The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  Eliot’s wariness of the romantic self had led him, as it would lead Joyce, Picasso, and others, to a strange new way of comprehending the world in art. The familiar Western way of portraying the world, whether in poetry or in painting, would no longer do. Just as Picasso, escaping the prison of perspective and the traditional canons of “beauty,” abandoned the familiar arrangements of images in space, so Eliot abandoned the conventional narrative order of poetic images in time. The Romantics had sought to capture the beauty of the world in their feelings. But Eliot would use all available images and experience, learning and fragments of learning, to make an object of the poet’s emotion. Young readers welcomed his expression of the sterile world their elders had made for them.

  We are the hollow men

  We are the stuffed men

  Leaning together

  Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

  Our dried voices, when

  We whisper together

  Are quiet and meaningless

  As wind on dry grass

  Or rats’ feet over broken glass

  In our dry cellar.…

  This is the way the world ends

  This is the way the world ends

  This is the way the world ends

  Not with a bang but a whimper.

  “The Waste Landers” would become a cult and The Waste Land a sovereign metaphor. The most effective polemic against television was to call it “a vast wasteland.” Seldom has a poet so successfully imprisoned his age in a phrase. But Eliot, an expert at self-disparagement, still affirmed the sovereign self in the poet. He said The Waste Land was not so much “an important bit of social criticism” as “the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life; it is just a piece of rhythmical grumbling.”

  Eliot was no more predictable as a spokesman for modern anti-Romanticism than Wordsworth had been as a prophet of Romanticism. He was born in 1888 in St. Louis to a scion of an old New England family with a long line of ministers known for their Unitarian conscience. His grandfather, leaving Boston in 1834 to carry the faith to the frontier, had been a founder of Washington University. The university might have been named after him if he had not objected. Thomas Stearns Eliot’s father, Henry Ware Eliot, defied family tradition by becoming a businessman. After several unsuccessful ventures he finally went into brick manufacturing, which prospered in burgeoning St. Louis. Proud of his own business success, he admired it in others. Eliot’s mother wrote poems and seems to have been a woman of some literary talent, but felt herself a failure because she had never managed to go to college, and had to earn her living as a schoolteacher. For young T. S. Eliot the family tradition prevailed, he was sent to Milton Academy and entered Harvard in 1906. He graduated in three years, but with no show of brilliance.

  At Harvard his lifelong attitudes were shaped by the dogmatic and domineering Irving Babbitt (1865–1933), professor of French and comparative literature, the apostle of anti-Romanticism. In Rousseau and Romanticism and other books he made Rousseau the anti-Christ and Romanticism the modern heresy that aimed to replace the reason and restraint of the classics and religion by the mush and conceit of self-expression. “Those who call themselves modern have come to adopt a purely exploratory attitude towards life.” They had abandoned discipline and made their ideal “the man who has cast off prejudices without acquiring virtues.” He liked to quote Byron’s “true Rousseauistic logic”—“Man being reasonable must therefore get drunk. The best of life is but intoxication.” To compose a poem like Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” “in an opium dream without any participation of his rational self is a triumph of romantic art.”

  Eliot stayed on at Harvard to work for an M.A. in philosophy. Then his father staked him to a year in Paris, where he followed Bergson’s lectures and improved his French and his knowledge of the Symbolist poets Baudelaire and Mallarmé. Returning to Harvard as a graduate student in philosophy, he studied Sanskrit, and was temporarily tempted by Buddhism. He was attracted by F. H. Bradley’s philosophy of the Absolute and chose him as the subject of his Ph.D. thesis. Bradley preached skepticism of the uses of conceptual intelligence in defining reality, and insisted that truth could be reached only through some systematic whole. In Bertrand Russell’s seminar on logic, Eliot surprised the professor by his learning, and made an acquaintance that would complicate his later life. Russell characterized Eliot as “altogether impeccable in his tastes but has no vigor or life—or enthusiasm.”

