Young Eliot

by Robert Crawford

  Mon cher ami, nous ne sommes pas très loin, vous et moi, de la limite au dela de laquelle les êtres perdent, l’un l’autre, je ne sais quelle influence, quelle puissance d’émotion naissant à nouveau quand ils sont rapprochés. Ce n’est pas seulement le temps qui peut faire l’oubli – la distance (l’espace) y a une part qui est grande. Elle déjà pèse entre nous, sans doute (avouons le franchement) puisque des occupations stupides, et beaucoup de paresse ont tellement raréfié ma correspondance.

  (My dear friend, we are not very far, you and I, from the point beyond which people lose that indefinable influence and emotive power over each other, which is reborn when they come together again. It is not only time which causes forgetfulness – distance (space) is an important factor. It is already, no doubt, making itself felt between us (let us admit this frankly), since my stupid occupations and considerable laziness have made my letters few and far between.17

  Tom’s academic interests were removing him, too, from his undergraduate friends, most of whom had left Cambridge. His doctoral work in philosophy would involve about five years’ further study. Now he was safely home from Paris, his parents were happy to fund this.

  Partly perhaps under Babbitt’s lingering influence, and aware of his brother-in-law Shef’s interest in Eastern thought, Tom began studying Sanskrit. Among other things, this involved leaving Western alphabets far behind. His professor was Charles Rockwell Lanman, whom he may have known through family connections: Lanman’s wife was a Hinkley. Then in his sixties, Professor Lanman had developed Harvard’s outstanding collections of Sanskrit books and manuscripts. His Sanskrit Reader, one of Tom’s set texts, introduced such topics as ancient Indic customs and the transmigration of souls. Lanman liked to point out that ‘The belief that a man must be born and live and die, only to be born and die again and again through a weary round of existences, was widespread in India long before Buddha’s day’, and that ‘the “Jataka”, the most charming of all Buddhist story books’, contained ‘a narrative of not less than 547 former existences’ preceding the ‘birth’ of Buddha. Benign but exacting, Lanman drew parallels between Buddhist and Christian traditions. He emphasised Buddha’s analysis of ‘the cause of human suffering’ which

  he finds in the craving for existence (no matter how noble that existence) and for pleasure. If you can only master these cravings, you are on the road to salvation, to Nirvana. This, so far as the present life is concerned, means the going out of the fires of lust and ill will and delusion, and further a getting rid thereby of the round of rebirth.18

  Such thinking would condition The Waste Land, and during these graduate student years Tom wrote in black ink on square-lined paper lines that underpin parts of that poem. In their original form they begin, ‘So through the evening, through the violet air’. They describe wandering among ‘sunbaked houses’ and encountering ‘strange images’. Among these is an image of a woman drawing ‘her long black hair out tight’. Conrad Aiken recalled reading this passage years before it was revised as part of The Waste Land. Imagery of ‘bats’ leads to mention of ‘A man’ with ‘abnormal powers’ who is seen to ‘creep head downward down a wall’.19 This derives from a passage in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, that vampire narrative in which cycles of reincarnation involve the tormenting sexuality of the undead: a very different cycle of rebirth and destruction from the Buddha’s, but one which would also be pertinent to Tom’s famous poem.

  During session 1911–12 he took Lanman’s courses Indic Phililogy 1a and 1b (Elementary Sanskrit). He embarked on the Panchatantra and Bhagavad Gita. Meeting thrice weekly, on Monday, Wednesday and Friday afternoons, these were intimate classes. In 1a the students were a freshman, V. N. Banavalikar (who seems to have dropped out), Thomas Brown Kite, Jr (a Quaker graduate student of German), John Van Horne (a graduate student linguist), Levi Arnold Post (another graduate student, who went on to become a distinguished Greek scholar) and Tom. Course 1b was even smaller; Tom, Post and Van Horne got straight As.20 Around this time, pondering world religions, Tom authored a fragment that draws on the Bhagavad Gita and ends, glancing towards sacred sacrificial ‘ghee’ butter, ‘I am the fire, and the butter also’.21 This tries to juxtapose Christ’s words from the Gospel of John 11:25, ‘I am the resurrection, and the life’, with allusions to the Gita; but the lines risk bathos: ‘butter’ to many readers sounds a bit comical. Nonetheless, Tom hung on to this fragment, which clearly signals his continuing interest in religious rites, and forms part of the drafts from which The Waste Land would emerge.

