Young Eliot

by Robert Crawford

  Yet at the Pension Casaubon Tom grew close not so much to fellow Americans as to a French lodger who remarked with a certain sarcasm how ‘Monsieur Dana en tressaillerait derrière ses lorgnons d’or’ (Monsieur Dana would shudder behind his gold pince-nez). This French medical student, Jean Jules Verdenal, found Prichard boring, prone to being taken in by charlatans. Verdenal joked with Tom about these visiting, apparently gay aesthetes, but it would be wrong to assume Verdenal was either homophobic or anti-American; likewise, it would be naïve to decide that Verdenal, who could use expressions in letters to Tom such as ‘Cher ami, je vous serre la main’ (Dear friend, I shake your hand), was homosexual.33 He was a young Frenchman of 1910, who spoke, behaved and wrote as one; in his letters to Tom he used the more formal ‘vous’ (you), rather than the more intimate ‘tu’. Tom, eager to become as much of a young Frenchman of 1910 as he could, found Jean Verdenal the best of companions. He was delighted by how much they shared – from a taste for Laforgue’s poetry to philosophical interests, and from tentative habits of mind to astutely ironic observations. Verdenal had friends in Parisian literary circles, and knew such young writers as Jacques Rivière, brother-in-law of the aspiring novelist Alain-Fournier. Remarkably, right here in his lodgings, Tom had found a soulmate.

  Even if, in response to his former professor’s request, he sent back to Harvard’s Edward Waldo Forbes a catalogue from the Trocadéro and offered him brochures from the Luxembourg Museum, Tom had come to Paris to loosen his ties with New England. Situated a short stroll from the Sorbonne and the Collège de France, the Pension Casaubon welcomed Americans, but was most attractive when most Parisian. At 151 bis rue Saint-Jacques it stood between a poultry shop and a café-restaurant. The restaurateur liked to set out chairs and tables on the pavement. Above the Pension’s doorway was a balcony with an ornamental wrought-iron railing. A street lamp stood right beside the front door, and at night, when in this part of Paris (as a fellow lodger put it) one could hear at ten o’clock ‘all the bells in the area … ringing and, almost at the same time … a tinkling of fairly distant chimes, soon blotted out by the measured pealing of a deeper bell’, the Pension Casaubon’s street lamp lit up rows of plucked fowls hanging in the adjoining poulterer’s window.34

  To come from the ‘village’ of Cambridge to Paris, a capital city of 3,000,000 people still substantially bounded by its ancient city walls, was wonderful. Aged twenty-two, Tom was just a year older than the Eiffel Tower. Four years earlier, not far from his lodgings, Rodin’s famous statue, The Thinker, had been set up outside the Panthéon. The area around the Pension Casaubon was steeped in several nations’ history. Just off the rue Saint-Jacques (an ancient pilgrim route) was the church of St Séverin, its stained glass depicting the murder of England’s St Thomas à Becket; near Tom’s pension, in the direction of the River Seine, was the medieval rue de Bièvre where Dante (said to have attended lectures nearby) was reputed to have written some of his Divine Comedy. Walking by the Seine, Tom could catch a glimpse of ‘Anatole France’; then in his mid-sixties, this writer had produced his earliest work while Baudelaire was still alive.35 The American student liked to saunter in the ‘Luxembourg Gardens’ near the place Edmond-Rostand, a few hundred yards downhill from his lodgings. There, as young ‘Uncle Tom’ (aka ‘L’Oncle Tom’) explained to his six-year-old niece Theodora, children sailed boats in a pond, spun tops and rolled hoops in ‘a sort of park like the Boston Public Gardens’.36 Sketching French infants surrounding him as he bowed, he sent his scribbles to Theodora, who preserved them. She liked Uncle Tom.

  The Pension Casaubon was close to both the Collège de France with its imposing statue of Dante, and the Sorbonne, one of the world’s oldest universities. Intellectually, Tom found himself at an intersection between ideas emanating from both insitutions. ‘At the Sorbonne’, where he was now a student, ‘the sociologists, Durkheim, Lévy-Bruhl’, he observed, ‘held new doctrines’.37 The great Jewish thinker Émile Durkheim, a Sorbonne star, established sociology as a fully-fledged academic discipline. He stressed that individuals were bound to a greater cultural whole, a tradition, though in Europe this bond had been weakened by Christianity’s decay. Durkheim had studied at Marburg in Germany; his work’s philosophical underpinnings drew on epistemological as well as anthropological thought. From 1906 onwards in his Sorbonne lectures Durkheim outlined the matter of his last great book, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912), which Tom would read in French. Reviewing its 1918 English translation shortly before writing ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, he described it as ‘intensely interesting’, not least for its ideas about ‘“group-consciousness’’’.38

  Durkheim’s Sorbonne colleague, philosophy professor Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, was also concerned with epistemology, anthropology and religion; in 1910 he published Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures, arguing that there was a separation between the mentality of ‘savages’ and that of modern civilised people. Soon Tom took issue with this: Lévy-Bruhl ‘appears to me to draw the distinction between primitive and civilized mental process altogether too clearly’.39 Following those intellectual currents, familiar at Harvard, which linked anthropological thinking to literature, Tom’s greatest poetry would juxtapose modern-day life with the rituals of societies supposedly ‘inférieures’. Though the Sorbonne’s records of his studies do not survive, he encountered the work of its leading thinkers. He mentioned once working on ‘un travail de quelque envergure que je désirais présenter à l’Université’ (a project of some magnitude that I wanted to submit to the university).40

  At that time, he thought, ‘[Pierre] Janet was the great psychologist.’41 A correspondent of William James, Janet had lectured at Harvard Medical School on hysteria in 1906, and coined the terms ‘subconscious’ and ‘dissociation’ (indicating a psychological detachment from reality). Tom, soon to write a poem called ‘Hysteria’, would adopt and adapt the word ‘dissociation’ when, a decade later, he argued that English poetry suffered from a ‘dissociation of sensibility’.42 These Sorbonne thinkers were an important stimulus for his reading about the intersection between religious mysticism, asceticism and hysteria in ‘primitive’ and modern life. Among his student notes a substantial reading list of works in French and English contains nothing published later than Edward Scribner Ames’s The Psychology of Religious Experience (1910); almost all the books Tom listed are in the Sorbonne’s library. His notes from Janet’s 1898 Névroses et Idées Fixes include (from Volume II) a summary of ‘Observation 95. Woman who showed hereditary traces of hysteria’, and cover such topics as hearing voices in different languages and links between sexual pathology and religious rapture. Tom, whose first collection of poems would be made up of ‘Observations’, noted down, too, details of articles by Maxime Bernier de Montmorand in the Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger between 1903 and 1905 with titles such as ‘L’érotomanie des mystiques chrétiens’. These studies investigated the relationship between asceticism, mysticism and sexual ecstasy. At least one of them argued with the work of ‘M. le Dr Pierre Janet’ on ‘les hystériques’ and on those described as ‘abouliques’. Tom jotted down the relevance of this ‘to Janet’ and ‘aboulie theories’.43 This material and terminology would haunt him.

  While these might seem weirdly arcane interests, connections between erotomania and Christian mysticism were also part of the most exciting avant-garde culture Paris had to offer. They not only featured in Janet’s lectures but, as Nancy Hargrove points out, were seen also on stage in May 1911 when the Théâtre du Châtelet premiered a shocking five-hour extravaganza, Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien, which became ‘the talk of Paris’. With a script by Gabriele d’Annunzio, specially composed music by Debussy, choreography by Mikhail Fokine and costumes by Leon Bakst, its star was Jewish Russian ballerina Ida Rubenstein. She had played Cleopatra in a Ballets Russes production the previous year. Now, cross-dressing, she was Saint Sebastian, dancing ecstatically over burn
ing coals, her ultimate fate to be bound to a tree and martyred by being shot full of arrows. This Sebastian was, one reviewer wrote, ‘a woman with a supple and voluptuous body of pale and gleaming flesh who portrays, in languid and sensual dances, the Stations of the Cross’ in ‘a savage, insane, but very impressive work of art, which produces piercing sensations, divine or diabolical, in our minds’. Jean Cocteau put it more succinctly, ‘She is delicious.’44

  The Pope had just proscribed d’Annunzio’s works. In Sebastian the erotically excited and anthropologically-informed Italian playwright sought to fuse, as he put it, ‘Christian myth’ with ‘the beautiful wounded god’ Adonis. ‘Let me know your love / again, in the arrows’, Sebastian begs the archers. The archbishop of Paris denounced the play, threatening Catholics with excommunication if they went to see it. The row became a public scandal. Le Figaro published a cartoon on 25 May depicting a fashionably dressed young woman confessing to a priest that she has seen the drama. ‘Combien de fois?’ he asks her – ‘How many times?’45 Tom enjoyed Parisian theatre, seeing, for instance, a performance of Les Frères Karamazov at the Théâtre des Arts that spring. Whether or not he attended Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien, he surely knew about it, and had previously described Pollaiuolo’s St Sebastian. Three years later, writing to Conrad Aiken (who had also been in Paris in 1911), enclosing his poem of erotic violence ‘The Love Song of St Sebastian’, Tom asked, ‘no one ever painted a female Sebastian, did they?’46

  Though no match for d’Annunzio’s wild eroticism, the Collège de France nonetheless attracted large audiences – including Parisians who were not students – thanks to the sheer excitement of its lectures. Alfred Loisy, its professor of religion, had been excommunicated recently by the Pope for implying the Catholic Church had betrayed Jesus Christ. ‘Loisy’, Tom recalled, ‘enjoyed his somewhat scandalous distinction’.47 Even more popular were the Collège de France lectures of Durkheim’s old classmate, Bergson, whom Tom remembered as a ‘spider-like figure’ dangling above Parisian intellectual life.48 Crowds flocked to Bergson’s lectures, so to secure a seat Tom needed to arrive early. He took out his squared-paper exercise book (map of France on the back, illustration of the Paris Odéon on the front), and inked on its cover in block capitals, ‘BERGSON = VENDREDI’. Every Friday in January and February (and perhaps later too, though only these jottings survive), he took notes in French as Bergson discussed ‘la psychologie’ and ‘la personnalité’. Fundamental to these lectures was David Hume’s sense of the self not as singular and fixed, but made up of fleeting impressions. Bergson quoted Hume in English, and Tom wrote down the words, ‘I always stumble on some particular perception. I never can catch myself.’ Though Bergson went on to contend that ‘La question de l’unité ou la multiplicité de la vie de la personnalité n’est pas une question vitale’ (The question of the unity or multiplicity of the life of the personality is not a vital question), and passed on to Kantian ideas of personality, that notion of the self as fragmentary and in flux would pervade Tom’s poetry.49

  He was far from the only clever Harvard man excited by Bergson’s rhetoric. In a piece in the 1909 Hibbert Journal (a magazine Tom sometimes read), William James had enthused about the ‘lucidity’ of Bergson’s style: ‘It seduces you and bribes you to become his disciple. It is a miracle, and he a real magician.’ Harvard enthusiasm for Bergson was part (though only part) of what made Tom so keen to reach Paris in 1910. Iconoclastically, this French philosopher challenged the supremacy of the intellect, and the belief ‘that fixity is a nobler and worthier thing than change’. Emphasising the vital ‘flux of life’, Bergson, explained James, argued that ‘Thought deals … solely with surfaces. It can name the thickness of reality, but it cannot fathom it.’ You must ‘Dive back into the flux itself, then, Bergson tells us, if you want to know reality.’ With regard to past, present and future as well as other supposedly different categories, Bergson’s philosophy in Matter and Memory and Creative Evolution (both of which Tom read eagerly in French) ‘presents, as if they were dissolved in each other, a lot of differents which retrospective conception breaks life’s flow by keeping apart’. Like Tom for a time at least, James was captivated. ‘Open Bergson, and new horizons open on every page you read. It is like the breath of the morning and the song of birds. It tells of reality itself, instead of reiterating what dusty-minded professors have written about what other previous professors have thought.’50 Sitting in Bergson’s presence, Tom felt the full force of this almost messianic figure. He experienced a ‘conversion’. It would only be ‘temporary’.51

  By the time he listened to Bergson, his French had improved. He was greatly assisted by a private tutor, recently married Henri Alain-Fournier, the brilliant young writer who lived with his wife at 2 rue Cassini in Montparnasse. To reach their house Tom headed southwards about half a mile along the rue Saint-Jacques. Just two years his senior, Alain-Fournier was at the heart of Parisian literary life. So was his twenty-four-year-old friend and brother-in-law, Jacques Rivière, whom Tom also visited ‘chez lui’ (at his home), who had recently begun to write for La Nouvelle Revue Française, and who knew Tom’s fellow-lodger Verdenal.52 ‘Gauche’ Tom had published nothing outside school and student magazines.53 Yet these young men, virtually his own age, were already writing for leading publications in Paris, a city whose international ‘predominance’ in literature was then, he was sure, ‘incontestable’.54 Observing and listening to them, he learned not just how to improve his French but also how to raise his game.

  He eyed not only the internationally-minded Nouvelle Revue Française, to which he soon subscribed, but also other journals including the philosophically and socially engaged Les Cahiers de la Quinzaine with its stark ‘cover of austere grey paper’.55 This was a world away from the Harvard Advocate. Yet Alain-Fourier, whom he recalled as a ‘quiet-spoken, witty, elegant young man, who spoke with real conviction of his ambition to write a great novel in the tradition of the established French masters’, had a combination of ambition, sense of tradition (he made Tom ‘recite passages from the classics’ of French literature) and apparent reticence that came close to aspects of Tom’s own personality.56 Tom was given suggestions about what to read: not older French classics, but recent work which, like Laforgue’s poetry, helped show this young American writer how he might draw on aspects of what he knew already. ‘When I came first to Paris’, he recalled, ‘I first read Bubu de Montparnasse.’ This relatively little-known novel of slum life by Charles-Louis Philippe became for him ‘a symbol of the Paris of that time’ and was admired by Alain-Fournier and Rivière.57 Around December 1910 when Tom’s ‘Fourth Caprice in North Cambridge’ became ‘Fourth Caprice in Montparnasse’, he had begun (he recalled) to work together some earlier fragments into a poem involving the name ‘Prufrock’. Featuring a walk through run-down urban streets of the sort familiar to him from America, ‘Prufrock’s Pervigilium’ may feature American-sounding ‘drugstores’, but its sense of ‘narrow streets’, ‘evil houses’ and ‘Women, spilling out of corsets’ who ‘stood in entries / Where the draughty gas-jet flickered/ And the oil cloth curled up stairs’ owes debts also to Bubu’s Paris.58 Tom’s French ‘romantic year’ (as he later termed it) was not ‘romantic’ in the usual sense.59 It left us no poetic descriptions of the Eiffel Tower or kisses in the Champs Élysées. Instead, it helped him incorporate into poetry vignettes of a kind of life he had seen in the alleys of America as well as on the lanes of Montparnasse. It helped him, too, to draw less on the ‘romantic’ itself than on intense anxieties about it.

  Ultimately, Tom became a great poet through learning how to access and articulate unforgettably the wide spectrum of his inner life, his experience and his voracious reading. He learned to face up to and make poetry out of his own hurts, but gave his material a wider resonance through blending it with what he read. Apparently completed in Paris in 1910, the third of his ‘Preludes’ carries an epigraph from Bubu, and steals Philippe’s ‘sordid images’
, including ‘the yellow soles of feet’. Bubu, along with Philippe’s Marie Donadieu, which Tom read in 1911, also haunts ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’.60 That poem features a ‘street-lamp’ that ‘sputtered’ and ‘muttered’, calling attention to an inviting yet intimidating woman of the night, ‘the corner of her eye’ twisting ‘like a crooked pin’.61 Tom missed female company acutely in Paris; though he conversed with women there, he knew none well, and certainly, as he made clear three years later to Aiken, he did not sleep with any of them. Instead, feeling intensely self-conscious, in ‘Paris’ he suffered from ‘nervous sexual attacks’.62 He attempted to ward these off at times with over-compensatory imaginative bravado. Some fragments, later excised from his notebook but apparently penned in late 1910 begin:

  There was a jolly tinker came across the sea

  With his four and twenty inches hanging to his knee

  Chorus With his long-pronged hongpronged

  Underhanded babyfetcher

  Hanging to his knee.

  Tom might delight in such an imagined sexual epic, but in his less rowdy poems he investigated more anxious aspects of sexuality, psychology and modern life.63 Completed in March 1911, his ‘Rhapsody’, in which ‘the floors of the memory’ are made to ‘Dissolve’, fuses Bergsonian flux with precise, sometimes sexualised images of nocturnal streets. Its crazy synaesthesia, perhaps drawing on Janet’s psychology, ranges far beyond the street lamp that stood outside the Pension Casaubon:

  Every street lamp that I pass

  Beats like a fatalistic drum

  And through the spaces of the dark