The midnight shakes my memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.64
No one had written like that in English before. The geranium was Laforgue’s. A sworl of exciting ideas and images surrounded Tom, and he was able to synthesise many of them in startling combinations. Undergirded by all his American reading and experiences, this was the making of him, the making of his style.
Alain-Fournier urged him to read recent French poetry by the Catholic poet Paul Claudel. Also verse by Charles Péguy, as well as prose by André Gide and Dostoevsky. ‘Under his [Alain-Fournier’s] instigation’, he read Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov ‘in the French translation during the course of that winter’. They ‘profoundly impressed’ him, and he ‘had read them all before Prufrock was completed’.65 Sometimes it can seem that all he did in Paris was read. Yet the city showed him how literature and cultural values were intermixed. Such fusion impressed him: ‘in 1910 I remember the camelots cheering the cuirassiers who were sent to disperse them, because they represented the Army, all the time that they were trying to stampede their horses’.66 This is a reference to a near riot at the Théâtre de l’Odéon, not far from Tom’s lodgings, on 3 November 1910 when the young dramatist René Fauchois criticised Racine in a public lecture, and there were street demonstrations by the Camelots du Roi who championed the traditionalist nationalist beliefs of the faction known as L’Action Française. Tom, receiving some informal ‘leçons de philosophie’ from Alain-Fournier, read a good deal of the writings of Charles Maurras, anti-Semitic intellectual leader of L’Action Française. Maurras’s L’Avenir de l’Intelligence was on Tom’s 1911 bookshelf.67
This pessimistic, anti-Romantic work saw literary intellectuals as increasingly enslaved by a sterile capitalist society. To Tom, in flight from America’s version of such a society, it spoke compellingly. Its influence (‘l’importante influence’) has been traced on The Waste Land and elsewhere.68 During 1913 Maurras would be defined in the Nouvelle Revue Française (which had published criticism of his views) as ‘classique, catholique, monarchique’; fifteen years later, Tom used those terms of himself.69 His interest in Maurras was one of many traits he shared with Jean Verdenal who, a fellow medical student recalled, ‘took a small interest, literary and political in Charles Maurras and his Action Française. He may have been inclined to be monarchist theor[et]ically, but not to take part in this extremist movement.’70 Verdenal’s interest in Maurras was at once thoroughly French, yet also in some ways consonant with Tom’s familial conservatism.
Maurras’s vision of a great tradition of European culture impressed this young American. He paid tribute to Maurras for much of his life, addressing him later (as his supporters did) as ‘Cher Maître’.71 He knew Maurras had precious little liking for foreigners (of whom Tom was one) and virulently detested Jews.72 Deeply attached to what he told Tom were ‘les qualités les plus françaises de subtilité, de grâce et d’héroisme’, yet also with a background as an ‘internationaliste’, Alain-Fournier borrowed Tom’s English-language books. He spoke with him about the novel he was writing, Le Grand Meaulnes, a lyrical account of lost youth, a paradisal French milieu and an unattainable woman. Tom, ‘tres jeune et gauche’ (very young and gauche), and a person for whom all women were as yet sexually unattainable, was profoundly impressed. He was also conscious that Alain-Fournier had in him an increasing resentment towards Germany.73 Aided by Alain-Fournier’s tuition, Tom’s French was improving rapidly. He could read almost non-stop.
