In 1909 he read Laforgue with delight. Almost a decade later, he still had a vivid sense of ‘sending to Paris for the texts’, then poring over them after they arrived, acclimatising to the French poet’s language.
I puzzled it out as best I could, not finding half the words in my dictionary, and it was several years later before I came across anyone who had read him or could be persuaded to read him. I do feel more grateful to him than to anyone else, and I do not think that I have come across any other writer since who has meant so much to me as he did at that particular moment, or that particular year.9
Laforgue’s most intent American reader was this shy, bright, sexually inexperienced twenty-one-year-old, anxiously desperate to sound utterly knowing in his Bolo poems and, though he had not yet managed it, in other poems too. Tom came to believe that Laforgue, ‘if not quite the greatest French poet after Baudelaire, was certainly the most important technical innovator’ in his development of a form of vers libre which ‘contracts and distorts’ traditional verse measures. Tom read Laforgue alongside ‘the later Elizabethan drama’ (which he heard in terms of a contracting and distorting of blank verse), and the French poet’s ear for language astonished him.10 In ‘Complainte de cette bonne lune’ (Complaint of This Good Moon), ‘la Lune’ (moon) rhymes with ‘rancune’ (rancour), a rhyme Tom’s ear would retain for years and echo in his Laforguian ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’.11 Laforgue’s devices, such as snapping off bits of the Lord’s Prayer, or mixing Classical mythology with modern tawdriness and boredom, would become Eliotic hallmarks. Laforgue’s sense of windy desolation, ennui and ‘Néant’ (Nothingness – a favourite word) haunts some of Tom’s early poems. Moreover, in a number of poems Laforgue presents intimate judgements, overheard or imagined in a way that inhibits the speaker. In 1923, crediting this poet with inventing a ‘particular type of fragmentary conversation’, Tom confessed that he had ‘been a sinner myself in the use of broken conversations punctuated by three dots’.12 When a voice in one of the several Laforgue poems entitled ‘Dimanches’ (Sundays), begins ‘J’aurai passé ma vie à faillir m’embarquer’ (I will have spent my life in failing to embark), it offers, surely, an impossibility: a nineteenth-century J. Alfred Prufrock.13
‘We must all develop our originality in the same way’, Tom wrote in 1925, ‘by steeping ourselves in the work of those previous poets whom we find most sympathetic.’14 For him none was more sympathetic than this Frenchman. ‘There was’, he claimed in 1946, with perhaps a hint of exaggeration, ‘no poet, in either country [Britain and the USA], who could have been of use to a beginner in 1908. The only recourse was to poetry of another age and to poetry of another language.’15 Laforgue remade English speech for him. Several of the more unusual words of Tom’s poetry – ‘anfractuous’, ‘bocks’, ‘cauchemar’, ‘estaminet’, ‘hebetude’, ‘sempiternal’ and ‘velleities’, for instance – also occur in Laforgue’s French, while some Laforguian imagery, whether ‘sous-marine’ (submarine) strangeness or street-lamps or geraniums or bats or urban industrial smoke or horns or whirlpools or Philomel, becomes Tom’s too. Laforgue’s prose revealed interests in the ‘cauchemar’ (nightmare) quality of Egyptian art, in experimental metaphysics and mysticism, in the unconscious and a sense ‘du moi et du non-moi’ (of I and not-I).16 In his Moralités Légendaires where he brought ancient myths and older works of literature disturbingly up to date, Laforgue has Salome encounter the Administrator of Death, conjuring up a labyrinth of corridors and deploying submarine imagery of molluscs and undersea ‘silence’. Elsewhere he offers a rocky landscape of ‘pittoresque anfractuosité’ (picturesque anfractuosity).17 In ‘Pan et la Syrinx’ the prose is perforated by weird Wagnerian ‘clameurs de Walkyrie!’
Hoyotoho!
Heiah!
Hahei! Heiaho! Hoyohei!18
Tom’s most famous poem is famous not least for its own Wagnerian cries, those of ‘Rhine-daughters’ transposed from Götterdämmerung to the modern-day Thames. Their sounds disturb part III of The Waste Land:
Weialala leia
Wallala leialala …19
Quoting in English, Laforgue could take a familiar passage of Elizabethan drama and recontextualise it: ‘“Good night, ladies; good night, sweet ladies! Good night good night!” Ça chantait, et souvent des gravelures.’ (It sings, often dirtily). In The Waste Land Tom would redeploy a version of the same line from Hamlet. When he wrote in 1928 that ‘The form in which I began to write, in 1908 or 1909, was directly drawn from the study of Laforgue together with the later Elizabethan drama’, this was true, and Laforgue had encouraged him even to make the connection.20 Never in the history of English language poetry has the importation of three new French volumes had such spectacular results.