  A Sheldon traveling fellowship from Harvard sent him to Merton College, Oxford, to pursue his studies of Bradley. In 1914 at the urging of his friend Conrad Aiken, but only after some hesitation, he went to see Ezra Pound and his wife, Dorothy, in London. This was the crucial encounter of his life. Eliot said that Pound reminded him of Irving Babbitt. Pound himself, born in Idaho and raised in Philadelphia, noted Eliot’s “Americanness” and said he “has it perhaps worse than I have—poor devil.” Their quests had converged, for both were seeking an authentic tradition abroad as an antidote to American philistinism and to the sentimental tradition in English poetry. Eliot all his life was known for his Anglophile obsession with correct dress. But a friend once remarked of him that while his clothes were English, his underclothes were American. Instantly, Pound responded to Eliot’s talent and began to promote him. When Eliot showed him “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “Portrait of a Lady,” Pound sent them to Harriet Monroe, the Chicago patron and editor of Poetry magazine. He declared them “the best poems I have yet seen or had from an American.… He has actually trained himself and modernized himself on his own.” Pound may not have known that Eliot did not admire the poems of Pound that he had seen.

  Both Pound and Eliot had arrived in Europe with interrupted academic careers, but their paths had been quite different. Pound’s father, Homer, had set up the government land office in Hailey, Idaho, a town with one hotel and forty-seven bars. There Homer’s job was to certify the land titles of optimistic mining prospectors and deal with angry competing claimants. Ezra was born in 1885, and when he was four his family moved to Philadelphia where his father had obtained a job in the United States Mint. Homer became an elder in the local Presbyterian church, and sent Ezra to a nearby military school. He entered the University of Pennsylvania in 1901, when he was only sixteen, but the family was troubled by his erratic interests and associates (one was a young medical student, William Carlos Williams). After two years they encouraged him to transfer to Hamilton College, in upstate New York, where his studies and his morals might be more closely supervised. Then he returned to the University of Pennsylvania for graduate study. He never completed his Ph.D., but en route he acquired the classical and modern European languages, in addition to Provençal and Anglo-Saxon.

  The president of Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana, impressed by Pound’s learning and his trips to Europe, appointed him to the faculty. The literary associations of Crawfordsville consisted of the fact that Lew Wallace, author of Ben Hur, had lived there. And the Presbyterian elders were not prepared for Pound’s freewheeling tastes and shocking ways. He spiked his tea at college gatherings from his flask of rum, and actually smoked cigarettes. “For I am weird untamed,” he wrote “that eat of no man’s meat.” He had been warned that he would have to marry if he was to stay in Crawfordsville. But when he struck up an acquaintance with an English actress who performed as a male impersonator in the local theater, he was suspected of being “bisexual and given to unnatural lusts.” He felt “stranded in a most Godforsaken area of the middle west,” the sixth level of Dante’s hell.

  Dismissed in disgrace, he had little chance for another American academic post, and sailed for Europe in 1908. In Venice he published a little volume of his poems at his own expense, then settled in London, where he joined the literary circle of William Butler Yeats. The group was dominated by a philosophical poet and critic, T. E. Hulme (1883–1917), who had much in common with Babbitt. Hulme became a philosopher of the Imagist sch
ool of poetry, hated Romantic optimism, and pleaded for a “hard dry” art and poetry. He opposed Bertrand Russell’s pacifism, and himself was killed in the War. Pound worked at odd journalistic assignments. As London correspondent for Poetry, founded and edited by Harriet Monroe (1860–1936), he sponsored a catholic assortment of the best writers of the age—Robert Frost, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and Ernest Hemingway.

