Young Eliot (79 page)

He met Hermann Hesse, to whom he had written. Hesse, who had known depression and was deeply interested in Buddhism, had moved in 1919 to the Casa Camuzzi in nearby Montagnola. There he had been writing his Indic novel
Siddhartha.
Like Tom in
The Waste Land
, he sought to fuse perceptions of East and West. After World War I, again like Tom, Hesse had championed the unity of European culture, even if the book Tom so admired,
Blick ins Chaos
, was filled with foreboding. It argued ‘the Downfall of Europe is foretold' by Dostoevsky, especially in
The Brothers Karamazov.
‘This downfall', wrote Hesse, ‘is a return home to the mother, a turning back to Asia, to the source, to the “
Faustischen Müttern
” and will necessarily lead, like every death on earth, to a new birth'.
59
Encouraged by Tom, Sydney Schiff would publish these words as part of his translation of Hesse in the June
Dial
. Tom's unpublished long poem also had a ‘turning back to Asia' in its use of the Buddha's Fire Sermon and in ‘What the Thunder Said'. Yet in the newly revised
Waste Land
, even if the wasted, infertile terrain were to be reborn through the coming of the rain invoked in the final section, that would bring only a cyclic return to the poem's hurtful beginning. Whatever Tom and Hesse discussed, both envisaged a gruelling future. However, Tom, meeting a man whose thinking he so admired, was delighted that Hesse would contribute an article on recent German poetry to his new journal. ‘Ich erinnere ich mich immer an meinem Besuch bei Ihnen', he wrote: ‘I am still full of memories of my visit to you.'
60

He made another visit, too. Crossing into Italy, he spent a couple of days with his staunch friend Pound who was then in Verona. They spoke at length. Tom found Pound ‘delightful', but remained wary of Bel Esprit.
61
Pound's idea was to recruit supporters in New York (including Quinn, who pledged $300), and to have Aldington look after British operations. However uneasy, Tom did not veto this. Pound asked him about his marriage. To Quinn, setting out Tom's problems, Pound wrote in early July, ‘Eliot has always been very reserved about his domestic situation, so much so that I thought Mrs. E. had syph; and marvelled that they didn't get a dose of 606 [arsphenamine, a compound used to treat syphilis]. Last time I saw him I got down to brass tacks. And find that the girl really has a long complication of things, tuberculosis in infancy,
supposed
to have been cured.' As Tom outlined Vivien's symptoms, Pound thought the problem was probably pituitary. Later that summer he asked Louis Berman, author of
The Glands Regulating Personality
(1922), to speak to Tom; but Tom made it clear that no one could work out just what Vivien's illness was. ‘I find', Pound told Quinn, ‘that she has all along behaved very finely [
deleted:
wanted separate establishment, so she shouldn't get on Tom's nerves, and prevent his working], is ready to live by herself if it will help T. to write etc. And in general ready to do anything she can to help his work. He can't simply chuck her in the Thames, even if he were so disposed, which he aint.'
62
Vivien, as ever, believed in Tom's talent; their marriage was hurting them both.

Back in London and feeling refreshed, Tom found that his wife, too, thought her problems might be glandular in origin. Tensions between them continued. Despite having said in May to Ottoline Morrell that visiting Garsington on 16 June ‘will suit us very well', Tom now explained that there had ‘been a misunderstanding'. He blamed Vivien. ‘She knew that I had already told her that I could not leave London for a weekend until she went to Bosham in July.'
63
After keeping Lady Rothermere waiting for most of a year, he felt under pressure to produce his magazine's first issue. If he had more leisure, he explained to Ottoline, he could do all sorts of things; but he had not, and could not. Advised by Lady Ottoline, Vivien had seen a new specialist. He had told her at once, in addition to glandular problems, she had ‘poisoning from colitis'. The cure, Tom told Ottoline on 15 June with a degree of resigned annoyance, was ‘perfectly new and violent'. For four weeks Vivien was to consume cachets called Ovarian Opocaps containing ‘the glands of animals' on a ‘purely experimental' basis, in addition to having ‘a very strong internal disinfection, and going without food
completely
for two days a week'.
64
Meanwhile, the Eliots were moving back from 12 Wigmore Street into their 9 Clarence Gate Gardens flat.