Compared with this, Tom’s academic studies were comparatively unexciting. Yet, just as he was about to hit his poetic stride, so in his courses he found a new dedication. Laforgue boosted his confidence. He could be his own man. At times this carried over into his classroom tasks, though not always with stellar results. In the spring of 1909, he took the popular, preening Charles Townsend Copeland’s course on English Composition, English 12. Tom submitted on 2 March a neatly handwritten essay about an author whose work he had known since childhood. He began with a title and an opening sentence that adopt a confident tone:
The Defects of Kipling
As the novelty of certain innovations dies away, as the school of literature of which Mr. Kipling is the most illustrious representative, the exotic school, passes with all its blemishes exaggerated more and more into the hands of less brilliant practitioners, so Kipling’s fame is fading, and his unique charm is diminished.
Professor Copeland changed Tom’s word ‘brilliant’ to ‘able’. He described this as ‘A mouth-filling sentence’. A seasoned public reader of verse, Copeland had a sense of the oratorical. He was strict with Tom, whose judgement he considered ‘harsh’, though ‘with some elements of truth’. Tom thought some of Kipling’s short stories such as ‘the “End of the Passage”’ (which later supplies an image in ‘The Hollow Men’) were ‘masterpieces’; Copeland, grading Tom’s essay B+, wanted to keep this student in his place. ‘Youthful rashness’, he wrote waspishly, ‘is not likely to be one of your attributes, at least till you are middle-aged’.21 Attempting to project mature confidence in his verdicts, Tom only succeeded in amusing his teacher. Still, B+ was a higher mark than any he had got for his previous year’s courses. Overall on English 12, Copeland graded him B – also Tom’s grade on Rand’s two Latin half-courses, and on Comp. Lit. 7 with Murray Potter. Both of Professor Schofield’s Comp. Lit. half-courses brought him As, however: his first such marks since his freshman-year English 28. Things were starting to look up.
During that spring of 1909 he absorbed not just Laforgue, but also a new book by a recent Harvard graduate who had served on the Advocate editorial board of 1908. Poet-critic Van Wyck Brooks, whom Tom later claimed to ‘remember at Harvard as a dapper little man with a taste for Charles Lamb’, had fallen in love with European culture.22 Like Henry James he had crossed the Atlantic in pursuit of it. Precociously, Brooks had completed in October 1908 a critique of American mores, The Wine of the Puritans: A Study of Present-Day America. In his first published book review Tom wrote about this volume admiringly for the May 1909 Advocate. Brooks thought New England’s Protestant and Unitarian values of thrift and industry (represented by Whittier and Emerson) ‘unable to meet the needs of great prosperity, imperialism and cosmopolitanism’; Emerson’s thought, ‘the direct result of a provincial training’, might have been ‘rational as an explanation of the peculiar life of one corner of the world’ but was ‘inadequate to explain life in the wider sense’. Acutely aware of what he perceived as American provincialism and of a need to learn more about European culture, if only to establish a sophisticated ‘tradition for those who come after’, Brooks wanted an idiom to express ‘full-grown, modern self-consciousness’. The American, he argued, was ‘independe
nt of tradition’; lacking an appropriate reservoir of myths and tradition suitable for ‘modern, cosmopolitan life’, he had ‘to think it all out for himself’. That was what Tom, with Laforgue’s help, sought to do. With apparent approval he quoted – or, not entirely uncharacteristically, misquoted – Brooks’s wish for a future when ‘the names of Denver and Sioux City will have a traditional antique dignity like Damascus and Perugia – and when it will not seem to us grotesque that they have’.23
Brooks’s book, exposing, as Tom put it, ‘the failure of American life (at present) – social, political, in education and in art’, was ‘if one take it rightly, a wholesome revelation’.24 Yet, however increasingly Francophile, Tom felt strong New England filiations. ‘Those of us who can claim any New England ancestors’, he wrote in the Advocate three weeks later, ‘may congratulate ourselves that we are their descendants’, though he added that such descendants could ‘rejoice that we are not’ those ancestors’ ‘contemporaries’. Reacting against his American familial inheritance, he also loved and venerated it. This would become a lifelong pattern. Even as he read Jules Laforgue, he relished ‘fine old ships’ and locations such as Salem or nearby Baker’s Island – which he probably knew through his own sailing exploits with his friends. He wanted to afford ‘our New England forbears … the grace of recognition’.25 Yet, commenting on Tom’s article in a review, Harvard’s Dean Briggs thought it revealed immaturity: ‘“Gentlemen and Seamen” treats of the old merchant sea-captains in New England and of Salem, the old seaport for trade with the East. The feeling in the article is good; but the imperfect workmanship and the tendency to moralize give the effect of a school composition.’26 Harsh but fair, such criticism indicated Tom was not yet a fully fledged writer. That May, after reading The Wine of the Puritans, he contributed to the ‘cocktail chorus’ of the Fox. Having found a place in his life for Sandow exercises as well as for avant-garde French poetry, he argued there needed to be room at university both for the physical liveliness of the ‘sport’ and for the studious pursuits of the ‘grind’.27 Mixing immaturity and precocious brilliance, he bided his time.
