Young Eliot (80 page)

Once again, Vivien remained fiercely loyal to what she saw as her husband's genius. She perceived he was taking a big risk, and wanted him to win. ‘He does stand or fall by this review', she wrote with regard to the
Criterion.
‘Each person who gives him a push now gives him a push out of England. And that will be damned England's loss.'
83
Vivien fought from a position of weakness. She saw Tom's temper, his pride, his vulnerability, and wanted to do what she could to help. Yet she also recognised how worn out he could become, and sensed that she could exhaust him. As usual, he hardened his shell to survive. Failure would help neither of them.

When Vivien moved to an ‘inconceivably tiny' cottage in Bosham for the summer, Tom weekended there with her, staying in London for the rest of the week. In town on 19 July, he met Dorothy Pound who handed him over 4,000 Italian lira (then worth about £40) from Bel Esprit; as if anticipating the money, Vivien had hired two household helps, ‘one in the mornings and one for the evenings'. She thought she and Tom might go and live in Paris after Christmas, if only he left the bank. Having told Aldington a few days before how much she hated England, now, thinking of Bosham, she informed Mary Hutchinson, ‘there is no country I like better than English country', and offered the opinion that London was far better than Paris.
84
Tom would try to buy a bungalow near Bosham in mid-September, conscious Vivien now ‘hated' leaving the place, but he failed in his attempt.
85

If his wife could be demandingly unpredictable, Tom could come over as difficult too. Virginia Woolf detected that when she met him with Roger Fry and Clive Bell in London at the end of July. Bell had been full of gossip, but then attempted his ‘best behaviour'. Tom, Woolf noted, ‘was sardonic, precise, & slightly malevolent, as usual'.
86
He could put on a façade. Pound knew this, and thought him like a possum, an idea that appealed to Tom. The two poets took to refering to each other as ‘Rabbit' and ‘Possum' – using nicknames from the white Southern writer Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus stories, popular in America from the 1880s onwards. To ‘play possum' means to act as if dead, and Harris's characters Brer Rabbit and Brer Possum derived, ultimately, from African American folk-culture. ‘What do you think of “The Possum” for a title?' Tom asked Pound, thinking about the emergent
Criterion
.
87

Pound had suggested Tom ‘send Vivien over to Paris' for a rest and for medical advice, but Tom thought she was too ill. Neuralgia, neuritis, eye trouble and colitis were among her sufferings, though it is tempting for twenty-first-century observers to speculate she was afflicted with depression. In accord with early-twentieth-century medical guidance, all her meat was minced three times in a machine; she took vitamins and protein supplements each day, and needed ‘the best sealed medical milk'. Tom, who had a bout of neuralgia himself in early August, hoped this newly recommended diet was ‘really doing her good'.
88
Maybe they would go to Paris in October, after the
Criterion
was published. Tasks associated with the magazine proliferated: one Tuesday night after work at the bank he wrote at least ten letters. Still, having kept his wife's troubles largely private from Pound for so long, he showed a certain relief in being able to discuss them more freely. Impressed and amused by Pound's assumed expertise in the physiology of love (he had, after all, been translating de Gourmont's book on sex), Tom hailed him as ‘student of the Kama-Sutra', wishing him ‘Good fucking, brother'.
89

For different correspondents he adopted different voices. He hired ‘a very nice, intelligent, serious Scotch woman', Miss Duff, as a ‘shorthand typist'. She came for a few hours ‘twice a week' to help cope with the demands of magazine editing. Tom grew used to dictating formal, efficient-sounding letters.
90
Typed up on
Criterion
notepaper, these gave the magazine's address as 9 Clarence Gate Gardens; problematically, there was now little or no boundary between his home life and work. At least the first issue's contents were shaping up, though not quite as the editor had anticipated: as well as
The Waste Land
(now likely to appear entire in the first issue), he now expected to publish pieces by George Saintsbury, May Sinclair, poet-critic T. Sturge Moore, Aldington and several foreign contributions, including the lecture on Joyce by Larbaud and Hesse's article on recent German poetry. The journal's objectives remained lofty. Tom summarised them in a letter to German intellectual E. R. Curtius, to whom he sent
The Sacred Wood
. The ‘great aim is to raise the standard of thought and writing in this country by both international and historical comparison. Among English writers I am combining those of the older generation who have any vitality and enterprise, with the more serious of the younger generation, no matter how advanced, for instance Mr Wyndham Lewis and Mr Ezra Pound.'
91
Mr Pound, Mr Lewis and himself were to be the magazine's ‘jailbirds'– the resident bad boys.
92
Mostly Tom wanted contributors to represent the
Criterion
as unimpeachably impressive – ‘the best people of each generation and type'.
93
His first issue, containing nothing by Pound or Lewis, would open with the irreproachable wisdom of seventy-seven-year-old George Saintsbury, retired Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. Pound, who thought Saintsbury ‘a meritorious old dodo', soon described Tom's magazine as ‘very good' and ‘octogenarian'.
94

