Young Eliot

by Robert Crawford

  Tom would ponder similar ideas in his own philosophical way. Years afterwards, he theorised the ‘objective correlative’ and, when considering the Metaphysical poets, wrote of how ‘a poet’s mind … is constantly amalgamating disparate experience’.62 His later ideas grew from a pervasive Harvard milieu in which Santayana, Palmer and others so readily linked philosophy to poetry, assuming it was a great thing to be a philosophical poet. Like most good students, Tom reacted against aspects of his teachers’ teaching, but he came to share several of their enthusiasms, not least for Dante and Metaphysical poetry. In 1909–10 he took another course with Santayana, whom some considered a dilettante. Palmer’s counsel to writers was to ‘work day after day unwearyingly’.63 Sophomore Tom hardly lived up to this ideal: he got a C on Palmer’s Philosophy course, and a B for Philosophy B. Among his sophomore grades, B was his highest. Yet in his junior year he began to hit his stride academically – which meant at least that the Bs became more common – and, thanks to Symons and Laforgue, he worked more productively on his poetry.

  Having already studied French, German, English and Greek in his first two years at Harvard, it seemed reasonable to Tom to proceed to take courses during 1908–9 in the small Comparative Literature department. This had been established in 1906 with the appointment of Professor William Henry Schofield to a chair in the subject. Conveniently for Tom, some of its classes were held right next to the Union in Warren House, a handsome 1833 building which had once been the residence of the Professor of Sanskrit. In the academic village of Cambridge, nothing was ever very far away. To register for his 1908 first-term classes Tom needed only to cross the road from Holyoke House to the Yard.

  Relishing institutional history, Harvard asked students to present themselves for classes at the first meetings in the appropriate ‘recitation rooms’, a term dating from the days when undergraduates, instead of simply listening to lectures, were expected to recite and comment on their learning.64 In the first week of October 1908, the recitation room for the first meeting of Comparative Literature 7, Tendencies of European Literature in the Renaissance, was in room 31, one of the smaller spaces in Henry Hansel Richardson’s imposing red-brick Sever Hall in the Yard. In charge of the course, Assistant Professor Anthony Murray Potter had interests that ranged from Petrarch and Dante to Spanish literature. Deeply committed to the new department, Potter had just endowed Comparative Literature prizes (still awarded today) in memory of his mother. His doctoral thesis had been published in 1902 as part of a distinguished series of literary studies including volumes by his senior colleague, Professor Schofield, and by the anthropologically-minded English folklorist Jessie L. Weston, with whom Schofield would soon collaborate.

  The new discipline of Comparative Literature encouraged people, as Gilbert Murray and others had sometimes done, to connect literary works through anthropology to supposedly primitive rituals. Professor Potter was given to citing anthropologists such as John Ferguson McLennan or Edward Westermarck, author of The History of Human Marriage. He liked to consider literature anthropologically: ‘Miss Weston has conjectured that in the combat of Father and Son we have a romantic presentment of the struggle between the old and new divinities of vegetation, which finds ritual expression in so many spring and harvest festivals, and of which Mr. Frazer has claimed the Arician rite as an example.’65 Tom was not yet used to thinking this way. However, over the next few years he too would read McLennan, Westermarck, Weston and Frazer. He internalised some intellectual habits familiar to his Harvard teachers. Schofield, his other Comparative Literature professor that year, thought this way too; at least on later occasions Schofield discussed the evolution of the figure of Tiresias who would come to feature in The Waste Land.66 Tom acquired a copy of Schofield’s English Literature from the Norman Conquest to Chaucer which he took back to St Louis; years afterwards, he was reminded of it when he was preparing to work on The Waste Land.67 For Schofield the story of ‘Tristram and Isolt’ was ‘the apotheosis of illicit love’, and he was interested in the way that ‘pagan’ material underlay stories such as that of the Holy Grail.68

