Young Eliot

by Robert Crawford

  Number 1 Berkeley Square is not a vast house. Conditions for performers and audience were intimate. Eleanor recalled that ‘The scenes were laid by the parlor fireplace, in a space no bigger than seven square feet, so that the actors could be seen by the audience in the next room, through a door-way that was four feet eight.’116 At home in this house that he had known from childhood, and among trusted relatives and friends, Tom listened to Emily singing ‘andantino con molto espressione’ a song called ‘Ecstasy’, which opened the evening:

  Only to dream among the fading flowers,

  Only to glide along the tranquil sea;

  Ah dearest, dearest, have we not together

  One long, bright day of love, so glad and free?

  Only to rest through life, in storm and sunshine,

  Safe in thy breast, where sorrow dare not fly;

  Ah dearest, dearest, thus in sweetest rapture

  With thee to live, with thee at last to die!117

  Written by pioneering Boston composer Mrs H. H. A. Beach, this was passion New England-style, but passion it assuredly was: as she sang the words ‘dearest, dearest’ the soprano’s voice soared into the lyric ecstasy of the title. Here was the woman with whom Tom was ineradicably smitten.

  Emily sang five other love songs that evening: James Hotchkiss Rogers’s ‘Julia’s Garden’ (Tom came to associate her with flowers and gardens), Francesco Paolo Tosti’s ‘La Serenata’ (another song of longing and the sea), an ‘Old Air’, Luigi Denza’s ‘A May Morning’ (‘For you are the Queen of the May, my sweet, / And all the world to me’),118 and Boston composer Margaret Ruthven Lang’s ‘Mavourneen’. This last song had been sung as an encore at the Boston Symphony Orchestra the previous autumn, and was particularly popular; Emily’s uncle Philip, a devotee of the Boston Symphony and one of America’s leading music critics, was among the composer’s admirers.119 Formally entitled ‘An Irish Love Song’, though often called ‘Mavourneen’, its anonymous lyrics liltingly articulated both love and separation. The distinctive, constantly repeated Irish woman’s name was drawn out for emotional effect across rising chords:

  O the time is long, Mavourneen,

  Till I come again, O Mavourneen;

  An’ the months are slow to pass, Mavourneen,

  Till I hold thee in my arms, O Mavourneen!

  Shall I see thine eyes, Mavourneen,

  Like the hazel buds, O Mavourneen;

  Shall I touch thy dusky hair, Mavourneen,

  With its shim’rin glint o’ gold, Mavourneen?

  O my love for thee, Mavourneen,

  Is a bitter pain, O Mavourneen;

  Keep thy heart aye true to me, Mavourneen,

  I should die but for thy love, O Mavourneen.120

  Emily Hale was not Irish, but Tom, who later went to some length to send her a bunch of Killarney roses, may have associated her with this Irish love lilt, and it is possible she accompanied him to the Boston Opera House’s Tristan und Isolde when he went to hear Edoardo Ferrari-Fontana as Tristan and Margarete Matzenauer as Isolde in the production of 1 December 1913.121 Tom, like his friend Jean Verdenal, found Tristan und Isolde profoundly moving; later, in the context of intense erotic desire, he quoted in The Waste Land those lines where Tristan, in the first act of Wagner’s opera, longs for his Irish girl:

  Frisch weht der Wind

  Der Heimat zu

  Mein Irisch Kind

  Wo weilest du?122

  [The wind blows fresh

  To the homeland

  My Irish child

  Where are you lingering?]

  In the poem Tom follows these lines with a passage of his own about giving a ‘girl’ flowers (hyacinths) and being unable to speak or to move for intense emotion. Then he returns to Tristan und Isolde for a sense of the sea that separates the lovers as ‘wide and empty’: ‘Oed’ und leer das Meer’.123

  Tom enjoyed an intense bout of concert and opera-going during the 1913–14 season. He had relished classical performances before, experiencing, for instance, Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande when he was an undergraduate, but now he kept the printed programmes.124 Several are for Boston Symphony Orchestra concerts in Sanders Theatre at Harvard and for concerts and recitals at the orchestra’s base, Boston’s Symphony Hall. Emily was clearly musical and her uncle Philip wrote all the programme notes for performances given by the Boston Symphony.125 At Harvard in October and November 1913, Tom heard that orchestra playing Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, Sibelius’s Fourth Symphony and Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto. Then, heading into Boston, he went to Tristan und Isolde, then on Tuesday 2 December to a Chopin piano recital by Josef Hofmann at Symphony Hall. Next, on Sunday 7 December, while gearing up to read his paper on interpreting primitive ritual to Royce’s seminar group that Tuesday, he attended an afternoon violin recital by Fritz Kreisler (Symphony Hall again). He saw Tosca at the Boston Opera House on the evening of Monday 22 December; its sets depicted the splendid architecture of Rome.126