  Fired up by Paris, he now excelled in demanding areas of graduate scholarship. The following session he took two further Lanman courses on Pali, the language of the earliest Buddhist scriptures. ‘These courses in the language of the sacred books of Buddhism’, Harvard’s Official Register explained in 1913, were intended ‘for students interested in the history of religions and folk-lore’, of whom Tom was certainly one.22 He obtained a catalogue of books, published by the Vedanta Society in New York, on topics including ‘Reincarnation’ and the ‘Theory of Transmigration’.23 In Indic Philology 4 and 5, there was one other student. Shripad Krishna Belvalkar, a Hindu, had come to Harvard intending to edit Pali texts after he had met another of Tom’s professors, James Haughton Woods, in India. Together Tom and Belvalkar read selections from the sacred books of Buddhism, the Jataka and Buddhagosa’s commentary on the Anguttara Nikaya – lives of the Buddhist saints – as well as a selection of dialogues of the Buddha himself. The two graduate students shared an interest in chess. Conversing with this Indian fellow student and, later, reading about contemporary India made Tom wary of generalisations about ‘the Indian mind’, and sympathetic towards Indian ‘aspirants after autonomy’ at a time when India was still subject to ‘British rule’ that often involved a ‘lack of sympathetic imagination’.24

  For Indic Philology 4, Tom and Shripad Belvalkar read through the first eighty-one pages in Part I of Copenhagen librarian Dines Andersen’s Pali Reader. It contains ‘The Fire Sermon’ in which the Buddha maintains all things are afflicted with burning (in the Pali text the word ‘addita’ is repeated hypnotically); the noble disciple, disgusted with all these things, becomes divested of passion: the Pali word ‘nibbinhah’ (disgusted with) recurs again and again.25 Encouraged by Lanman and Woods, Belvalkar (graded ‘A’) would become a distinguished editor, publishing in Lanman’s Harvard Oriental Series. Tom, too, was a favoured, straight-A student. Within a decade his use of ‘The Fire Sermon’ with its sense of disgust and repeated ‘Burning burning burning burning’ would make this piece of preaching the best-known Pali text in Western literature.26

  Lanman liked Tom. During the academic session before they read ‘The Fire Sermon’ in class, the great scholar presented his student with a 1906 Bombay edition of the Upanishads, inscribing its flyleaf, ‘Thomas Eliot, Esq., with C. R. Lanman’s kindest regards and best wishes. Harvard College, May 6, 1912’.27 Inside Tom kept a sheet of headed notepaper from 9 Farrar Street, Cambridge, Lanman’s family home. Dated ‘May 22 1912’, it is a handwritten list of passages from the Upanishads, including one (which has been ticked) from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, an ancient mystical and philosophical text about unknowability and the Absolute. In one passage thunder and lightning are envisaged as consciousness interrupting the darkness of sin. Lanman has listed a section where, as he notes, ‘Da-da-da = damyata datta dayadhvam’.28 Thanks to The Waste Land, along with the concluding utterance ‘Shantih’ (‘a formal ending to an Upanishad’), these words would become known to readers of poetry around the world.29

  ‘Life is pain’ was simply ‘a matter of fact, not necessarily pessimistic’, Tom jotted in his notes on Eastern philosophy on 3 October 1913.30 Next day he went to the Harvard Cooperative Society to buy an Indic text.31 That September, bookish as ever, he had been browsing in the Coop’s Sanskrit section, and had bought for $4.50 Paul Jakob Deussen’s Die Sutras des Vedanta, along with Deussen’s Sechzig Upanishads des Veda ($4.95). Though
he didn’t know it, his $9.45 was a shrewd investment in the future of poetry; he would refer readers to Deussen’s book in his notes to The Waste Land.32

