Young Eliot
Page 26
Just before Tagore gave his last two Harvard lectures, on Friday 4 April 1913, Tom, Robert Rattray, Norbert Wiener and other members of the Philosophy Club including Dr Harry Todd Costello (a young teaching assistant recently returned from attending Bergson’s lectures in Paris) met in Emerson C to participate in ‘A Review and Discussion of “The New Realism”’.66 This was a debate about A Preface to Politics by Walter Lippmann, one of Tom’s undergraduate classmates. Tom worked carefully on the paper he read that evening. It reveals much about his habits of mind. A clear satirical impulse surfaces in his vignettes of current philosophical tendencies, whether ‘Mr B. Russell directing with passionate enthusiasm’ what Tom calls a ‘ballet of bloodless alphabets’ (Wiener, interested in Russell, might have liked that), or ‘Professor Bosanquet’ as ‘a prophet who has put off his shoes and talks with the Absolute in a burning bush’. Drafting this talk, Tom dithered over what to say about Royce. Initially, and somewhat flatteringly, he was going to say that Royce (who that year published The Problem of Christianity) ‘as a relativist is a wholly sympathetic figure’; eventually he settled for something more arrestingly sharp: ‘to Professor Royce we owe the realisation of Christianity by the method of last aid to the dead’. With sideswipes at ‘Bergsonians in various degrees of recovery from intellect’, Tom was trying hard to impress fellow grad students.67
His opening vignettes come closest to the social satire of his early poems; his mockery of radical chic reveals a sympathy with conservatism inherited from his Republican father and quickened by his time in Paris. After much scoring out, rephrasing and the inserting of bons mots about Boston’s Beacon Street (whose well-to-do mansions were then being turned into apartments), he continued:
The present furthermore is a time of lively agitation of political theory. Radicalism is become conventional. Socialism has settled down on Beacon St.; but no radical is so radical as to be a conservative. Where are all the conservatives? They have all gone into hiding. All the old ladies with cozy shares of telephone stock, all the clergymen of subsidised goodness – now socialists waiting not for the millennium, but for the minimum wage which shall abolish prostitution; all our millionaires are socialistic theorists who will dispose of their incomes – later – according to their own theories.68
With a fine ear for dramatic effect, Tom inserted that word ‘– later –’ as he redrafted. His remarks lean in one direction towards the mockery of the progressivist clergyman Lyman Abbott in ‘Ballade pour la grosse Lulu’, and in a slightly different direction towards the skewering of modern New England life in such poems as ‘Cousin Nancy’, ‘Aunt Helen’ and ‘Mr. Apollinax’, written not so long afterwards.
Attacking Rousseau, Tom’s paper on Lippmann’s book mocked ‘the fallacy of progress’. It shows him still wrestling rather sarcastically with his religious upbringing: ‘I belong to a church of which one of the tenets refers to the Progress of mankind onward and upward forever.’ Referring to Lippmann’s admiration for Frenchman Georges Sorel’s ‘doctrine of the “Social Myth”’, Tom protests, ‘I do not understand how M. Sorel avoids seeing that his theory of myths is itself a myth; that the aspirations and impulses which his myth bodies forth will inevitably be reinterpreted by history.’ Underlying fashionable enthusiasms, including those of Bergson and Nietzsche, Tom finds ‘fundamental pessimism and despair’. He worries that ‘if all human meaning is human meaning, then there is no meaning. If you assume only human standards, what standards have you? History, if it is to be interpreted at all, must be interpreted from a point of view itself outside the process.’69
Tom’s critique of notions of progress involved a perception that one myth comes to be interpreted by another, then by another again in a potentially infinite regress. This can be aligned with the direction of thought in some of the comparative literature classes he had taken as an undergraduate; those saw older pagan myths and practices being overlaid with Christian symbolism. Such a way of thinking would be reinforced by his reading in anthropology and primitive religion. Eventually all this would feed into the consciousness that produced The Waste Land, where it seems impossible to find a point of view outside the process of history from which history can be interpreted.
