However shy in Missouri, he enjoyed meeting little girls at Gloucester, and at least one other little boy. A series of photographs taken on the boulder-strewn shoreline and on the sand show him around 1896 in the company of his cousins Barbara and Eleanor Hinkley and Frederick Eliot. Sometimes Fred’s sisters, Abigail and Martha, came too. These Massachusetts relatives were his summer playmates. Similar in age, privileged upbringing and Unitarian background, they got on well together. They dug in the sand, carefully supervised by their nannies, or sat, all smiles, in a row on a hammock; or clambered over rocks, examining rock pools. Sometimes, wearing a hat with a brim to protect him from the summer heat, Tom played on top of a big boulder where he had erected a flagpole as if it were a fort. Less than a mile away, Fort Hill Avenue led to the remains of an actual Civil War fortification which became a military campground again in the summer of 1898 during the Spanish-American War. As Tom played by his flagpole on the rocks, his ever-vigilant mother stationed herself nearby.
Gloucester was very different from St Louis. Twenty years before Tom’s birth, Philadelphia-based Lippincott’s Magazine called it ‘the most extensive fishing port in the world’.74 In the 1890s, with three centuries of documented history behind it, the place was very much a working harbour, full of local boats and gear, busy with the salting and packing of fish; but Gloucester’s increasingly well appointed hotels also lured wealthy vacationers from Boston and beyond. In the late 1880s and 1890s on land sold off at Eastern Point, some wealthy men, including Tom’s father, built extensive second homes in what is today an exclusive gated community.
Decades earlier, Gloucester’s combination of setting and marine light had attracted American painters of the Luminist school; in 1880 Winslow Homer had created some of his finest watercolours while living in a lighthouse on a tiny rocky island in Gloucester harbour; the area continued to appeal to artists and writers. Graced by Protestant, Catholic and Unitarian churches, this place was also sanctified by art. ‘It has’, wrote Tom later, ‘the most beautiful harbour for small ships on the whole of that coast.’75 Though Gloucester’s growing population in 1900 hovered around 25,000, the town’s eminence as a locus of fishing, fish smoking, boatbuilding and heroic voyaging endured. Tom saw how ‘on the long rows of drying racks that lie behind the wharves, the salt fish is dried in the sun’. He watched fishing ‘schooners’ as they set out ‘for their cruises of several weeks’.76 (Locals claimed to have coined the word ‘schooner’.) These vessels with their huge white sails thronged Gloucester throughout Tom’s boyhood; proudly he claimed he had seen the Rob Roy launched in 1900.
During this time, as they had done for many, many years, schooners in quest of cod, halibut, haddock and herring voyaged from Gloucester round Eastern Point at the tip of Cape Ann, then headed north up the New England coast. Small boats called dories would be lowered over the side; men on board would row out to fish for cod. Drownings were frequent. ‘Between 1830 and 1897’, wrote the twentieth-century Gloucester historian Joseph Garland, ‘668 of Gloucester’s vessels never returned around Eastern Point, nor 3775 of her men’.77 Songs and poems (including verse by Whittier) commemorated heroism and losses beyond ‘the gray rocks of Cape Ann / And Gloucester’s harbor-bar’;78 and in the summers of 1894 and 1895 Rudyard Kipling resided in a hotel on Eastern Point Road, absorbing local lore for his story of Gloucester fishermen, Captains Courageous.