  For the previous session, 1912–13, he had enrolled in philosopher James Haughton Woods’s Indic Philology 9 (Philosophical Sanskrit). Years later, in the midst of mental and emotional pain, his Harvard studies in Sanskrit and Pali – or moments from them at least – returned to him offering an articulation of burning, torment and disgust. Yet during his graduate student years these studies formed part of his preoccupation with the nature of reality. He read as a philosopher. In 1911–12 he had taken his old teacher George Herbert Palmer’s ethics course, Philosophy 4, considering the theory of morals; also Woods’s Philosophy 12, Greek Philosophy with Especial Reference to Plato. There were connections between these two courses. Woods, who began by outlining the ‘Origins of the Ethical Point of View of the Greeks’, was well placed to compare and contrast Greek with Indic philosophy: ‘Read the Vedas and then Homer and you will feel that the Greeks have discovered a new kind of freedom’, Tom noted. Woods took it for granted that poetry and philosophy could be bonded; he praised the way in Greek ‘Each thing is described with scrupulous honesty.’33 Tom had sought such honesty in creating Prufrock, and continued to do so. Woods spoke not only of Greek ‘self-restraint’ and the effort to be ‘disinterested’, but also of Greek ideas of the ‘Independence of soul from body-ecstasy’, of ‘a round of rebirth’ and ‘transmigration’ different from that of ‘India’ and the ‘Buddhist’.34

  Tom took copious notes on the Presocratic philosophers, especially Heraclitus whose work had survived in fragments, Woods explained in October 1911, because it was ‘quotable’. Deploying alliteration, repetition and even rhyme, it was ‘Poetic’. Reading G. T. W. Patrick’s Heraclitus of Ephesus, Tom noted Patrick’s view that it was ‘Impossible to understand Hct. unless we consider the ethical and religious character of his mind.’35 Speaking of Heraclitus’ belief in a ‘primary substance – pur’, Woods explained that this substance was not quite ‘fire as we should say’, but was ‘accepted because he can find no better word’. Heraclitus presented a vision of flux that involved the elements. Tom took dictation:

  anathumiasis: a difficult word. Means the movement from earth towards pur. A kind of substitute for air. While the fire is solidifying into water and earth you have the contrary action going on in the same substance. And the world is merely the result of these contrary strains.

  The essence of the substance is the flux.36

  This was oddly fascinating. Tom wrote of ‘fire’ and ‘flow’ in a poetic fragment of his own.37 Woods pointed out there were three worthwhile modern editions of Heraclitus; the best arrangement of the fragments was that of Hermann Alexander Diels. Heraclitus, Woods explained, ‘complains of the inability of the ordinary man to pierce the appearance of stability and see the finer play of the world movement’. He was the ‘originator of the idea of opposites … He shows that the opposites do not neutralize each other, but may sometimes be the same thing.’ More than two decades after noting all this down, Tom returned to the Heraclitus section of Diels’s Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker and took from it two fragments as epigraphs for ‘Burnt Norton’, first of his Four Quartets. The initial epigraph means, ‘Though the law of things is universal in scope, ordinary people live as if they had their own insight’; the second means, ‘the way up and the way down are the same’.38 Each of the Four Quartets seems to correspond to one of the elements: air, earth, water, fire. All this is just one of many indications of how even the most recondite details of his graduate learning bore fruit in later poetry.

  Yet larger-scale philosophical thought processes also shaped his poetic procedures. Discussing Heraclitus’ habit of seeing ‘the same object in different relations’, Woods encouraged ideas of juxtaposition and shifting interpretations.39 In poetry Tom was always open to recontextualising older materials so that, without altering the original words, he let them be read in new ways. In retrospect, we can see that he shared this technique with other well-read modernist writers from Ezra Pound to James Joyce and Hugh MacDiarmid; it was encouraged, too, by his philosophical studies. Grounded in Western thought from the ancient Greeks through Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz to Kant and recent speculation about the nature of reality, he grew increasingly interested in fundamental questions of knowledge and interpretation; his awareness of these was enhanced by his schooling in Indic and Oriental philosophy. Reading Spinoza’s Ethics, he jotted comments in the margin: ‘Intellect an abstraction. There is only the stream of ideas.’40 Ideas, reality and flux obsessed him. He was not infallible but was – and remains – hard to keep up with. Reading Bergson in French, then in English, he also read Patanjali in the original Pali, the Upanishads in Sanskrit, Heraclitus in Greek, Kant in German, Dante in Italian – and, as for Spinoza, he read that great Jewish philosopher in elegant seventeenth-century Latin. No other major twentieth-century poet was so thoroughly and strenuously educated.

