Young Eliot (74 page)

Writing his ‘London Letter' that September, Tom recalled Stravinsky's
Rite of Spring
and how it had made a new music through transforming ‘the rhythm of the steppes into the scream of the motor horn, the rattle of machinery, the grind of wheels, the beating of iron and steel, the roar of the underground railway, and the other barbaric cries of modern life' which Tom regarded as ‘despairing noises'.
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He was seeking to do something similar in his own long poem, but the adjective ‘despairing' revealed his state of mind. Richard Aldington, now permanently separated from his wife the poet H. D., having difficulties with his own mother, and used to dealing with writers' problems, sensed Tom was suffering from nervous exhaustion. To Aldington Tom was ‘the one friend I have made since my return' from fighting in the war. The returned soldier wanted to help his struggling ally, and defended Tom against the New England wariness of fellow poet Amy Lowell, telling her that Tom had ‘a soundness, a coolness, an urbanity, Ezra never could have. He is quite unprovincial, which is perhaps the highest praise one can give an Anglo-Saxon writer. He is certainly the most attractive critical writer ever produced by America; I for one am extremely grateful to him for living in England and not a little proud that he prefers to.'
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Aldington invited Tom for a weekend to stay near his home, Malthouse Cottage, in Lower Padworth, on the banks of the Kennet and Avon canal close to Aldermaston station, easily reached by train from London.

While Tom was there around the start of September, Aldington lent him a French book. Tom read it on the train back to London and during bank lunch hours. Jean Epstein's
La Poésie d'aujourd'hui: Un nouvel état d'intelligence
was newly published in Paris. Epstein discussed the fusion of ‘L'intelligence et la sensibilité' in modern literature, including the writing of Proust, whom he associated with an ‘aristocratie névropathique' (a neurasthenic aristocracy). Modern poets from Baudelaire to Cocteau were associated with ‘nervosité', and sometimes with kinds of ‘dissociation' that gave their work a ‘hermétique', difficult quality. Epstein discussed ‘Précision et brièveté' as well as incantatory ‘répétition' – qualities Tom had long admired in verse – and the Frenchman linked poetry and science as well as verse and illness. Sometimes poetry had to evade rules of logic and even grammar, making it ‘difficile'. Poetry might involve sensing before understanding; as Cocteau had argued, it demanded ‘la bataille contre l'inexprimable' (the struggle against the inexpressible). Epstein, who went on to become a film director, linked poetry to ‘le cinéma' (rather than to theatre) because of its intimate powers of suggestion; fascinated by the ‘esthétique de succession' of ‘movies', he argued a poem could be made out of ‘une bousculade de détails' (a rush of details). This was an aesthetic of quick transitions and striking metaphors, at once poetic and cinematic. The third part of Epstein's book, mentioning ‘magasins des mythes' (stores of myths), linked modern literature and the new poetry of extreme rapidity to a sense of intellectual ‘fatigue' at once personal and civilisation-wide. Most attuned to this were people who brought together creativity, intelligence and ‘la fatigue nerveuse'.
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Having ‘enjoyed immensely' his weekend with Aldington, Tom told him he found all this ‘most interesting'. He disagreed with some of the conclusions, ‘but it is a formidable work to attack, and therefore very tonic'.
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Just after reading Epstein's book, he wrote to Aldington about feeling ‘tired and depressed', making reference to ‘neurasthenics like … myself'.
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As so often, illness and creativity seemed bonded for him; and Epstein's book supplied an aesthetic to reinforce the combination. In this same letter he mentioned he had just finished ‘an article, unsatisfactory to myself, on the metaphysical poets'. Here he argued that

It appears likely that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be
difficult.
Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning. (A brilliant and extreme statement of this view, with which it is not requisite to associate oneself, is that of M. Jean Epstein, ‘La Poésie d'aujourd'hui'.)
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Though Tom did not take on board Epstein's theories lock, stock and barrel, he did deploy the psychological term ‘dissociation', maintaining that a ‘dissociation of sensibility' had set in during the seventeenth century, leading to Romantic poets who ‘thought and felt by fits, unbalanced'. As elsewhere, he aligned his favoured English Metaphysical poets, especially Donne, with his cherished French poets, particularly Laforgue. Taking issue with Samuel Johnson who had complained that in Metaphysical verse ‘the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together', he also set out one of the most brilliant descriptions of how poetry is composed.