  Tom would return to such thoughts when he read Jessie Weston’s 1920 From Ritual to Romance and incorporated her thinking into The Waste Land, but in 1908, studying medieval Arthurian romance with Schofield, setting it in a wide comparative context, he was nowhere near that stage. Nevertheless, as John Morgenstern has argued, Schofield’s interest in ‘tradition’, ‘the individual’ and the ‘impersonal’ may have influenced his most famous student.69 In Comparative Literature 6a (The Literary History of England and its Relations to that of the Continent from the Beginning to Chaucer), Tom encountered again some of the Arthurian material with which he had grown up; in Schofield’s Comparative Literature 6b (The Literary History of England and its Relations to that of the Continent from Chaucer to Elizabeth) he heard more about Dante. Around this time he began to absorb Dante for himself; Tom never formally studied Italian, and later admitted he ‘read Dante only with a prose translation beside the text’; but, excitedly, he

  began to puzzle out the Divine Comedy in this way; and when I thought I had grasped the meaning of a passage which especially delighted me, I committed it to memory; so that, for some years, I was able to recite a large part of one canto or another to myself, lying in bed or on a railway journey. Heaven knows what it would have sounded like, had I recited it aloud; but it was by this means that I steeped myself in Dante’s poetry.70

  In Dante he found great poetry wedded to a system of spiritual belief. Deploying with technical mastery his terza rima verse form, Dante begins his Inferno as a lost soul, and makes poetry out of uncertainty long before being guided towards certainty:

  E quale è quei, che disvuol ciò che volle,

  e per novi pensier cangia proposta,

  sì che dal cominciar tutto si tolle,

  tal mi fec’io in quella oscura costa:

  perchè pensando consumai la ’mpresa,

  che fu nel cominciar cotanto tosta.

  Stumblingly pronouncing such lines to his inner ear, Tom grew fascinated by Dante’s music – the alliteration, the hints of internal rhyme, the way one stanza picks up a rhyme from the last. Like his mother before him, he was drawn also to the spirituality of Italian culture, but, like Browning, he sensed its carnality. The pocket-sized Temple Classics version of Dante (Tom acquired a copy of the 1909 edition) made the Italian poet a portable travelling companion. In this version Dante’s text came with a facing translation so that Tom could glance across at the English prose to reveal or confirm the sense of the sonorous Italian:

  And as one who unwills what he willed, and

  with new thoughts changes his purpose, so that

  he wholly quits the thing commenced,

  such I made myself on that dim coast: for with

  thinking I wasted the enterprise, that had

  been so quick in its commencement.71

  Tom wasn’t a quitter, but Harvard’s elective system encouraged him to drift from course to course. Twenty years later he told his mother he was sorry about this: ‘I was one of the victims of the “elective system”. I have always regretted that as an undergraduate I did not stick to Latin and Greek, and some mathematics, and leave alone all the things I dabbled in year after year.’ He felt he had been ‘so interested in many things that I did nothing thoroughly, and was always thinking about new subjects that I wanted to study, instead of following out any one’.72 Yet this was what he thought later. As an undergraduate he picked a melange of topics which mightily enriched his poetry. As well as reading that great Florentine, Dante, he went on to enrol in Edward Waldo Forbes’s Fine Arts 20b course on Florentine Painting in his final undergraduate year. Often Tom’s mature poems contemplate pictures or objets d’art. If his course choices seem capricious, his caprices were shrewd.

  His third year at Harvard saw him taking two Latin courses. In Latin 2a (Latin Literature) he heard during fall 1908 an overview of poetry given by Assist
ant Professor Edward Kennard Rand, whom he came to know as ‘Ken’. Herbert Howarth suggests Tom may have encountered Ken also in the rather more convivial surroundings of the Fox Club.73 Well liked, Rand was yet another Dante scholar; he wrote, too, about St Augustine. Like Tom’s mother, Rand had an interest in mysticism, especially that of St Ambrose. He admired Horace and Ovid, but also more obscure reaches of Latin literature. His lectures were ‘too learned’ to be ‘popular’, Tom decided, but that did not put him off. Rand’s emphasis on ‘the continuity of pagan and Christian culture’ reinforced the line taken by his other anthropologically-minded teachers. Tom came to regard Rand as ‘one of the finest classical scholars and humanists of our time’, even if his lectures outshone his publications.74 Most of the latter post-date Tom’s student days, and one of them, on ‘The Latin Literature of the West from the Antonines to Constantine’, includes a consideration of the ‘Pervigilium Veneris’, a poem tied to the ‘cult of Venus’ that Rand links to the work of Apuleius; the poem, which Walter Pater had discussed, was something ‘a poet, growing old and sad, might have written’.75 It caught the attention of Tom, who would soon write his own ‘Prufrock’s Pervigilium’, lines from which would form part of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’.

