Young Eliot

by Robert Crawford

  [His] verse and prose are alike a kind of travesty, making subtle use of colloquialism, slang, neologism, technical terms, for their allusive, their factitious, their reflected meanings, with which one can play, very seriously. The verse is alert, troubled, swaying, deliberately uncertain, hating rhetoric so piously that it prefers, and finds its piquancy in, the ridiculously obvious. It is really vers libre, but at the same time correct verse, before vers libre had been invented. And it carries, as far as that theory has ever been carried, the theory that demands an instantaneous notation (Whistler, let us say) of the figure or landscape which one has been accustomed to define with such rigorous exactitude. Verse, always elegant, is broken up into a kind of mockery of prose.

  Encore un de mes pierrots mort;

  Mort d’un chronique orphelinisme;

  C’était un coeur plein de dandysme

  Lunaire, en un drôle de corps;

  [Another of my pierrots is dead;

  Dead from being chronically orphaned;

  He had a heart full of lunar

  Dandyism in a funny body;]

  he will say to us, with a familiarity of manner, as of one talking languidly, in a low voice, the lips always teased into a slightly bitter smile …31

  Tom, remembered for his own ‘somewhat Lamian smile’, clicked with all this. ‘The Symons book’, he stated later, ‘is one of those which have affected the course of my life.’32 At least two Symons phrases from the same page would find their way into his poetry. When Symons writes of Laforgue composing ‘love-poems hat in hand’, Tom in a 1909 poem has ‘Romeo … hat in hand’. Symons’s oddly phrased statement that ‘In Laforgue, sentiment is squeezed out of the world before one begins to play at ball with it’ surely ghosts Prufrock’s thought of having ‘squeezed the universe into a ball’.33 In Symons’s bibliography Tom noticed mention of Laforgue’s three-volume Oeuvres Complètes, published in 1902–3. No Harvard library had these books. Tom ordered all three to be shipped from Paris. Probably he was the first person in the United States to do so. He knew exactly what he needed.

  His interest in French literature may have been encouraged by his acquaintance with another young Harvard poet, Alan Seeger. Thirty-five years later, a fellow student, Gluyas Williams, who did not know Tom well, recalled how impressed he had been that Tom and Seeger shared rooms. Seeger had a reputation as an aesthete (he was rumoured to wear a golden fillet around his hair after he washed it), and Williams thought Tom ‘an aesthete too’.34 Haniel Long, in his 1908–9 diary, writes of Seeger as rather friendless, ‘always in search of solitide’ – so much so that he would sometimes lock himself into an unoccupied guest-room.35 In his slightly self-mythologising prose, Seeger, who had a taste for Balzac and French literature, and would go on to become a celebrated American literary Francophile, recalled that ‘at college’ he had ‘led the life of an anchorite … My books were my friends.’36

  If Tom did indeed room with an ‘anchorite’ of whom he saw little, he shared some of Seeger’s tastes, including an attraction towards Dante. Seeger’s version of Inferno Canto XXVI, which ends, ‘Over our heads we heard the surging billows close’, seems to date from his Harvard student days and is interesting to set beside the drowning that concludes Prufrock’s ‘Love Song’.37 Tom and Seeger were in the same year as undergraduates, but very different as people and poets; since 1908 Seeger had been working on his long Keatsian poem, ‘The Deserted Garden’, awash with fairyland imagery.38 Yet his later poem, ‘Paris’, hymning that city of ‘ragged minstrels’, ‘Uncorseted … adolescent loveliness’ and ‘Open café-windows’, sums up a Francophilia that, increasingly, Tom shared.39 After Seeger had been killed in World War I in France, Tom wrote a short, anonymous 1917 review that described Seeger’s old-fashioned poems as ‘high-flown’: ‘Alan Seeger, as one who knew him can attest, lived his whole life on this plane, with impeccable poetic dignity.’ Tom singled out Seeger’s ‘Paris’.40 He thought, though, that his old classmate seemed to live ‘in a violet mist’ so that ‘The Paris of his verse’, to its detriment, ‘might be the Paris of a performance of “Louise” at the Boston Opera-House’.41 When Tom followed Seeger in using the word ‘Uncorseted’ (in his 1917 ‘Whispers of Immortality’), he did so with ironic precision, deploying a very different tone. Tom and Seeger shared a deepening commitment to literature, especially in French; and sometimes they circulated in the same Harvard society: in 1909 Seeger was hoping to move to a Cambridge ‘attic down on Ash St. No. 16’, an address where Tom would reside a couple of years later.42 However, Seeger, unlike Tom, wrote work that was ‘well done, and so much out of date as to be almost a positive quantity’. Tom thought Seeger’s poetry ‘goes back to the early Keats’.43 Seeger learned nothing from Jules Laforgue.