When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.
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His own long poem carried a strong sense of the ‘chaotic, irregular, fragmentary', splicing together various voices, some of them distinctly nervy. For the time being, he had given it the title ‘HE DO THE POLICE IN DIFFERENT VOICES',taken from chapter sixteen of Dickens's
Our Mutual Friend
where a boy reading newspaper reports aloud is praised because ‘He do the Police in different voices.'
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Its sonority and resonance unforgettably compelling, Tom's poem depends throughout on intercut voicing and revoicing.

The first two parts, ‘The Burial of the Dead' and ‘In the Cage', had been typed on his old typewriter, probably in May, during a ‘fine hot rainless spring' with its ‘crop of murders'.
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Other shorter poems, including the sexually tormented one entitled in typescript ‘Song for the Opherion', were also candidates for possible inclusion. Though most of the long poem's bleak encounters appear heterosexual, he built in allusions to many shades of sexuality, whether (in part three) that of Mr Eugenides – whose name means ‘good breeding' and who seems to be gay – or to Tiresias – a man who, the poet Ovid recounts, spent seven years as a woman. In so doing, Tom let his poem speak not just for and from different eras, places and languages, but also (like the work of other modernists including Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray – photographed cross-dressed as Rrose Sélavy in
New York Dada
that April) for and from different sexualities. All are linked by a pervasive sense of torment, infertility, waste. Several poems and fragments would be incorporated, in whole or part, into the larger structure; others would be cut adrift.

Repeatedly that summer, he pondered how to reconcile the wearying raggedness of life with large-scale ordering principles in art. The sometimes jagged, cut-up angularities of ‘cubism' were not ‘licence, but an attempt to establish order', he wrote in July. To be ‘surprising' was ‘essential to art: but art has to create a new world, and a new world must have a new structure'. Joyce had succeeded in
Ulysses
; Woolf's best short stories, more ‘feminine' and bound up with ‘contemplating the feeling rather than the object which has excited it', were often ‘remarkable' but ‘examples of a process of dissociation'. Tom was writing here for readers of the
Dial
, but also thinking aloud in ways relevant to the bundle of papers, thoughts and feelings he was trying unsuccessfully to finesse into his new poem. ‘What is needed of art is a simplification of life into something rich and strange.'
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Those last words echo a song about drowning in Shakespeare's
Tempest
; Tom alluded to the same song that year in ‘Dirge' (about a drowned ‘Bleistein' who has, unsettlingly, ‘Graves' Disease in a dead jew's eyes') and in untitled lines beginning ‘Those are pearls that were his eyes'. Neither piece became part of his long poem. However, another drowned man, ‘Phlebas the Phoenician', would feature mesmerically in its chilling fourth part, ‘Death by Water'. There drowning brings forgetting of ‘profit and loss', and a concluding memento mori invites ‘Gentile or Jew' to ‘Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you'.
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Classing himself among the ‘neurasthenics' by September, Tom was, he told Aldington in confidence, ‘seeing a nerve specialist'.
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Vivien had made the appointment, and accompanied him. The specialist strongly recommended a complete change of scene. Valuing Tom's service, Lloyds Bank granted three months' leave. Friends did what they could. Virginia and Leonard Woolf hosted him at their seventeenth-century country cottage, Monks House, near Lewes in Sussex, for the weekend of 24–25 September. Virginia Woolf enjoyed seeing him, a little ‘disappointed to find that I am no longer afraid of him'.
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Back in London Tom got quotations for printing and publicising his proposed magazine – ‘about the size of the
Nouvelle Revue Française
'; but its launch was put on hold.
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Even from a distance, people who knew him detected something was wrong. Katherine Mansfield wrote to Violet Schiff in October: ‘Poor Eliot sounds tired to death. His London letter is all a maze of words. One feels the awful effort behind it – as though he were being tortured. But perhaps thats all wrong and he enjoys writing it. I don't think people ought to be as tired as that, though. It is wrong.'
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To his brother Henry Tom wrote candidly, ‘I have been feeling very nervous and shaky lately, and have very little self-control.' This hints at flare-ups of temper, but also depression. He wrote that Vivien needed ‘change and stimulus'. His family's visit had been unsettling, but their leaving cut him to the quick: ‘Your having been here seems very real', he confided to Henry, ‘and your not being here but in Chicago seems as unreal as death'.
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He tried to make light of his troubles to his mother, but she worried nonetheless.