  Though focused on the philosophy classroom, his studies involved, too, aspects of modern scientific culture. Psychology was a field in which William James’s work and the establishment of a psychological laboratory upstairs at Emerson Hall had made Harvard a centre for advanced investigation. In 1912–13 Tom studied in Philosophy 20b the relations between mind and body with leading psychologist Hugo Münsterberg, a German Jewish intellectual hired by James and trained in Berlin by Wilhelm Wundt. Practically-minded, the prolific Münsterberg had recently published Psychotherapy; he had little time for mysticism, though he did admit, in his idiosyncratic idiom, that it could have value for those with personal problems. ‘The own personality is submerging into a larger all-embracing hold and thus inhibits the small cares and troubles of merely personal origin. The consciousness sinks into God, a mental process which reaches its maximum in mysticism. The haphazard pains of the personality disappear and are suppressed by the joy and glory of the whole.’41 Tom was much more fascinated by this sort of thing than was Münsterberg, but eventually Tom’s doctoral thesis would contain a chapter entitled ‘The Psychologist’s Treatment of Knowledge’. During the previous session, having come into contact with the Parisian explorations of Janet, he had also embarked on an elementary laboratory course in Experimental Psychology, Philosophy 21, taught by Münsterberg’s colleague, Dr Herbert Sidney Langfeld. Dutifully, Tom took notes on how the skin reacted to touch, pain, heat and cold. These jottings, which appear burned at the edge, make it look as if at some point his practical experiments went too far, but perhaps he was just careless with one of the pungent Gauloise cigarettes he favoured for much of his life: a Parisian vice that may not always have endeared him to the other residents of 16 Ash Street.42

  Langfeld’s scholarly concerns included synaesthesia and the effects of fasting. Tom had shown interest in synaesthesia in poems he had worked on in Paris; this phenomenon fascinated several Symbolist poets as well as writers on mysticism. Still thinking of his friend as working in this vein, Conrad Aiken, probably his closest poetic associate during these years, wrote to him from Rome where he had gone to enjoy life with his wife Jessie, asking if Tom had a ‘superfluous copy of the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, which Aiken could not get out of his head. He mentioned he had written ‘a caricature of T. S. Eliot Esq., – O, a most seductively horrible pome – entitled “Decadence.” – It is a caricature worthy of Beerbohm. It has you, and your poems (the earlier Lamia kind as well as the later Prufrock variety) and your hoisted Jesus, and all; a complete composite photograph. Tom posed as a decadent!’43 Though this poem does not survive, and Aiken did not mail it, clearly Tom’s print of Gauguin’s yellow Christ – which could be linked to synaesthesia, martyrdom and Paris – appeared part of his ‘Decadence’. ‘What have you been writing – futurist poems?’ Aiken asked, mentioning that he had written ‘some dozen or less of long narrative poems’ himself. He also asked about Tom’s ‘latest meditations’.44 With no wife, no long narrative
poems and no grand travel plans, Tom in Ash Street was finding that philosophical ‘meditations’ took up a demanding amount of his time. After the excitements of Europe and the poems he had made there, his decision to return to the States and to pursue graduate work in philosophy may have curbed his writing of verse. His courses were intellectually strenuous. Pursuing them involved unremitting interrogation of the grounds of knowledge and belief.

  Eastern and Western philosophical and religious systems overlapped, but also conflicted. Though Tom grappled with them in ways that most people could not manage, they posed apparently impossible choices. Studying Greek philosophy alongside Sanskrit and Pali was almost mind-boggling. However much, sitting in class beside Belvalkar, or chatting with professors Lanman and Woods, he was attracted to and deeply impressed by Indic thought, he found it unsettlingly problematic. In Woods he saw a professional able to teach both Greek Philosophy and Philosophical Pali. Yet for Tom the two came to clash in ways he could not reconcile.

  Two years spent in the study of Sanskrit under Charles Lanman, and a year in the mazes of Patanjali’s metaphysics under the guidance of James Woods, left me in a state of enlightened mystification. A good half of the effort of understanding what the Indian philosophers were after – and their subtleties make most of the great European philosophers look like schoolboys – lay in trying to erase from my mind all the categories and kinds of distinction common to European philosophy from the time of the Greeks. My previous and concomitant study of European philosophy was hardly better than an obstacle. And I came to the conclusion – seeing also that the ‘influence’ of Brahmin and Buddhist thought upon Europe, as in Schopenhauer, Hartmann, and Deussen, had largely been through romantic misunderstanding – that my only hope of really penetrating to the heart of that mystery would lie in forgetting how to think and feel as an American or a European: which, for practical as well as sentimental reasons, I did not wish to do.45