Young Eliot (78 page)

On 13 March, having moved flats to 12 Wigmore Street and sublet 9 Clarence Gate Gardens until June, Tom described himself (probably accurately) as ‘irritable and exhausted'. However, his magazine planning showed he believed he could cope with his problems as before – by throwing himself determinedly into work. Having been edited so effectively by Pound, he became all the more a committed editor, sourcing contributions and composing business letters with consummate aplomb. Sometimes he immured himself in protective editorial reserve; writing a short note to Thayer about Schiff's translation of
Blick ins Chaos
, he signed himself ‘Sincerely yours, T. S. Eliot', as if he and Thayer maintained a purely commercial relationship.
32
Yet, better than most people, Tom knew the business of writing. He understood that good authors valued style first, but cared, too, about financial reward.

Having received a garbled telegram apparently indicating Tom wanted at least £856 for his new poem, Thayer sent a frosty but not belligerent reply. Pound was wary of Tom's new magazine; offering £10 per 5,000 words, it was likely to pay less than the
Dial
. Yet he remained concerned about Tom. ‘Eliot is at the last gasp', he wrote to William Carlos Williams in America on 18 March.
33
Having been the beneficiary of John Quinn's largesse, Pound had been developing a scheme he called ‘Bel Esprit'. Using a subscription model, the aim was to channel money to talented artists – ‘captives' needing ‘release'. Sending Williams an outline of his idea, he explained that Aldington and he had already pledged £10 each per annum. ‘Leisure', Pound contended, was essential to the true artist, but Tom had returned to the ‘bank, and is again gone to pieces, physically', along with his ‘invalid wife'. Bel Esprit was less a charity than a way to ‘restart civilization', bolstering artistic excellence.
34
Branches of it might be set up in various European and American locations to support the arts generally. Tom must be its first beneficiary.

Soon Pound publicised this heady scheme in several places. He wrote about it for the
New Age
magazine. He distributed a private circular, making clear the plan had been hatched without Tom's knowledge. He also stated Tom's ‘bank work has diminished his output of poetry, and … his prose has grown tired'. Pound proclaimed
The Waste Land
a ‘series of poems, possibly the finest that the modern movement in English has produced'.
35
This was a big claim for a ‘series' that almost no one had read, but several subscribers pledged cash. May Sinclair matched the money committed by Pound and Aldington. As the plan developed, Tom felt increasingly awkward.

Virginia Woolf had suffered frightening bouts of chronic insomnia the previous summer, then a relapse in January. She was still under the weather when she saw Tom in early March. Intelligently and unpatronisingly nice to her, he made her smile. She found him ‘grown supple as an eel; yes, grown positively familiar & jocular & friendly, though retaining I hope some shreds of authority. I mustn't lick all the paint off my Gods.' He told her about his nascent magazine and wanted her to contribute – Leonard Woolf too. Work would be needed by 15 August. Then he discussed his new poem. It would take up about ‘40 pages' and they agreed the Hogarth Press would publish it ‘in the autumn'. Tom does not seem to have shown the Woolfs
The Waste Land
yet. He was hoarding it. ‘This is his best work, he says', Woolf wrote in her diary. ‘He is pleased with it; takes heart, I think, from the thought of that safe in his desk.' They gossiped, not least about Murry, whom they considered dishonest as a writer, and probably as a man. ‘I've ceased even to think about Murry. I've forgotten all about him', Tom maintained. Woolf, a connoisseur of such gossip, had heard from Clive Bell, via Mary Hutchinson, that Tom used ‘violet powder to make him look cadaverous'.
36
Tom, though he could seem cheerful to Woolf, was run down again: the powder may have been a nod to Baudelaire (a poet who advocated wearing ‘make-up'), but it may just have been for a skin complaint.
37

His situation grew little better. Moving had been ‘hell', and by 16 March Vivien, back from her nursing home, was ‘in bed with fever'. Once more he had been ‘very tired and depressed'.
38
Finding out about Bel Esprit hardly cheered him. If news of it reached the bank, where he was trusted and had just been given a special period of leave, it could be seen as a slur on his employer. Pound, having sounded Tom out about his financial needs, meant well, but a scheme that required thirty guarantors each to pledge £10 per annum sounded unreliable. Also, it could embarrass Tom and his friends. Over the coming months, it did.

