Young Eliot

by Robert Crawford

  As he loafed around Harvard Yard, Tom observed buildings familiar today, but his Harvard, smaller and less driven than now, was also subtly different. Including summer school participants, there were just over 5,000 students; across the whole institution the staff–student ratio was roughly one-to-twelve, and in Tom’s part of the university, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, there were a little over 2,200 students, most expecting to reside for three or four years.33 Lecture audiences could number nearly four hundred in big courses like Government 1, and over three hundred for History, German and English; instructors and assistants led smaller group discussions and helped with grading.34 Some undergraduates, including members of Tom’s own Class of 1910, thought the university had grown excessively large, and that it was too easy for students to avoid notice. Yet, though the red-brick dormitory of Forbes House had prepared Tom for the look of Harvard Yard, after St Louis Cambridge was very small. One of his friends, who arrived in 1907, recalled it as ‘a village’, albeit an atmospheric one: ‘Lilacs, white picket fences under elms, horse-drawn water-carts to lay the dust in the blindingly dusty streets of summer, board-walks put down on the pavements every winter and taken up every spring, sleighs and pungs [sleighs with box-shaped bodies] in the snow, and the dreadful college bell reverberant over all.’35

  Though a few rich Harvard men brought with them those newfangled machines, motor cars, most, including Tom, did not. Cambridge was walkable. One could stroll to eat with over a thousand fellow students in the great dining hall attached to Sanders Theatre, its roofbeams over sixty feet above diners’ heads, and stare at stained-glass windows depicting Chaucer, Dante and, less predictably perhaps, Sir Philip Sidney; or, as Tom sometimes did, one could scrutinise statuary and paintings in the Fogg Museum, or walk a few hundred yards towards the Weld Boat House if the weather was suitable for rowing. Everywhere, even in the newest buildings, there was a weight of tradition redolent of New England. Completed in the College Yard the year before Tom arrived, Emerson Hall, home to the Philosophy Department, had a large bronze statue of the seated Ralph Waldo Emerson in its concourse, positioned to confront all who entered the building; an inscription over the grandly pillared doorway quoted the biblical book of Psalms, ‘WHAT IS MAN THAT THOU ART MINDFUL OF HIM?’ Tom grew used to such imposing spaces. Later, he would craft a mock-grandeur of his own: ‘The lengthened shadow of a man / Is history, said Emerson’.36

  The present-day centrepiece of Harvard Yard, the great Widener Library, had not yet been built. In its place stood the several times extended Gore Hall. Cathedral-like outside and in, this library held about half a million books. Specialities including its Dante collection were not open for undergraduate browsing, but it had a large reading room accessible to all students, even if its librarians seemed stern. A member of the Class of 1907 noted a growing undergraduate wish to seem ‘literary’, a symptom of which was ‘the falling off in attendance at Gore Hall, and the increase at the Union library’.37 As he got used to Harvard, Tom came to prefer student-controlled reading spaces like that of the Harvard Union. Endowed by Henry Lee Higginson, founder of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, this extensive club had been built a few years earlier at the corner of Quincy and Harvard Streets, overlooking attractive gardens.

  Costing just $10 to join, the Union gave 2,000 student members access to dining rooms, reading rooms and facilities including a billiard room and barber shop. Entering it brought Tom close to the centre of undergraduate literary life. A basement suite of rooms comprised the offices and composing room of the Crimson; the top floor housed the offices of student literary magazines, the Harvard Advocate and Harvard Monthly. Tom sauntered through the entrance hall leading to a hundred-foot-long ‘Living Room’, its oak-panelled walls hung with grand portraits. In winter wood fires blazed in great open hearths at either end while students lounged around, reading (‘Daily papers from the principal cities of the United States are kept on file’), or took coffee and refreshments at small tables. With its game room, writing room and periodical rooms adjoining the main Living Room, the Union was designed for privileged chaps: a separate, less impressive entrance provided access to a ‘ladies’ dining room’.38

