Young Eliot

by Robert Crawford

  Though the 1896 cyclone destroyed some businesses, and others suffered during a serious economic depression between 1893 and 1897, rebuilding and local population growth were good for Tom’s father’s Hydraulic-Press Brick Company. Large urban parklands and tree-lined streets in the better-off areas might be loud with cicadas, but towards the river were rows of poorer brick houses, while tall, imposing shops and office blocks thronged the downtown area. Smokestacks belching out fumes from soft Illinois coal dominated the horizon, dirtying the pale stone of the grand domed State House building. St Louis fogs were as thick as those in some of Tom’s favourite childhood reading – recently published detective stories with ‘illustrations’ by Sidney Paget featuring London’s Sherlock Holmes.3 ‘A thick fog rolled down between the lines of dun-coloured houses, and the opposing windows loomed like dark, shapeless blurs through the heavy yellow wreaths.’4 Many years later, Tom stated that Prufrock’s ‘yellow fog’ was drawn from that of his industrial birthplace, but even in his childhood St Louis fog was mixed with Conan Doyle’s imaginings.5 Tom’s father supported moves to improve air quality, and a smoke abatement ordinance introduced when Tom was five had some beneficial effect, but was soon ruled unconstitutional. For most of Tom’s boyhood the air was generally worse than it had been in 1885 when Frenchman Charles Croonenbergh had commented that ‘the pasty dust from American coal smoke falls so thick in the streets, that one is satisfied by an afternoon walk in St Louis as if one had eaten a heavy dinner … Everyone coughs.’6 ‘Yellow fog’ and ‘brown waves of fog’ billow through Tom’s early urban poetry, a fog coated with ‘soot that falls from chimneys’.7 The cough in ‘Gerontion’ is the most insistently memorable in English-language verse. Recalling St Louis as ‘very smoky’ – and opining that New England brought a literal ‘change of climate’ that did one good – in adulthood Tom suffered increasingly from lung problems; eventually he died from emphysema.8 Not all of that can be blamed on his later fondness for cigarettes and London.

  The St Louis of his boyhood, like its great rival Chicago, was famous for local government corruption. His Republican father signed a petition calling for political fair play. Yet with its heritage of municipal bribery, grime and slumminess, the place had, too, a heritage of idealist philosophy. Owing much to German thought, this intellectual tradition regarded reality as a mental construct. It stressed how the intellect influences society. Passionate about Kant and Hegel, Henry C. Brokmeyer and his followers had founded the St Louis Philosophical Society in 1866. The following year they launched the internationally circulated Journal of Speculative Philosophy. Its contributors would include Josiah Royce and William James. The Society invited Ralph Waldo Emerson to St Louis. It developed connections with New England Transcendentalism as well as with the local Unitarian community. Other figures linked to this Philosophical Society included a remarkable Scottish polymath Thomas Davidson, who went on to write on Aristotle and, after emigrating to England, founded what became the Fabian Society; also the Unitarian literary scholar James Kendall Hosmer (several of whose relations were associates of Lottie Eliot), and Susan E. Blow who, with fellow member W. T. Harris, pioneered the kindergarten movement in America. Blow’s ideas were followed by the St Louis Wednesday Club which Lottie Eliot helped found in 1890, and Blow was a friend and 1890s literary collaborator with Lottie’s sister-in-law, Etta Eliot.9

  St Louis Philosophical Society members wrote and lectured on Dante, establishing in the city what one of their leaders, Denton J. Snider, called a ‘Dante cult’. Signs of this were still apparent in Tom’s boyhood when a local hotel hosted ‘An Evening with Dante’.10 Susan Blow’s 1886 Study of Dante contends that ‘We live in an age which is rapidly losing the consciousness of sin. Equally alien to our feeling are the physical self-scourgings of the medieval saint and the spiritual agony of the Puritan.’11 It may seem strange that this same woman pioneered children’s education, contributing to the efforts that made the St Louis school system a national beacon, but it would not have seemed odd to Lottie Eliot as she made poems out of scenes of ancient martyrdom while also campaigning for children’s rights.