At last Tom had sent a typescript of
The Waste Land
to Pound in Paris, so that Pound could show it to his visitor James Sibley Watson, Jr, of the
Dial
. Tom seemed minded to accept a developing offer to have the
Dial
publish it. This deal would bring payment at roughly the usual rate, but there would be an understanding also that the magazine would award him its annual $2,000 prize ‘for services to the cause of letters'.
95
Initially, the publisher, James Sibley Watson, found the poem ‘disappointing', but after reading it three times he thought it might be ‘up to' Tom's ‘usual'.
96
Pound had sounded out
Vanity Fair
about possible US publication of
The Waste Land
(a ‘series of lyrics'), as it was rumoured that Tom and Thayer had ‘split', so that the
Dial
would not publish the work.
97
Nevertheless, by mid-August, in a prickly and necessarily punctilious way, Tom was edging towards agreement with his old classmate's magazine – provided Boni and Liveright did not object to his poem appearing in a journal at almost the same time as they brought it out as a book.
98
The
Dial
and Boni and Liveright came to a mutually beneficial arrangement. Edmund Wilson, then managing editor of
Vanity Fair
, asked Tom for some prose instead. So it was that
The Waste Land
was lined up to be published in London in the October
Criterion,
then in New York in the November
Dial
, then as a slim volume by Boni and Liveright in December. It would be the following year before the poem became a British book.

As August 1922 drew to a close, Tom was rushing to pull together the material for the first issue of his magazine. Let down by a translator, he found himself having to translate Larbaud's lecture, ‘The “Ulysses” of James Joyce', and was working against the clock. His mother sent him addresses of possible subscribers at Harvard; she registered that Vivien was ill and in Bosham, and hoped she would ‘soon be better'.
99
In London there were setbacks. Cobden-Sanderson's father died on 7 September. Stressed, Tom fidgeted over the magazine's contents. Having overestimated the amount of material he could fit into ninety-six pages, he reverted to his original idea of publishing just ‘
The Waste Land
I–II' in the first issue, only to change his mind yet again.
100
It seems that, like other people, he was torn between treating
The Waste Land
as a series of poems and as a single work. Overwhelmed with gratitude to Quinn, Tom sent him not only his poem's manuscripts but also the notebook (‘Inventions of the March Hare') which he had started in 1909. Quinn accepted the
Waste Land
material ‘as a mark of friendship', but insisted on sending Tom $140 for the notebook.
101

By mid-September Tom was correcting ‘excellent' proofs from Boni and Liveright.
102
Manifesting a lasting ability to get over fallings out, he enjoyed having dinner with Murry on the 13th. Neither man had changed his view of the other, but both were keen they should get on. Among other things, each knew ‘the worries' of bringing out a literary magazine.
103
Despite delays, it looked as if the
Criterion
would be ready for 15 October. Tom knew Bel Esprit was still under way, but, after a meeting with Virginia Woolf during the time
Criterion
proofs were being corrected, he gave her the distinct impression that he thought Bel Esprit ‘impracticable'.
104
Woolf and her husband agreed. Yet the scheme ran on. Vivien believed if the
Criterion
succeeded and money from the Pound-inspired fundraising could be ‘
guaranteed
', then ‘Tom would automatically leave the bank'.
105