By early April he was still keeping
The Waste Land
hidden from the Woolfs. ‘My dear Tom', Virginia Woolf wrote to him, slipping in a request to see it.
39
No poem arrived. Nor had he arranged for it to be published in book form in America. He had, though, received an offer from Pound's publisher, Liveright, who had been impressed by Tom in Paris. Boni and Liveright remained keen to publish the poem in New York that autumn, but there was a contractual complication: Tom was obliged to offer Knopf two books following the 1920 New York edition of his
Poems.
The American-issued
Sacred Wood
had been the first of these two; now Tom asked if
The Waste Land
might be the second. Oddly, as he had done with Thayer, so with Knopf he expected a decision without the publisher having seen the work. He simply told Knopf that Liveright had offered him $150, and he expressed eagerness to ‘get the poem published as soon as possible'.
40
Given Tom's apparent impatience, Knopf advised him to accept Liveright's offer. So Alfred Knopf lost the opportunity to publish
The Waste Land
, and said simply that he would look forward to Tom's next book of prose.

Vivien's return to England and to her husband brought a deterioration in her health. On 3 April Tom told Lucy Thayer (herself in Europe) that Vivien ‘evidently really needs to get away from London and from England for long periods together'.
41
There was no suggestion he might accompany her. Still, he supported her decision to head to Paris in early April. Unfortunately, she fell ill as soon as she got there, returning home with ‘a temperature of 100'.
42
Her doctor advised her ‘not to see anyone or talk'. ‘Frightfully vexed', she wanted to speak with Mary Hutchinson about ‘most
important
matters'.
43
Like Vivien, Tom found Mary's company a solace, but his wife's return seems to have coincided more or less with his becoming unwell again too. Awkwardly, the Eliots tried to aid each other, whether that meant their being apart or together. Togetherness could make them both suffer.

To Tom's satisfaction he had recently received from Sylvia Beach, an American in Paris who ran the bookshop Shakespeare & Company, a ‘beautiful
broché
[paper-backed] copy of
Ulysses
'.
44
Beach was the European publisher of Joyce's novel and Tom was due to review it for the
Dial.
He produced no ‘“full dress” review', but eventually submitted his important essay, ‘Ulysses, Order, and Myth', which appeared in November 1923. Vehemently he contested Aldington's criticism in the April 1921
English Review
that
Ulysses
was designed by a ‘great undisciplined talent' so as ‘to disgust us with mankind'.
45
Regarding Joyce's novel as a masterpiece, Tom hoped that, if his intuition and Pound's comments were accurate,
The Waste Land
might be fit to stand beside it.

The Waste Land
was his greatest achievement, but he worried circumstances might conspire against him. Recognising that Vivien had had a particularly ‘bad time recovering herself' while she also had a sick husband ‘on her hands as well', on 20 April he complained to Sydney Schiff that he felt ‘about ready to chuck up literature altogether and retire'.
46
Meanwhile Pound (as he said he had done in Paris in January) was trying to get his friend to send
The Waste Land
to the
Dial
. Pound wanted Thayer to pay handsomely for it.
47
Thayer, however, decided Tom was insulting him, demanding far beyond the going rate for a work he had not even set eyes on. Negotiations stalled.

Complaining of ‘incessant illness', but sure they were fit enough to travel and needed a change, Tom asked Ottoline Morrell on 26 April if she could recommend a hotel in Brighton where he and Vivien might recuperate.
48
Feeling a bit stronger, he had gone to the London Coliseum to see Léonide Massine of the Ballets Russes dance – ‘more brilliant and beautiful than ever'. Adopting the accents of Bloomsbury, Tom told Mary, ‘I (having never been so close before) quite fell in love with him.' Mary had sent news about Massine, and Tom, considering the dancer ‘a genius', wanted ‘to meet him more than ever'.
49
For the moment, though, he stressed that he and Vivien were trying to get away together for the sake of their health. On 5 May Aldington had told Amy Lowell Tom was ‘very ill, will die if he doesn't get proper & complete rest'.
50