  Pound earned his title as “midwife of twentieth-century modernism,” for he helped bring to public life the rebels against the Romantics, who by then were the literary establishment. Wordsworth and his generation had expressed Revolutionary individualism, the movements for Independence and the Rights of Man. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven!” Theirs was the joy of the ebullient self, to be expressed in the language of common men. A century later, in the age of Eliot, the cycles of nineteenth-century revolution had run their course. The latest “revolution,” on the eastern borders of Europe, had paradoxically sought salvation not in the individual self but in the mass. In four years of world war, as Ezra Pound observed in 1920:

  There died a myriad,

  And of the best, among them,

  For an old bitch gone in the teeth,

  For a botched civilization.…

  How should the poet respond?

  In that discomfited postwar world it was not so curious that someone as different as Pound should have been Eliot’s promoter and mentor. Both were American expatriates seeking the poet’s response to what they saw as a confused and dreary world. And Pound’s personal response was passionate. He was a political person, which explained his success in promoting the publication of authors he admired. But in politics he was a crank and a Utopian, a willing victim of panaceas. In London he had found employment with an iconoclastic socialist magazine, The New Age. It was bought by Major Douglas, a self-made economist with a prescription for all social evils. His “social credit” scheme was based on the notion that depressions could be avoided and social justice attained by the manipulation of the monetary system. This became an obsession for Pound, who, loving conspiratorial theories, made it (like almost any other notion that caught his fancy) a basis for his rabid anti-Semitism, which in turn provided the foundation of his theory of history. With the rise of Mussolini in Italy Pound became an enthusiastic Fascist and even came to the United States in 1939 to persuade the country not to go to war. Incidentally, Pound was an energetic and unscrupulous salesman for the vicious hoax “the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” even when he knew it was a forgery. “For God’s sake, read the Protocols,” he urged listeners in 1942.

  In 1924 Pound left London for Paris, where he briefly joined Gertrude Stein’s circle. Then on to Rapallo, on the coast near Genoa, where he would live for the next twenty years. When war came, having failed to persuade Americans to support Mussolini by his book Jefferson and/or Mussolini (1935) and his trip back to the United States, he became a tireless Fascist propagandist. In hundreds of radio broadcasts he exploded diatribes against Jews, America, and Democracy. Arrested by American forces in 1945, he was confined in the prison for military criminals in Pisa, where he wrote more of his Cantos, which had begun in Homeric vein:

  And then went down to the ship,

  Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and

  We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,

  Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also

  Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward

  Bore us out onward with bellying canvas,

  Circe’s this craft, the trim-coifed goddess

  Then sat we amidships, windjamming the tiller,

  Thus with stretched sail, we went over sea till day’s end.

  Returned to the United States to be tried for treason, he was pronounced “insane and mentally unfit for trial.” For the next twelve years (1946–58) he was confined in St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., for the criminally insane. There Pound held bizarre court, edited his poetry, wrote letters, received visitors, and became an icon for artistic freedom when, over loud objection, the Bollingen Prize was awarded him by the Library of Congress. In 1958 the charges against him were dropped, and he returned to Rapallo and Venice, where he died in 1972.

  The disciple of the wild and belligerently political Pound was the withdrawn and respectable T. S. Eliot. While Pound was the public advocate of panaceas and of hate, Eliot was on a traditional search for personal salvation. Dante was his ideal poet. “The poetry of Dante,” Eliot wrote, “is the one universal school of style for the writing of poetry in any language. And the less we know of a poet before we read him, the better. For the poem is a thing in itself, and should be enjoyed even before it is understood.” Both Pound and Eliot were refugees from the self, but it was Pound oddly who would help Eliot find his refuge in poetry.