On weekdays Tom squeezed in lunchtime literary meetings at Ye Olde Cock Tavern, 22 Fleet Street, a characterfully tall narrow building which still exists and boasts associations with a variety of writers. Here he plotted his new magazine. Restless and dissatisfied, he had no sooner moved into Clarence Gate Gardens than he cabled Quinn on 21 June to say he was unhappy about Liveright's
Waste Land
contract
.
Apologetically, he asked Quinn for help, which was forthcoming immediately. In effect the busy New York lawyer acted as Tom's agent. Over the next few months he negotiated a significantly better deal, then assisted with typescript and proofs. At first Tom had not even told Quinn the title of his new volume; Quinn took it all on trust. When, eventually, he read
The Waste Land
in typescript, he regarded it as ‘poems' rather than a poem.
65
‘I thank you from the depth of my heart for your kindness', Tom wrote, and soon made it clear he would present Quinn with the bundle of surviving manuscripts.
66

Around the same time, perhaps as part of a theatre visit, Mary Hutchinson arranged for Tom to meet Massine. Tom thought this ‘very sweet' of her, and, signing his letter ‘With love, Tom', told her so. ‘Do you think Massine liked me? and would he come and see me, do you think?'
67
His continuing warmth towards Mary and his excitement at meeting Massine reveal eagerness to find distractions from the situation at home. Vivien ‘starved' herself as the doctors ordered. One night in late June while she did so, Tom escaped to dinner and an ensuing dance, then headed to the Wigmore Street flat (not yet fully vacated), finishing off there what was left of a bottle of vermouth. He packed up his remaining clothes to move them back to Clarence Gate Gardens. ‘Rather fun', he described his evening to Mary, hoping to see her soon.
68

By 25 June both Vivien and Tom were uneasy about her new treatment. She arranged to see a different Harley Street specialist, and, unsure how to proceed, sent Pound details of her symptoms. These included colitis, temperatures of almost 100°F (37.8C°), exhaustion, insomnia (‘this has been going on for eight years'), migraines, and what she called ‘Increasing mental incapacity'. That last symptom she explained by saying, ‘I have a horror of using my mind and spend most of my time in trying to avoid contact with people or anything that will force me to use my mind.' Though despairing at times, she was determined to try to get well. She confided to Pound that she and Tom planned a week's holiday together in Paris in late September; if she could find ‘intelligent doctors', she might go on to Switzerland or Germany. Tom thought there was more to the illness than Vivien had revealed, noting she was ‘
very
ill and exhausted'.
69

Rumours spread that his proposed new journal might never appear. While sympathetic to his situation, Lady Rothermere wanted progress. She seemed to favour the title the
London Review
; Tom thought that ‘weak'.
70
Supportively, Vivien came to the rescue, proposing that the magazine be called the
Criterion.
Tom liked that idea, and so did Cobden-Sanderson. Lady Rothermere agreed, and preparations for a launch in October gathered pace. Tom experienced the usual editor's problems: some contributors exceeded their word limit, others did not deliver what he expected. He decided the first two parts of
The Waste Land
would appear in issue one, due on 1 October, the rest following in issue two. All going well, early contributors might include Virginia Woolf, Hermann Hesse and Marcel Proust. In a brave but risky move, the quarterly
Criterion
would contain more work by foreign writers than was customary. Tom was gambling his literary reputation and perhaps even the balance of his mind on his new poem and his new periodical together.

Bel Esprit, too, seemed a gamble. The further the proposal advanced, the more awkwardly entangled he felt. Discussing Pound's ideas at length with Aldington, he made clear he appreciated the motives which led his friends to try to buy him out of the bank, but could hardly accept or reject the scheme until it was reasonably certain what his ‘income, tenure, and security' might be.
71
‘Precarious' was his word for the planned arrangements; increasingly he believed Bel Esprit smacked of ‘slightly undignified charity'.
72
Rodker, one of very few potential backers to have seen
The Waste Land
, had already printed, strictly for private circulation, that circular in which the work was hailed as a triumph of ‘the modern movement'.
73
Again, regardless of the outcome of Bel Esprit, this made publication of
The
Waste Land
in the
Criterion
and in book form crucial to Tom's entire future.

