Young Eliot

by Robert Crawford

  My clearest remembrance of him is when he was attending a ‘Farmers’ Party’ because everyone was in farmers’ costumes. I was a shy girl but on that occasion I saw (or thought I saw) my brother who from the rear looked exactly like every other boy (blue jeans, plaid shirt & huge straw hat). So being partnerless I tapped him on the shoulder and said ‘Hi, kid, let’s dance.’ The form turned around. It wasn’t my brother – just Tom turning redder than a turkey cock. I too was stunned – but we danced.64

  Confronting and overcoming shyness, Tom danced in his boyhood and teens and grew to love it; twenty years later he would roll back the carpets of his London flat and foxtrot with his wife; he waltzed in old age. If dancing in St Louis brought him into contact with ‘inamoratae’, it also set a pattern. Just as he was interested in actresses, so he liked dancers. If he recalled his childhood in terms of shyness and being ‘protected from … sexual precocity’, he knew too that, for good and ill, his childhood had made him.65 At Professor Mahler’s and elsewhere, sometimes gauchely, it encouraged him to dance.

  Tom remembered the Dancing Academy as deliberately ‘Select’, catering ‘for the jeunesse dorée [gilded youth] of St. Louis’.66 The Academy had its own printed ‘catalogue’ which could be mailed out to families wishing their children to attend.67 Each season, from October until March, the theatrically imaginative Professor – who also organised small children’s shows with ‘fairy drills and cupid marches’ – held a good number of dances at his house for local teenagers from the upper stratum of St Louis Society, as well as Saturday matinee events in his ballroom, typically including a ‘Valentine matinee’ and a ‘farmers’ party’ like the one at which Tom danced with Margaret Shapleigh.68 Jacob Mahler has been described as ‘a terpsichorean titan, despite his light, lithe build and despite the fact that he always wore velvet ballet slippers’.69 Well-off parents entrusted their children to this man’s care, confident that ‘the responsibility, the unseen but nevertheless unmistakable subtle refining influence, the ease of manner, and all the other essential things which go to make young people well bred are in the safest of hands when Mr. Mahler has the helm’.70

  In his teaching Mahler was an enthusiast for the work of François Delsarte, the French theorist whose work influenced Isadora Duncan and who sought to relate mental to physical articulation, grounded in philosophy and theology.71 Idealistic in its conviction that ‘the artist needs an exactly-formulated definition of art’, the Delsarte System was just the sort of dancing that was appropriate for high-minded Lottie Eliot’s younger son.72 Though Tom liked some of the girls at Mahler’s, he disliked several of the boys. His ‘most loathed enemy’ was Atreus Hargadine von Schrader, Jr, who teased him mercilessly. When he was younger Atreus had lived nearby at 2648 Locust Street, but when Tom was nine the rich and ambitious von Schraders had moved away to more salubrious quarters.73

  Soon so did another boy who aggravated him at Mahler’s dancing classes. Lewis Dozier, Jr, sang in the Smith Academy Glee Club and was a rival admirer of Edwine Thornburgh. Though shorter than Tom, Lewis exuded self-assurance that only heightened Tom’s shyness. In 1899 the Dozier family migrated to Westmoreland Place, arguably in Tom’s boyhood the city’s swankiest street.74 Mixing with these very rich kids, and coming from a prosperous family himself, the boy who wrote up in the Fireside ‘Miss Stockenbonds’, ‘Mrs Insessent Snob’ and ‘the Bondholder Fortunnes’ was able to make fun of social pretension in a milieu where ‘Miss Kamchatty de Havens gave a small tea of twenty covers.’75 From a very young age he was able both to participate in polite elite culture and to mock it. That mixture of impulses would be crucial to the poems of his first collection; it never left him.