In his 1913 paper, Tom perhaps surprised his philosophical audience as they listened to his thoughts on Lippmann’s book. Having written first of all the words ‘we do not need to wait for Bergson to tell us that’, he later changed this to ‘for we know already that’; then he quoted Dante’s Purgatorio:
Lo naturale è sempre sanza errore,
ma l’altro puote errar per malo obietto,
o per troppo o per poco di vigore.70
A few years later, once more considering poetry beside philosophy, Tom would quote these lines again in ‘Dante’, the essay which concludes his 1920 book The Sacred Wood, seeing them as ‘pure exposition of philosophy’, but maintaining that ‘We are not here studying the philosophy, we see it, as part of the ordered world.’71 Dante’s lines are about the love of what is good. In Purgatory Dante’s guide Virgil tells him that ‘Neither Creator nor creature was ever without love, either natural or of the mind’. He continues, in the lines Tom quoted in Italian:
The natural is always without error,
but the mind’s love may go wrong through a wrong object
or else through excess or defect of vigour.72
By the time he copied out these lines in 1913, Tom was falling in love, though he seems not to have been able to give voice to what he felt. Yet the lines are not about sexual but about intellectual passion. Speaking them in a philosophical discussion with his friends on an April evening, Tom quoted them in an apposite context; but he also hinted that, despite all his intellectual commitment and rigour, the most important form of expression for him would not lie in politics or even in philosophy but in Dante’s medium, poetry.
Still, he was on course to become a philosopher, and he took that seriously. Conrad Aiken, who had missed Tom’s company and who returned to Cambridge with his wife in 1913, was keen to emphasise the importance of living – and, indeed, having sex – rather than just sitting thinking. Though Aiken had his own philosophical interests, he asked Tom, ‘Why indeed study philosophy?’73 Aiken was gearing up to publish his first collection of poems, Earth Triumphant, which appeared in September 1914. Tom, who had probably seen much of it earlier, read it in proof. It scorns ‘Clutching philosophy’s vapid wraith’, and mocks poets who deploy ‘fantastic’ symbols yet lack ‘warm blood’ in their ‘veins’. Aiken’s poems are sexually knowing, but often banal: ‘Like blossom-fires of spring her body went, / He closed his eyes and knew now what life meant’. Trying hard to be modern but sounding notes from the 1890s, Earth Triumphant includes glimpses of the sort of vaudeville shows Aiken and Tom had relished in Boston, hymning
The latest musical comedy, –
To sink back in a front-row seat
And watch the intricate flash of feet
Of well-trained chorus-girls, who came
To give him ecstasy and shame –
With legs of lustrous saffron silk,
White frills, and skin as white as milk,
With sexual laughter, nods and becks,
Mechanical display of sex, –74
If Aiken somewhat show-offishly urged more life and sex, and less philosophy, then Tom remarked on his friend’s naively excited poem ‘Youth’ that ‘the hero was perhaps not as innocent and romantic as he was made out to be, and maybe carried rubber goods in his hip pocket’.75
Aiken could not help stealing rhythms and phrases from Tom, who had to put up with this in Aiken’s volumes for years even before his own first collection was published. However, the perceptive Aiken recognised Tom’s poetic genius before almost anyone else, and, perhaps despite himself, was impressed by Tom’s studies. Later, in the 1920s, linking Tom’s poetry and personality, Aiken would write about his friend that ‘From the outset his poetry was the poetry of a sceptic, an ironist, an intellectual
; it was detached and convictionless; but it was also the poetry of a highly sensitive and shrinking individual with exceptionally acute insight, and imagination and a very fine sense of the values of rhythm.’76 Conrad remembered being with Tom and the young philosopher George Boas (who spoke to the Philosophical Club on 13 March 1914 about ‘The Fine Arts and Expression’) in a Greek restaurant near the waterfront on Boston’s Kneeland Street while Tom held forth about ‘using words of which I don’t know the meaning’.77 Tom was obsessed with issues of meaning and interpretation, but, despite his ‘shrinking’ tendencies, he also worked hard at getting on. Now president of the Harvard Philosophical Club, he wrote from 16 Ash Street to a Yale professor (‘My dear Professor Hocking’), inviting him to come and speak; then, after William Ernest Hocking had spoken on 5 December 1913 about ‘Bergson’s Philosophy of Art’, Tom thanked him fulsomely.78 Another visitor (whose Seminary in Metaphysics on the nature of reality he took in the earlier part of session 1913–14) was Professor R. F. A. Hoernlé from the University of Durham. Later Hoernlé would be asked to comment on Tom’s PhD.
