Young Eliot

by Robert Crawford

  In due course Tom wrote to inform his mother. ‘You must be sure’, she replied, ‘and secure tickets when the time comes for Father and me to hear your Ode’.41 He mentioned, too, that he was about to give a lecture (probably to a student society) and to visit New Haven. He had been in the habit of sending home copies of the Advocate when he had work published there. Lottie, conscious of her own relative failures as poet and teacher, was very keen that her ‘dear Boy … receive early the recognition I strove for and failed’. She wished he would send letters more frequently. What were his most recent marks? Would he please send them now? She was, she assured Tom, ‘interested in every detail of your life’.42

  Apparently, he had not been going into full details about his latest reading and writing. Some knowledge was best kept secret. He had been drafting several poems influenced by Laforgue and other French poets. He did, though, signal to his parents that his work, encouraged by courses such as Babbitt’s, was taking him in the direction of French culture and that he would like to go to Paris. His mother made it clear in April 1910 that she had ‘rather hoped you would not specialize later on in French literature’, and wondered if he might change his mind. ‘I cannot bear to think of your being alone in Paris, the very words give me a chill. English speaking countries seem so different from foreign. I do not admire the French nation, and have less confidence in individuals of that race than in English.’43 In Lottie Eliot’s St Louis, fashionable Paris was still the City of Sin. To Tom it meant Baudelaire, Laforgue and others whose work fascinated him; it was that heady philosopher Bergson’s headquarters, the capital of sophistication, a compass point for Americans, from Henry James to Van Wyck Brooks, eager to engage with European culture. He made clear his resolute Francophilia. Probably his mother didn’t know the half of it.

  That session Tom took cosmopolitan Santayana’s course Philosophy 10 (Philosophy of History) which examined ideals of society, religion, art and science in their historical development – further reminders that there was a world out there much greater than St Louis or New England. Santayana’s teaching seems to have drawn on his recent five-volume The Life of Reason, or the Phases of Human Progress, a vast comparative survey of intellectual life which, like Babbitt’s writings, considered aristocratic and democratic ideals while showing a marked, if agnostic, interest in religion. As would Tom, Santayana speculated about knowledge and experience, from the mores of ‘savages’ to the world around him: ‘Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’44

  Born in Spain, though schooled at Harvard, Santayana was fascinated by the aesthetics of Catholicism. He left Harvard not long after teaching Tom’s class, and his later novel, The Last Puritan, satirises New England life as repressedly small-minded. Tom remembered ‘when an undergraduate’ thinking Santayana ‘rather a poseur, who chose to look down upon New Englanders as provincial Protestants’.45 Determined to come to terms with any threat of provincialism, early that session Tom had been reading the work of yet another American Francophile. In October 1909 he contended that ‘Now that Arthur Symons is no longer active in English letters, Mr. James Huneker alone represents modernity in criticism.’ He had found Huneker’s biography of Chopin interesting and, cheekily, he made clear just what he loved about this critic’s writing: ‘he is far too alert to be an American; in his style and in his temper he is French’.46

  ‘I suppose I am not enough of a scholar to know what is termed the “particular genius” of any people’, Tom’s mother wrote, rather woundedly, to her son, cautioning him against undue Francophilia.47 Over half of Huneker’s Egoists: A Book of Supermen was given over to French culture, and some of the rest to Nietzsche. Allusively, Huneker ranges from the ‘colossal and muscular humanity’ of Michelangelo to ‘Rochefoucauld’, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and ‘Jules Laforgue’. He links Laforgue’s Hamlet to Stendhal’s ‘timidity with women’. Huneker is interested in Stendhal’s dislike of America for being too ‘democratic’ and ‘utilitarian’ to produce art. Quoting Stendahl’s remark, ‘My head is a magic lantern’, Huneker regards Stendahl as a ‘man of action paralysed little by little because of his incomparable analysis’. Some of this inveigled its way into Prufrock who has his own nervously cerebral ‘magic-lantern’. Writing of ‘muffled delirium’ (an arresting phrase which anticipates, perhaps, Tom’s later ‘chilled delirium’ in ‘Gerontion’), Huneker linked John Donne to Baudelaire. He admired Baudelaire’s ‘power of blasphemy’, seeing him as a ‘strayed’ Manichaean Christian, ‘the patron saint of ennui’ whose ‘disharmony of brain and body’ and ‘spiritual bilocation, are only too easy to diagnose; but the remedy? Hypocrite lecteur – mon semblable – mon frère!’ Tom, who had been reading Baudelaire as well as the other French poets in Poètes d’Aujourd’hui, would remember that line too. It ends the first section of The Waste Land, while his later Baudelaire essay too owes debts to Huneker.48

