Though these sentences date from 1914, they reflect the sexual code Tom’s father passed to the boys in what Tom’s older brother called ‘such a fanatically conservative family as ours’.41 Later Tom’s brother became conscious of being attracted to girls who seemed exciting but unsuitable; he married late, happily, and had no children. For Tom, shy and sometimes fastidious, his father’s attitude to sex was unlikely to relieve any anxiety he may have had about his body, not least when conscious of potential weakness caused by his congenital hernia. Yet photographs of him with his father suggest there was clear physical affection between them. As a couple, Lottie and Hal Eliot had produced seven children. Tom’s parents were strict, but hardly sex averse.
On at least one occasion during his Smith Academy years Tom moved beyond parental control. In 1904, rather than staying for the summer at Eastern Point, he headed further north to Quebec. Though in another country (this was his only boyhood trip abroad), he was still in Eliot territory. The previous year his uncle, the Reverend Christopher Rhodes Eliot of Boston, had visited the St Louis Eliots and preached at the Church of the Messiah.42 Around that time Christopher also bought land on the shore of Canada’s Lake Memphremagog. This became the site of a fifty-four-acre family camp, Camp Maple Hill, where everyone slept in tents. At Camp Maple Hill Christopher Eliot’s Scottish wife Mary liked to read aloud Walter Scott’s ballads, encouraging visitors to join in impromptu songs and amateur theatricals.43 When Tom went in 1904, it was the camp’s first season. His cousin Frederick was there, as were nine women and girls, including several other cousins.
There were trails to mark out on this plot of land, garden ground to plant, even a log cabin to build. This life by shores and forests was a world away from Locust Street, and much more basic than vacationing at Eastern Point. At least one of his cousins noted that it was liberating for Tom to be away from his parents.44 He went swimming in the lake. He rowed on it. The weather was hot. He took part in an expedition to climb a 3,000-foot mountain from whose summit he could see as far as Mount Washington in the United States and Montreal in Canada.
Something of his excitement can be sensed in a verse letter he sent from this camp to his sister Charlotte. Married the year before to architect George Lawrence Smith, son of a Harvard Classics professor, she seems to have been unwell after the birth of her daughter, Tom’s little niece Theodora. ‘Hoping you are better, / At least enough to read my letter’, fourteen-year-old Tom tells his sister about his expedition:
We after breakfast took a start,
Four of us, in a two horse cart
Together with a little luncheon,
Including things quite good to munch on …
Part gauche rhyming, part mischievous excitement, this letter exudes fun, though the writer does not seem entirely sure how his sister will receive it. ‘I suppose now I should desist, / For I am needed to assist / In making a raft’.45
Raft-building was the sort of thing boys did in Captain Mayne Reid’s stories. This summer delighted Tom, and at least one aspect of it entered the heart of his mature poetry. His time at Camp Maple Hill explains why the ‘Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop’ of The Waste Land is accompanied by a note that sounds surprisingly personal as it details, with its reference to Chapman’s Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America, ‘the hermit-thrush which I have heard in Quebec Province’.46 Tom here brings together a memory of his time among the lakeside trees with the bird book his mother had given him. Under the surface of the mature poem are memories of relative freedom from his parents as well as a treasured maternal link. A sense both of escape from the constraints of home and of a powerful awareness of ties to his upbringing would condition all Tom’s adult life. His first taste of this came in Quebec.