  Tom liked to wander upstairs to the Union Library, its windows overlooking the lawns, its shelves stocked with over 6,000 books in three connecting rooms. Here students could read unsupervised in ‘agreeable privacy’. For an undergraduate like Tom who enjoyed pursuing his ‘private reading’ at least as much as his coursework, this was a refuge.39 The Union Library was a great place for contemporary literature. New highlights added to its shelves – whether volumes of Shelburne Essays by St Louis-born critic Paul Elmer More or more risqué volumes such as Oscar Wilde’s Salomé – were listed regularly in the Crimson.40 Tom, who started reading Shelburne Essays at Harvard and whose ‘Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ with its image of a ‘head (grown slightly bald) / brought in upon a platter’ would soon parody the Salome narrative, used the Union as an enlivening resource.41

  Somewhat sobered after being placed on probation, he chose a more coherent assortment of courses for his second year. Ancient Greek became his centre of gravity and in 1907–8 he signed up for Fine Arts 3 (History of Ancient Art), taught by Classicist and art historian, Assistant Professor George Henry Chase. Chase was cataloguing the classical pottery collection of James Loeb, soon to be presented to Harvard’s Fogg Museum. Chase’s lectures were considered dry, but their subject matter complemented Tom’s study of Greek Prose Composition in the half-course called Greek E, as well as another course he took that session, Greek Literature, where teaching was led by Assistant Professor Charles Pomeroy Parker. An Oxford graduate, Parker had an interest in Greek philosophy, but Greek 2, the literary course that he and Professor Earnest Cary taught, included very different material. The Eliot scholar Grover Smith points out that ‘At Harvard there is a school copy of Aristophanes’ Acharnians in W. W. Merry’s edition, with marginal notes by Eliot.’42 Merry, the Victorian editor, presented Aristophanes as ‘burlesque’.43 Schooled in choral Aristophanic comedies including The Acharnians and The Birds, both of which he read for Greek 2, Tom later fused their structure with modern burlesque in ‘Sweeney Agonistes’. In his late sixties, he would still find the heartily obscene Aristophanes ‘delightful’.44

  As well as these Greek courses, in his second year he continued the study of German, an important language for Classical scholarship. He concentrated on grammar and written German, but also read some poetry and prose with a native speaker, the instructor Hermann Julius Weber, and his colleague William Arnold Colwell, whose interest in German literature in eighteenth-century England was a further example of Harvard’s inclination towards comparative literature. Unfortunately Tom’s German was not considered satisfactory. He slipped back into the danger zone with a ‘D’ grade. In French 2a (where his grade was ‘C’) his lead instructor, Assistant Professor Charles Henry Conrad Wright, was working on a compendious History of French Literature. Eventually published in 1912, it deals with the authors covered in Tom’s course. These ranged from Corneille and Racine to the nineteenth-century writers de Musset, Sainte-Beuve and Rostand.

  Wright was an assiduous scholar. His critical vocabulary included the terms ‘dislocation’ and ‘impersonality’, but his tastes show him to have been just the sort of critic that Tom, especially when discussing modern French literature, would come to attack. For Wright, de Musset, ‘perhaps the most characteristically French poet of his century’, was far more attractive than the Baudelaire who, influenced by Poe, had helped give a questionable ‘vogue to Symbolism … and decadents who built their theory of poetry on the element of suggestion and the relations between things and the soul, precisely as they professed to see in the music of Wagner’. Sainte-Beuve was to be lauded as ‘one of the greatest of critics’, a man preoccupied with the literary examination of ‘personality’, even to the extent of becoming ‘a Peeping Tom, especially of women’. Rostand, though he achieved a ‘high level�
�� in the ‘long and rambling’ Cyrano de Bergerac, had fallen away in his more recent, fashionable Chantecler with its ‘evanescent modern Parisian wit, often sinking to the commonest slang’. Wright’s French 2a stopped with Rostand. He disliked Symbolist poetry as ‘obscure’, ‘unintelligible’ and ‘freakish’ – just the sort of line that his most famous student would soon react against with creative vehemence.45

  ‘C’ was pretty much Tom’s average grade throughout session 1907–8. Though he managed Bs in Fine Art and the more literary of the Greek courses, he got a C for Greek Prose Composition. Having chosen also two Philosophy courses, in one he got a ‘C’, in the other a B. Yet, set against his D in German, this run of marks made him an undistinguished student. His loafing contributed, but there was also a sense he was not yet finding quite what he needed. For an undergraduate so grounded in literature, the philosophy courses in Emerson Hall were a new departure. Taken together, Philosophy A (History of Ancient Philosophy) and the matching introductory course B (History of Modern Philosophy) were surveys providing a general overview to which students might add depth later. Tom was selecting courses that let him read around freely, indulging a taste for roaming across cultures: from ancient Greece and Rome through the Middle Ages to modern English, French and German. No one who has embarked on Goodwin’s Moods and Tenses of the Greek Verb could argue that he chose only the easiest options; but he was hardly an academic star.