Tom addressed the Club of which he was president on 24 October 1913, taking as his title ‘Philosophy and Politics’. This talk built on the earlier ‘New Realism’ discussion in which he had played a prominent part. He knew how to get himself known. During the second part of 1913–14 he studied ethics in Philosophy 20d with William James’s former student, Professor Ralph Barton Perry; and for the whole year he participated in Philosophy 20c, a seminar in logic overseen by Josiah Royce who had chosen as the topic for that session a comparative study of various types of scientific method. Royce had appointed as recording secretary for the seminar Harry Todd Costello, whose PhD Royce and Perry had examined and whom Tom knew from the Philosophical Club. Costello was a recent holder of Harvard’s Frederick Sheldon Fellowship which provided money for educational travel to Europe; on 31 March 1914 the president and fellows of Harvard appointed Tom as a Sheldon Fellow in Philosophy.
All this confirms he was not just talented but could make the most of the Harvard system. He was keen, too, to demonstrate to his parents, and not least to his father whose financial support had made his Harvard life possible, that he was not simply an indulged incumbrance. He wrote to tell his folks his good news, and expressed something of his gratitude and his anxiety. His father replied generously,
My dear Tom:
I am much pleased that you have rec[eive]d the Scholarship, on ac[coun]t of the honor, as you couldn’t get it unless you deserved it. You have never been a ‘burden’ to me, my dear fellow. A parent is always in debt to a son who has been as dutiful and affectionate as you have been.
Yrs.
P.79
This note meant a lot. Later, after his parents died, Tom made sure almost all his correspondence with them was destroyed. But these words survived.
He remained close to his parents emotionally, even if the relationship was at times problematic. In class, he was in a different world. Encouraged by Hoernlé’s seminar on the nature of reality, he postulated that ‘There are I believe degrees of reality.’ He wrote a paper in which he began, ‘I do not intend to draw any absolute distinction between perception, image and judgment, between real and unreal.’ Discussing the epistemology of hallucination, appearance and judgement, he tried out materials that, in revised form, would find their way into his doctoral thesis. Undermining distinctions between real and unreal, he worked on fascinating but vertiginous ideas. His sense of humour helped him preserve both mental agility and psychological balance. ‘Metaphysical opinions’, he pronounced, ‘ascend like a rocket and come down like a stick. The struggle of life is to eat your cake and have it too: to go up on your Jacob’s ladder of reality and stay on the ground at the same time.’ Addicted to image and metaphor even as he discussed philosophical abstractions, he added, ‘If we have good long legs, the attempt to keep one foot on sea and one on shore does not become embarrassing until the boat is well under way.’80 So Tom, the experienced sailor, tried to navigate precariously through metaphysics.
