Young Eliot

by Robert Crawford

  It deals with weakness. Some of its fragmentary drafts mention ‘nausea’ and even ‘Madness’. However, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ is not directly autobiographical; nor is it set in Munich.103 Tom appears to have brought with him the notebook he had bought in Gloucester, and copied into it extended sections – at one time, perhaps, intended as separate poems – that drew on earlier fragments. This way of hoarding bits of older material, then piecing them together, would become a compositional strategy. Schooled but not confined by Laforgue’s style, his new poem with its generalised yet tellingly memorable cityscape of ‘restless nights in one-night cheap hotels / And sawdust restaurants with oyster shells’ tosses and turns restlessly. It presents a masculinity hampered by incisive self-consciousness and inhibition.

  Three titles were in play: ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, ‘Prufrock among the Women’ and ‘Prufrock’s Pervigilium’. Eventually Tom spliced together what may have started life as at least two different related works. In draft his first line began with ‘…’ Those dots sent a signal at the very start of hesitancy and, perhaps, of something ending before it had even begun. The final version, not published until 1915, four years after he completed it at the age of twenty-two, begins more confidently.

  Let us go then, you and I,

  When the evening is spread out against the sky

  Like a patient etherised upon a table …104

  That ‘Let us go’, which so soon lapses into an unforgettable image of illness and paralysis, may owe nothing specifically to Tom’s illnesses in Harvard’s Stillman Infirmary or in Munich with its ‘Lazarett’ (hospital). Boston’s Ether Monument is surely present in the background. But this poem of a man who fantasises about saying, ‘“I am Lazarus, come from the dead / Come back to tell you all”’, yet who cannot bring himself to behave with any assurance in his obsessive, nervously imagined interactions with women, may draw more deeply on Tom’s own lack of achieved love life. Several years later, he was still worrying in a letter to Conrad Aiken (one of the earliest readers of the unpublished Prufrock poem) about sexual anxiety and about not having lost his virginity. ‘The thing is to be able to look at one’s life as if it were somebody’s else’, he wrote around that time to Aiken.105 The ‘Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ constructs a voice and state of mind which, however much the poem draws nutrients from other poets’ voices, bravely confronts, mines and metamorphoses anxieties that lay deep within Tom and may lie within some of his audience. With its speaker who is at once intimate with the reader yet afflicted by seeming cut off from life, Prufrock’s ‘Love Song’ is one of the bravest poems about gender ever authored.

  The male speaker, worried he will be perceived (especially by women) in terms of his thinning hair, thin arms and thin legs, is afflicted by a sense of how ‘I grow old … I grow old…’ Yet many readers sense it as a young man’s poem, a staged yet secret utterance by a speaker disconcertingly articulate about his tongue-tiedness. Echoing with overheard and imagined comments from women much more assured and sophisticated, it ends with an over-protested attempt to look fashionably attractive – ‘I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach’. There is a vision of alluring, unattainable and dangerous mermaids, then death by water. The poem’s last word is ‘drown’.106 Furnished with lines from Dante’s Inferno which, ironically or otherwise, add to its cultural resonance, this ‘Love Song’ requires no biographical knowledge of its author. Yet, like most hypnotically alluring poems, it is powered by real emotion. Anyone with an interest in its young poet may be tempted to recall several photographs in which he looks thin; in at least one he appears to be wearing white flannel trousers.

  Responding to enquiries decades afterwards, Tom made clear that ‘The poem of Prufrock was conceived some time in 1910’, though it may have drawn on some ‘earlier fragments’ written before he went to Paris; it was ‘not completed until the summer of 1911’; he finished it ‘in Munich’.107 In the cosmopolitan Bavarian capital, as in Paris, he was in a city where sex was on display as it was not in Cambridge or Boston. The conventional artists in a huge exhibition shown all that summer at the Glaspalast offered many titillating female nudes; avant-garde painters, some of whom were about to exhibit in the famous Blue Rider show later that year, went much further. Franz Marc, photographed drawing the reclining naked Marie Schnür outdoors on a grassy slope, was only one of Munich’s artistic figures famous for their sexual explicitness. 1910’s ‘Bachusfest in Old Rome’, held in a local brewery, had resulted in photographs of happily naked revellers: a sometimes orgiastic, sometimes lyrical eroticism was part of the temper of this city where the reputedly mad King Ludwig II (before drowning in the nearby Starnbergersee) had been Wagner’s greatest patron.108 ‘Try, if possible, to hear something by Wagner in Munich’, urged Jean Verdenal, who had just enjoyed Götterdämmerung in Paris. Verdenal’s view of Tristan und Isolde, he explained to Tom later, was that it ‘is terribly moving at the first hearing, and leaves you prostrate with ecstasy and thirsting to get back to it again’.109