  He had left Mount Auburn Street in his second year, but had moved no further than around the corner to a purpose-built Gold Coast residential hall. There he shared a suite of rooms with his former Milton school friends Howard Morris and John Robinson. While a freshman, nineteen-year-old Morris had lived nearby in sumptuously appointed Westmorly Court, sharing a suite with another friend from Milton days, twenty-year-old Californian Welshman Evan Cyfeilwig Evans, Jr, and his younger brother Harry Llewellyn Evans. Morris lost his two room-mates when their mother died and the Evans boys left Harvard after just a year, returning to San Rafael, California. Big, heavily built, Morris had comparatively little interest in literature, but was easy-going, enjoyed music and liked to eat and drink. Also, he was used to fraternising with people he had known from Milton. He spoke with Tom and John Robinson about sharing a suite of rooms in another of the Gold Coast’s swanky privately-run residences, Russell Hall, very close to Westmorly.

  Tom knew he could get on with Morris and Robinson so they signed up for accommodation during 1907–8 at 22 Russell Hall. This substantial five-storey building stood at the corner of Plympton Street and Bow Street. Now demolished, it was replaced in 1930 by another Russell Hall, today part of Adams House. A surviving photograph shows that the earlier building’s design featured bow-windowed towers at its street-front corners. Each student in suite 22 had a separate bedroom, but they shared a large sitting room in one of these tower-like extensions, with three windows looking out over the street and a semicircular, cushioned window seat beneath them. In the fashion of the day, the windows were equipped both with blinds and lace curtains. Occasionally, in true student fashion, Tom and his flatmates drew their blinds half down in daytime. Hardwood-floored, their sitting room had dark woodwork, but its atmosphere was softened by an elaborately patterned carpet in the centre of the room. Furniture was à la mode: ‘the general tendency is towards “mission” morris chairs’, a 1907 Harvard Advocate article ‘On the Decoration of College Rooms’ had remarked, noting that as well as such recliner chairs with their wooden arms and cushioned leather seats, ‘some steins’ (ornamental beer mugs) and ‘plaster casts’ were desirable.46 If you could afford the substantial rent, 22 Russell Hall was not a bad place to loaf.

  A photograph of Tom and Howard Morris in their sitting room was perceptively if a little speculatively described in the 1970s by the journalist T. S. Matthews.

  It was well lighted: in the middle of the ceiling hung a chandelier, fitted for both gas and electricity; two wall brackets, each with gas and electric fixtures; on a small table by the fireplace a ‘student lamp,’ with a green glass art nouveau shade. On the table, cluttered with tobacco tins and a small pile of books, was a copy of the Saturday Evening Post (that would be Morris’s); on the other side of the fireplace a small bookcase, shaped like a truncated pyramid, filled with an encyclopedia and a set of ‘the classics’ (that would be Eliot’s). A sizable oriental rug covered most of the floor. A chafing dish stood on top of the bookcase; a tea set was on another small table. The space under two of the three bay windows was filled by a divan, spread with pillows and rugs. There were two Morris chairs, with flat wooden arms and frame and leather-covered cushions; a third chair, uncompromisingly hard.

  Over the fireplace and above the mantelpiece a large rectangular crimson banner, bearing the legend HARVARD 1910, was tacked to the wall; the 1910 was partly obscured by two photographs of football teams. Between the photographs stood a beer stein; on the second mantel shelf were four more, flanked by two silverplated trophy cups (Morris’s). In the center of the shelf were a dozen books (common property). Just over the fireplace hung a pipe rack, a line of trolls’ heads in plaster; at the side, a German peasant’s pipe depended from a hook. The andirons in the fireplace were piled with short birch logs. The framed pictures that covered the walls were mostly photographs: family groups, classical buildings and statues, a framed diploma.47

  When the photograph was taken both young men were in their characteristic dark suits. Tom, hair neatly combed, sat in one of the leather-seated chairs, legs crossed and hands folded in his lap. His dark leather shoes are typically gleaming. Beyond him, Howard Morris has adopted a characteristic student attitude of the day ‘as he lounges on the proverbial window seat’, one hand behind his head, smoking relaxedly.48 Their body language is very different. Morris looks the more at ease.