  Tom’s extra-curricular student reading was remarkably resilient in shaping his subsequent work. Huneker’s ‘The Pessimist’s Progress’ praised French novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans (whose work Tom read), not least for depicting ‘the nervous distaste of a hypochondriac for meeting people’. Huysmans was a ‘singer of neurasthenia’ whose characters ‘suffer from paralysis of the will, from hyperaesthesia’. Yet Huneker also pointed to Huysmans’s preoccupation with ‘the perverse odour of perfumes’, and the figure of Salome, ‘symbolic deity of indestructible Lust, the goddess of immortal Hysteria’. A Catholic convert with a penchant for writing about Paris, Huysmans delighted in reading ‘the mystics’ including ‘St. John of the Cross’. Huneker admitted that Huysmans’s ‘union of Roman Catholicism and blasphemy has proved to many a stumbling block’.49 Yet Tom was fascinated by ‘the genius of faith’ he read about in Huneker as well as by other kinds of ‘perverse and lunary genius’.50

  Chatting with Tom in early 1909, Haniel Long was struck by his discriminating knowledge of modern fiction. They discussed novels by Thomas Hardy and George Meredith.51 Tom was particularly interested in Henry James. Revealingly, ‘in the matter of English style’, he found what Huneker (in Overtones) had to say about James especially ‘illuminating’.52 Huneker’s James was ‘in rebellion against conventional art forms’. What Maisie Knew and The Ambassadors revealed a ‘fastidious artist’ who was nonetheless (like fastidious Laforgue) ‘among the revolutionists’. This writer, ‘a Puritan tempered by culture’, had learned from Hawthorne. James showed how a New England inheritance might be fused with the sometimes scandalous stylishness of France. Thanks to ‘French influences’, Henry James, fascinated by how ‘Americans abroad suffer a rich sea change’, and preoccupied, like his brother William, by the workings of psychology, had developed a style which was ‘a jungle of inversions, suspensions, elisions, repetitions, echoes, transpositions, neologisms’. This ‘elliptical method’ free of ‘descriptive padding’ drew on Flaubert’s ‘oblique psychology’, producing more than one ‘exquisite portrait’. Thanks to French influences, and in an era when so many Americans flocked to Paris that they had been accused of turning the French capital into ‘a “sinister Chicago”’, James had issued ‘a declaration of independence’ and created ‘companion work to the modern movement in music, sculpture, painting’.53 Tom, though he had not yet discovered how to do so, sought to do likewise. Paris was the place for it.

  Could one be Parisian without leaving America? Tom remembered seeing Van Wyck Brooks in a ‘French restaurant’, Petitpas, at 317 West Twenty-ninth Street in Manhattan – a venue redolent of ‘little corners of Montmartre’ – where ‘Van Wyck Brooks, Alan Seeger’, the rich lawyer turned art patron John Quinn and the artist Jack B. Yeats, nicknamed ‘the seer of Petitpas’ (and famous as brother of the poet), often foregathered.54 Yet be
ing Parisian in Gloucester, Massachusetts, was harder. Nevertheless, Tom was keen to sound as Parisian as he could. Probably in the summer of 1909, in Procter Brothers Co., based at Gloucester’s Old Corner Bookstore, he bought a lined seventy-two-page notebook. At some point he wrote in black ink on its front flyleaf ‘Inventions of the March Hare’, and by November he was beginning to invent poems in it, such as ‘Short Romance’ (published in 1916 as the more French-sounding ‘Conversation Galante’) in which a nervously wordy (presumably male) speaker and a female interlocutor discuss such topics as the moon and piano-playing. The interchange is brittle, nervy, Laforguian; underlying it are fears of inanity. The poem’s discussion of the music of an ‘exquisite nocturne’, and the repeated word ‘eternal’ (used of ‘madam’), may owe something to Huneker’s Overtones, whose essay ‘The Eternal Feminine’ asks whether women can play Chopin as well as men. Like this poem and the later, Jamesian-titled, Chopin-related ‘Portrait of a Lady’ and Prufrock’s self-conscious ‘Love Song’, Huneker’s work presents women as ‘other’ and as intimidating in their retorts: ‘These long-haired, soft-eyed animals, as Guy de Maupassant describes them, are our true critics weighing us ever in scales that are mortifyingly candid.’55 Huneker thought Chopin ‘the favourite composer of women’; The ‘Lady’ in Tom’s ‘Portrait’ thinks ‘Chopin’ is ‘So intimate’ that ‘his soul / Should be resurrected only among friends’.56 In another poem which Tom wrote into his notebook about a month later, ‘a lady’ is overheard exclaiming, ‘“Where shall I ever find the man! / One who appreciates my soul”…’57