Thanks to Tom’s father’s wealth, money for his studies was never a problem. By the time he had completed sufficient classes for his A.B. (Bachelor of Arts) degree in summer 1909, taking into account half-courses and whole ones, he had a total of 1.5 courses at grade A, 6.5 at grade B, 5 at C and 1 at D. It was hardly a stellar record, but his marks had improved in his third year (no Cs or Ds then), and he stayed on for a fourth, studying for a master’s degree. As he matured, his interest in European culture increased. Henry James was the consummate novelist of New England society’s engagement with Europe, and Tom read The American, The Europeans and The Portrait of a Lady. Friends including Conrad Aiken went off to Europe that summer, and considered living in London or Paris. Tom, though, as usual, summered in New England (sailing off the Maine coast), and could only read about those European capitals.28
Still, he was hardly leading a deprived existence. To his father’s relief, he looked likely to graduate as a credit to the family. Generously bankrolled, the young man made arrangements to live during his master’s year in one of the largest rooms in Apley Court, the swankiest private dormitory in Cambridge. Built in ornamented red brick, this lavish, five-storey block on Holyoke Street towered over the small wooden house next door. Its fine lobby led to a marble staircase; its large rooms boasted magnificent woodwork and handsome fireplaces. Apley Court was associated with wealth, aestheticism and such figures as Pierre La Rose, termed by Tom’s brother ‘The nifty Prince of Apley Court’.29 Moving into this regal splendour, now Tom applied himself more intensively to his studies as well as to extra-curricular reading and writing. In the first term of 1909–10 Tinckom-Fernandez ‘made a desperate effort to get editorials from him’ for the Advocate and was forced ‘to run him to earth in his room’ at Apley Court where Tom, ‘working harder than ever’, had become ‘a recluse’.30
He took three courses in 1909–10 with Professor William Allan Neilson. One was English 1 (on Chaucer), which Neilson co-taught with Fred Robinson; the others were Neilson’s own courses: Comparative Literature 18 (Studies in the History of Allegory) and English 24 (Studies in the Poets of the Romantic Period). The terms Classicism and Romanticism were important to Neilson. He used them not so much to designate literary periods as to highlight ‘persistent tendencies’. Just as he saw the Middle Ages and the Renaissance as interlinked, so Neilson was wary of splitting apart a Classical from a Romantic era. In 1911 he gave a lecture series, published the following year, drawing on his teaching ‘of students in Harvard University’:
Romanticism is the tendency characterized by the predominance of imagination over reason and the sense of fact. Classicism is the tendency characterized by the predominance of reason over imagination and the sense of fact. Realism is the tendency characterized by the predominance of the sense of fact over imagination and reason.
Deprecating Rousseau, Neilson was suspicious of a vagueness associated with ‘Romanticism’. Enumerating prose writers from Balzac, Flaubert and Tolstoy to ‘Howells and James in America’, he thought that the temper of the modern age was ‘truth to fact’. A scientific age was interested not least in the ‘psychological’, though ‘in poetry … we are still in the romantic age’. For Neilson ‘We have suffered, and we continue to suffer, from a defect of the classical qualities, both in creation and in appreciation: we have much to gain from a greater reverence for tradition, a finer sense of the beauty of retained and regulated form, a more rigorous intellectual discipline.’31 These became Tom’s beliefs too.