  Some months before his three-volume Laforgue arrived, Tom wrote a sonnet, ‘On a Portrait’. Published in January 1909’s Advocate, it juxtaposes the narrator’s sense of being outside in a busy street against a remote, dreamy female figure in a room; she seems cut off, like ‘A pensive lamia’ (that expression probably triggered Conrad Aiken’s later description of Tom’s own smile) or like Walter Pater’s Mona Lisa, ‘Beyond the circle of our thought’; if that sounds a little grandly eloquent, the poem’s last rhyming couplet snipes ironically at its earlier rhetoric, and at the lady: ‘The parrot on his bar, a silent spy, / Regards her with a patient curious eye’.44 Though it has not yet got there, this poem heads towards the accurate, unsentimental perception and anti-rhetorical writing advocated by Symons and his Symbolists. ‘“Take eloquence, and wring its neck!” said Verlaine in his Art Poétique.’45

  Symons’s book excited Tom, and socially things were looking up too. Haniel Long, the student so impressed by Tom’s Advocate ‘Song’ (‘The moonflower opens to the moth’), spoke to him on Monday 8 March 1909 about his writing ability. Long thought Tom should be involved with both the Advocate editorial board and the Signet Society. One of the most writerly of Harvard’s private clubs, the Signet was headquartered in a recently renovated large 1820s corner house at 46 Dunster Street where it joins Mount Auburn. A flamboyant heraldic crest over its door carried the words ‘Mousikehn poiei kai ergazou’ (Greek for ‘Make music and live it’), while another Signet motto, from Virgil’s Georgics, was ‘Sic vos non vobis Mellificatis apes’ (So, not for yourselves, you bees make honey). As Long was aware when he spoke to Tom, this most cultural of clubs, whose undergraduate members were called ‘drones’, needed to make money too. Over a thousand dollars in debt, the Signet wanted prosperous new members. There was a meeting on 19 March to discuss candidates for election. This went on for hours, with members trying to blackball various possibles, but Long waited and managed to get the name of ‘Tommy Eliot’ accepted.46 On 21 March a handwritten letter on a small sheet of Signet notepaper went out to ‘Mr. T. S. Eliot’ from a member who also worked on the Lampoon:

  Dear Sir,

  It gives me great pleasure to inform you of your election to the fourth seven from the class of 1910. For your initiation, which takes place Friday evening, April second at seven thirty, you will prepare a part of not less than ten hundred words.

  Very sincerely

  Morton Peabody Prince47

  This was an honour, even if Tom, in the ‘fourth seven’, was hardly among the first chosen. Held in its clubhouse, the Signet’s secret initiations were less riotous than Digamma ones, but still formidable. Rumours circulated that there might be ‘very drastic physical dangers’. We do not know the exact nature of Tom’s initiation, but candidates were expected to prepare a ‘part’, or speech, for delivery to an intimidating jury of former members who then interrogated them, not necessarily on issues related to the ‘part’. An account of another, less shy poet’s ‘quite overawing’ interview with a Signet jury about three years earlier indicates the club’s style. Candidates were kept waiting to make them nervous. Then they were led ‘into this beautifully lighted room, and sitting before us were George Lyman Kittredge, the great schola
r; William James, Professor of Psychology at Harvard; Josiah Royce, the philosopher; Hugo Münsterberg, the philosopher, I think was also there; and Charles Townsend Copeland, Boylston Professor of Rhetoric’. Questioning of candidates was carried out individually. Tom’s jury would have been similarly constituted, and his questions may have been as unexpected as those of his fellow-poet candidate John Hall Wheelock, whose interrogation was opened by Kittredge:

  ‘Spell “syzygy”.’ I couldn’t spell it. He then said, ‘That’s spelled S-Y-Z-Y-G-Y.’ He looked at the other inquisitors, and said, ‘This candidate doesn’t seem very promising to me.’