  Suffering from cerebral anaemia, Tom may or may not have been in the mood for Tristan. However, the Pension Bürger was just round the corner from Richard-Wagner-Strasse, and it was impossible to walk around 1911 Munich without being aware of the city’s erotically-supercharged artistic atmosphere. Tom pencilled the date ‘July 1911’ on his ‘Ballade pour la grosse Lulu’. That poem juxtaposes actual or supposed reports about Harvard’s President Eliot and others from the worthy American Christian periodical The Outlook with much more shocking shenanigans associated with ‘Lulu’ – a name made scandalous throughout Munich and the rest of the German-speaking world by Frank Wedekind’s fin de siècle plays about a sexually provocative dancer: ‘But, My Lulu, “Put on your Rough Red Drawers / And come to the Whore House Ball”’, reads Tom’s markedly un-Prufrockian refrain.110 Though he never succeeded in publishing this piece, at some point (maybe later) he came up with an arresting rhyme for a German city’s main railway station – ‘Hauptbahnhof’. Turning that word into a ‘frightful cry’ of sexual excitement, he rhymed it, a little clumsily but in a style of which avant-garde Munich might have been proud, with ‘pulled her stockings off’.111 Ironically, the highly sexed Munich milieu may have heightened and crystalised J. Alfred Prufrock’s memorable sexual anxieties.

  Fresh air, good food and exercise were recommended to anaemics, and one of the ‘most popular excursions from Munich’ at the time was to the thirteen-mile long Starnbergersee, Germany’s greatest lake. In those days it was accessible by rail from Munich’s Hauptbahnhof in well under an hour. Especially beautiful in summer, it lay calm in front of the mountains beyond.112 Perhaps in July 1911, though we do not know when or how, Tom met Marie Larisch, one of whose titles was Countess of Munich.113 A remembered conversation with this middle-aged aristocrat, unhappy in her marriage and associated with sexual scandal, would be recalled, mixed with other memories and desires, in the first section of The Waste Land.

  Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee

  With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,

  And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,

  And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.

  Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.

  And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke’s,

  My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,

  And I was frightened. He said, Marie,

  Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.

  In the mountains, there you feel free.

  I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.114

  Readers sometimes ignore the punctuation of these lines: it is not the peo-ple but the summer that (as in 1911) is ‘coming over the Starnbergersee / With a shower of rain’. The people, making the most of sunshine, coffee and conversation, are where Tom was – in Munich.

  Recovered, he headed south about a hundred and fifty miles from Bavaria
to northern Italy. Guided by his own earlier studies and probably by advice from the Byzantinist Prichard, he travelled for about two weeks on a carefully choreographed trip that took in Verona, Vicenza, Venice, Padua, Ferrara, Bologna, Modena, Parma, Milan and Bergamo, cities linked by a good rail network. Everywhere he went in Italy he carried with him a small black leather-covered pocket notebook. Its pages were ruled with the squared paper he often chose to write on. This was not a notebook for poems, but for observations on art and antiquities. His use of technical language – detailing the ‘ceiling’ of San Zeno Maggiore in Verona with its ‘shallow coffers, or rather a grating’ – indicates how attentive a student he was, pausing to make a pencil sketch and draw a floorplan. Such architectural exactness would benefit his poetry: the ‘coffered ceiling’ of ‘A Game of Chess’ in The Waste Land is followed by a ‘carvèd dolphin’ and an ‘antique mantel’.115 A trained art historian from his undergraduate days, Tom noticed, and noted. On a sunny summer Sunday in Vicenza, a place he found ‘altogether charming’, he walked among a crowd of locals up the steep road to the Basilica S. Maria di Monte Berico where the Virgin Mary (represented by a striking statue) was said to have appeared twice in the fifteenth century. He gazed out over the city below. Enjoying life, he wrote in his notebook on the spot or shortly afterwards: ‘View from near church is superb, over the flat plains on one side and toward Alps on other. Blue haze and talking bells. Road leads to narrow lane, very fine, between high brick walls (lizards and rosebushes) to Villa Valmarana. Villa and garden charming, but Tiepolo rather a disappointment.’ Perhaps from one of those rosebushes he plucked the flower which he pressed in his notebook, and which still survives, dry and fragile, in Harvard’s Houghton Library. Then he went to sketch a floor plan of the Rotonda.116

