Young Eliot

by Robert Crawford

  They met again on Sunday 10 May 1914 at a garden party held at the house of Santayana’s and Jean Verdenal’s Francophile friend Benjamin Apthorpe Fuller, high-minded author of The Problem of Evil in Plotinus, which saw ‘Evil’ as linked to ‘the body’.90 Fuller lived in the country with his wife and his mother, and Russell thought him ‘an Oxfordized Harvardian, cultivated, full of the classics, talking as like an Englishman as he can, full of good nature, but feeble – quite without the ferocity that is needed to redeem culture’. Noticing Tom, too, at this party, Russell decided he was ‘a very similar type, proficient in Plato, intimate with French literature from Villon to Vildrach [Vildrac], very capable of a certain exquisiteness of appreciation, but lacking in the crude insistent passion that one must have in order to achieve anything’.91 As Russell observed the shy graduate student, so Tom watched Russell. His observation of this visitor at the Fullers’ home prompted his later poem ‘Mr. Apollinax’, in which the physicality, behaviour and ‘dry and passionate talk’ of a visitor to the United States discomfit his academic hosts, whose logic is less than perfect: ‘“His pointed ears … He must be unbalanced.”’92 Apollinax comes over as clever, disruptive, ready to violate the proprieties. Unsettling this genteel milieu, he makes the poem’s speaker think of the Classical sex god Priapus juxtaposed with the ‘shy figure’ of the delicate-sounding ‘Fragilion’: this (though the poem was authored considerably later) was perceptive, for Russell liked to give free rein to his sexual appetite. Tom, customarily far more repressed in his conduct, remained part of the polite New England milieu, but knew well that it needed disrupting. As a forceful personality and as a philosopher, Russell was fascinating. However, for some time, though philosophical argument was certainly important to Tom, he had known it was not his sole concern.

  Since at least the previous summer he had had lines to learn, and had been enjoying mixing with people who were not philosophers. He had been playing the leading man, Lord Bantock, in Fanny and the Servant Problem, performed in summer 1913 by the Cambridge Social Dramatic Club in Brattle Hall, not far from Harvard Yard. The female lead, Lady Bantock, was a dark-eyed, sophisticated young woman called Amy de Gozzaldi. Schooled at Cambridge’s Berkeley Street School along with Tom’s cousin Eleanor (who lived along the road at 1 Berkeley Place), Amy had grown up at 96 Brattle Street. Both girls loved acting; their school had a tradition of performing plays. Amy would act in the Social Dramatic Club for much of her life. For a few years she and Eleanor had been schoolfellows with another girl with a passion for drama, Emily Hale from Boston. Emily’s mother had had a mental breakdown, so the girl had been brought up by her uncle and aunt, the Reverend and Mrs Joyce Carroll Perkins. After Berkeley Street School Emily had attended Miss Porter’s School in Connecticut where the headmaster was married to a Hale. Tom’s parents knew the Perkinses, and were familiar with the circles in which Emily and her friends moved. Amy’s mother was active in the recently founded Cambridge Historical Society; Eleanor, who wrote plays as well as acting in them, had played with the Eliot children at East Gloucester and Cambridge since infancy. Emily’s uncle was a music critic for the Boston Globe; her father Edward was, like several of Tom’s uncles, a Unitarian minister. He had taught at Harvard Divinity School and became first assistant to the Reverend Edward Everett Hale in Boston. At one point, in 1900, it had been expected that the Reverend Edward Everett Hale would be succeeded in his ecclesiastical ‘pastorate’ by one of Tom’s relations, the Reverend Samuel A. Eliot.93 Each of them born in 1891, Amy, Eleanor and Emily belonged, like Tom, to the cultured upper echelon of New England society.

  Lord Bantock was a major part. Since it was customary for the players to work up from minor roles to larger ones, probably Tom had done so too; later in life Eleanor Hinkley stated that his ‘first dramatic appearance’ was in February 1913, but his interest in drama predates that.94 Certainly he enjoyed the work of the Social Dramatic Club. Though much of its archive was destroyed in a flood, a list of productions survives, and Tom’s enthusiasm would fit with his father’s concerns about his son spending too much time on drama. During Tom’s junior undergraduate year the Social Dramatic Club, an amateur group mounting three or four shows annually, had as its 75th performance She Stoops to Conquer, a work alluded to in The Waste Land. While he was away in Paris they had performed J. M. Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton; as one of Tom’s friends put it, this was long remembered since ‘one of our better actresses walked on stage clad in a rather short leopard skin with no shoes or stockings – quite a sensation in those days and a fine conversation piece for the rest of the season’.95