  Later Morris described himself as belonging ‘to more clubs than I need’.49 He and Tom shared jokes and got on fine, but Tom’s intellectual life was separate. Rather than cooking much for themselves, it was customary for well-off students to belong to private Gold Coast dining clubs, but Morris and Tom tended to move in different circles. As an undergraduate Tom belonged to several societies. Probably the first he joined was the Southern Club whose other members drawn from his year included Texan Jack Harrold; at a time when, unlike Boston, Cambridge was a dry town, belonging to a private club brought access to alcohol. Tom remembered the Southern Club as a hell of drinking and poker-playing, perhaps indicating that he went there most during his ‘unsatisfactory’ period, or maybe that he did not frequent it much at all. Southern Club membership was appropriate, given his Missouri roots, but he seems to have avoided significant contact with other Smith Academy alumni at Harvard such as his fellow member of the Class of 1910, James Taussig, Jr. Tom’s one-time childhood neighbour and foe, Atreus Hargadine von Schrader, Jr, was a year ahead, playing tennis – without notable success – in the Class of 1909.

  A better tennis player was Tom’s ‘really closest friend’ at Harvard, Harold Peters.50 This New Englander had grown up on family land on South Street in the Forest Hills district of Boston, today part of Harvard’s lush, green Arnold Arboretum with its Peters Hill.51 In the spring of 1907 while von Schrader was being knocked out in the early rounds of the interclass tennis tournament, Peters was powering his way to the final of the Freshman Championship.52 He continued to play, but not quite so well, in the following two years. As did Tom, Harold Peters came from a prosperous family that could trace their roots to seventeenth-century New England; if Tom’s father had a house at Eastern Point, Harold’s held property on Maine’s North Haven Island.53 Again, like Tom, Peters had a family background to live up to: his elder brother had enjoyed a successful Harvard undergraduate career before studying at the Law School. The age gap between these two brothers was even greater than that between Tom and Henry. By the time Harold Peters was winning at tennis, his sibling Andrew James Peters (Class of 1895) was a Democratic Congressman for eastern Massachusetts; later he becam
e Mayor of Boston.

  Like Howard Morris, Harold Peters was a good companion to Tom, but no intellectual star or civic leader. He was, however, passionate about sailing. He and Tom spent several energetic holidays cruising in small boats from Gloucester and other New England ports. While Tom was rooming with his ex-Milton pals Howard Morris and yachting enthusiast John Robinson, Peters at 106 Westmorly was sharing with his old school-friend Leon Little, who had grown up in Newburyport, Massachusetts, and was, like Tom’s brother, another keen sailor. Little and Tom were members of the Digamma Club, founded about a decade earlier: a private Harvard society. Tom’s sophomore room-mate Robinson knew Peters too, and was another member of the Digamma. So were other old school friends of Tom’s such as Chicken Gilbert from Milton.54

  With its substantial, white-doored clubhouse at 44 Boylston Street, the Digamma was an exclusive, all-male space where well-off young men could socialise, dine, drink and make merry in very fine surroundings.55 Boasting three storeys and a substantial basement, the detached building was ornamented with imitation classical columns at its corners, though the Digamma was not among the very richest of Harvard’s clubs.56 Founded by six students in 1898, its name comes from the sixth letter of the archaic Greek alphabet; however, ‘F’, the archaic Greek letter digamma, just happens to look like the English initial associated with academic failure – and may hint at other F-words too. The Digamma’s title made it sound like one of the elite intellectual ‘Greek letter clubs’ of the Ivy League colleges, best known of which in Tom’s Harvard was the Phi Beta Kappa; but its coded moniker was partly parodic. Though it had numbered literary men, such as journalist Maxwell Perkins and poet Van Wyck Brooks, among its members (Brooks had been club librarian), bibulous sociability and even scandalous exclusivity, rather than remarkable brainpower, were its hallmarks; its signature ‘F’ led to its being renamed the Fox Club, its emblem a rampant fox slyly holding a letter ‘F’.