  By the time he got to Venice he was determined to be cowed neither by Baedeker nor by conventional assumptions. He wanted to look, and take notes, for himself. About San Marco he wrote somewhat grudgingly, ‘The piazza is not so attractive as the P. Erbe (or P. Vitt. Eman.) in Verona. It is large and magnificent (I suppose) but has an oddly businesslike, mercantile appearance. Its effect, at least, like that of the Grand Canal, is all in the first moment.’117 Readers of Tom’s American-in-Venice poem ‘Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar’, published in 1919 and opening with an epigraph that conjures up ‘charming’ Venice, are often struck by the ensuing poem’s sense of modern tawdriness. They register, too, its apparent distaste (shared with Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice) for ‘The Jew’.118 In the summer of 1911 Tom was prepared to be unimpressed: ‘unattractive gold’ he wrote of the Pala d’Oro, the Byzantine masterpiece in the Basilica di San Marco; ‘Libreria Vecchia is an impressive bldg. which does not impress me.’119

  Yet, almost despite himself, he could be bowled over, as he was by the elongated, grey-clad Byzantine-style mosaic figure of the Mater Theou – the Mother of God – on the golden apse inside the cathedral of Santi Maria e Donato on the Venetian island of Murano. ‘The Interceding Virgin is the finest mosaic I have seen; the finest Virgin, and one of the finest religious expressions I have anywhere seen. Note effect of curve in apse, which bends the Virgin forward over you, enhancing the evocation of divinity. Color first-rate.’120 For all his interest in Janet, Bergson and the sceptical interrogation of religious belief, and despite his apparent determination not to be wowed by Venice, he could still be profoundly affected by religion made manifest in art.

  Tom progressed round the galleries, churches and other attractions of northern Italy. His notebook shows he disliked the over-elaborate. The Certosa di Pavia monastery complex he saw as ‘One of the most repellent buildings in Renaissance art. The production of a rotten art.’121 When he returned to Paris it was as a seasoned, opinionated European traveller. He had cheated death – again. He had completed his first masterpiece – not that he seems to have shown it to anyone in the Pension Casaubon. He was beginning to think, albeit with some reluctance, about returning to Harvard. Sceptically full of the heady ideas of Bergson, he would probably become a philosopher.

  8

  A Philosopher and Actor Falls in Love

  RETURNED to Massachusetts to pursue doctoral work in philosophy, Tom was keen to remain Parisian. For some time he wore what Conrad Aiken considered ‘exotic Left Bank clothing’.1 Like composer Maurice Ravel and others in 1911 Paris, Tom at Harvard sported a Malacca cane. He also parted his hair behind, and took out a subscription to the Nouvelle Revue Française. He had come back from the Left Bank having written ‘Entretien dans un parc’ (a poem dated February 1911 about romantic ‘uncertainties’ around holding hands with a woman ‘under the April trees’)2 as well as the more scandalous ‘Ballade pour la grosse Lulu’. Before Aiken married in 1912 and left for Europe, he and Tom conversed regularly during the academic session 1911–12. Knowing Tom and Paris, Aiken was well placed not only to become one of the first readers of the unpublished ‘Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, but also to observe his friend’s post-Parisian reinvention.3 Tom hung on his wall a reproduction of Gauguin’s disconcerting crucifixion painting, Yellow Christ, and from time to time letters arrived with stamps bearing the words ‘République FranÇaise’.