  His friend’s delight in the frisson that a glimpse of leopard-skinned flesh could cause in Cambridge would be matched by Tom’s own mischievous coining of the name ‘Professor Channing-Cheetah’ in his priapic poem ‘Mr. Apollinax’.96 The 1911–12 season had seen the Club performing Robert Marshall’s comedy The Second in Command, in which a young woman reads aloud to a young man from a romantic novel and enacts what she reads: ‘“She stood gazing into his eyes, the sunlight turning her soft hair to golden lustre. Scarce knowing what she did her arms crept round his neck (places her arms round HILDEBRAND’S neck) And in a moment as a wild and sudden blush leapt to her cheek, she kissed him passionately.” (kisses HILDEBRAND).’97 Tom’s poems liked to mock such stagey, self-conscious romantic effusions. Sometimes, however, as in the sense of ‘a gesture and a pose’ in his poem ‘La Figlia Che Piange’, his verse shows an acute awareness of theatricality:

  Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair –

  Clasp your flowers to you with a pained surprise –

  Fling them to the ground and turn

  With a fugitive resentment in your eyes:

  But weave, weave the sunlight in your hair.98

  Henry Arthur Jones’s The Manoeuvres of Jane in which an English lord wonders how ‘self-possessed’ he really is and Anthony Hope’s The Adventures of the Lady Ursula completed the Dramatic Club’s 1911–12 season.99 1912–13 brought John Hartley Manners’s The House Next Door, which staged English anti-Semitism (‘Jews, Jews, Jews everywhere one turns’)100 and Israel Zangwill’s Merely Mary Ann, the production that preceded Fanny and the Servant Problem. During Tom’s last year as a Harvard graduate student, the Club mounted productions of Somerset Maugham’s Jack Straw, with its disconcerting waiter, and Hubert Henry Davis’s 1914 comedy A Single Man in which a middle-aged writer is attracted to and eventually marries his secretary.

  In such English plays well-bred men fall in love with actresses; upper-crust characters sport names like Agatha; situations unfold in country houses; upper-class mores and cockney dialect mix; scenarios are clever and traditionally plotted. Tom’s poems might mock these kinds of romantic comedy, but they would supply narratives and images for his future life and work. Sometimes, much later, his own plays would mix their style with plots taken from ancient Greek drama, attempting to render ‘degrees of reality’ and to appeal to popular audiences. The most striking theatrical moment in Davis’s A Single Man is when, at the end of the second act, a confused group of lovers dance round and round to the nursery rhyme ‘Here we go round the mulberry bush’.101 Having read much about interpretations of dances and rituals, about a decade later when his own love-life had become a disaster, Tom would move from thoughts of ‘Lips that would kiss’ to a parody of that same nursery rhyme:

  Here we go round the prickly pear

  Prickly pear prickly pear

  Here we go round the prickly pear

  At five o’clock in the morning.102

  Acting provides a way for people to overcome their shyness. Tom, whose shyness was often perceived as arrogance, had worked hard to transform himself from the schoolboy whose public speaking was poor into the graduate student suitable for a starring role. Just as his St Louis dancing classes had been a way to meet girls, so, the Social Dramatic Club offered similar opportunities. It had been set up as a merger between two older societies in 1891 to meet �
�in Brattle Hall on Saturday evenings’ with ‘some dramatic performance or other entertainment given in the early part of the evening, followed by simple refreshments and – from eleven to twelve o’clock – dancing’.103 The ‘Brattle Hall dances’, where Conrad Aiken remembered seeing Tom, were probably descendants of these functions. Very different from his all-male philosophy seminars, and from the all-female schools attended by Amy de Gozzaldi, Eleanor Hinkley, Emily Hale and their friends, the ‘Social Dramatic’ encouraged respectable Cambridge young folk to mingle. Harvard’s drama clubs were male-dominated, though some Radcliffe students participated; the Social Dramatic drew on a wider gene pool. Under its auspices young women and men danced, flirted, and even indulged in onstage kissing.