By the end of his year in Paris he was being addressed by Alain-Fournier in customary French style as ‘Mon cher ami’.74 Jean Verdenal used the identical form of address and became an even closer friend. Twenty-year-old Verdenal was a doctor’s son from the small, historic medieval city of Pau in the Pyrenees, about thirty miles from the Spanish border. Birthplace of France’s King Henry IV, whose fourteenth-century chateau dominated the town, Pau throughout Jean Verdenal’s boyhood had been a favourite resort for British, American and other tourists. Thanks to the late-twentieth-century detective work of George Watson and Claudio Perinot, we know Verdenal excelled at school there. Sporty, clever, he had been considered delicate and introverted as a boy. Well read in English and German, he had read Dante in French, learning passages by heart. He loved poetry and, like Tom, had ‘a remarkable knowledge of things cultural’. Surviving books from his library include volumes by Laforgue, Mallarmé, Gide and Claudel, as well as Charles-Louis Philippe’s La mère et l’enfant, a work Tom read too after Verdenal recommended it. When Verdenal, who had travelled little, came to the French capital as a provincial in his late teens to study medicine at the Sorbonne, he lodged with old family friends, the Casaubons. Gradually he began to love Paris. He attended art exhibitions, plays and concerts; Wagner was an especial favourite. He liked discussing philosophy with fellow lodgers and, like Tom, went to Bergson’s lectures. Brought up to be patriotic, he was interested in Maurras, but ‘didn’t think of him as a model leader’. Psychology, philosophy and poetry fascinated him; he read William James. Long afterwards, his nephew recalled him as ‘a kind of mystic, not the Saint Catherine type of course, but he did have a strong inner life, a personal spiritual life. He was a profound believer and rather shunned the exterior rites of religion.’75
This was the man who became Tom’s closest friend. Each was haunted by passages in Laforgue, by Bergson, by Wagner, by Maurras. Each combined a serious intellectualism and formality with a wryly amused take on life. Inked in his clear, never florid hand, this young Frenchman’s surviving letters to Tom are always signed ‘Jean Verdenal’. Occasionally they contain tiny changes (such as replacing ‘habitude’ (custom) with ‘études’ (studies)) which suggest a fine sense of verbal nuance; only once, on a scribbled postcard, does he sign himself simply ‘Jean’.76 If Laforgue, amalgamating improbable materials, was ‘fascinated’ (as Tom later remarked) not just by the alluring English governess he married but also ‘by the Kantian pseudo-Buddhism of Schopenhauer’, then the student Verdenal could tell Tom about whores’ supple busts and a glimpse of shapely leg through the slit of a fashionable split skirt; yet he might also shoot the breeze in a letter mixing almost mystical rhetoric with amusing trivia:
l’histoire conte que le terrible Schopenhauer en était fort amateur. Il jouait aussi de la clarinette, mais c’était peut-être pour embêter ses voisins. Voilà bien assez de choses pour nous rattacher à la vie. La volonté de vivre est mauvaise, cause de désirs et de peines mais la bière est appréciable – et l’on continue. O! Raison.
history tells us that the formidable Schopenhauer was a great beer-lover. He also played the clarinet, but perhaps that was just to annoy his neighbours. Such things are quite enough to make us cling to life. The will to live is evil, a source of desires and sufferings, but beer is not to be despised – and so we carry on. O Reason!77
Unlike other lodgers, such as the sometimes boring Prichard, Verdenal combined brilliance with fun. None of Tom’s Harvard companions had been on his wavelength in quite the same way: Harold Peters was great company on a boat, but hardly the man for Laforgue. Verdenal came from another country. He spoke another language. Yet those things made him all the more valuable as a friend. He’d wander downstairs to Tom’s room in his slippers, collarless, in an old jacket, ready to chat about anything: anything, usually, except his medical studies. Often those seemed to interest him less than literature and philosophical speculations.
Later, it would be suggested by some commentators that Tom and Verdenal had been lovers. They were close, kindred spirits. Tom, at least, was so clever and complicated that he almost never found a kindred spirit, which made this friendship, so unexpected and strong, matter all the more. They went walking together, sometimes with Prichard and with Harrison Bird Child, that old acquaintance of Tom’s from Milton and Harvard, who was studying during 1910–11 in England. They strolled among the trees at the large parklands of Saint Cloud a few miles along the Seine.