Instead of going to Brighton, the Eliots went to Royal Tunbridge Wells, a historic spa town in Kent about thirty-five miles from London by rail. They stayed at the four-storey, ivy-covered Castle Hotel which faced on to a three-hundred-acre common. During the week Tom commuted daily to London's Cannon Street, but Vivien felt ‘very seedy'. Probably sensing his son-in-law would benefit from a break, and doing what he could for the Eliots' marriage, Vivien's father stepped in. Having been at death's door not so long before, the old artist had made a spirited recovery. Now he wanted to treat Tom to a fortnight's Swiss vacation in Lugano from 20 May until 4 June; Tom had two weeks' holiday from the bank. Vivien was trying to decide whether to accompany her husband as far as Paris, or ‘go miserably to the seaside in further search of health'.
51
Again, there seemed no suggestion she and Tom would remain together while abroad, though they did plan to go as a couple to visit Garsington in mid-June.

Tunbridge Wells failed to revive them. Repeatedly Tom had postponed a piece on Seneca he was supposed to be writing for
The Times Literary Supplement.
Before heading for Lugano he struggled to construct his
Dial
‘London Letter' for July. Vivien recalled him as ‘in a state of collapse – so
ill – he asked me what he should say
'. She made suggestions. He wrote them down, ‘not caring'.
52
Though Vivien's memories (penned about six weeks later when she was annoyed) may be coloured by her own circumstances, Tom's ‘London Letter' was unusually short. He mocked English politics (‘the Liberal is merely a drifting Conservative') and suggested that the University of Oxford should choose as its next professor of poetry ‘an American, Professor Irving Babbitt'.
53
It did not.

He was certainly fed up. When the
Chapbook
, where he had published a substantial essay in 1920, sent him a questionnaire about poetry, his answers were honest but dourly monosyllabic:

1.    Do you think poetry is a necessity to modern man?

No.

2.    What in modern life is the particular function of poetry as distinguished from other kinds of literature?

Takes up less space.
54

Given that he had already written in four hundred and thirty-three lines what Ezra Pound had told him was ‘the longest poem in the Englisch langwidge', these answers made sense.
55
They were also shorter than Pound's.

Editing a magazine demands stamina. The Woolfs had allowed Tom to hand-copy a list of about six hundred names and addresses of potential subscribers supplied by the Hogarth Press. He felt too exhausted to type this up before departing for Lugano. Nonetheless, preparations for his journal's first issue were going ahead, necessitating liaison with the publisher, Richard Cobden-Sanderson. Just before leaving, Tom received for his magazine from Leonard Woolf the ‘Plan of the Novel, “The Life of a Great Sinner”' by Dostoevsky, which Virginia Woolf had co-translated; Tom also wrote to Knopf, confirming that he would accept Liveright's offer to bring out
The Waste Land
as a book in the autumn. This would help him secure American copyright, while he might still offer Knopf a future prose volume. Then he set off. While he was in Lugano, Vivien would spend several days relaxing in her old seaside haunts at Eastbourne.

In 1922, for anyone feeling strain and needing somewhere to recuperate, Lugano's Hotel Bristol was an excellent choice, particularly if someone else was paying. When Tom arrived around 22 May, the mountain views across Lake Lugano were breathtaking. The whole region was idyllic: nearby was a settlement called Paradiso. Capital of the Italian-speaking Swiss canton of Ticino, Lugano was home to about 15,000 people. Set on an elevated site, the Bristol, opened two decades earlier, was the city's first Grand Hotel. Extensive grounds sloped down to the waterfront. Guests could ascend from or descend to the lakeside in a private cable car. Transposed from Tunbridge Wells, Tom savoured red ‘Barolo' wine, white sparkling ‘Asti Spumante', an Italian Swiss lakeside festival and, at night, a display of fireworks.
56
He walked; he boated on the lake; he bathed – all ‘good for me'.
57
Yet his father-in-law's gift of this holiday indicated how difficult his marriage was. The Swiss resort would have been the perfect place for a couple; but Charles Haigh-Wood, a loving father who knew his daughter as well as anyone, and who respected Tom, realised his son-in-law had to get away. Despite Lugano's ‘American trippers', Tom relished the gift. ‘I shd like', he wrote to Lady Ottoline, ‘six months of Italy and heat and sunshine, and have never felt quite so lazy and languid.'
58