  The kissing was famous. Dick Hall, whom Tom later described as one of the ‘old theatrical friends of mine from the days of the Cambridge Dramatic Society’, told heroic tales about it.104 It was also remembered by a local Unitarian minister’s son called Edward who had grown up in Irving Street, just along the road from Josiah Royce. At the age of eighteen Edward played the part of Ernest Bennet, Lady Bantock’s second footman, in the summer 1913 production of Fanny and the Servant Problem. During the play the second footman has to kiss Lady Bantock, but in real life the young actor was intimidated by the well-travelled, sophisticated twenty-two-year-old Amy so his kissing was too tentative. ‘At rehearsals the director continually encouraged him to be more bold. At length, on the night of the performance, he outdid himself in a kiss that he remembered for months.’105 In fact, he remembered it for decades: ‘billions cheered:I shall never forget’.106 The second footman’s name was Edward Estlin Cummings, later better known as E. E. Cummings.

  Tom got to kiss and be kissed by Amy de Gozzaldi several times in the play. Amy played Fanny, an actress who has married Vernon, Lord Bantock, and turns out to be the niece of his butler. That butler seeks to order Fanny about, despite the machinations of her agent, Newte: hence the ‘servant problem’ in English humorist Jerome K. Jerome’s play. Tom’s onstage interactions with Amy were rather different from his exchanges with the members of the Harvard Philosophical Club:

  FANNY (she laughs – takes his hand in hers). I wish you hadn’t asked Newte any questions about me. It would have been so nice to feel that you had married me – just because you couldn’t help it – (laughs) – just because I was I; and nothing else mattered.

  VERNON. Let’s forget I ever did. (He kneels down beside her.) I didn’t do it for my own sake, as you know. A man in my position has to think of other people. His wife has to take her place in society. People insist upon knowing something about her. It’s not enough for the stupid ‘County’ that she’s the cleverest, most bewilderingly beautiful, bewitching lady in the land.

  FANNY (she laughs). And how long will you think all that?

  VERNON. For ever, and ever, and ever.

  FANNY. Oh, you dear boy. (She kisses him.) You don’t know how a woman loves the man she loves to love her (Laughs.) Isn’t that complicated?

  VERNON. Not at all. We’re just the same. We love to love the woman we love.

  FANNY (laughs). Provided the ‘County’ will let us. And the County has said: A man may not marry his butler’s niece.

  VERNON (laughing). You’ve got butlers on the brain. If I ever do run away with my own cook or under-housemaid, it will be your doing.

  FANNY. You haven’t the pluck! The ‘County’ would laugh at you. You men are so frightened of being laughed at.107

  Gently exploring issues of gender, social class and English mores, such plays were just the sort of thing that the markedly Anglophile Social Dramatic Club relished. E. E. Cummings seems to have felt some jealousy of Tom’s role and the relationship with Amy de Gozzaldi that it afforded him; Tom, who later imagined Amy dancing to the music of Carmen with ‘huge eyes’, did not complain.108 The woman he had fallen in love with, though, was not Amy (who went on to marry Tom’s fellow actor and Harvard classmate Dick Hall) but her friend Emily Hale. Given that Emily had known Amy and Tom’s cousin Eleanor so long, it seems inconceivable that she was not watching Lord and Lady Bantock’s performance closely.

  Later, Emily Hale acted in several Dramatic Society productions, and taught acting at various colleges, but in her youth her family forbade her to go on the professional stage – it was not considered respectable. Having returned from Miss Porter’s School to the Boston area, she was a regular visitor to Eleanor’s house. Planned from early in the year, the June 1912 fiftieth anniversary of the Berkeley Street School and the setting up that February of a Berkeley Street School Association (in which Amy’s mother was to the fore) brought together a number of former pupils.109 It was in 1912 that Tom met Emily through Eleanor.

  Shrewd, observant, musical, slim and elegant, Emily, like Tom’s mother, was intelligent but had not gone to university. She had the polite manners of an upbringing in Chestnut Hill, just outside Boston, and of her several single-sex schools. Her ability to act helped conceal a history of familial damage: in early childhood she had had to cope with the death of her infant brother, then with separation from her increasingly mentally ill mother. Those close to Emily (including Tom) detected a vulnerability about her, as well as a gift for friendship. She could be very fine company; with those whom she really trusted she was a prolific, entertaining correspondent. People who knew her less intimately sometimes thought her snobbish, aloof and repressed. Tom, too, could be perceived this way. His intellectual brilliance, and the persistent shyness he had fought hard to overcome through various pursuits from acting to taking some boxing lessons in Boston, could set him apart. Many years later, Cummings, when it was pointed out to him that his fellow actor had been T. S. Eliot, remembered ‘a snob, cold, older than me, aloof, never sat with the rest of the cast at rehearsals, immaculately dressed; you know, a type “the frozen jeunesse dorée”’.110 In choosing this ‘gilded youth’ for the part of an English lord, the play’s director may have detected something similar too, yet could not have thought Tom too ‘frozen’ to kiss Amy convincingly.