78 They talked culture and philosophy. But there is no evidence that Tom and Jean Verdenal slept together or even that their mutual attraction was essentially homoerotic. Certainly they liked each other enough to be daft with one another. Spotting Verdenal outside in the garden, Tom ‘threw a lump of sugar at him’.79 The two students went on corresponding after Tom left Paris, and some of the daftness lingered. The Frenchman sometimes felt trapped in a Pension Casaubon time-warp: ‘everything is just the same (this evening, for the 2474th time, I shall see Madame Casaubon hold her napkin between her chin and her chest as her wrinkled hands mix the salad)’.80
These student friends shared hopes and dreams. At times, despite their different native languages, they even seem to share turns of phrase: Verdenal’s ‘Ce n’est pas facile de se faire comprendre’ sounds almost like a recollection of Tom’s ‘It is impossible to say just what I mean’ from his Prufrock poem.81 There is no evidence that Tom showed Verdenal his verse, but he kept his French friend’s letters and occasionally a usage or a phrase in them seems to anticipate his own later work: Verdenal’s ‘C’est un homme charmant’ (used of Harvard philosopher B. A. G. Fuller), for instance, becomes Tom’s ‘“He is a charming man”’ in ‘Mr. Apollinax’, a poem based on incidents at Fuller’s Massachusetts home.82 Tom’s friendship with Verdenal may have been the closest friendship he ever enjoyed with another man. It stayed with him particularly intensely for a terrible reason. In 1934, recalling that year in Paris, Tom confessed ‘that my own retrospect is touched by a sentimental sunset, the memory of a friend coming across the Luxembourg Gardens in the late afternoon, waving a branch of lilac, a friend who was later (so far as I could find out) to be mixed with the mud of Gallipoli’.83
The last letter Tom kept from this friend, who died in the Great War at almost the same age as Jules Laforgue, was sent at the end of 1912. The young Frenchman signed off characteristically: ‘Au revoir, mon cher ami, et bien à vous … J. Verdenal.’84 Five years later, when Tom published his first collection of poems, he added the simple dedication, ‘For Jean Verdenal, 1889–1915’. Some years again after that, he appended to the dedication the words ‘mort aux Dardanelles’, and some lines from Dante’s Purgatorio in which two poets meet in the afterlife. Virgil speaks first to his ‘brother’ (‘Frate’), Statius; then Statius replies:
‘Or puoi la quantitate
comprender dell’ amor ch’a te mi scalda,
quando dismento nostra vanitate,
trattando l’ombre come cosa saldi.’
which Tom translated into prose in 1929 as
‘Now you can understand the quantity of the love that warms me towards you, so that I forget our vanity, and treat the shadows like the solid thing.’85
These Dantescan words are not just a declaration of fraternal love. They state, too, an enduring literary bond.
Tom’s voyage to Paris for that academic year 1910–11 brought him a sense of deep, unexpected personal kinship, but also an excitingly immediate sense of European culture. Like many Americans on a year’s study abroad, he planned several side-trips. During the Christmas vacation he travelled for two weeks, including visits to ‘Poitiers, Angoulême, Toulouse, Albi, Moissac, and other places in the south west’.86 All these towns were on railway lines. Conceivably Tom visited them with his good friend and fellow lodger if Verdenal went home to Pau, about sixty miles from Toulouse. In mid-May 1911 Tom visited Rouen, planning visits to further ‘towns about Paris’.87 By then he had also crossed the English Channel to spend a good deal of the Easter vacation in the city that he had read about in childhood and which would one day become his home. It was the place where Jules Laforgue had married, the metropolis of Dickens and Sherlock Holmes.
‘At London one pretended it was spring’, he wrote to his cousin Eleanor on 26 April. He had returned to Paris the night before, finding a note from her among ‘a pile of letters’. In Paris it was ‘full spring’, but London’s spring had been a mere pretence and ‘one continued to hibernate among the bricks’.88 That last phrase also formed part of his poem, ‘Interlude in London’, written the same month. Christopher Ricks has pointed out this poem shares phrasing with ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, ‘Preludes’ and even, perhaps, The Waste Land, while drawing at times on French poetry.89 Apart from the word ‘London’ in its title, the urban details could come from almost any city. In London, though, Tom went to a number of specifically English churches. Mainly in the financial district – the City – they were mentioned in his Baedeker, and included the Church of St Bartholomew the Great. The Baedeker entry for this carries Tom’s pencilled note ‘St. B. Inscription “John Eliot” gave £30 for the poor.’90 Even here, he was among Eliots.