At this juncture Tom felt unable to go over all the ins and outs of his predicament. Vivien was ill again. Galley proofs needed correcting. Advertising for the
Criterion
had to be booked in newspapers and magazines. Further circulars must go to potential subscribers. Lady Rothermere had to be kept happy: details of financial arrangements, about which Tom was scrupulous, must be sent to her at ‘Claridges Hotel, Paris'. With these pressures as well as Lloyds Bank to contend with, he felt ‘assailed from all sides'. To get through, he ‘had to keep his mind off' the whole complex tangle of Bel Esprit ‘and concentrate on what I must do from hour to hour'.
106
The first page proofs of the magazine arrived on Saturday 30 September. Going through them on Sunday, Tom posted them back to the printer on Monday. By Tuesday night he had proofed the whole journal a second time – ‘extremely satisfactory', though the setting of
The Waste Land
was proving fiddly.
107
Tom would receive a ‘dummy' copy of the magazine a few days later.
108
In the midst of all this his old college room-mate Howard Morris, now ‘a very successful Bond Broker in New York' dropped by. They talked finance. Howard expected ‘another slump'. Tom bore this in mind when discussing with Henry what to do about income he was now receiving from inherited stock in the St Louis Hydraulic-Press Brick Company. Yet Howard, ‘a late Harvard friend of mine', seemed almost from a buried life.
109

At home Tom maintained a small shrine to that life, at least as far as it included his family. Ancestral pictures hung on the wall. Occasionally disconcerting visitors, these confirmed at once his sense of tradition and his foreignness. Having visited less than a year earlier, his brother Henry had been convinced that ‘The strain of going out among people who after all are foreigners to him, and, I believe, always must be to an American – even Henry James never became a complete Englishman – has, I think, been to him pretty heavy.' His brother recalled Tom complaining in 1920 of ‘always having to be keyed up, alert to the importance of appearances, always wearing a mask among people'.
110
If Henry (like Lady Rothermere) thought Tom needed simply to relax and rest, he may have been right, but Tom's public and private life afforded less and less respite. His collection of family photographs was a reminder of earlier generations of hard-working, stern-faced Eliots who had simply buckled down and endured; it was also, to a poet who hoped his mother might visit him again, a consolation; and it was an ancestral challenge, a personal criterion against which he measured himself, even as he came to feel further and further removed from much modern United States life.

In the
Criterion
's first issue Tom was the only American writer. He was also the sole contributor of new verse. Consciously or not, he assembled around
The Waste Land
prose that clearly set it off. Saintsbury's opening essay on ‘Dullness' counselled against ‘“passiveness”' in reading; the elderly professor urged readers to ‘extend your knowledge and interests as far as possible' and, if encountering ‘a reference or allusion' that seemed difficult, not to condemn it ‘
without making sure that the fault is not your own
'.
111
This was surely good advice for readers of
The Waste Land.
The second piece was a translation of Dostoevsky's plan for an unfinished novel, a story involving ‘horror', ‘passionate desire', religion and ‘the abyss'; though in September 1922 Virginia Woolf and Tom agreed that Dostoevsky was ‘the ruin of English literature', Tom once described his own life as a Dostoevsky novel authored by Middleton Murry.
112
Then, on either side of
The Waste Land
came two items relating to doomed love affairs: the first part of T. Sturge Moore's account of ‘The Legend of Tristram and Isolt in Modern Poetry', and May Sinclair's tale ‘The Victim', in which a man who suspects his partner of sexual betrayal commits a murder and has to live with the consequences of his knowledge. The first issue continued with Hesse's piece on ‘Recent German Poetry', which envisages ‘the ruin of the world' and states that ‘“Dadaism” belongs thereto'; the final article was Larbaud's discussion of ‘The “Ulysses” of James Joyce' – the masterpiece Tom came to see as using that ‘mythical method' so vital to his own long poem.
113
Editorially, then, he set
The Waste Land
carefully among prose with which it resonated, deftly establishing a reading context that spurred and guided its initial public. He printed his poem without epigraph or dedication. After the concluding words of Sturge Moore's ‘Tristram and Isolt' (which Tom had edited so that its first part ended with mention of how ‘cut or wired flowers doomed to sterility' compared poorly with ‘bloom on thriving plants'), readers turned the page and encountered
The Waste Land
with its opening lines about ‘Lilacs' and ‘dead land', ‘roots' and ‘tubers'.
114