  Tom juxtaposed such soulfulness with very different material. Setting out to write about the lower-class area of North Cambridge, but taking motifs and rhymes from Laforgue, Verlaine and others, in his notebook he would deploy seedy urban images with conviction for the first time: ‘yellow evening … dirty windows … broken glass … tattered sparrows … the gutter’; his ‘First Caprice in North Cambridge’ – rhyming a little dissonantly the word ‘patience’ with a rather mannered last line, ‘Oh, these minor considerations!…’ – has all the calculated awkwardness and dismissive shift of tone that characterise Laforgue’s poetry.58 Exclaiming over ‘The charm of vacant lots!’, eyeing ‘debris of a city’ and juxtaposing such observations with ironic invocations of ‘aesthetic laws’, Tom was writing French American poetry.59 Practising for Paris, he was finding his style. Almost casually, later in 1910 when he went to the French capital, he would delete the words ‘North Cambridge’ from the title of his ‘Fourth Caprice in North Cambridge’ and pencil in instead ‘Montparnasse’.60

  For now, his Harvard teachers, fellow students and the books he read were his guides to European culture. In March 1909, Haniel Long had written, Boston was ‘crazy over Wagner’.61 Tristan und Isolde was performed that month at the Metropolitan Opera in New York; Tom mentions ‘New York’ in his ‘Humouresque (after J. Laforgue)’, published in January 1910, shortly after Boston’s new Opera House had opened in November. The Met performance led a reviewer to enthuse over ‘all the emotions that sweep through the soul of Wagner’s heroine’.62 For Huneker in Overtones, Tristan und Isolde represented ‘the subjugation of man by woman’; its ‘epic sweep’ made it comparable with the Divine Comedy and Hamlet. ‘One of the most complex scores in existence’, it was, nonetheless, ‘built upon but one musical motive’. Within it lay ‘the seeds of the morbid, the hysterical, and the sublimely erotic – hallmarks of most great modern works of art’.63 Tom, when he first responded to Wagner in ‘Opera’ in November 1909, wrote in terms of ‘love torturing itself’. With Laforguian defensiveness his poem reacts with ‘a feeble smile’. Its speaker concludes, ‘I feel like the ghost of youth / At the undertakers’ ball’.64 This tone, in part young and in part beyond all youth, was one he would perfect in other poems. He sought an armature of sophistication that would allow him, like Laforgue, to voice powerful emotion and vulnerability, yet avoid the sentimental. Watching Romeo woo Juliet under ‘a bored but courteous moon’, his ‘Nocturne’, published in the November 1909 Advocate, takes a similar tack. Its mixture of blood, tears and ‘climax’ is mocked through the speaker’s ‘best mode oblique’.65

  His last six months at Harvard saw Tom perfecting his Anglophone French voice. ‘Spleen’ sounds like a title from Baudelaire, but belongs to a poem Tom published in the Advocate in late January. Its first word, ‘Sunday’ (repeated in the second line), was produced, surely, by Laforgue’s several poems entitled ‘Dimanches’ (Sundays), and the ‘fastidious’ figure of ‘Life’ who stands, ‘a little bald and gray’, is Jamesian but also Laforguian, in his ‘tie and suit’, waiting ‘On the doorstep of the Absolute’.66 Tom, too, was waiting, waiting to go. He and Tinckom-Fernandez had encountered ‘in college’ some of the early work of that transplanted American poet, Ezra Pound, who had crossed the Atlantic some years earlier.67 Tom didn’t like it much (it sounded old-fashioned), but did ponder the idea of moving to Europe to write. By the summer he had completed all his coursework, including his final art history course, Florentine Painting, taught by Emerson’s grandson Edward Waldo Forbes, a Europhile Boston Brahmin recently appointed Director of Harvard’s Fogg Museum.