  He read constantly. Photographed aged eight, he hunches, engrossed in a book while sitting at an odd angle, one leg curled under him, on a rocking chair on the porch of the house at Gloucester. In a portrait in oils, painted by his art-student sister Charlotte about five years later, Tom sits formally upright on a dining chair. He is wearing what looks like a dark jacket and white bow tie, reading one of the red leather-bound volumes of the Temple Shakespeare edition which his mother had given him and which remained in his library all his life. Tom remembered how his ‘family advised or exhorted me to read’ approved works, ‘for they concerned themselves about my reading, and I remember my mother’s anxiety because I devoted too much attention to the novels of Mayne Reid – she tried to interest me in Macaulay’s History [of England] instead’.76

  Unauthorised reading was exciting. Captain Mayne Reid, whose popular Victorian adventure stories included The Boy Hunters and The Forest Exiles or the Perils of a Peruvian Family amid the Wilds of the Amazon, was just the author to appeal to the St Louis lad whose Fireside contained such little tales as ‘Up the Amazon’, ‘Rattlesnake Bob’ and ‘“Pony Jim” by Dimey Novles’.77 Tom may have seen pieces such as ‘Up the Paraguay River’ in the Globe-Democrat.78 He had a taste for Mayne Reid-style adventures involving deserts and jungle locations, striking flora and fauna (the ‘humming-bird’ whose ‘throat … glitters’ in The Boy Hunters re-emerges as the ‘glitter’ of the ‘hummingbird’ in the 1930 poem, ‘Marina’), and accounts of rites such as that of the ‘“rain-maker”’ which are ‘the first dawning of religion on the soul of the savage’.79 These were tales Tom found for himself, some time after he had inherited from his older siblings the ‘beloved Rollo books’ authored around the time of his father’s birth by New England clergyman and educationalist Jacob Abbott.80 Abbott’s educational stories about a polite little American boy, who learns about the world and eventually travels abroad (Rollo in London, Rollo in Paris), were the genteel, approved counterparts of the adventures among supposedly primitive peoples offered by Mayne Reid. Tom absorbed the lot.

  There were books at school, too, of course. In his second year at Smith Academy in 1899–1900 these included not just Edward Eggleston’s History of the United States and Its People, with its emphasis on ‘correctness’ and ‘clearness’, but also a more imaginatively alluring group of ‘English Classics’, including the Lambs’ Tales from Shakespeare, Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and a work entitled Legends of King Arthur.81 Probably this was a book by Thomas Bulfinch, but there is a similarly titled volume by Sir James Knowles; either way, here was Tom’s introduction to the legend of the quest for the Holy Grail which, reinterpreted by anthropological writer Jessie L. Weston, would play an important part in The Waste Land.

  The boy worked assiduously. When his father signed to certify that he had ‘examined’ Tom’s report card for the second term of session 1899–1900, Hal was pleased to see that whether for coursework or final examinations every grade – for Arithmetic, English Literature, English Grammar, English Composition, US History, Spelling, Drawing, Writing and Deportment – was an A.82 Tom’s performance in the first-year class of the main school was a marginal improvement on his report card for the comparable term in his previous year. Then he had dropped to a B for one element of Arithmetic coursework, and had scored consistent Bs for Writing – probably meaning handwriting, not the separate subject of ‘English Comp’. For composition, as in everything else, he had been awarded straight As for ‘exceptional work’.83

  Tom drew on his schoolwork for his writing at home, and sometimes anticipated it. He wrote in pencil the tiny booklet, George Washington, A Life, presenting the author on the title page as ‘Thos. S. Eliot, S.A., Former Editor of the “Fireside”’. He then crossed out the word ‘Former’, so probably this briefest of works (which compresses Washington’s life into just twelve lines of prose) was contemporary with the early 1899 Fireside productions. Tom’s Washington ‘wanted to go to sea but his mamma didn’t want him to’.84 Tom repeated this detail in a tiny piece on Washington in the Fireside.85 Mammas were commanding figures.

  In St Louis around 1900 there were local newspaper features on London life and on Charles Dickens – an author whose work Tom grew to love. One could attend a Literary Symposium lecture on St Paul’s Ca
thedral and the area of London known as ‘the City’ centred round ‘old London Bridge’ near which had been the ‘shrine’ of ‘Thomas à Becket’.86 At schools like Smith Academy private education for boys was relatively Anglophile. Tom worked through a history of England during session 1900–1901, but read American literature too – not just Hiawatha but also Longfellow’s ‘The Courtship of Miles Standish’, which, blending amorous pursuit with a rather plain name, anticipates ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. Another text the boy read in 1900 was Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield; as he later acknowledged, words from a song contained there (‘When lovely woman stoops to folly’) entered The Waste Land.87 When he was thirteen the third page of John Williams White’s First Greek Book introduced him to the term logos.88 The meanings of that word came to fascinate him.