  Apparently insatiable, he was back at the Boston Opera House on the evening of 2 January 1914 for Madama Butterfly, then attended a Mischa Elman violin recital on the afternoon of Saturday 10 January (more Beethoven) and a recital the next week by the ‘celebrated Belgian Violinist’ Eugène Ysaÿe on the afternoon of Sunday 18 January. Throughout this period he was arguing in Royce’s seminar about the difference between description and explanation, between reality and illusion. On 30 January at the Boston Opera House the graduate student of philosophy, who had not so long before walked the streets of Montmartre, listened to the ravishing aria of young love ‘Depuis le jour’ sung as part of a staging of Gustave Charpentier’s Montmartre opera Louise whose present-day Parisian characters included, the programme noted, ‘Premier Philosophe’ and ‘Deuxième Philosophe’. On 5 February in Sanders Theatre, Tom heard the Boston Symphony play at their evening concert Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony and Beethoven’s powerfully emotional ‘Emperor’ piano concerto.127

  Beethoven would be a lifelong love for Tom. He had an especial fondness for that Seventh Symphony he had heard performed at the outset of this period of intense musical gratification. In it, Emily’s uncle wrote in his programme note, ‘as Beethoven achieved in the scherzo the highest and fullest expression of exuberant joy – “unbuttoned joy,” as the composer himself would have said – so in the finale the joy becomes orgiastic’.128 If not quite orgiastic, Tom’s attendance at these deeply moving concerts and operas was certainly as committed as his philosophising. These performances were very different from the shows he and Aiken went to. Perhaps he just wanted a break from endless seminars; but combined with the fact that (supplementing the knowledge he had gained at Mahler’s Academy of Dance in St Louis) he paid teacher Emma Wright Gibbs $7 for three hours of ‘dancing lessons’ on 15 December 1913, following up with a lesson at the Cambridge Skating Club on 4 April – and since this was the period when his relationship with the music-loving singer Emily was deepening – it seems likely that he was going on a full-blown series of dates.129

  Yet by the start of 1914 he had clear plans to leave for Europe that summer. ‘Mr T. S. Eliot of Harvard College’ had been ‘admitted as a Commoner’ of Merton College, Oxford, ‘for the Academical Year 1914–1915’ on 21 January, some months before being awarded the Sheldon Travelling Fellowship.130 Though his absence was unlikely to last more than a year, this planned departure was a deadline to concentrate the heart as well as the mind. Never a man to reveal his emotions readily, about two years after meeting her, Tom managed to tell Emily that he was in love with her. Having made a ‘declaration’ of what he felt, he found her response crushingly disappointing. According to an account that he set down in old age in a private memorandum, and which is the most authoritative record of his intimate reactions, Tom ‘had no reason to believe, from the way in which his declaration was received, that his feelings were returned “in any degree whatever”’.131

  Probably in his excitement and nervousness he misread elemen
ts of the situation. In his twenties he was, as he later put it, ‘very immature for my age, very timid, very inexperienced’.132 Aged twenty-two in the summer of 1914, Emily, who later made it clear to friends that she did love Tom, seems also to have been inexperienced in matters of the heart, however eloquently she could sing about them. Her brilliant, sometimes intimidating but witty and sensitive twenty-five-year-old philosopher who knew all about Paris and was teaching, as Emily’s father had done, at Harvard, was heading soon for Europe once again. Though his travelling fellowship might involve no more than twelve months’ absence, the future was far from certain. Possibly Emily knew that, whatever he said to his parents, he wanted to be a poet at least as much as he aspired to become a professional philosopher. Neither he nor she had any permanent employment. All this made an engagement seem unwise.