  After leaving Merton College in 1915 Eliot discovered, somewhat to his surprise, that he would have to earn his own living. He had met and impulsively married the vivacious but mentally disturbed Vivien Haigh-Wood, of a wealthy and respectable English family, whom he had met at Oxford. Bertrand Russell, who was to have several affairs with her after her marriage, called her “light, a little vulgar, adventurous.” Her mental illness, never clearly described, was unknown to Eliot before their marriage. The disorder became so serious after 1933 that she and Eliot lived separately. She entered a mental hospital in 1938, where she died in 1947. When Eliot married her in 1915, he saw more cheerful prospects. He went to America alone in a futile effort to explain his marriage to his family, who thought it only proved that he would never amount to anything. Back in England he taught briefly in a private grammar school. When Vivien would not go to America, he tried to earn a living in London. First he gave a series of university extension lectures on literature, which listeners found so dull that his appointment was not renewed. Then in 1917, with the help of Vivien’s family, he secured a post in the Colonial and Foreign Department of Lloyd’s Bank. They were told he knew the European languages, but in fact he knew only French and Dante’s Italian. The routine work in a formal environment suited his temperament and he stayed there for the next nine years.

  The contrast between the temperaments of Pound and of Eliot was dramatized in Pound’s repeated efforts to “liberate” Eliot from his bank-clerical routine. But Eliot repeatedly refused to be liberated. He appears to have found a welcome security in the routine formality of his work, and he began writing poetry again. Now he seemed at ease in the observer’s role, which he might have lost if he were out on his own in the competitive world. In 1922 Pound led the movement to raise the Bel Esprit fund to provide a fellowship for Eliot to write his poetry without other employment. But the result of the movement and of Eliot’s reticence was embarrassing. The Liverpool Daily Post reported that after eight hundred pounds had been raised to free Eliot of his bank employment, he had taken the money with thanks and then said he would stay with the bank anyway. Eliot considered a libel suit against the newspaper, but was satisfied when they published his statement that he had had no intention of leaving the bank and that the fund had been raised without his consent. The episode unnerved him with fears that it might jeopardize his position at the bank, but his fears proved unfounded and he remained until 1925. Then he left for a five-year contract with the London publishing house Faber & Faber.

  The poetry that established Eliot was written and published before he gave up his observer’s post at the bank. Significantly, his first modernist poem was published in the America whose culture he had fled. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” was published, at Pound’s urging, in Poetry magazine in Chicago in 1915.

  Let us go then, you and I,

  When the evening is spread out against the sky

  Like a patient etherised upon a table;

  Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

  The muttering retreats

  Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

  And sawdust restaur
ants with oyster shells.…

  Then in 1917, only four months after he entered the bank, his first volume of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations, appeared under the imprint of Harriet Weaver’s Egoist, which Pound had made a vehicle for Imagist poets. In this magazine she had just been publishing Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist in serial form. Pound had confidentially offered to publish this, Eliot’s first volume of poems, at his own expense if Harriet Weaver would let him use her imprint. She agreed, and with the help of money from Dorothy Pound (not known to Eliot) five hundred copies were printed. Five years passed before these were all sold.

  Some critics objected that Eliot’s work was not really poetry because the author had no notion of “the beautiful.” This was not surprising, for Eliot had spent the last five years behind a desk, in an urban routine not much different from Kafka’s in Prague about the same time. From this narrow perspective, how could poetic beauty bring order into “the vast panorama of futility which is contemporary history”? The months in 1921 when he was writing his most famous poem were especially dreary. His mother, Charlotte, whom he had not seen for six years, was coming to London. She had not met Vivien, whom the family blamed for Eliot’s decision not to return to the United States. And Vivien resented the affluent Charlotte’s refusal to support them in a more comfortable life. Now Eliot was painfully reminded of his estrangement from a family that had made much of tradition when, in June, Charlotte arrived with his father, Henry Ware, and sister Marian. England was suffering a disastrous drought. No rain fell for six months. Eliot himself was writing in the Dial of the new type of influenza, which left a dryness and a bitter taste in the mouth. It was a season like that which had inspired Rabelais’s dipsomania. Vivien was on the verge of a “breakdown.” Incidentally American authorities were harassing him to pay his income tax. When the family left in late August, Eliot’s doctor explained his feelings of anxiety and dread as a nervous disorder and told him to take a vacation. Lloyd’s gave him a leave of absence for his “nervous breakdown.”