In 1905 he saw Ada married to Alfred D. Sheffield, an instructor at Harvard Preparatory School, Springfield, Massachusetts. The Unitarian marriage ceremony was a quiet one held at the family home in Locust Street. Christopher Eliot presided alongside the Reverend John William Day, who had replaced Reverend Snyder as minister of the Church of the Messiah. A significant figure during Tom’s early teens, Day had established himself as a clergyman with marked philosophical concerns, at least some of which Tom would come to share. Day maintained that knowledge was in an important sense relational. He believed that ‘every created thing is part of some larger life than its own. Learning about the world is a process of learning to what things belong. We do not know a thing by knowing that thing alone, we know it by knowing of what it forms a part.’ Discussing the way ‘the agnostic attitude … assumes that the part is the whole’, this pastor argued for a ‘logic of knowing’ which made the ‘valid inference, like the inferences of science’ that the part can be related to ‘the whole’. While he spoke up for ‘The profound, indisputable significance of the resurrection of Jesus’, Day saw this as affirming ‘a science of the soul, a larger order than the order of birth and death’.47 This for him was the meaning of Easter. Mixing philosophical rhetoric with invocations of Christ, Day continued his predecessor’s custom of making the Unitarian Lent and Easter services a cultural as well as a religious festival. So, for instance, when Tom was eleven, Day preached in the Church of the Messiah at services where members of the St Louis Choral Symphony played, and singers and narrators performed parts of Gounod’s ‘Redemption’ oratorio.48 Like Lottie Eliot, this pastor emphasised the importance of those who had suffered for faith: in a sermon on ‘The Cheer of Suffering’, delivered when Tom was twelve, he stressed that, ‘In all the bright armory of fame, nothing shines with quite the luster which is reflected from the deeds of those who have been tried as by fire and have not been found wanting.’49
In a 1901 Easter sermon on ‘Death in Life and Life in Death’, the intellectually ambitious Day examined the German philosopher and scientist Ernst Haeckel’s thought. Day considered ‘the result of mind and will being concentrated on one kind of reality, so that they lose all sense of every other kind’.50 Tom’s parents regularly took him to church. The boy who listened to this philosophically minded Unitarian preacher later developed into a student who would write on such matters as degrees of reality and who would question in his poetry what was real and ‘Unreal’.51
While he could never match up to the Reverend William Greenleaf Eliot, the balding, bearded Reverend Day, who championed ‘the survival of the faithful’, shared several of Tom’s parents’ interests, secular as well as religious.52 Not least, he argued that their Church should play a full part in the 1904 St Louis World’s Fair, with aspects of whose planning Hal and Lottie, too, were involved.53 Like those of the Eliots, Day’s cultural loyalties lay with the legacy of New England transcendentalism, and in the spring of 1903 he held an ambitious evening at the Church of the Messiah to celebrate ‘the centennial of the birth of Ralph Waldo Emerson’. At this event, speaking about philosophy, Professor A. O. Lovejoy argued that Emerson’s teachings had ‘done much to counteract “the modern disease of personality”’.54 Tom Eliot would grow up to make fun of Emersonian optimism in his poetry, but he too would present a critique of ‘personality’.
Tom’s minister championed Unitarianism precisely because it was ‘a denomination which publishes no authoritaritative declaration of faith’ yet represented ‘intellectual and spiritual strength’.55 Day believed that ‘human nature improves’. Though Tom would come to react strongly against such Unitarian beliefs, aspects of the faith shaped him. Preaching traditional adherence to the Ten Commandments, Day urged his congregation to ‘Condemn our modern idolatries with the law which condemned ancient idol worship.’ What he advocated was what Tom and his family generally practised: ‘Reverence, sanctity, honor to parents, respect for life, chastity, honesty, truth and unselfishness’.56 This was a lot to live up to, but the Eliots were schooled and churched to live up to it. In Tom’s sixteenth year the Church of the Messiah celebrated Lent with a concert at which ‘Several numbers were heard for the first time in St Louis, one of the most interesting bei
ng the Angels’ Chorus from Elgar’s “Dream of Gerontius”’ with its libretto by the famous English Catholic convert Cardinal Newman.57 There had been discussion of Elgar’s oratorio in St Louis beforehand and given that this performance was one of the highlights of his church’s year, Tom was bound to have heard about it. ‘Gerontius’ gave him a name that, like other names garnered from St Louis, lingered in his mind. Retuned, it emerged fifteen years later in that geriatric poem-title, ‘Gerontion’.
His brother Henry was surprised to hear Tom’s later statement that it was reading Edward Fitzgerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám which had been his crucial early encounter with poetry. Instead, Henry remembered discovering Tom about the age of ten immersed in Milton’s Samson Agonistes. When Henry, then a university student, reported this to the rest of the family, they were astonished.58 Milton was regarded by many Unitarians as sharing their beliefs; he was a great religious poet, though a difficult one. Perhaps Tom was reading what he thought he should be reading; yet his being discovered poring over Samson Agonistes in private suggests that he genuinely wanted to come to terms with it. At the very least it is obvious that, albeit ironically, he did go on to make use of Milton’s title in his own ‘Sweeney Agonistes’.