  Then one of the other professors … said to me, ‘Would you please let us know to which of Longfellow’s sisters he addressed that beautiful line, ‘Hail to thee, blithe spirit, bird thou never wert.’ And I was confused, because I knew of course that this was from Shelley’s ‘Ode to a Skylark,’ and it would seem rude to catch a professor in a mistake of that sort, so I had to claim that I wasn’t familiar with that either. Then they looked very doubtful.

  Then the third question was: ‘could God make rocks bigger than He could lift?’ I’d never heard this question before. I have heard since that it’s sometimes been used by boys to stump a Sunday school teacher. But there didn’t seem any answer to that. So I just said I couldn’t answer it.

  All unanimously agreed – James, Munsterburg, Royce, Kittredge, Copeland, and whoever else was there: ‘This man is not fit for admission to the Signet. I’m sorry that we’ve subjected him to this ordeal’ and so on. ‘Next candidate, please.’ And I retired in the most dreadful state of shame and annoyance. Then, when they’d all been listened to and been subjected, I suppose, to the same humiliation, punch bowls were brought in, and I was welcomed with the rest of them as a new member.48

  Tom, having presented his ‘part’, was suitably initiated. After the news was broken to them that they had been admitted after all, new members were expected to drink from a bowl, a ‘loving cup’, and each received a red rose which he was expected to press and preserve before eventually returning it to the club after he had published his first book. Today the Signet Society at Harvard numbers among its proudest possessions Tom’s rose.

  In this club Tom fraternised with his fellow classman Robert Canby Hallowell (later to work for the Century Magazine) and with Thomas Powel, editor and secretary of the Lampoon; his friend Tinckom-Fernandez, who became President at the Advocate; and other student poets, including Eyre Hunt, soon to be editor of the Monthly, Haniel Long and Rogers MacVeagh (both Advocate men). Just as helpful was the fact that distinguished academics mixed with student members. The Signet was a place for inter-generational conversation as well as undergraduate discussion and sumptuous reunions where members and alumni would quaff Moët et Chandon, sing (‘Champagne? Yes, yes. Rum punch? Yes, yes’), and smoke Romeo and Juliet cigars.49 Tom’s election to another club with a literary bent, the Stylus, brought him into contact with many of the same people – Hallowell, MacVeagh, Powel, Prince and Tinckom-Fernandez were all members there too – while again granting him access to an informal space where students sometimes mixed with faculty.

  The Stylus attracted, for instance, flamboyant aphorist Pierre La Rose – also linked to the Signet. An enthusiast for heraldry, Catholicism, style and bon ton, ‘le bon Pierre’ had designed several of the Signet’s splendid interiors as well as its vast, bee-crowded crest above the door. The Signet boasted a well-heated 18-by-40-foot library (with ‘shelf-room for 6000 volumes’, La Rose stated in 1903); a house speciality in Tom’s day was Chateau La Rose claret.50 Friendly with Harvard philosopher George Santayana, La Rose was associated by Tom’s brother Henry with Mount Auburn Street and the ‘elite’ welcomed by ‘Mrs Jack’ – Isabella Stewart Gardner – to gatherings at her magnificent Boston home.51 Tom would go there too. Through these clubs he had the opportunity to meet socially men like the stocky, shrewd Josiah Royce, with whom he would later study, and other influential academics including the dapper English professors Copeland and Briggs. Some members, including Eyre Hunt, courted the faculty: in 1909 Hunt wrote the introduction to his modern translation of the medieval poem Sir Orfeo, prefacing it with a chunk from one of his English professor’s books, ever so gratefully acknowledged.

  Tom did not go in for such sycophancy, but his was a Harvard with friendly, club-level as well as formal, class-level contact between privileged circles of students and professors. If the former might caricature or adulate the latter, the faculty also reviewed the ‘drones’. So, for instance, several professors involved with Tom’s English courses were readers and reviewers of the Advocate. Others who took an interest included the great Sanskrit scholar Charles Lanman, with whom Tom would study as a graduate student, and the art historian, Professor Chase. Such contacts could work wonders. It was after reading Hunt’s Sir Orfeo in the October 1909 Monthly that Professor Schofield suggested it should be ‘published in separate form’; just months later, it was.52 Nothing so promising happened to Tom, though he was ‘cheered’ to receive a letter from Thomas Head Thomas, an old student friend of his brother, praising his Advocate poems.53 In print, less generous comments came from an anonymous November 1909 reviewer who merely mentioned that the new Advocate’s ‘contributions of verse are from T. S. Eliot and C. P. Aiken’.54 Yet Tom’s membership of literary clubs and writing for the Advocate, to whose editorial board he was elected in his junior year, countered his often deserved reputation for shyness and brought him greater visibility. He obtained, too, first-hand experience of the business of literary publishing.

  Among the professors Tom liked was George Herbert Palmer, whose survey History of Ancient Philosophy (Philosophy A) he had taken as a sophomore. In his sixties and recently widowed, Palmer had a ‘splendid personality’; his ‘high quality of lecturing’ was particularly prized by students in Tom’s year who gave Philosophy A ‘more favourable “points” than any other course’. It was ‘a good essential introduction’ that ‘no educated man can afford to neglect’.55 A committed Christian as well as a scholar of Greek and Philosophy, Palmer was affable, polymathic and engaging. He made time to meet students in societies, to preach at chapel and to give public talks about George Herbert, the poet whose name he shared. Avidly, Palmer collected editions of Herbert, having edited the complete works in 1905. Encouraged by Palmer, a public ‘exhibition of books by and relating to George Herbert’ was held in the Treasure Room in Gore Hall during Tom’s junior year – another indication of Harvard’s interest in Metaphysical poetry.56 Much later, Tom would write a small book about Herbert.

  It was Palmer whose writerly advice had been quoted in Composition and Rhetoric for Schools, Tom’s textbook at Smith Academy. The professor, who encouraged students to ‘seek out the company of good speakers and writers’, had translated Homer in his youth. He was revising his widely read Self-Cultivation in English when he first taught Tom. Interested in ‘the transmission of the power to write’, Palmer detected Tom’s ‘early promise’. Later, when he taught him as a graduate student, he decided Tom had ‘a mind of extraordinary power and sensitiveness’.57 Palmer liked to emphasise that writers should be ‘obedient’ to their matter, suppressing their own personality when they wrote:

  Great writers put themselves and their personal imaginings out of sight. Their writing becomes a kind of transparent window on which reality is reflected, and through which people see not them but that of which they write. How much we know of Shakespeare’s characters! How little we know of Shakespeare!58

  In time, especially after engaging with Laforgue’s poems, Tom adopted a similar aesthetic, at least when it came to dispelling a Romantic aura of ‘personality’. Palmer’s pleasurable classes introduced him to a subject beyond his high-school curriculum: philosophy. He started to learn about Heraclitus and Aristotle, Plato and Plotinus, to all of whose work he would return.

  As well as Palmer’s Ancient Philosophy survey, in that 1907–8 session Tom took Philosophy B, History of
Modern Philosophy, taught by Pierre La Rose’s friend and fellow Signet member, George Santayana. It seems to have been less this Spanish-born professor’s philosophical stance that impressed Tom than his cosmopolitan sophistication. Like Palmer, Santayana enjoyed ‘informal meetings with his students’, and had a practitioner’s interest in writerly style as well as in philosophy.59 An agnostic powerfully shaped by several aspects of Catholicism, he used his philosophical training to think about poetry. Maintaining later that Santayana was ‘more interested in poetical philosophy than in philosophical poetry’, with a hint of misogyny or homophobia Tom stated that ‘I have never liked Santayana myself, because I have always felt that his attitude was essentially feminine, and that his philosophy was a dressing up of himself rather than an interest in things.’60

  When he taught Tom’s class Santayana was at work on his Three Philosophical Poets, which devotes considerable attention to Dante. His earlier Interpretations of Poetry and Religion argued that

  The poet’s art is to a great extent the art of intensifying emotions by assembling the scattered objects that naturally arouse them. He sees the affinities of things by seeing their common affinities with passion … By this union of disparate things having a common overtone of feeling, the feeling itself is evoked in all its strength …61