpetually
eingeschachtelt
[encased] into meanings, which evidences a very high development of the senses, a development of the English language which we have perhaps never equalled'. Glissading between dramatic poetry and poems written for private reading, he associated this period in Jacobean drama with the verse of Donne as the culmination of an era when ‘the intellect was immediately at the tips of the senses. Sensation became word and the word was sensation.' Again, he saw this process as akin to the formation of a ‘chemical compound'.
91
His theory here can appear scientific and detached; the resulting poetry sounds at once pained and pinpoint, musical with echoes that ripple out across eras and cultures, extending the boundaries of language.

Tom had developed a sense of the making of art as arduous. Drawing on Rémy de Gourmont, and on Édouard Dujardin's 1919
De Stéphane Mallarmé au prophète Ezéchiel: et essai d'une théorie du réalisme symbolique
, he maintained that ‘the creation of a work of art is like some other forms of creation, a painful and unpleasant business: it is the sacrifice of the man to the work, it is a kind of death'.
92
For his own labour-intensive poetic toil he would need time. Meanwhile, Dujardin's linking of poetry and religion in the context of discussions about ‘la réel' (the real), ‘la réalisme symbolique' and ‘la bible' (not to mention his connecting Mallarmé with Wagner) nourished Tom's thinking about the poem he wanted to write.
93
When he did compose it, reality and the unreal interpenetrated; the biblical book of Ezekiel, ancient religions and Wagnerian leitmotifs fused. Other topics he wrote about in summer 1920 – Cleopatra, Dante, sex and fertility throughout nature (Tom alludes to de Gourmont's work on ‘physiology',
Physique de l'Amour: essai sur l'instinct sexuel
which Pound was about to translate) – would resurface in his forthcoming poem. When he argued in July that ‘the critic and the creative artist' were ‘frequently … the same person', he defined the combination he had striven to become.
94

In November he published his first article in Thayer's
Dial.
‘The Possibility of a Poetic Drama' shows him still thinking about issues that preoccupied him while watching Murray's
Medea
earlier that year. Many ‘poets hanker for the stage'. Tom was conscious the great age of English poetic drama was long past; yet it struck him that, among forms of art, ‘the drama is perhaps the most permanent, is capable of greater variation and of expressing more varied types of society, than any other'. Possibly the oddest thing he said in this essay was that ‘poetic drama's autopsy was performed as much by Charles Lamb as by any one else'.
95
What he referred to was the way Lamb in his
Specimens of English Dramatic Poets Who Lived about the Time of Shakespeare
had anthologised extracts from plays so that they could be read privately as poems.

Tom would grow increasingly interested in how one might write modern poetic drama; but the poem that he was about to produce would anthologise, in an often Poundian way, extracts from plays and older poems. Like his admired Dante and his brilliant contemporaries Pound and Joyce, Tom ‘knew', as he put it that November, ‘how to pillage right and left'.
96
Reflecting on Matthew Arnold's contention that the Romantic poets simply ‘did not know enough', Tom as a critic knew a vast amount; his ideal was ‘to see the best work of our time and the best work of twenty-five hundred years ago with the same eyes'.
97

Yet his poem would not come. Life filled with other work: not just bank tasks, but moving house and the emotional demands of looking after Vivien, himself and visitors. He wrote very little prose in late 1920, his energies exhausted by the sheer practicalities of living. Harold Peters and several companions arrived in England in mid-October en route to the Mediterranean in an ocean-going yacht. They knew ‘no one in London'. Tom tried to entertain them: such Americans in London populate ‘Sweeney Agonistes'. All this increased his sense of ‘strain'.
98
His prose hints at recurrent thoughts of mortality. He wrote not just of Lamb performing an ‘autopsy', but with regard to poetasters advised curtly, ‘Kill them off'; his December
Dial
piece, ‘The Second-Order Mind', ends with the eerily resonant phrase, ‘a monarchy of death'.
99

He had just seen mortality close-up. While the Eliots were moving flats, Vivien's father, who had helped with legal arrangements, had collapsed suddenly at home on 21 October. At first it looked like food poisoning. The next day, when Tom was called to Compayne Gardens, specialist physicians decided to carry out an emergency operation in the house. They discovered a huge abdominal abscess ‘just beginning to break'. Mr Haigh-Wood was within five minutes of death, and the surgeon feared he would not live until morning.
100

Tom stayed up all night at his father-in-law's house. Vivien was ‘on the edge of collapse'.
101
Her brother helped procure medicines. Two live-in nurses assisted with the old man, who hung on with great spirit. Watching him when he lay on the edge of unconsciousness, Tom was moved by the way the elderly painter rallied and, recognising his son-in-law, asked him when
The Sacred Wood
would be published. The doctors stipulated a second operation was necessary. Eventually returning home to make room for the nurses, Vivien waited anxiously at Crawford Mansions. As the invalid lay ill for days, then weeks, Tom felt intense trepidation.