Henry also recalled his brother reading Browning before he encountered Fitzgerald’s Rubáiyát.59 Browning too was a difficult poet. His interest in saints and in religious tensions, whether in ‘St Simeon Stylites’ or ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’, was both akin to and sceptically different from Tom’s mother’s pious literary commitment. Browning had perfected the dramatic monologue, the poetic form that ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ would build on. At one point in later life, Tom would be dismissive of the Victorian poet in relation to his own work: ‘Browning was more of a hindrance than a help, for he had gone some way, but not far enough, in discovering a contemporary idiom.’60 However, it was precisely Browning’s combination of conversational tone, intellectual rigour, passion and irony that would stand Tom in good stead, and on occasion he came to recognise that Browning among nineteenth-century writers was ‘the only poet’ to devise a way of speech which might be useful for others and that ‘Browning’s lesson’ lay ‘in [the] use of non-poetic material – in reasserting [the] relation of poetry to speech’.61 Henry remained insistent that his brother was wrong about the age when he read certain books, maintaining that Tom read Milton before he devoured Fitzgerald, and that, by the time he was fifteen, Tom, reading voraciously in ways not suggested by his elders, had absorbed a good deal of Browning.62 Tom’s precocity struck some observers. Aged about fourteen and on holiday in Massachusetts, he was introduced to Harvard historian Professor Kuno Franke, a neighbour of his cousin Eleanor in Cambridge. The professor asked Tom with a twinkle if he ‘was a sub-sub-Freshman’.63
Certainly during this formative period Tom encountered Fitzgerald’s Rubáiyát, the work which, from at least the 1930s to the 1960s (when Henry was no longer alive to contradict him), he consistently presented as having provided his first profound experience of enjoying poetry. Asked in 1959, ‘Do you remember the circumstances under which you began to write poetry in St. Louis when you were a boy?’ he replied, ‘I began I think about the age of fourteen, under the influence of Fitzgerald’s Omar Khayyam, to write a number of very gloomy and atheistical and despairing quatrains in the same style, which fortunately I suppressed completely – so completely that they don’t exist. I never showed them to anybody.’64 This poetic start is presented as totally private, and (though Tom does not explicitly say so) in complete opposition to his parents’ values. When he wrote in the 1930s about being excited by poetry as an adolescent, his vocabulary was a sexual one of ‘seduction’ and ‘infatuation’:
Everyone, I believe, who is at all sensible to the seductions of poetry, can remember some moment in youth when he or she was completely carried away by the work of one poet. Very likely he was carried away by several poets, one after the other. The reason for this passing infatuation is not merely that our sensibility to poetry is keener in adolescence than in maturity. What happens is a kind of inundation, of invasion of the undeveloped personality by the stronger personality of the poet.65
This seems to be what happened to Tom when he ‘happened to pick up a copy of Fitzgerald’s Omar which was lying about’, and found in the poem an ‘almost overwhelming introduction to a new world of feeling’ that was ‘like a sudden conversion; the world appeared anew, painted with bright, delicious and painful colours’.66 As Henry pointed out to him, there had been a vogue for Fitzgerald’s poem when Tom was about ten or twelve.67 In 1898 the St Louis Musical Club had performed English composer Liza Lehmann’s settings of parts of the Rubáiyát; that same year the Globe-Democrat discussed poet Richard Le Gallienne, agreeing with ‘those who laugh at his impudence in trying to improve upon Fitzgerald’s version of Omar Khayyam’.68
The popularity of the Rubáiyát in America explains why Tom was able to find a copy of Fitzgerald’s translation of the Persian poet ‘lying about’ a few years later. This poem about ‘reviving old Desires’ was unashamedly hedonistic as it invoked ‘the fire of Spring’ in a desert terrain of ‘the Waste’, a milieu of wine, longing, fear of ‘the NOTHING’, and admiration for the fleeting ‘Nightingale that in the branches sang’. Here was a sensuous poetry which asserted heretically, ‘“I Myself am Heav’n and Hell”’, and whose insistent message was carpe diem – something the shy adolescent Tom seemed unable to do at his dancing classes. One of Fitzgerald’s images for desire involves an exhausting search for water in the desert:
Would but the Desert of the Fountain yield
One glimpse – if dimly, yet indeed, reveal’d,
To which the fainting Traveller might spring,
As springs the trampled herbage of the field!69
Though Tom’s quatrains sparked by his absorption in Fitzgerald are lost, it is clear his reading propelled him into an intense engagement with nineteenth-century Romantic poetry. ‘Thereupon I took the usual adolescent course with Byron, Shelley, Keats, Rossetti, Swinburne.’70 He was attracted not least to verse that mixed sexual longing with religious sentiment. A poem he mentioned along with Fitzgerald’s Rubáiyát as part of the ‘intellectual pubescence’ of ‘a boy of fourteen’ was Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘The Blessed Damozel’.71 This work was classed among Rossetti’s ‘masterpieces’ in one of Tom’s textbooks, Henry S. Pancoast’s An Introduction to English Literature.72 Even more sensuous than Fitzgerald, Rossetti’s poem portrays a woman longing for her lover as she leans out from ‘the gold bar of Heaven’, wearing ‘Her robe, ungirt from clasp to hem’. Such poetry excited Tom. He read on: ‘Her hair that lay along her back / Was yellow like ripe corn’.73 Eventually he would ironise this material, not least by juxtaposing its phrasing with the repressed, polite milieu in which he came to move: ‘The readers of the Boston Evening Transcript / Sway in the wind like a field of ripe corn’.74 Probably such ironising began early, and indeed elements of it may be sensed in at least one piece Tom published in the Smith Academy Record.
This was ‘A Fable for Feasters’, a poem for Christmas published unseasonably in February 1905. Tom’s tale about a ghost in a medieval monastery uses the stanza form favoured by Byron in Don Juan, another signal of the boy’s liking for nineteenth-century poetry with an erotic tinge. Cheeky rhymes such as ‘Mormon’ and ‘Norman’ suggest Tom liked Byron’s wit and acoustic nimbleness too.75 Yet the immediate model, as readers from his brother Henry to modern critics have recognised, was the Ingoldsby Legends, or Mirth and Marvels, a once popular series of Victorian English comic verses about medieval life. The poems of the Ingoldsby Legends mix modern, sometimes slangy lingo (‘You will have a kicking!’) with mock-medievalisms (‘Quoth his saintship, “How now!”’), and parody both actual medieval forms and nineteenth-century medievalising, such as that of Keats in ‘The Eve of St Agnes’.76 Where Tom’s admired Morte d’Arthur and Vision of Sir Lanfaul were solemnly medieval, Ingoldsby caper
ed; so does ‘A Fable for Feasters’.
Tom’s first printed poem describes the many-wived King Henry VIII as ‘that royal Mormon’ and presents monks as ‘quacks’. Tom’s brother relished the way, conducting an exorcism, the poem’s Abbot douses a dining room with holy water, ‘And watered everything except the wine’.77 Into his poem Tom works expressions such as ‘“O jiminy!”’ rhyming with ‘the chimney’. As well as drawing on ‘The Ghost’ from The Ingoldsby Legends, he learned from the poem that follows it in the same collection, ‘The Brothers of Birchington, A Lay of St Thomas À Becket’. When Tom wrote in his last stanza of how ‘Each morn from four to five one took a knout / And flogged his mates ’till they grew good and friarly’, his use of the unusual word ‘knout’ in this context probably owes something to the way in ‘The Brothers of Birchington’ we hear of ‘such a knout! / For his self-flagellations! The Monks used to say / He would wear out two penn’orth of whipcord a day!’78
Reading and imitating this work, Tom began to put together allusions to older cultural forms with anachronistically modern colloquial language. He also found a way both to indulge and subvert the taste he shared with his mother for sometimes ascetic medieval religious life. Though later he would be fascinated by masochistic saints and as a mature poet would return more solemnly to Thomas à Becket, what he started to essay in this teenage poem was mixing modern and antique diction. In doing so he drew on some of his interests in older poetry and religion, yet developed an ironic edge. Tom did not succeed fully in 1905, but perhaps the untonsured man in ‘The Brothers of Birchington’ who worries about ‘a little bald patch on the top of his crown’ would return later as J. Alfred Prufrock with a ‘bald spot in the middle of my hair’.79
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