  At Forbes’s lectures Tom took copious notes, not least on the work of Filippo Lippi. Forbes, who had studied English at Oxford and possessed a lifelong interest in poetry, was a shrewd observer of paintings. To sharpen their powers of observation he sent students to look at works in the Fogg and in books. From late February until mid-April 1910 Tom made regular careful pencil sketches of religious images from Italian art. He reproduced two studies of the head of Christ, and of three female saints. He drew the head of a man, after the fifteenth-century Florentine painter Masaccio; and the head of an angel, after Giotto’s La Speranza, as well as the kneeling figure of a neophyte – again after Masaccio. Waldo Forbes kept Tom’s sketches, and later donated them to Harvard. Tom’s written answer to a question asking him to describe a work by the Florentine painter Antonio Pollaiuolo has been preserved: he examines a painting of St Sebastian ‘on a warm light ground’.68 This is the picture (now attributed to Piero del Pollaiuolo) in London’s National Gallery, and later ticked in Tom’s London Baedeker (bought in October 1910).69 It shows a near naked Sebastian tied to a stake and raised aloft, surrounded by archers firing arrows at him. Different from his mother’s pen-portraits of martyrs, yet linked perhaps to that interest in mysticism and strange visions of saints enjoyed by Huysmans and other scandalous French writers, this visual image of the tortured saint would stay with Tom and would soon be supplemented by others. These were images of tormented masculinity.

  Making tiny, nuanced verbal revisions to further comments on Renaissance art (e.g., by scoring out ‘charm’ and substituting ‘interest’), Tom took extensive notes, for instance, on the ‘spiritual sensualism’ of Leonora Buti as seen by Florentine monk-cum-artist Filippo Lippi, ‘The painter of Women’: ‘Leonora was in somewhat the same condition that F had been. Shut up. This was the 1st opportunity she had to gratify her instincts, and she took it. She is supersubtle & delicate, sensual, nervous, languid, the instinct of sex stronger than the instinct of maternity.’ Tom made extended notes as Forbes, mentioning Robert Browning’s poem ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’, lectured about how poetry, repression and sexuality could come together in art.

  I do not think that Browning’s characterization of Filippo gives quite all of the personality which is found in the man’s work. Browning’s Lippo is a sort of jolly Rabelaisian peasant, hating the task of painting saints and saints, longing for freedom and licence. This is true so far as it goes, but the temper of Lippo does not seem to me that of the healthy sensual man of the lower class. True, he was a different man from what he would have been if he had had a normal youth, if he had not been shut up in a monastery at the age of 8, but far from checking and crushing his personality, his misfortune gave him the subtlety and refinement which take him out of the rank of a mere genre painter, and gave his sensuality its
peculiar interest. It is not the splendid sensuality of the Venetians, nor the stolid bestiality of Rubens, but the morbid and maladif craving of the enforced monk. Filippo is very emotional, & interested in his own emotions: that gives us the feeling of a personal, self conscious confession. His emotions have the refinement of Angelico’s, but lacking Angelico’s idealism, they are turned in on themselves.70

  Fascinated by the intense self-consciousness of Laforgue, Tom wrote all this down carefully. Obsessed with women who talk of Renaissance art, yet turned in on himself, J. Alfred Prufrock would soon articulate his own ‘morbid and maladif [sickly] craving’.

  Suddenly Tom himself was ill. His father wrote anxiously to his uncle, Thomas Lamb Eliot, on 12 May: Tom had been hospitalised in Cambridge. He had suspected scarlet fever, said to have reached epidemic proportions in Boston. In distant St Louis his parents were desperate for information: ‘Lottie goes to Boston tonight.’71 Tom lay in Harvard’s Stillman Infirmary, which had its own quarantine facility. Scarlet fever was potentially fatal. His brother Henry had been left partially deaf after contracting this disease in childhood. Yet apart from the awful matter of having to confront the possibility of dying, the worst that happened to Tom, who weathered the storm, was that he missed his concluding examinations in English 14, Fine Arts 20b and French 17. Special arrangements were made for him to receive final grades.72 About a month after he was released from hospital in Cambridge, he wrote a poem about a fearful ‘Silence’ linked to ‘the ultimate hour’. It was not ostensibly autobiographical, but its account of being ‘terrified’ at having to face up to an absolute ‘peace’ registers emotional disturbance.73