Serialised in 1896–7 and published immediately afterwards in book form, this was a tale young Tom Eliot read. Opening in North Atlantic fog and drawing to a close with a litany of drowned fishermen that forms part of late May Memorial Day commemorations in Gloucester, Kipling’s novel has as its hero a fifteen-year-old boy with a wealthy businessman father and ‘a strict Unitarian’ mother. Harvey Cheyne, Jr, is rescued from drowning and finds himself with the Gloucester fishing fleet, listening to traditional tales of ‘boats smashed to splinters’ and ‘ships that sailed in the fog’ to such locations as ‘Mount Desert’, Cape Breton, ‘the Maine ports’ and ‘the ice between the mainland and Prince Edward Island’. Mixing dialect and standard English, Kipling’s book was full of places Tom knew or had heard about: one character whistles a song about sailing past Eastern Point and nearby Thacher Island where in the seventeenth century twenty-one out of twenty-three members of a family had drowned. Early in the year of the publication of Captains Courageous, the real-life Gloucester schooner Yosemite was wrecked on a Newfoundland voyage, its crew either killed or marooned in a snowstorm; a few survived, swimming through icy waters, bodies of others were frozen into the rocks.79 Such stories were part of local life in Gloucester and surrounding ports; reminders of them were unavoidable. The most famous local sailor of Tom’s boyhood was Gloucesterman Howard Blackburn who had returned frostbitten and fingerless from the waters of Newfoundland after being separated from his ship, the Grace L. Fears, whilst fishing in a dory; Blackburn was a familiar sight on Gloucester Streets.80 On 20 August 1901, when Tom was almost thirteen, the Gloucester Daily Times published an item telling how a teenager had picked up a bottle on a local beach; inside was a message from a courageous captain whose vessel had gone down with all hands four years earlier: ‘We are sinking in the Grace L. Fears. Whoever finds this, hand it to my wife.’81
As a boy Tom was taught to swim and given sailing lessons by an old Gloucester sailor nicknamed the Skipper. Predictably, Tom’s mother and sisters kept a close eye on the proceedings. The ocean was beautiful, many-voiced and potentially deadly, but ‘I don’t regret all the sailing that you and I and father did together, I assure you!’ Tom wrote to his mother when he was in his late twenties.82 All his life the sea fascinated him. He relished ‘brilliant’ tales such as those of James B. Connolly in Out of Gloucester (1902) which recounted the adventures of Gloucester fishermen or ‘bankers’ who sailed in summer aboard schooners laden with ‘seines and dories’ to ‘the south Banks or “Georges”’ and in winter to ‘the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, where the codfish abound’, and even as far as ‘Reykyavik, Iceland’.83 Years afterwards, in his late teens and early twenties, Tom would voyage with friends up the New England coast towards the Canadian border, on at least one occasion risking death.
Such experiences, mixed with fact and fiction he had absorbed in successive childhood summers, fuel his later writing in The Waste Land manuscripts about an imagined trip from Cape Ann ‘to the eastern banks’ in search of ‘codfish’ which begins in fair weather, then moves into ‘gale’, loss of ‘dories’ and a voyage ‘Northward’ past ‘the farthest northern islands’ in deafening seas, heading eventually into a hallucinatory and lethal seascape far, far from ‘Home and mother’: a world of ‘cracked ice’, ‘bones’ in a ‘whirlpool’ and ‘Death by Water’.84 Eventually, most of that material was cut from the published poem, though alert readers will spot the word ‘dory’ in the poet’s published notes to it. From his most famous early poem, whose last words are ‘we drown’, through the storm-blasted seagull of ‘Gerontion’, the fogbound, granite-shored seascape of ‘Marina’ and the white sails of Ash-Wednesday to his extended meditation on fishermen, loss and sheer persistence in ‘The Dry Salvages’, Tom’s poetry is suffused with material which can be linked, however indirectly, to experiences and reading associated with the New England coast. From childhood onwards, Gloucester shaped him as a poet.
Yet in the 1890s the place was changing. Tom could still explore Whittier’s ‘depths of Gloucester woods, / Full of plants that love the summer’ and thronged with birdlife.85 The boy from St Louis loved the ‘fir trees, the bay and goldenrod, the song-sparrows, the red granite and the blue sea’.86 Also, situated on Cape Ann where glaciation had left great outcrops of granite, Gloucester boasted nearby quarries which had supplied the stone for Brooklyn Bridge; at Eastern Point between 1894 when Tom was six and 1905 when he was seventeen, the monumental Dog Bar Breakwater, by far the most striking man-made feature of East Gloucester, was being constructed out of locally quarried grey granite. A bell was placed a
t its seaward end, adding its sound to the whistling buoy southwards. Named after an Eastern Point rock formation, this buoy was called Mother Ann’s Cow. Gloucester was on the Boston–Maine railroad, but when Tom was very little the town still had horse-drawn trams – horsecars; the early 1890s saw these replaced by ‘electrics’, though they did not run as far as Eastern Point. You could take a short ferry ride across the harbour from Gloucester itself to the East Gloucester landing, and if, like Tom, you knew about boats, you could see that schooners were evolving in subtle ways: the Rob Roy with its spoon bow, short foremast and minimal bowsprit, was different from most earlier Gloucester vessels: supposedly a safer design. ‘Since the introduction of the “knockabout rig” – the schooner with a long bow and no bowsprit – there are fewer losses at sea’, Tom wrote later, ‘but Gloucester has many widows, and no trip is without anxiety for those at home’.87
Even if he knew it was a port familiar with danger, Gloucester for him was a family refuge. Aged six or seven and clad in his sailor suit – that customary outfit – he had a fine toy sailboat. Enthusiastic about pirates, sometimes he played at sword fights using sticks, but in all his early childhood photographs at Gloucester he is, like his cousins, decorously attired. Every inch a well-cared-for small Eliot, digging in the sand with his spade, he wears dark long trousers; sitting on a verandah in his neat sailor suit holding his model boat he looks kempt, correct and engrossed.
Spending part of his summer working in St Louis, Tom’s prosperous father loved Gloucester too. Built in 1896 on land which he had purchased in 1890, Henry Ware Eliot’s substantial summer residence at Eastern Point, called the Downs, was very close to the shore: a three-storey detached dwelling with a verandah overlooking the sea, a very spacious family room with a great brick fireplace, and a garden path leading down to the beach. Indoors, above the upper-storey bedrooms, the Downs had plenty of attic space where the boys in the family could indulge their taste for play; a painted skull and crossbones with the word ‘Blood’ and the initials ‘HWE’ can still be seen there. Henry, Tom’s brother, liked to take family photographs. Some show 1890s visits to nearby places connected to the extended Eliot family, past as well as present: to the large, well-appointed house of Thomas Heywood Blood at Sterling, Massachusetts, and to the house and gravestones of Blood’s parents, Samuel (d. 1834) and Lucretia (d. 1827); to the Cushing family home at Lunenburg in the same state – Tom’s sister Marion had the middle name Cushing from her ancestor Colonel Charles Cushing (1744–1809); to the house of Tom’s grandfather, Thomas Stearns, at North Lexington where his parents had married.88 This sort of delving into the New England past quickened in Tom’s brother a taste for American history – in 1897 his Paul Revere essay won second prize in a competition; but such excursions also reinforced a strong sense in Tom of his extensive New England ancestry. In later years he would sometimes say that he came from St Louis, sometimes that he hailed from New England.
Being a little boy in Gloucester was not all ancestor-worship. Sometimes Tom’s father took him riding in a pony and trap, played chess with him or accompanied him on the golf course. A surviving photograph shows the father playing golf, the son looking on from a safe distance. In Gloucester his parents rarely went to church, and some prohibitions were relaxed. Tom liked the 4th of July celebrations in this New England port, associating them with fireworks, a yacht race (there was a substantial yacht club at East Gloucester) and strawberry ice cream.89 For all the hard life of those local captains courageous, Gloucester was fun. Later, the sort of experiences he had there re-emerged, transmuted into poetry: ‘There might be the experience of a child of ten, a small boy peering through sea-water in a rock-pool, and finding a sea-anemone for the first time: the simple experience (not so simple, for an exceptional child, as it looks) might lie dormant in his mind for twenty years, and re-appear transformed in some verse context charged with great imaginative pressure.’90
Tom’s father had some interest in natural science and in 1902 was elected President of the Academy of Science of St Louis which had received a splendid collection of butterflies. A 1901 photograph of one of the rooms in the Locust Street house shows a framed butterfly on the wall. In Tom’s Missouri there were ‘high limestone bluffs where we searched for fossil shell-fish’.91 In Massachusetts he enjoyed gathering algae on the shore, drying them out and classifying them.92 He had a microscope at Gloucester, watched crabs and possessed a child’s interest in small creatures, such as the field mice that got inside the Downs. Aged nine, he wrote in late June from Gloucester to his father who was still in St Louis, concerned that a box of butterflies had got broken, and saying that he was hunting for birds with his sister Charlotte.93
These interests stayed with him. In Missouri he loved ‘the flaming red cardinal birds’, but, in New England, Eastern Point, a staging post for many migratory birds, was and is an ornithologist’s paradise.94 For his fourteenth birthday his mother gave him ‘a much coveted birthday present’, the new sixth edition of Frank M. Chapman’s black-leather-bound volume whose gilded lettering read Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America. Lottie wrote her son’s name on the flyleaf, and the date of his birthday: no ‘with love’, but it was a loving gift.95 The volume included descriptions of plumage, nest and eggs, as well as accounts of ‘haunts and habits’. Specialist articles, such as that on page 400, ‘Turdus aonalaschkae pallasii’ (more familiarly, the hermit thrush), detailed many different aspects of bird behaviour, not least birdsong: ‘The Hermit thrush bears high distinction among our song birds. Its notes are not remarkable for variety or volume, but in purity and sweetness of tone and exquisite modulation they are unequalled.’96 Remembered and longed for, years later that bird’s song would become part of the concluding section of The Waste Land, heard at that moment in ‘What the Thunder Said’:
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop …97
This was a cherished sound that belonged to the poet’s boyhood – to the deep part of him that was always Tom.
2
Hi, Kid, Let’s Dance
FOR Tom, returning from Gloucester to St Louis in late summer involved a very long rail journey in the inevitable direction of the classroom. Papa headed back to the routines of his Brick Company office. Mamma committed herself again to her social causes and cultural interests, including her poetry. From early childhood Tom was aware of his mother’s verse. On 17 September 1896, for instance, not long after the family returned from Gloucester, she took pride in a public reading of one of her hymn-like poems. It proclaims her characteristic high-mindedness, invoking the ‘God of our fathers’ and George Washington, while surveying the ‘savage’ past of America and a ‘happy’ seaside present-day where ‘ships pass ceaseless by’.1
After a summer watching ships pass Eastern Point, the Eliots recommitted themselves to the city that was, for most of the year, their happy home. The St Louis they returned to, from that first summer in their newly completed Gloucester house, was still rebuilding after the devastation of the cyclone. Nonetheless, it was thriving. Tom stepped off the train into his hometown’s monumental Union Station whose frontage extended for over six hundred feet. Opened two years earlier, this statement of municipal pride provided another opportunity for good works: a local women’s philanthropic group which his mother belonged to had arranged for it to contain boxes into which travellers could post unwanted reading matter suitable for distribution to the poor.
More railroads converged on St Louis than on any other American city. Traversing Union Station’s Grand Hall, travellers saw an impressive pictorial window depicting three white female figures sitting on a bench: those at either end represented New York and San Francisco; between them sat St Louis. That was how the city regarded itself, a midpoint in the mighty United States. With a population of around 600,000, by 1900 St Louis was its nation’s fourth largest urban settlement: ‘too far north to be a Southern city, and too southern in its social
characteristics to be a Northern city; with all the polish and finish of an Eastern center, and yet toned by all the warmth and spirited verve of a Western metropolis’.2 Its French past was still discernible in local street names such as Lafayette, Chouteau and Soulard; but by the late nineteenth century German and Irish influences mixed with African American and Jewish culture. Home to the world’s largest brewery, and producing everything from bricks to newspapers, St Louis saw itself as an industrial and mercantile powerhouse. It was dominated by a rich, sometimes progressive, white elite to which the Eliots belonged.
Young Eliot Page 5