  Latin 11, Tom’s other Latin literature class in session 1908–9, dealt with the Roman novel, especially Petronius and Apuleius. Petronius’ Satyricon, a mixture of prose and verse from Emperor Nero’s Rome narrated by a man who has provoked the sex god Priapus, fired Tom’s sometimes priapic imagination. Taught by Professor Clifford Herschel Moore (later founder of the Harvard Faculty Club), this Menippean satire included such Aristophanic elements as a whale-bone dildo, farting, much gluttony and all sorts of graphic sexual shenanigans – just the sort of thing to appeal to the student singer of ‘Columbo’ and to other male undergraduates of a Bolovian cast of mind. No Fox Club romp quite matched Petronius. Professor Moore, author of textbooks on Latin grammar and an editor of the Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, was a New England farmer’s son who had studied in Munich and worked in Rome, so perhaps he was unshockable. Moore and his wife were renowned for hospitality at their Brattle Street home, and the professor was recalled as ‘an accomplished figureskater’.76 Like many Harvard students, Tom too would take skating lessons.

  Having read Petronius’ Satyricon for Moore’s course, Tom kept a very old German edition in his library. A pencil note stuck inside suggests that this work, also, demonstrates how literature, customs and popular material might coalesce as anthropologists often suggested, mixing pagan and Christian material. The note records how a Roman story about ‘The matron of Ephesus’ (dealing with ‘the faithlessness of women’) was ‘brought from the east by the crusaders’ and can be found in works as diverse as medieval stories and George Chapman’s early-seventeenth-century play The Widow’s Tears.77 A pencil gloss in Tom’s copy of Petronius explains that the Latin ‘tubere’ could be translated ‘mushroom’.78 Years later, Tom would write his own poem of ‘dried tubers’ and would add to it a chilling, multilingual epigraph from Petronius.79 Though the Satyricon (alluded to by F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby and by that libertine novelist Henry Miller) was more familiar to American undergraduates of Tom’s generation than it is today, its priapic excesses were not what left their mark on The Waste Land. Instead, however fascinated Tom may have been by Petronius’ millennia-old bawdy-meets-highbrow burlesque, he drew on it eventually for a passage about the Sibyl of Cumae who says in Greek, ‘I want to die.’80

  6

  Secret Knowledge

  IN 1909 Tom did not want to die. He wanted to read more Laforgue. He was able to read some, along with poetry by Tristan Corbière, Stéphane Mallarmé, Jean-Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Valéry, Paul Verlaine and others in the Parisian ‘Van Bever anthology’, Poètes d’Aujourd’hui 1880–1900, edited by Adolphe van Bever and Paul Léautaud, but this was not enough.1 When Laforgue’s three-volume Oeuvres Complètes arrived, it contained more prose than poetry: sometimes, like a late-nineteenth-century Petronius, Laforgue had intermingled the two. The first volume was all poetry. Volume II was Moralités Légendaires in prose with a sprinkling of verse, and volume III a Mélange posthume whose contents ranged from reflections and aphorisms ‘Sur La Femme’ to art criticism, and selected letters. This was the feast Tom had been waiting for. It took him some time to digest. Steeped in Catholicism, Laforgue had lost his Christian faith, acquiring interests in Buddhism and Indic religion. In diction, themes and form, his verse had come to terms with urban modernity.

  Laforgue was a twenty-something male obsessed with sex, disconcertingly and ironically direct about its mixture of fascination and repulsion. He articulated anxieties involved in conversations – real, abandoned and imagined – between men and women. Veering between styling himself a ‘bon misogyne’ (good misogynist) and attempting self-mocking declarations of love, the hyper-intellectual protagonist of his poems sees women, whom social conditioning seems to have groomed for reproduction, as intensely desirable but deeply unsettling. Here was a poet of many ‘Complaintes’ who, taking the expression ‘enfant-terrible’ all too literally, could write in the voice of a ‘foetus’ emerging from the ‘mucus’ of the womb. For Laforgue, ‘Vieille et chauve à vingt ans’ (Old and bald at twenty), spring was a ‘cortège’, or ‘purges’. He rhymed ‘Préaux des soirs’ (The evening quads) with ‘Christs des dortoirs!’ (Dorm Christ-Gods).2 To Tom, this poet was, quite simply, astonishing. ‘He gave me’, he recalled in 1920, ‘the same revelation which I imagine he has given to other people before and since: that is, he showed how much more use poetry could make of contemporary ideas and feelings, of the emotional quality of contemporary ideas, than one had supposed’. Tom admitted that Browning (whom he had read since boyhood) had done as much, but ‘It is easier for a young poet to understand and to profit by the work of another young poet, when it is good, than from the work of a mature poet.’3