  Intelligent, vulnerable, strictly brought up and defensively ‘proper’ in a bygone ladylike way that may be hard for us now to understand, Emily was schooled in Bostonian restraint. An observant woman who met her later, when she was middle-aged, thought her ‘like a sergeant major’; in her youth she was softer, but still correct.133 Perhaps inexperienced in relationships with suitors, she did not give Tom a signal that he could interpret as encouragement. They went on being friends and she remained unmarried. Though all their early letters are destroyed, they corresponded for some time after he sailed for Europe. As months and then, unexpectedly, years kept them apart, each thought of the other with longing and new understanding. Tom came to regret profoundly the loss of this woman he loved and who shared so much of his own background; Emily felt troublingly wounded by their separation. These feelings were modified over the rest of their lives, but remained central to their pained relationship. It was something they could never put right.

  In Princeton University Library are twelve boxes containing ‘approximately 1,131 letters and related enclosures’ sent by Tom to Emily Hale. No correspondence survives from their youth: the Princeton collection begins only around 1930; ‘by agreement with the donor, Emily Hale’, it ‘is sealed until January 1, 2020’, so it will be discussed in the second volume of the present biography.134 The archive’s principal significance lies in what it says about the later years of the relationship. Though Tom sent Emily only seven letters in 1930, the next year he sent her ninety-two letters and in 1932 he sent a hundred. Throughout the 1930s they met face to face on both sides of the Atlantic. On average he mailed Emily at least one letter a week, usually more. While tapering off, their correspondence continued throughout the 1940s and 1950s. It ended abruptly when Tom married his secretary, Valerie Fletcher, in 1957. His connection with Emily lasted forty-five years. Late in life, recalling his sense of how in 1914 she gave him no reason to believe his feelings were reciprocated ‘in any degree whatever’, he still articulated a pang of hurt.135

  9

  The Oxford Year

  SURE he had failed in love, he turned to poetry. One of his early poems, which he never published, addresses a ‘beloved’ linked to ‘song’; but that poem’s speaker, associated with broken glass, sees his fate as ‘To be swept away’.1 Convinced he had been rejected by Emily, during summer 1914 Tom read in proof Conrad Aiken’s debut collection of poems. Dedicated ‘To My Wife’, it was thronged with images of young love, happy and otherwise.

  And so he lay awake long hours,

  Traced on the wall the patterned flowers,

  And while the clock ticked, cold and slow,

  Carefully backward would he go

  In hushed mind over memories of her

  To ask if she were friend or lover …2

  The first poem in Conrad’s forthcoming book lasted sixty-eight pages, the second sixty-three. Neither was first rate. Yet the volume would be published by a good publisher; it attracted decent reviews, appearing alongside titles by Tom’s former classmate Edward Sheldon and collections by noted American poets including Vachel Lindsay, Harriet Monroe and Amy Lowell. Tom could only be patient, and bide his time. Annoyingly, Aiken’s poems contained moments reminiscent of Tom’s own unpublished verse. Sometimes he despaired. ‘I have done nothing good since J. A[lfred] P[rufrock] and writhe in impotence’, he complained late that summer. It was now three years since he had completed Prufrock’s ‘Love Song’ in Munich. With his relationship with Emily confined to epistolary friendship and his poetry apparently stalled he had to face up to ‘having made a failure of one’s life’.3

  He went to Germany. On the transatlantic liner bound for England he was mistaken for an Englishman, and was asked if he had enjoyed his visit to America. Undeterred, he danced to the captain’s phonograph; sat ‘astride a pole, a pillow in each hand’, competing in a pillow fight; partnered ‘Miss Mildred Levi of Newton, the belle of the boat’ in a ‘Thread the Needle contest’.4 On board ship during the 4th of July celebrations, he joined in singing ‘Rally, rally round the Flag, Boys!’ with piano accompaniment.5

  From his ‘snug little cabin’ he wrote to his cousin Eleanor about the voyage. Probably she had some inkling of his situation with Emily, and recognised he was putting a brave face on things. Witty, kind, attentive to details, his letter shows how charming he could be with women he trusted. He had always liked Eleanor. Alert to theatre dialogue, she shared his alert ear for phrasing; for her he transcribed transatlantic snippets: ‘Well I never should have said you came from St Louis.’6 Ironically, at least one of Tom’s early ocean crossings was made on a ship called the USMS St Louis. On its notepaper he wrote a prose poem (perhaps imitating the 1912 French prose poetry of Charles Vildrac) called ‘The Engine’. The steamship’s engine hammers and hums, oblivious to its American passengers. The engine stops and the speaker imagines what would happen if the ship sank.7