  With her love of ‘Infinite Mind’ and her taste for philosophy, high educational ideals, poetry and culture, Lottie belonged to a community where the Philosophical Society’s influence was still felt. Her own intellectual loyalties lay with such St Louis women’s organisations as the Humanity Club, the Wednesday Club, the Colonial Dames of America and, especially, the Unitarian church. Her husband, a former Sunday School superintendent at the Church of the Messiah and a member of its choir, helped Lottie preserve Tom’s earliest gifts, including a christening spoon from his great-aunt Caroline.12 For the first ten years of Tom’s life the Church of the Messiah’s minister was the Reverend John Snyder, William Greenleaf Eliot’s successor; Snyder even set up in the church an Eliot Society, which brought together under one aegis several congregational women’s groups, and whose members included Tom’s elderly Grandmother Eliot. Throughout his boyhood, Tom was taken regularly to this Unitarian place of worship, one of the most important institutions of his early life.

  Writing on ‘Unitarianism in St Louis’ in 1899, Tom’s childhood minister set out ‘historically’ Unitarians’ beliefs. According to Snyder, the earliest Christians had belonged to a ‘Unitarian epoch of the church’ and had followed Jesus’s teaching which, true to Jewish monotheism, maintained that ‘the Lord is one!’ Later, ‘The Christian Church only ceased to be Monotheistic when it ceased to be Jewish.’ The Unitarian Snyder contended that a modern ‘Tri-Unitarian’ Catholic or Protestant who believes in the Three-in-One of Father, Son and Holy Ghost ‘rests his case upon the forced interpretation of a few doubtful and obscure texts, which may be stretched or shrunken to fit his dogma’. Christianity had been shaped by forces as different as ‘Greek mysticism’ and ‘Roman imperialism’. Machinations of church ‘hierarchy’ had led to a deadening of spirituality into a ‘magical sacramentalism’. So, for Unitarians, it was the other Christian churches which had lapsed from the true faith. However much he idealised it, Snyder recognised that ‘The form of the primitive church will never be restored’, but he asserted that such a restoration was not even desirable since

  Its formal administrative defects have been slowly outgrown. But Unitarianism seeks to reproduce the spirit of the Apostolic Church – its democratic simplicity –, its freedom from sacerdotalism, its boundless charity, its spiritual spontaneity, its vital ethicalism. These qualities are essential and indestructible in Christianity. They will survive all future changes of forms and all the possible modifications of doctrine which larger knowledge may make necessary.13

  Like members of his congregation including Lottie Eliot, Snyder identified the Unitarian cause with earlier medieval, Renaissance and Reformation martyrs who had suffered ‘the honor of persecution’. He saw modern Unitarianism as emerging first in sixteenth-century Europe, then spreading in seventeenth-century England where, he claimed, ‘Among its most illustrious advocates were John Milton and Algernon Sidney.’ He stated that the first ‘distinctly known’ Unitarian Church in England had been established by Theophilus Lindsey in 1778. Snyder liked the roster of writers, including Coleridge, Anna Barbauld and Harriet Martineau, who had made Unitarianism such a literary faith. Boston and New England Unitarianism he saw as countering ‘frantic emotionalism’. He admired Unitarianism’s ideal of Christianity as ‘not a scheme of salvation to be defined by dogma, but the art of living virtuously and piously’. For him ‘The history of Christianity shows that if you will lift from any mind the repressive or interpretative force of a creed, leaving it free to face either the light of nature or the teachings of the Bible, it will inevitably lose the impress of orthodoxy.’14

  This was the teaching that permeated Tom Eliot’s childhood home and the Unitarian faith community in which he was brought up. His extended family – from his uncle Thomas in Portland, Oregon, to his many New England cousins – belonged to a clan who were, he joke
d later, ‘the Borgias of Unitarianism’.15 Uncle Tom Eliot authored The Radical Difference Between Liberal Christianity and Orthodoxy, published by the American Unitarian Association in Boston. The Association’s future president would be young Tom’s Eastern Point playmate, cousin Fred. In St Louis the family’s Unitarianism was headquartered in the stone Church of the Messiah with its tall English Gothic spire on ‘Piety Hill’ at the corner of Locust Street and Garrison Avenue where the Reverend Snyder presided. For years Tom’s mother was secretary of the Mission Free School of the Church of the Messiah. In that church building, admired for its architectural design by Boston’s Peabody and Stearns, and for its memorial stained-glass windows by Scottish artist Daniel Cottier, Tom sat, sang, prayed, worshipped, fidgeted and looked around. Under the great exposed roof-beams he saw biblical stories turned into stained-glass art: Christ as the sower, the good Samaritan, the wise and foolish virgins.

  Among these windows, too, were contributions linking poetry to Christianity. A memorial window to a thirteen-year-old girl who had died in 1875 alluded to Longfellow’s poem ‘The Reaper and the Flowers’ with its white dove and angel of death; its inscription was taken from the Gospel of Luke 20:36, in the King James version: ‘Neither can they die any more, for they are equal unto the angels.’ Another Cottier stained-glass window showed an angel musician, but the dominant windows, facing the congregation, were, like Eliot’s grandfather’s theology, firmly centred on Christ and the biblical parables. Towards the end of his life, William Greenleaf Eliot had worried that the Church of the Messiah risked ‘becoming less a church than a society. The religious strength less, the social greater.’ His church’s architecture was designed to separate the purely social aspects from the area reserved for worship. The congregation sat surrounded by rich stained-glass memorials to former members that spoke not just of the society on earth but of that in heaven and of Christ himself. It communicated through powerful imagery and structure William Greenleaf Eliot’s conviction that ‘the best citizen … receives from the community he serves far more than he can give’, and it extended that sense of community to include both the traditions of the local dead and union with Christ himself.16 Yet Snyder’s creedless Unitarianism could easily become mere undogmatic politeness.

  Among generations of Unitarian Eliots, Tom grew up to be the one that got away. Yet an interest in the ‘primitive’ roots of religion, and in tracing religion to its earliest stages that is so evident in the Reverend Snyder’s thinking would be a continuing preoccupation. Tom was not reading theology in his cradle, but certainly imbibed it from boyhood. Occasionally, too, picking up books almost at random around the ‘family library’, quite different kinds of religion intrigued him: ‘I came across, as a boy, a poem for which I have preserved a warm affection: The Light of Asia, by Sir Edwin Arnold. It is a long epic poem on the life of Gautama Buddha: I must have had a latent sympathy for the subject-matter, for I read it through with gusto, and more than once.’17 In this work, subtitled The Great Renunciation, Edwin Arnold presented the Buddha as combining ‘the intellect of a sage and the passionate devotion of a martyr’. Reading it, Tom, who would go on to study Buddhist texts at university, read about ‘The Scripture’ of a ‘Saviour of the World’ who was not Christ. He discovered, too, ‘The thunder of the preaching of the word’ in Buddhist beliefs, where to be ‘saint-like’ meant something non-Christian, something alien whose ‘Wheel of perfect Law’ was intriguing not least because aspects of it chimed with his parents’ religion.18

  From infancy Tom knew he belonged not just to a special family but to a community that included the dead as well as the living, and whose great exemplar was his Saviour. Issues of faith and doubt were as inescapable as his own Christian name; a fondness for church buildings was something he carried from his childhood to his old age. St Louis Unitarianism gave him much to come to terms with. Eventually he felt he had been brought up in ‘a strong atmosphere of the most Liberal theology’, but concluded in adulthood that soulful ‘Unitarianism is a bad preparation for brass tacks like birth, copulation, death, hell, heaven and insanity.’19 His adult poetry likes to puncture romantic illusion with a sharp application of brass tacks.

  Not long after passing from the tutelage of Mrs Lockwood to the much larger educational premises of Smith Academy, ten-year-old Tom created his earliest surviving literary work. The previous term he had started at Smith, gaining entry direct to its Preparatory Department’s Year 2, where he had been studying Arithmetic, Geography, Spelling, Drawing, Writing, English and French. Familiar with words such as ‘comatose’, and eager to write down interesting sounds including the ‘Click, click, clack’ of ‘the telegraph’, Tom clearly relished language; his studying French so early at Smith Academy was unusual, the first indication of a Francophilia that would shape his literary life.20 Reading in English seems to have directed him towards Classical culture as well as to Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose Tanglewood Tales featured on the curriculum along with Charles Kingsley’s The Heroes, or Greek Fairy Tales for my Children.21 In both volumes Tom encountered, probably for the first time, the story of Theseus, Ariadne and the Minotaur, which would be alluded to in his poetry. Yet the Fireside, the childhood magazine he wrote in January and February 1899 owes nothing at all to his schoolbooks. Possibly it was spurred by his school’s plan to initiate the Smith Academy Record that spring; or by Tom’s brother Henry’s involvement with Student Life magazine at Washington University; or by the imminent publication of his mother’s booklet Easter Songs.