  ‘Ne croyez pas que je vous oublie’ (Don’t think I have forgotten you), Jean Verdenal wrote in a short, mid-October note after hasty farewells. He added that they would talk again in the future.4 Tom had already written to Verdenal. He may have missed Paris, but he was busy. He had taken lodgings at 16 Ash Street, that address his Francophile classmate Seeger had mentioned a few years earlier. Unlike his previous Cambridge abodes, this one was a wooden three-storey private house in a quiet, leafy residential street. Here he would live for the next three years: clearly he and his landlady, Miss Caroline J. Carroll, were mutually agreeable. His lease for 1913–14 survives, neatly signed in ink, ‘T. S. Eliot’, and recording that from September until June he rented ‘the suite of 2 rooms on the third floor’.5 During the same session ‘a nice fellow’, Elmer Keith, had rooms on the same floor; Keith had just been studying at Oxford and was able to tell Tom about that experience.6 The two men got on well, though Keith seemed ‘very English – thoroughly so’, which Tom found ‘baffling’.7 Tom’s parents could scarcely have disapproved of this genteel street where Harvard students conversed about Oxford and older residents might advertise they were ‘at home’ on Mondays or Thursdays.8 Overlooking trees and gardens, Tom’s upper-storey rooms were a haven of birdsong and concentration. At 16 Ash Street he demanded of himself far more philosophical brainwork than he had displayed as an undergraduate.

  Leafiness suited him. Harvard Yard was a ten-minute walk away; he was closer to Radcliffe, and not far from where his cousin Eleanor lived in a similar, suburban-style house. ‘For rent of rooms’ in 1912–13 Miss Carroll charged him $40 per quarter plus a few dollars more for coal and wood – New England winters were chilly after Paris.9 There were two other ‘principal residents’, Miss Mary Stimpson and Miss Ella M. Palmer.10 Verdenal could share a joke with Tom about the ‘label “elderly American spinster”’.11 Now back in Cambridge, Tom shared a house with several unmarried ladies in the markedly feminine Radcliffe part of town. That November he returned to a poem he had worked on in Paris, ‘Portrait of a Lady’. Like Prufrock’s ‘Love Song’, this work about strained nuances of etiquette between a young man and an older woman conscious of her ‘buried life, and Paris in the spring’ seems to have developed alongside raunchier writings, each perhaps spurring the other. In manuscript the first part of ‘Portrait of a Lady’ has, Christopher Ricks notes, ‘Bolo verses on the other side’.12 Apparently drawing on Tom’s undergraduate interaction with the considerably older Miss Adeleine Moffatt who ‘lived behind the State House in Boston and invited selected Harvard undergraduates to tea’, the poem’s third section involves an awkward conversation about ‘going abroad’. The male speaker, nervous about his ‘self-possession’, envisages smiling after the lady’s death, but questions whether he has ‘the
right’ to do so.13 His mind wanders from talk of Chopin to popular culture – Tom and Aiken were fans of comic-strip characters Mutt and Jeff. Tom anatomises male (and sometimes female) anxieties, several of which seem hard to separate from his own shyness, however offset by a dash of Parisian swank.

  Some French passions he shared with his family. His mother, always eager to understand her younger son, read Bergson’s newly translated Creative Evolution, and even attended ‘lectures thereon, largely influenced by Tom’s enthusiasm’, though she noticed less Bergsonian ardour now her son was back from France.14 Further ongoing interests – Boloesque and otherwise – he kept more private. He and Verdenal went on corresponding, still sharing the same wavelength, but the Frenchman’s letters show no awareness of Bolo or Columbo. In the Pension Casaubon the Parisian medical student had moved to Tom’s old room:

  the pattern of the wallpaper (do you remember it?) often gets on my nerves. Damn. It occurred to me a moment ago to send you a little bit of wallpaper – then I immediately realised that the idea was not mine but that I had got it from a letter by J. Laforgue, so I will abstain. I am not quite sure of ever having had an idea that really belonged to me.

  Though committed to pursuing his studies, Verdenal had regrets about having chosen a scientific career. He worried he read too much, and had ‘little gift for action’. He invoked Bergson with an ironic tone, and his rather Prufrockian concerns about his own self-consciousness make it clear why he and Tom felt close: ‘if I act (O action, O Bergson), I am bright enough to take a sincere look at the joy of action and destroy it by analysis.’15 Tom’s poems show he, too, pondered how self-analysis could inhibit action. Like Verdenal, he went on with his reading in French. April 1912 saw him buying from Boston’s Schoenhof Book Company works by Corneille and Racine as well as Charles-Louis Philippe’s Lettres de jeunesse, newly published by the Nouvelle Revue Française.16 Yet his Paris life was fading. For all their friendship, he and Verdenal were rather dilatory correspondents. If Verdenal’s final surviving note to him dates from December 1912, then as early as April, in his last extended letter, the young Frenchman realised that, continents apart, they were each getting on with their considerably different lives.