‘It is a risk', Pound admitted with regard to Bel Esprit. ‘So is an oil well.'
74
Tom was willing to venture a good deal on his poem and his magazine, but Bel Esprit looked too problematic. Hearteningly, it showed his friends rallying round, yet the way several of its contributors were also producing paid work for the
Criterion
made the network almost strangulatingly incestuous. It was, he explained to Aldington, ‘embarrassing and fatiguing to me in spite of the motives, which I appreciate'.
75
As discussions grew protracted over the summer, Virginia Woolf found people more ready to offer one-off lump sums to Tom himself; some feared Pound might ‘drink it all first'. ‘Poor Tom', Woolf termed her friend.
76
Lady Ottoline started distributing further forms. There was to be a new committee, on which Aldington and Woolf were to serve, to raise money specifically for an Eliot Fellowship Fund. Mary Hutchinson, Lytton Strachey and others seemed eager to donate. Leonard Woolf was sceptical. Virginia encountered opposition. ‘I am told that most people are as badly off as Tom', she wrote to Lady Ottoline on 18 August, ‘and as most people have to earn their livings, they don't see why they should bind themselves for ever to earn £10 yearly for some one else'.
77

Tom's view was that provided he kept his bank position then at least he remained independent of friends' charity. Even if £300 per annum were raised, he would still have to earn a further £300 from time-consuming literary journalism in order to match his current £600 salary. So why should he commit himself to giving up Lloyds Bank? He worried ‘everybody concerned' would ‘be made ridiculous'.
78
He was distressed, too, lest people think his family wealthy enough to fund him; to Pound he had explained that his mother's circumstances were reduced. In the midst of all, while pursuing his day job as if everything was well, he had to summon up the shrewdness and energy for negotiations involving
Criterion
contributors and would-be contributors – some to be lured in, others headed off; many were his friends or his friends' contacts. Difficult in a different way was coping with Vivien's illness. Largely, he kept that private. As money-raising schemes linked to Bel Esprit took on a life of their own, he seemed unsure whether to deflect them, accept them or try to direct them. How much should he tell his family in America and his in-laws about what was going on? Then always there were his commitments to the
Dial
and to other journals that had asked him for prose; throughout these troubles, he strove to keep faith with his insistent conviction that he was, after all, a poet.

Pressures mounted. He was having advertising circulars for the
Criterion
printed. ‘You know that I have no persecution mania', he told Aldington on 13 July, but he was ‘quite aware how obnoxious I am to perhaps the larger part of the literary world of London and that there will be a great many jackals swarming about waiting for my bones.' If things fell flat, he would have to accept huge loss of ‘prestige and usefulness', and might ‘retire to obscurity or Paris like Ezra'.
79
There was nervous jokiness in his phrasing, but it was clear-eyed. He had much to be nervous about.

Aldington took umbrage at Tom's ‘London Letter' for July (submitted before he went to Lugano), which implied leading English critics were second-rate. Tom was getting ‘bitter and hypercritical'. An American, after all, he did not fully understand the ‘very subtle' English ‘repulsion for everything which seems to be assuming superiority'. Tom made light of this ‘little difficulty', but it rankled.
80
He wrote one more short ‘London Letter' for the
Dial,
then, saying he felt he could not maintain an appropriately high standard, suggested they find another correspondent. Over time a ‘breach' developed between him and Aldington.
81
Even more, that July, Aldington's reproach angered Vivien. Maintaining that her husband ‘always leaves his letters behind for me to read', without Tom's knowledge she informed Aldington his note was ‘unkind, and not friendly. It is exactly the letter to upset Tom, and to harden his pride, and to help to precipitate the disasters we all foresee and which you cheerfully say he is asking for.' She told Aldington she was largely responsible for the ‘London Letter' which had so annoyed him; that she was behind the title of Tom's new journal – a title Aldington disliked; and Vivien added that, though she had fought to keep Tom in England when they were first married, she hated the place now. ‘I hope Tom will soon get out.' Her bleakest words were, ‘You know I am ill and an endless drag on him.'
82