  Whatever its origins, with the Fireside, written in the dark days of winter, Tom became T. S. Eliot. Its front page announces it not only as ‘Edited by T. S. Eliot’ but also as a production of ‘The T. S. Eliot Co., St Louis’. Like his father, working for ‘The Hydraulic-Press Brick Co., St Louis’, Tom, asking for subscriptions, was businessman as well as writer. The ‘Printer’ was also ‘T. S. Eliot’, and chapter one of the railroad adventure ‘Bill’s Escape’ was announced as ‘by T. S. Eliot’. Tom was signalling what he would become in adult life: author, editor and publisher, a poet with a business brain. The Fireside offers by far the most detailed window on the small boy’s imaginative life and aspects of his St Louis milieu.

  The first issue, a ‘sample copy’ of this new ‘Weekly Magazine’ featuring ‘Fiction, Gossip, Theatre, Jokes’ and other interesting material, is dated ‘January 28, 1899’. It describes itself as both a magazine and ‘A Little Papre’ – Tom’s spelling was not always assured. Borrowing from material in St Louis newspapers of the time, as well as imitating writers and genres that he liked, the Fireside is a lively melange. Its ‘Gossip’ section announces the engagement of ‘Miss End and Mr Front’; a later issue mentions the elopement of ‘Mr. Up and Miss Down’; the familiar advertisement ‘EAT QUAKER OATS’ becomes in Tom’s version ‘EAT QUAKER CATS’, complete with a feline sketch.22 Teleologically-minded readers can spot anticipations of the poet who, decades later, would pen Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats; who would link ‘beginning’ to ‘end’ in Four Quartets; and who would put at the head of ‘Burnt Norton’ a Greek epigraph from Heraclitus which means in English ‘the way up and the way down are one’.23 Certainly the little paper contains in its ‘Poet’s Corner’ Tom’s earliest surviving verses. Clearly imitative, the first of these mentions a family emblem, the elephant, cherished by Eliots since at least the seventeenth century; while it may have been a misleading ‘family tradition’ that ‘“Eliot” is merely a corruption of “Elephant”’, Tom always liked the link, and in adult life chose for his bookplate an elephant emblem designed by David Jones.24

  At ten he was haunted by verbal cadences. He could not get out of his head the Mad Gardener’s song from Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno, published just nine years earlier. Carroll’s poem begins:

  He thought he saw an Elephant,

  That practised on a fife:

  He looked again, and found it was

  A letter from his wife.

  ‘A
t length I realise,’ he said,

  ‘The bitterness of Life!’25

  Not yet ready for the bitterness of life, and perhaps feeling that writing poetry called for the invention of a slightly different self, Tom signed his poem ‘Eliot S. Thomas’:

  I thought I saw an elephant

  A-riding on a ’bus

  I looked again and found

  Alas! ’twas only us.26

  From the very start, in such ludic childish efforts, he seems to have liked poetry’s power to cross between mundanity and the wildly imaginative. Several times in the Fireside he imitates Carroll’s poem, taking from it both ‘a banker’s clerk’ and ‘a hippopotamus’, not to mention a ‘kangaroo’. Judging from how often he followed its form, this was the ten-year-old’s favourite poem, a completely mischievous one based on striking discrepancies between appearance and reality. Sometimes awkwardly, Tom made it his own, earthing it in the Mound City he knew:

  I thought I saw a kangaroo,

  A-jumping on the ground,

  I looked again and lo!

  It was an earthen mound!27

  Poetry and prose in the Fireside suggest, too, an early love of the writings of Edward Lear, a lifelong favourite who had died in the year of Tom’s birth. When he presents Fireside recipes, Tom often ends with energetic advice on how to get rid of the food: ‘Burn up as fast as possible’ or (in the case of ‘broiled fritters’) ‘Put out of the window as fast as possible.’28 In imitative phrasing and inclination these follow Lear’s nonsense cookery in ‘To Make an Amblongus Pie’, which ends, ‘Serve up in a clean dish, and throw the whole out of the window as fast as possible.’29