  In an electrifying way, Laforgue was his contemporary. This young Frenchman who wrote poems with titles such as ‘Complainte des pubertés difficiles’ (Complaint of Difficult Puberties) and regarded the end of the world in terms of a puke-dish (‘Vomitoire’) was not necessarily a writer whose oeuvre Tom would show his mother, but that made him all the more exciting. Laforgue played subversively with religion. He flaunted his disconcerting sense of sex. He authored a poem about ‘doublure’ (underwear) with the title ‘Maniaque’ (Maniac). Tom, however, having written already of King Henry VIII as ‘that royal Mormon’, was delighted to discover a poet who could call the moon ‘Pape / Des Mormons’ (Pope of Mormons) in ‘La Lune est stérile’, or (in ‘Esthétique’) link up the Christian ‘Galilee’ to ‘rites végétatifs de l’Inde’ (Indian vegetation rites).4 Laforgue made poetry out of the sort of anthropological speculations familiar to Tom’s undergraduate lecturers. This Uruguayan Frenchman seemed absolutely at home, too, in writing about the modern city. His moon looks down not just on Paris but also on the Missouri, that river which shared its name with Tom’s home state. Here was the only poet in the world who rhymed – the French pronunciation helped – ‘Paris’ and ‘le Missouri’ (‘Complainte de la lune en province’).5 Metaphorically speaking, such a rhyme became Tom’s goal too.

  Sounding less than irreproachably French to the French (who still consider him a minor poet), this immigrant writer, Jules Laforgue, had a strange ear for words. Obsessively Anglophile – he married an Englishwoman – Laforgue was fascinated by Hamlet and Ophelia. Addicted to Shakespeare, he also loved oddly Byronic rhymes: ‘défroques’ (knee-socks) chimes with ‘époque’ (epoch) in his poem ‘Esthétique’. The first significant Francophone poet to use a form of vers libre, Laforgue was, too, a master of rhyme and form. Indeed, possessing a compulsively insinuating music, his verse seemed to fuse the two together. Tom took some time to learn from all this, but learn he did. By the end of 1909 he was beginning to imitate Laforgue in his own ‘Nocturne’ (published in the Advocate that November
) and ‘Humouresque (after J. Laforgue)’ (Advocate, January 1910). Laforgue released in him a new music, a fresh voice. This emergent ironic sound came at first a little falteringly, yet soon became not the acoustic of an undergraduate imitator, but the uncannily recognisable voice of T. S. Eliot.

  Before late 1908, Tom had never heard of Laforgue. By late 1909 he was almost his reincarnation. The experience was like falling in love. A decade later, when his marriage was in trouble, Tom used strikingly erotic language to describe vital, transformational reading, implying, perhaps, that (though the object of attention was a dead man) it had been better than falling in love. ‘When a young writer is seized with his first passion of this sort he may be changed, metamorphosed almost, within a few weeks, from a bundle of second-hand sentiments into a person.’6

  Though he could not have expressed it so arrestingly in 1909, Tom’s encounter with Laforgue had this remarkable power. At a deep level there is less a one-to-one mapping between Laforgue’s poetry and Tom’s than a weird sense of confirmatory consonance. The ‘cosmiques chloroformes’ of Laforgue’s ‘Jeux’ (Games) is not the verbal equivalent of the verb ‘etherised’ at the start of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, but surely it nourishes that poem. From his childhood, Tom would have seen the famous Ether Monument – a tribute to pioneers of anaesthetic surgery – in the Boston Public Gardens.7 The daring modernity of ‘When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherised upon a table’, prefacing mention of ‘half-deserted streets’, has been spurred by a related daring in the Laforgue who could write in ‘L’hiver qui vient’ (The Coming Winter) of how ‘La rouille ronge en leurs spleens kilométriques / Les fils télégraphiques des grandes routes où nul ne passe’: lines which Peter Dale translated as ‘Rust along deserted thoroughfares / Gnaws the kilometric spleens of telegraph wire’.8 Laforgue’s shocking modernity, born out of and clashing against his deeply felt Christian upbringing, is everywhere apparent; yet his quirkiness makes him a stunning nineteenth-century minor writer. Without his intoxicating example, however, Tom might have stalled forever.