  His schooling sculpted his imagination, as, indeed, it was designed to do. Overseen by Washington University whose junior ‘Academic Department’ it had been from 1856, then financed by local philanthropists James and Persis Smith, Tom’s all-male school was a private, non-residential establishment with about three hundred pupils and twenty teachers. Its substantial multi-storey brick building stood on land owned by Washington University at the corner of Washington Avenue and Nineteenth Street. Next door, but quite separate in gender and ethos, was the Women’s Christian Home, a fifty-bedroom hostel for young women of good character but relatively low income: nurses, teachers and shop assistants.89 A ‘preparatory school for colleges, schools of engineering and business’, Smith Academy attracted the sons of prosperous St Louis folk, just as the similarly constituted Mary Institute admitted their daughters.90

  Entrance to Smith Academy was by examination. Pupils had to buy their own textbooks. Fees were about $70.00 for each of the year’s two twenty-week terms. Facilities were good. There were chemistry and physics laboratories on the second floor equipped for practical experimental work as well as lectures, and a first-floor gymnasium ‘handsomely furnished with the most serviceable pieces of apparatus of modern pattern’. Tom took part in daily gymnastic exercises to which each class was sent around the middle of the school day. The object was ‘to give a systematic physical training, not only to those who enjoy athletic sports and would practice them of their own accord, but also to the large number who neglect bodily exercise, unless opportunity is furnished them’.91

  Many Smith boys in their white shirts, neatly knotted ties and formal jackets went on to become students at Washington University, but the school also sent students regularly to Ivy League colleges including Harvard, Yale and Princeton. For all its ties to Missouri education, Smith in the 1890s boasted that ‘The methods of instruction are such as prevail in the oldest and most popular preparatory schools of New England.’92 Pupils intending to pursue a university arts degree followed a six-year ‘Classical Course’: Tom took this traditional option including Greek. Cautioning its students ‘lest self-love should rule the mind’, Smith Academy had a Ciceronian motto: ‘Non nobis solum sed patriae et amicis’; as one of the school’s songs (written by Tom’s favourite English teacher, Roger Conant Hatch) translated it, ‘Not for ourselves alone but for / Our friends and native land’.93 This ethic of subordinating self to community accorded both with Tom’s grandfather’s teaching, and with his own mature thought.

  Smith’s lean, experienced headmaster Charles P. Curd from Louisville, Kentucky, set the tone. Curd had arrived in 1879 at the age of twenty-eight and risen through the pedagogical ranks. Given at times to platitudes, he believed, as he put it when Tom was fifteen, that ‘Energy, enthusiasm, honesty and an unbounded determination are among the chief requisites of success.’94 His ‘pupils’ were ‘expected to prepare at home a part of the lessons assigned for each day, and their hours of study should be regular and free from interruption’.95 A Latinist, a Germanist and an English teacher who had studied arts at the University of Nashville, then law at Vanderbilt University, Principal Curd held forth at school-chapel morning assemblies. Enthusiastic about public speaking (the school had regular oratory contests), he was known in the press as ‘an idolater of athletics’.96 Neither of these passions Tom shared. However, Curd was keen to inspire his boys in other ways too. He invited the school’s best-known former pupil, American author Winston Churchill (not to be confused with the British politician) to address the school on Citizenship when Tom was twelve. Shortly before, an extract from Churchill’s recently successful novel, Carvel Hall, had been read at the school’s Christmas chapel exercise. Here, as one of the highlights of the school year, was work by a living writer.

  Tom’s was a markedly literary education. He went to a school where it was possible to encounter a practising author, and where writing of different kinds was celebrated. Curd’s staff included outstanding English teachers such as young Percy H. Boynton, who taught at Smith from 1898 until 1902, lectured extramurally in St Louis on Tennyson, then went on to become a professor of English at the University of Chicago.97 When Tom was thirteen Boynton, who ran the school’s annual oratorical contest, launched a series of chapel exercises on the topic of ‘Boys’ Books’. There were sessions on Abbott’s Rollo books and on Kipling’s Captains Courageous.98 After Boynton left, Harvard graduate Roger Conant Hatch arrived. A sporty, broad-shouldered young man of twenty-four, Hatch was completing his master’s degree at Washington University and had written verse about striving to be ‘An honest Christian man’.99 When Tom was fifteen, Hatch took charge of ‘higher English and elocution’, but his passion was lyric poetry. He had a taste for Elizabethan verse and Robert Burns. Though his contributions to Songs of Smith Academy sang of the school’s ‘lofty halls’ and ‘feats of brawn’, he could also pen erotic verse about a woman’s ‘warm soft arms’.100 Hatch enjoyed teaching, later calling his Smith Academy pupils ‘“aygnorant young divils,” God bless ’em’.101 Tom liked him.

  He did not, however, like every aspect of schooling. It no longer exists, but the earliest poem he remembered writing was about not wanting to go to school on a Monday morning. He regarded himself as having been well taught; yet, with the exception of ‘Tom Kick’ whom he knew before he went to Smith, he tended not to recall having close St Louis friends. Later he described F. Anstey’s Victorian novel Vice Versa in which an older man is sent back to school as a ‘nightmare’.102 Back in St Louis as a sixty-five-year-old, he stated, with some qualification, that his ‘memories of Smith Academy’ were ‘on the whole happy’; he wanted to ‘pay tribute to’ the institution as ‘a good school’, not least ‘because of the boys who were there with me’. Yet he named no fellow pupils, and contemporaries from his schooldays recalled him as ‘diffident and retiring’ (as Tom Kick put it). To another, less well-disposed classmate he was ‘dreary, bookish’.103

  This last description suggests shy, hernia-afflicted Tom kept his mischievous side well hidden, maintaining a low profile in a school whose most celebrated pupils tended to be sports stars like August R. Krutzsch, fullback in the Smith football team.104 In 1903, about a month after Tom’s fifteenth birthday, Smith fielded burly, broad-shouldered Frederick Klipstein in centre position, though a week later he left the field when a fellow footballer, Otto H. Schwarz, was brought on as a substitute in a convincing Smith victory.105 While playing no part at all in football, Tom knew these players’ names well. He stored them up for decades only for them to re-emerge in unattractive contexts in his poetry. In the drafts of what became The Waste Land ‘Gus Krutzsch’ is one of several men out for a night on the town, while Eliot also used the name as a pseudonym when he published his ‘Song to the Opherian’ (later modified as part of ‘The Hollow Men’) in 1921.106 Klipstein would appear in ‘Sweeney Agonistes’ as part of the American duo Klipstein and Krumpacker, who at one point sing a jazzy duet accompanied by ‘Swarts’ on tambourine.107 J. Louis Swarts was at Smith along with Tom but when, years afterwards, Otto H. Schwarz (who had also captained the Smith Academy basketball team) was convinced that he recognised a version of his own name
and that of Klipstein in Tom’s writings, the poet confessed, adding that, in part at least, his character of Sweeney had been based on Klipstein.108

  It is hard not to think that in giving such names to less than reputable characters in his work, Tom was taking a kind of revenge on some of the sporting boys from whose circles he was excluded at Smith Academy. In a footballing school where lads were routinely weighed, measured and examined, Tom’s physique and shyness meant he did not conform to the gregarious norms of sporty masculinity.

  When he did incorporate names from high school into his later work, several sound Jewish. As a little boy in his Fireside, he had advertised a book called ‘History of the Jews by Fulish Writers’, illustrating his advertisement with a drawing of a man with a bulbous nose.109 Evidently the Fireside circulated among his immediate family, so presumably it was acceptable at Locust Street to link ‘Jews’ to ‘Fulish Writers’. If so, this prejudice, very common indeed in his youth and early manhood, did not come from Tom’s religion: his early minister, the Reverend Snyder, was aware of hostility towards Jews but sympathetic to them. Yet, with some embarrassment, Tom’s mother commented much later, in 1920 when her younger son was dealing with a writer called Bodenheim:

  It is very bad in me, but I have an instinctive antipathy to Jews, just as I have to certain animals. Of course there are Jews and Jews, and I must be not so much narrow-minded, as narrow in my sympathies. There must be something in them which to me is antipathetic. Father never liked to have business dealings with them …110

  The way his mother articulates this implies that anti-Semitism was a prejudice substantially unspoken in the Eliots’ St Louis household, but indisputably present. Tom’s attunement to it in the Fireside suggests that he took it on board early. His deployment of names like that of the sports star Klipstein hints that it may have stayed with him during his time at Smith Academy. It continued to dog him, part of an early conditioning which he sometimes went along with, sometimes questioned. Tom would benefit from Jewish critics and publishers, and during World War II would go out of his way to call attention to and denounce what was happening at Auschwitz. When directly confronted with the charge of anti-Semitism decades after his childhood, he denied it.