Neilson’s views had a good deal in common with those of another of Tom’s teachers that session, Professor Irving Babbitt, whom Neilson signed up to write on ‘literary criticism’ for his series of volumes, The Types of English Literature.32 When Tom took his half-course French 17hf, Literary Criticism in France with Special Reference to the Nineteenth Century, Babbitt was an Assistant Professor best known for his recent volume, Literature and the American College: Essays in Defense of the Humanities. Unlike most of Tom’s other teachers, but like Matthew Arnold, whose work Babbitt admired, this professor wrote for a wide audience; much of his recent book had appeared in the Atlantic Monthly and the Nation. As a young man, Babbitt had studied at Harvard and in Paris, and, though he taught modern literature, his background was in Classics, Sanskrit and Pali. He had an interest in Buddhist as well as in Christian thought, but was not a Christian. Like Neilson, Babbitt disparaged Rousseau’s Romantic ‘horror of every form of discipline’, arguing that ‘Liberty, to be humanized, must be tempered by true restraint’. Babbitt supported democracy, but, attuned to the writings of France’s Charles Maurras, advocated ‘an aristocratic and selective democracy’. In a culture dominated by capitalism and commerce, Babbitt spoke up for ‘Academic Leisure’, saw the value of ‘monasteries’ and argued that to benefit society colleges must ‘insist on the idea of quality’. He was suspicious of Harvard’s cafeteria-style elective system, and even of the ‘sudden prosperity’ of ‘Comparative literature’ if it took students away from ‘“the constant mind of man”’. Defending an ideal he termed ‘humanism’, he wanted ‘Genuine originality’, which was ‘a hardy growth, and usually gains more than it loses by striking deep root into the literature of the past’.33
Influenced by Babbitt, Tom came to share many of these ideals. The half-course he took drew on material soon developed in Babbitt’s The Masters of Modern French Criticism which sought ‘to criticise critics’ and to portray the ‘ideal critic’.34 Tom, future author of To Criticize the Critic and ‘The Perfect Critic’, would recommend Babbitt’s book in 1916. It saw the fashionable French thinker Henri Bergson as ‘perhaps the chief spokesman’ of a ‘new tendency’ in French thought which foregrounded anti-intellectualism.35 Though later he came to disagree with some of Babbitt’s non-Christian emphases, over the next few years Tom inclined towards Paris, towards the study of Sanskr
it and Pali, towards Buddhist thought and towards a politically conservative ideology engaged with adventurous aesthetics and expounded through prose that might reach beyond academic classrooms. At the end of his life Tom wrote that Babbitt was the ‘one teacher at Harvard’ who ‘had the greatest influence on me’.36
In 1909–10 he also studied with George Pierce Baker, taking his course English 14 on The Drama in England from the Miracle Plays to the Closing of the Theatres. This professor introduced students not only to medieval English religious dramas but also to Ben Jonson’s stagecraft and work by lesser known Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights including Dekker and Heywood.37 Baker’s interest in theatre was practical. Plays were scripts for performance, and he liked to mingle with students. Tom’s cousin Eleanor Hinkley was developing an interest in drama, as was his cousin and fellow Harvard student, Fred Eliot. The taste for drama that Tom shared with Baker ran alongside his rather different enthusiasm for vaudeville and melodrama – all part of what his father complained about when he complained in 1910 that Tom was ‘too dramatic busy’ at Harvard.38
Poetry, though, was his first love, and several fellow students knew it. For session 1909–10 ‘Thomas S. Eliot’ was elected secretary on the Advocate’s Board of Editors.39 His friend Tinckom-Fernandez began that session as president, though he left before its end, heading back to New York. Other companions and acquaintances such as Haniel Long and Conrad Aiken were on the Board too, along with 1910 classmen including poet Rogers MacVeagh. Tom’s position as ‘Secretary’ suggests that, even while immersed in the poems of Laforgue, he was regarded as a safe pair of hands. On 13 December 1909, he was nominated Odist of the Class of 1910 in a ballot held in the Lodge of Harvard’s Class of ’77 Gate, one of the entrances to the Yard. Alan Seeger stood for Class Poet, a separate position, so he and Tom were not in direct competition. When the votes were counted that Monday evening at the Crimson office, Seeger lost to Edward Eyre Hunt, but Tom beat his rival, MacVeagh, comfortably.40 In the summer he would have to stand in front of a vast audience at his class graduation and read his poem aloud. Even more than at Smith Academy, this was bound to make his parents proud.
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