  At twenty-four, Tom knew St Louis, Boston, Cape Ann and parts of Maine. He had been to London, Paris, Munich and Italy; he was sophisticated, nattily dressed. He had written unpublished poems such as ‘Preludes’, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, and ‘Portrait of a Lady’. For all his effortfully bawdy poems (shared only with his male buddies), he could dissect subtly and minutely social awkwardnesses between men and women. Yet his insight came not least from introspection. He was as vulnerable as anyone to such social awkwardnesses, but knew how to prepare a face to meet the faces that he met. He possessed, too, the skill and courage to interrogate his own vulnerability as well as to observe the awkwardness and assurance of other people.

  On 16 December 1912 the Tom who had rhymed about Lulu and the whorehouse ball purchased from the Schoenhof Book Company a copy of Pierre Loti’s Le roman d’un d’enfant with its account of young dreams of ‘l’amour’ and ‘tendresse infinie’, and its sense of ‘une commotion intérieure’.111 Three days later he went back to the same Boston shop to buy popular English novelist Leonard Merrick’s 1908 short-story collection, The Man Who Understood Women. Its opening words could be taken as speaking, at least indirectly, to his own situation in an accent that owed something to J. M. Barrie and Jerome K. Jerome:

  Nothing had delighted Wendover so much when his first book appeared as some reviewer’s reference to ‘the author’s knowledge of women.’ He was then six or seven-and-twenty, and the compliment uplifted him the more because he had long regretted violently that he knew even less about women than do most young men.112

  At eight o’clock on the wintry Massachusetts evening of Monday 17 February 1913, Emily Hale sang several songs at the very beginning of the ‘Stunt Show’ held in Eleanor Hinkley’s home to raise money for the Cambridge Visiting Housekeeper scheme which Eleanor’s mother helped organise. It trained unskilled young women to be domestic servants, and the evening’s entertainme
nt, with its own printed programme, was well fitted to genteel taste. Despite her family’s reservations, Emily was allowed to act and sing in this private performance for relatives, neighbours and friends. Her opening the show suggests that she had, and was seen to have, presence and a good voice. Eleanor, though, was the moving spirit. She had recruited old school companions, neighbours, brothers of her friends and some cousins to take part. She had written two original sketches, and had ‘arranged’ several ‘scenes’ from literary works such as Dickens’s Bleak House, for small group performance.

  Certainly Tom could mock mannered domestic theatricality (‘You have the scene arrange itself – as it will seem to do –’), but he also had a taste for it, and Eleanor Hinkley had his measure.113 She played a strict mamma in ‘Rosamond and her Mother’, dramatised from Maria Edgeworth’s Rosamond – one of whose stories, ‘The Purple Jar’, was a favourite in America. Eleanor also acted Emma in ‘An Afternoon with Mr. Woodhouse’ from her beloved Jane Austen. In this scene Tom (whom Eleanor had known from his delicate childhood) was cast as the prematurely aged hypochondriac Mr Woodhouse. To fine-mannered Emily Hale in the same Emma ‘stunt’ went the part of the vain but vulgar Mrs Elton. In another sketch of Eleanor’s own, entitled ‘Arnold Bennett chooses a Heroine’, Tom’s sister Marion (who had studied at Miss Folsom’s school for social service in Boston) was cast as ‘The Sunday School Teacher’.114

  The evening was carefully choreographed and full of teasing. ‘Mr. Thomas Eliot’, that would-be Parisian, found himself cast as ‘Monsieur Marcel’ in a sketch Eleanor had written specially, ‘Monsieur Marcel and his latest Marvel’. Here Tom played opposite Amy de Gozzaldi, who acted the part of his ‘Marvel’.115 Casting Tom alongside two of her friends, Emily and Amy, Eleanor knew what she was doing, but Emily rather than Amy was positioned as star of the show: she sang at its start as well as after the interval, and she was central to the evening’s conclusion.