His letter to Eleanor Hinkley contains a list of places visited that roughly corresponds to a pencilled tally on one of the back pages of his Baedeker. These sites include the ‘National Gallery’, the ‘Brit[ish] Mus[eum]’, ‘S. Kensington’ (i.e. the Victoria and Albert Museum) and the ‘Wallace Collection’.91 Ticks in Tom’s Baedeker suggest his particular interests included the ‘Egyptian Antiquities’ and ‘Religious Collections’ dealing with ‘Early Christianity’ in the British Museum; also rooms XVIII and XIX in the Wallace Collection, which contained respectively ‘a charming series of fêtes champêtres, conversations galantes, pastoral and romantic scenes, etc., by Watteau’, and Fragonard’s painting The Swing in which a man looks up a lady’s skirt as she swings.92 Tom wrote to Eleanor that he had ‘made notes!!’ at the Wallace Collection, but did not say what they were about.93 About five years later, he would write about ‘Priapus … Gaping at the lady in the swing’ in ‘Mr. Apollinax’, and would publish another poem ‘Conversation Galante’.94 Visual images and fragments of text lingered long in his mind. So did snatches of song and music. He always associated this youthful visit to London with Herman Finck’s tune ‘In the Shadows’ which was made popular by a 1911 show featuring the glamorous Palace Girls at the Palace Theatre.95
In London, despite cool weather, he spent much time outdoors. He perused the banking hub, ‘The City – Thoroughly’, and mentioned to Eleanor ‘Whitechapel (note: Jews)’. Perhaps the anti-Semitism of Maurras’s Paris made him all the more alert to Whitechapel’s Jewish presence, though visitors often noted it. At London Zoo he ‘gave the apterix a bun’; fond of the word ‘apterix’ (kiwi bird), years later he signed a review ‘T. S. Apteryx’.96 London offered music-hall treats: while Tom was there, George Robey was performing at the Empire Theatre, and Marie Lloyd at the Pavilion.97 As well as visiting the zoo, he went to Cricklewood – in those days a semi-rural village on the Edgware Road, though already on its way to becoming a suburb. Maybe, as with ‘apterix’, he simply liked the sound of the name; or perhaps he went because, though easily accessible, Cricklewood was not a place mentioned by Baedeker.
I made a pilgrimage to Cricklewood. ‘Where is Cricklewood?’ said an austere Englishman at the hotel. I produced a map and pointed to the silent evidence that Cricklewood exists. He pondered. ‘But why go to Cricklewood?’ he flashed out at length. Here I was triumphant. ‘There is no reason!’ I said. He had no more to say. But he was relieved (I am sure) when he found that I was American. He felt no longer responsible. But Cricklewood is mine. I discovered it. No one will go there again.98
Cheered by this exotic English adventure, and safely back in Paris, he planned further foreign trips: ‘After the middle of June I shall go to Munich for some time, to study German. I hope to spend a few weeks, at least, in Italy.’99
When he reached Munich in July, he found another great city of European culture. Its Maximilianstrasse, a broad, tree-lined royal avenue whose monumental buildings led the eye towards the heroically imposing Maximilianeum across the River Isar, was one of the Continent’s grandest streets. In London Tom had stayed in a hotel. Here in this Bavarian capital of 600,000 people he had arranged lodgings in a boarding house, the Pension Bürger, which occupied two storeys at 50 Luisenstrasse. On the half mile or so journey fr
om the main railway station to this address visitors passed the 765-foot long Glaspalast; opened in 1854, it was modelled on London’s Crystal Palace. Munich was full of palatial architecture. Beyond the Glaspalast was the imposing Basilika St Bonifaz (built in imitation of an early Christian basilica). Tom’s lodgings were close to a great Corinthian-style art gallery opposite the magnificent marble halls of the Ionic Glyptothek (sculpture-hall), built for King Ludwig I of Bavaria to house classical statuary. ‘A walk through Munich’, the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica article about that city proclaimed, ‘affords a picture of the architecture and art of two thousand years’. From the Luisenstrasse one could walk along Briennerstrasse, passing through a great stone gateway in the Propyläen (built to imitate a temple on the Athenian acropolis) to the massive Residenz (Palace) complex of the Bavarian monarchs. The Arcades to the west and north of the Hofgarten with its several open-air cafes contained one-hundred-twenty-five pier-arches and had been adorned with frescoes, including Joseph Rottmann’s Italian landscape pictures depicting classical ruins – a veritable ‘Ruinenpanorama’, to use a word that circulated in the Munich of July 1911 – though when Tom visited they were in poor condition.100
So was he. ‘In Munich’, he recalled during a later bout of low blood pressure, ‘in 1911’ he had experienced ‘cerebral anaemia’.101 At its worst, this disease is fatal. Usually accompanied by intense diarrhoea, dizziness, faintness and pallor as well as some mental confusion and general sensation of physical weakness, the illness in its milder forms (which seems to have been what Tom suffered) can be treated with drugs backed up by healthy eating, fresh air and exercise. ‘Most unpleasant’, he later summed up his ordeal.102 Following not so long after scarlet fever, this was the second time in just over a year that he had contracted a potentially life-threatening disease. Being ill alone in a foreign city is never easy. Yet for Tom it coincided with a poetic breakthrough. Later in life he came to suspect that sickness and poetic creativity could be linked. During his stay in Munich he completed his first great poem.
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