Tom's specialist's advice had been to leave immediately for three months, and remain apart from all contacts, resting his mind completely and adhering strictly to a set of rules, which included reading only ‘for pleasure, not profit' two hours a day.
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Tom was not so sure. He thought of simply giving up the bank and living off his journalistic wits; but felt that would bring added stresses. With Aldington, who was kind and generous to him, he discussed the idea of writing a book on Wren's London churches; but it would be unremunerative. Still unsure about the specialist's advice, but recognising he must try to get better, he wrote that he had asked Vivien to accompany him to the Kent seaside resort town of Margate ‘and stay with me as long as she is willing'.
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He aimed to spend a month there, after which Lady Rothermere had offered him the use of her Mediterranean villa at La Turbie near Monte Carlo. Vivien would travel with him to France, he hoped, but then go somewhere else ‘healthy'.
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Helping Tom with his voluminous correspondence, she wrote to Thayer to say, ‘Tom has had rather a serious breakdown.'
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Vivien ended her letter by stressing how keen she had been to get out of England for years, and hinted she might come to visit Thayer, who was then in Vienna.

At Margate Vivien and Tom stayed at the ‘nice, comfortable', sea-facing Albemarle Hotel in Cliftonville from 15 October.
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1920s Margate prided itself as a place where ‘Weary men of business are rejuvenated and invigorated by the magical air'; it catered for ‘the jaded city dweller, pale and worn' who sought to be ‘restored to vigour and activity'.
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With its chalk cliffs, expansive beaches and many entertainments, the seaside town was a popular summer destination; in 1921 even in late October and early November it boasted entertainments from a performance of Handel's
Messiah
to cinemas showing Charlie Chaplin comedies or romantic dramas such as
Wasted Lives
,
Puppy Love
and
Cupid Hires a Taxi-cab
.
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From the Eliots' four-storey hotel, one could stride from Cliftonville into town along a walkway at the foot of the cliffs, cutting at low tide across broad sands that in summer were crowded with deckchairs but in winter almost deserted. Tom, ‘not unhappy', as Vivien put it on 26 October, kept ‘regular hours' and was ‘out in this wonderful air nearly all day'.
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She was going to return to London next day, leaving him at the hotel, but she stayed with him a few days longer, sure he showed ‘great improvement already'.
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Before she left, Tom, who had been practising ‘scales on the mandoline', had decided he needed less ‘a nerve man' than ‘a specialist in psychological troubles'.
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Ottoline Morrell had recommended he travel to Lausanne in Switzerland to consult Dr Roger Vittoz, who had treated her as well as helping Aldous Huxley's brother Julian. Tom wrote to Julian Huxley, asking him just ‘how brilliant a physician' Vittoz was, particularly ‘as a psychologist'.
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A full recommendation came by return. Vivien agreed Vittoz sounded appropriate. She wrote to Bertrand Russell, saying so, and sending love from them both. She also congratulated the philosopher on becoming a first-time father. Tom joked that if the baby did not have Russell's characteristic pointed ears, nevertheless ‘they will sharpen in time'.
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