Of the many philosophical papers he wrote during these years one in particular stands out for readers of his later poetry. It was written for discussion in Royce’s seminar on scientific method, and dealt with the interpretation of primitive ritual. In a seminar that included researchers from several backgrounds, discussing everything from ‘protoplasm’ to Einstein’s ‘relativity’ and its ‘new analysis of physical space and time and their relation’ with regard to ‘simultaneity’, Tom on 9 December 1913 read a paper which asked the question, ‘On what terms is a science of religion possible?’81 Beyond that, he wondered, ‘Can it be treated wholly according to the methods of sociology?’ Drawing on Durkheim and Lévy-Bruhl, he brought to bear also his reading in psychology and anthropology. Works such as E. B. Tylor’s Victorian classic Primitive Culture and other anthropological tomes are alluded to, but Tom critiques these, arguing that ‘What seemed to one generation fact is from the point of view of the next, a rejected interpretation.’82
He sees the roots of religion as ultimately inscrutable. It may be possible to reconstruct an ‘external order in ritual and creed and in artistic and literary expression’, but only approximately, and examination of the elements of that order moves us immediately from unstable ‘fact’ into interpretation. ‘The actual ritual’ is part of ‘a complex which includes previous stages’ interpretations of the ritual of the preceding stage, and so on back indefinitely’. Though Tom’s interest here was in the way ‘“fact” melts into interpretation, and interpretation into metaphysics’, later this sense of ritual, artistic expression and religious forms being layered one on top of another in a possible order that went ‘back indefinitely’ would be part of the underpinning of The Waste Land, and of other poems.83
By 1913 he had been reading parts of anthropologist J. G. Frazer’s vast ‘comparative work’, The Golden Bough. He was in awe of it, but critical of how it imposed interpretations on its data:
I have not the smallest competence to criticise Dr Frazer’s erudition, and his ability to manipulate this erudition I can only admire. But I cannot subscribe – for instance to the interpretation with which he ends his volume on the Dying God. He is accounting for the magical rites of spring festivals: –
P.26684
At this point he seems to have read to the seminar group some of Frazer’s words from the opening of his section ‘The Magic Spring’. After supplying accounts of various vegetation ceremonies, including Indian ones involving Siva and Parvati and European ones featuring ‘the May Bride, Bridegroom of the May, and so forth’, Frazer (on page 266) opines:
The general explanation which we have been led to adopt of these and many similar ceremonies is that they are, or were in their origin, magical rites intended to ensure the revival of nature in spring. The means by which they were supposed to effect this end were imitation and sympathy. Led astray by his ignorance of the true causes of things, primitive man believed that in order to produce the great phenomena of nature on which his life depended he had only to imitate them …85
Convinced such speculations are unjustified in terms of philosophical method, Tom exclaimed pointedly to his 1913 seminar group that ‘This volume appeared as recently as 1911!’ Yet he argues, too, that other thinkers such as Durkheim, more methodologically up to date, also blur lines between fact and interpretation, and between individual and group consciousness, in ways that are untenable. A science of religion is impossible, however much craved. ‘I do not think that any definition of religious behavior can be satisfactory, and yet you must assume if you are to make a start at all that all these phenomena have a common meaning; you must postulate your own attitude and interpret your so-called facts into it, and how can this be science?’86
Tom the impressive graduate student cut through other thinkers’ assumptions with commendable incisiveness. Yet he also tied himself in knots. Tom the poet retained several ideas and images his reading supplied. T
his can be seen only in retrospect. In Cambridge, as he walked between Emerson Hall and Ash Street for the umpteenth time, he had other thoughts on his mind. He was very struck by the arrival of the English philosopher Bertrand Russell, lionised as a visiting professor at Harvard where he was delivering a lecture series on ‘Our Knowledge of the External World’. Russell (who found Harvard ‘soul-destroying’) invited students to visit him in his office, and on 27 March 1914 Tom went there along with a friend of his, fellow philosophy graduate student Raphael Demos whom he knew through the Philosophical Club. After talking to the two students, Russell observed that
one, named Eliot, is very well-dressed and polished, with manners of the finest Etonian type; the other is an unshaven Greek, appropriately named Demos, who earns money for his fees by being a waiter in a restaurant. The two were obviously friends, and had on neither side the slightest consciousness of social difference.87
Tom described himself later that year as ‘a thorough snob’, but that was not how Russell saw him.88 Tom audited some of Russell’s logic classes at Harvard and they spoke about Heraclitus (whom Russell was about to discuss in a lecture on ‘Mysticism and Logic’). ‘Yes, he always reminds me of Villon’, said Tom – presumably linking the medieval French poet François Villon’s lament for the vanished snows of yesteryear with Heraclitus’ perception of transience expressed through the idea that one cannot step into the same river twice. Russell thought Tom’s remark ‘so good that I always wished he would make another’. But Tom, in whom shyness and incisive eloquence often contended, was ‘extraordinarily silent’.89