  After a London stopover where he seems to have acquired a copy of avant-garde ‘Vorticist’ magazine Blast, Tom headed through Bruges (‘charming if you like that sort of thing’), Ghent, Antwerp and Brussels, visiting art galleries en route. Improving his knowledge of paintings of St Sebastian, he noted as among the best Hans Memling’s in the Brussels Musée des Beaux-Arts. By 19 July he had reached Marburg, the small, ancient German university town where he was to attend a philosophy summer school. Delightfully, Marburg was built on a steep hill terraced with rose gardens; his window looked across these and the River Lahn beyond. Tom lodged with a pastor, Herr Happich, and his kindly family. Embarrassed to arrive with ‘only one (torn) pair of pajamas’, he could not find the German for pyjamas in his dictionary, but noticed it did contain the German for ‘pudibund’ – a word he offered to Conrad Aiken, but squirreled away for his own poetic use.8 From the cultured Lutheran rectory he sent Conrad a new Bolovian opus rhyming ‘Fried Hyenas’ with ‘bit of penis’. He drew a bald, bewhiskered ‘Herr Professor’. The solemn, goggle-spectacled academic sports a knee-length double-breasted coat.9

  Tom liked the Happichs, and ate heartily: ‘five meals a day’. He swam, and hiked beautiful paths in the woods – ‘but not far, because I must always be back in time for the next meal’. In a university town noted for its philosophers he bought Edmund Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen – (Logical Investigations), and noted approvingly that you could purchase Abdulla cigarettes, an upmarket English brand.10 Modern German philosophy interested him; he seems to have attended at least some of the 1912 Harvard lectures by Rudolf Christoph Eucken, whose Can We Still be Christians? was translated in early 1914. Marburg’s professors were strong in neo-Kantian epistemology and links between theology and philosophy. It made sense for the Harvard graduate student who had studied Kantian metaphysics and who remained interested in religious thought to come here. Yet, as on his previous visit to Europe, Tom was impelled towards poetry.

  He was trying to write an ambitious long sequence provisionally entitled ‘Descent from the Cross’. One part was uttered by a philosopher: ‘Appearances appearances he said / I have searched the world through dialectic ways’. This speaker’s concerns related to Tom’s more abstract speculations about deg
rees of reality: ‘Appearances appearances he said / Are nowise real; unreal, and yet true; / Untrue, but real – of what are you afraid?’ Juxtaposed with such abstract material were to be a tormented love song, ‘an Insane Section, and another love song (of a happier sort)’; then a piece about a ‘married girl’ who ‘Wraps her soul in orange-coloured robes of Chopinese’, a ‘mystical section’, and a ‘Fool-House section’ beginning by parodying a religious scene:

  ‘Let us go to the masquerade and dance!

  I am going as St John among the Rocks

  Attired in my underwear and socks…’11

  In Tom’s mind, around the time he sketched all this in a letter to Aiken, were different notions of sex and love: from the taboo-breaking, sex-mad Bolo sort and Swinburne’s poem in praise of Venus, ‘Laus Veneris’ (which imprisons its German hero with a tormenting erotic goddess who kills all her lovers except the speaker) to Goethe’s Faust, another German protagonist famously fascinated with ‘Das ewig weibliche’ – the Eternal Feminine.12 The sequence of poems he was working on draws on his preoccupations with philosophy, mysticism, psychology, martyrdom and religion.

  Most striking, though, is its troubled eroticism – an exploration of violent, sometimes self-loathing behaviour that may emanate from sexual frustration. The poet of J. Alfred Prufrock was now authoring further love songs; but whereas in 1911 Tom had mixed worries about declaring love with finely judged ironic wit, in 1914 he presents a far more extreme scenario. In ‘The Love Song of St Sebastian’ the speaker flogs himself until he stands in a pool of blood. Scourged, he approaches the bed of his white-gowned beloved:

  Then you would take me in

  Because I was hideous in your sight

  You would take me in to your bed without shame

  Because I should be dead …

  This poem’s first stanza presents a saint who mortifies himself to death; its second shows him strangling the object of his affections with obsessive erotic attentiveness: ‘Your ears curl back in a certain way / Like no ones else in all the world’.13 Mentioning how ‘the world shall melt in the sun’, the phrasing echoes Robert Burns’s famous promise to stay faithful to his sweetheart until ‘the rocks melt wi’ the sun’.14 However, designed to lead readers towards a planned ‘Insane Section’, Tom’s lines present the lover as a possessive psychotic killer: