Young Eliot

by Robert Crawford

  ‘Eliot has suddenly married a very charming young woman’, wrote Ezra Pound to his parents on 30 June 1915, four days after the event.2 Friends liked both Tom and Vivien. Excitedly, the newlyweds did their best to put a brave face on things. On 30 June a conventional announcement appeared under ‘MARRIAGES’ in the London Times. It reads as a demonstration of unity. Just as her surname was the double-barrelled, rather upper-class English-sounding ‘Haigh-Wood’, so his became the double-barrelled ‘Stearns-Eliot’. Perhaps confused by complex instructions, the typesetter gave the bride, ‘Vivienne’, an additional middle name:

  STEARNS-ELIOT: HAIGH-WOOD. On the 26th June, by special licence, THOMAS STEARNS-ELIOT, youngest son of Mr. and Mrs. Henry Ware Eliot, of St Louis, Missouri, U.S.A., to VIVIENNE HAIGH HAIGH-WOOD, only daughter of Mr. and Mrs. C. H. Haigh-Wood, of 3, Compayne Gardens, Hampstead.3

  Mentioning ‘unusual preoccupations’, Tom signed himself ‘T. Stearns-Eliot’ when he thanked Harriet Monroe ten days later for payment for the publication of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. It had appeared, appropriately or otherwise, in the issue of Poetry that coincided with its author’s wedding. Though he soon dropped the hyphen, he went on calling himself ‘Stearns Eliot’ in formal letters for the next eighteen months or more. When signing more than just her first name, Vivien styled herself variously to Tom’s family and to Scofield ‘Vivien S. Eliot’, ‘Vivien S-E.’ and ‘V. S. E.’ The young couple wanted to rhyme.

  None of this ‘Stearns-Eliot’ stuff cut much ice in America. There, on the front page of the St Louis Globe-Democrat, above a story headed ‘SLAYS GIRL AND KILLS HIMSELF’, appeared an item, ‘THOMAS ELIOT OF ST. LOUIS WEDS ABROAD’.4 His family were summering as usual at Gloucester, and probably hoping that their younger son, like his friend Scofield Thayer, would soon be home. Tom did his best to manage how they received the news. Though his own announcement to his parents does not survive, they took it badly. Conscious they would think he was throwing everything away, Tom had lined up Pound (whose own father was closely involved in his son’s literary life) to send a long, reasoned epistle to Henry Ware Eliot, Sr, setting out what one might call the ‘business case’ for Tom’s remaining in London to pursue a literary career.

  Sent on 28 June, Pound’s arguments were in many ways shrewd, if as much about himself as about Tom. However, they were unlikely to go down well with the bridegroom’s father. For one thing, they revealed that Tom had discussed his personal plans – financial and otherwise – in considerable detail with this obscure, eccentric young poet in London whom Lottie and Hal had never met, while not even breathing a word to his own parents about his impending marriage. Disquisitioning on everyone and everything from Theocritus and Rihaku to Imagism and the Mercure de France, Pound focused on literary and commercial arguments. His line of pleading was not always geared to encourage a sympathetic reception:

  As to his coming to London, anything else is a waste of time and energy. No one in London cares a hang what is written in America. After getting an American audience a man has to begin all over again here if he plans for an international hearing. He even begins at a disadvantage. London likes discovering her own gods. Again in a literary career mediocrity is worse than useless. Either a man goes in to go the whole hog or he had better take to selling soap and gents furnishings. The situation has been very well summed up in the sentence: ‘Henry James stayed in Paris and read Turgenev and Flaubert, Mr Howells returned to America and read Henry James.’5

  Henry Ware Eliot, Sr, did not sell gents’ furnishings; his company sold bricks. He had never been to Paris. He knew how little his wife had wanted Tom to go there in the first place. His father loved Tom, but had little love for what he saw as the insanity of Blast and London’s avant-garde. The fact that Tom’s peculiar poem ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ had appeared in Poetry (tucked away towards the back because the editor did not greatly care for it) was unlikely to mollify him. Did Tom think his father would welcome this Mr Pound’s letter which concluded with advice hinting at how much money he, Henry Ware Eliot, Sr, should give his own son?

  It was almost three weeks before the marriage of ‘Oxford student’ Tom to his English bride was announced in his home city. This suggests that the family, in shock, bottled things up as they tried to work out how best to manage the situation. It was not Tom’s parents but his brother who stated awkwardly to the inquisitive St Louis press on 15 July:

  that he had been notified of his brother’s marriage, through his mother. He said that Thomas Eliot had been in London taking a year’s course in philosophy at the Oxford University. He said he knew little of Miss Haigh-Wood, but understood that she was a daughter of a member of the Royal Academy of Arts.6

  Tom had been trying to stress Vivien’s respectability. Yet St Louis readers who read between the lines might conclude that there was something suspect about this hasty marriage. That was what Tom’s parents thought too. His niece, Theodora, eleven that summer, remembered the family ‘row’. The consensus was that Tom had been ‘caught’ by Vivien.7 Having contacted his father and mother, on 2 July (using Vivien’s parents’ address), Tom wrote to his brother, telling him: ‘I feel more alive than I ever have before.’ His letter suggests that with Henry he had discussed in the past a general wish to marry, to commit himself to literature and to escape the milieu of the Boston Evening Transcript. Loyal, hard-working Henry, a single man who liked writing and had some similar aspirations, was sympathetic. Tom hoped that, to a degree, the family might be ‘prepared for my decision’. Mentioning that his bride, just days after the wedding, ‘is not very well at present’, he told Henry how much he and Vivien appreciated his kindness.

  Dear Henry,

  You will have heard by this time of the surprising changes in my plans. You know, however, what I always wanted, and I am sure that it will seem natural enough to you. The only really surprising thing is that I should have had the force to attempt it, and when you know Vivien, I am sure that you will not be surprised at that either. I know that you will agree that the responsibility and independent action has been and will be just what I needed. Now my only concern is how I can make her perfectly happy, and I think I can do that by being myself more fully than I ever have been. I am much less suppressed, and much more confident, than I ever have been.8

  Then, advised by Pound, Tom requested several favours. His brother might help him secure him good contacts with American editors. Henry, supportive and generous towards both Tom and his parents, sent a photograph taken on a visit to Chicago in June. It showed Henry with writer Dorothy Dudley. From a leading Chicago literary family, she too had work in the June issue of Poetry. Keen to aid Tom, Henry pointed out that Dorothy’s sister Helen, painted that year by Vanessa Bell, was ‘now in London’.9 She was also, though probably Henry did not know this, one of Bertrand Russell’s lovers.

  Tom hoped to persuade his parents to come to England to greet his bride, and strove to develop his growing network of London friends and acquaintances. Though they had not yet met, he heard through Pound about Richard Aldington, who had married the American poet H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) in 1913. An Englishman in his early twenties, Aldington was one of the original Imagists and assistant editor of the Egoist magazine. Publication in Blast had brought Tom a certain notoriety. He socialised with that journal’s dynamic editor Wyndham Lewis whose Vorticist circle included the young artist Edward Wadsworth and a more senior figure, forty-three-year-old novelist Ford Hermann Hueffer (Ford Madox Ford), who had edited the English Review. Through Pound, Tom met ‘Imagists and others’, including poets ‘John Gould Fletcher and F. S. Flint’.10 If any American writer was well placed to undertake what he called two years later the literary ‘siege of London’, it was Tom.11 Maybe, if they visited, his parents would come to understand his situation better.

  The newly-weds had been living in a small studio flat. His in-laws, Vivien’s brother recalled, ‘very quickly recognised Tom’s sincerity & high character’, t
aking him ‘to their hearts as a son-in-law’.12 Trying hard to get a job as a schoolteacher – in London if possible – he had withdrawn his application for a Harvard assistantship, while asserting that his commitment to London ‘literary work’ would not derail his thesis submission. His marriage, he explained awkwardly to Professor Woods, ‘was hastened by events connected with the war’.13

  Unsurprisingly, Tom was somewhat dizzied: he was adjusting to life with Vivien; seeking employment; negotiating a new, more ‘independent’ relationship with his family – and with the Harvard philosophy department; courting editors on both sides of the Atlantic. Some days he started to write letters, failed to finish them before he had a train to catch, then took them out again to continue in a station or in the open street. ‘It is hard to make a foothold’, he told the wealthy Isabella Stewart Gardner in Boston, whom he hoped might help him with American editors, ‘but I felt that the work at Harvard was deadening me.’14 If marriage brought new vitality, less ‘suppression’, it was also testing. Telling Mrs Gardner of his ‘happiness’ with Vivien, he wrote too about the demands of the relationship:

  You said once that marriage is the greatest test in the world. I know now that you were right, but now I welcome the test instead of dreading it. It is much more than a test of sweetness of temper, as people sometimes think; it is a test of the whole character and affects every action. This is what I have discovered.15

  Sixteen years older than his former student, Betrand Russell, who dined with the newly-weds on 9 July, just days after Tom wrote those words, thought the young husband was failing the test. Russell knew there had been ‘trouble between’ Tom and Vivien. Himself upset and writing to his married lover Lady Ottoline Morrell (a woman his own age with whom he had an intense, difficult and non-exclusive relationship), Russell is no objective witness. Yet his account is devastating:

  Friday evening I dined with my Harvard pupil Eliot and his bride. I expected her to be terrible, from his mysteriousness; but she was not so bad. She is light, a little vulgar, adventurous, full of life – an artist I think he said, but I should have thought her an actress. He is exquisite and listless; she says she married him to stimulate him, but finds she can’t do it. Obviously he married in order to be stimulated. I think she will soon be tired of him. She refuses to go to America to see his people, for fear of submarines. He is ashamed of his marriage, and very grateful if one is kind to her. He is the Miss Sands type of American.16

  Ethel Sands was a wealthy, exquisitely cultured and apparently lesbian American painter, long resident in England. Comparing Tom to her, Russell implies Tom lacks masculine vigour. Clearly, however, the philandering philosopher was struck by how ‘adventurous’ and ‘full of life’ Vivien was, and thought the marriage would fail. Three weeks later, finding herself alone, Vivien, while enjoying what she called her ‘very nice’ status as ‘Mrs Stearns-Eliot (notice the hyphen)’, wrote to Scofield Thayer, telling him she had had ‘blessings called down on my head’ as ‘the Poet’s Bride’ in the latest Blast. She also let Thayer know how ‘He is all over me, is Bertie, & I simply love him.’17 Russell had just invited her to dinner.

  An older man highly experienced in seduction, Russell made these moves as soon as Tom was off the scene. The poet’s parents were refusing to visit London: the transatlantic liner Lusitania had been torpedoed by the Germans in May, causing the loss of 1,200 lives, 128 of them American. The Eliots had summoned their son home. ‘Too frightened of the voyage & the submarines’, Vivien would not undertake the crossing. Tom went alone, attempting to balance his new, ‘independent’ husbandly self against his deeply ingrained sense of family duty. He reached America on 1 August, having told Vivien he would return in a month. They looked forward to ‘a second honeymoon’, and some security: thanks in part to a strong reference from the Dean of Merton, Tom had secured a job as a teacher at a school in High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, not far from Vivien’s parents’ holiday house at Upper Bourne End.18 In Oxford, the Dean wrote, Tom with ‘a genuine interest in fine literature’ had ‘made many friends and proved his ability and taste’. He was ‘likely to be a sympathetic and stimulating teacher and to exercise a good influence moral and intellectual over his pupils’.19

  Nevertheless, the newly-weds were anxious. Before departing England on 24 July, Tom left with Vivien a sealed letter to be opened in the event of his death. Beginning with the words ‘My dear Father’ and signed, ‘Your loving son Tom’, it made clear to his wary parents that Vivien had ‘not seen this’. The letter requested, in the event of Tom’s not surviving the Atlantic crossing, that Henry Ware Eliot, Sr, give Vivien the proceeds of a $5,000 insurance policy which he had taken out for Tom. The young husband explained, ‘I am convinced that she has been the one person for me. She has everything to give that I want, and she gives it. I owe her everything. I have married her on nothing, and she knew it and was willing, for my sake. She had nothing to gain by marrying me. I have imposed upon you very much, but upon her more, and I know you will help to make her life less difficult.’20 Reaching Gloucester, Massachusetts safely, Tom had to advance these arguments face to face.

  His parents listened. However much they felt he had been ‘caught’, that ‘he ought to have known better & certainly ought not to have married’, they could not unmarry him.21 They argued over his ‘blunders’.22 The senior Eliots thought Tom naïve and foolish. Later, his mother made it clear she believed that ‘up to the time of his marriage and residence in England’ he had ‘dwelt in an ideal world’.23 Years afterwards, having met both Vivien and her parents, Lottie Eliot wrote to Tom’s brother that Vivien’s mother was ‘not congenial … not a person of high principle … The standards in the female branch of that family are not as high as they should be.’ Tom’s mother continued to regard her younger son’s marriage as ‘a great misfortune’.24 ‘He married an English lady’, she explained curtly to the outside world.25 In August 1915 his parents tried to talk him out of his determination to stay in England. If Tom remained there, his father stated he would pay the rent but Tom must ‘support his wife’.26 It would be folly to throw away Harvard. Though he had declined it, Tom had already been offered an academic position at Wellesley College where his brother-in-law Shef had once taught. There was further work on offer at Harvard itself. Why couldn’t Tom be sensible? His parents wanted him to behave like an Eliot.

  After a few days he began to weaken. By 5 August he was writing to Conrad Aiken, telling him that, despite having secured the schoolmastering job in England, he might stay the winter in America to complete his doctorate in accordance with ‘my family’s wish’. ‘What I want is MONEY!$£!!’ he added, conscious of his father’s stance. ‘We are hard up!’27 The ‘We’ shows he had no intention of abandoning his wife, but by 16 August he was writing to Professor Woods to say he would be returning to Harvard in September. Vivien, with absolutely no wish to come to America, mounted a transatlantic campaign to bring him back. Her telling Scofield Thayer, whom she expected to meet Tom, all about Bertrand Russell’s attentions was part of this tussle, though Russell’s attentions were no invention. Calling herself ‘a grass widow’, Vivien told Thayer she had been dancing at the Savoy ‘with two male friends’ who were ‘consoling’ her. ‘Tom has gone to America without me … Rather unwise perhaps to leave so attractive a wife alone and to her own devices!’28

  Thayer, who had earlier cabled his congratulations on the nuptials, made it clear he was unhappy with Tom’s behaviour, and sought to meet in Massachusetts. Tom avoided encountering him, pleading that he had promised the time to his ‘relatives’.29 The aggrieved coldness of Tom’s reply shows that Thayer (who kept several of Vivien’s letters for the rest of his life) had expressed annoyance at Tom for having apparently poached Vivien from him. ‘I must confess’, Tom wrote on 9 August,

  that at the time I was surprised at the extent to which you were ‘nettled’. You had never given me the impression that your interest in the lady was exclusive – or indeed in t
he slightest degree a pursuit: and as you did not give her this impression, I presumed that I had wounded your vanity rather than thwarted your passion. If I was in error, at least Time (let us say) is the anodyne of disappointment rather than the separation of friends.

  Sincerely yours

  Thomas Stearns Eliot30

  Though transatlantic communications between Tom and Vivien do not survive, it is clear that, sensing she was losing the battle for her husband’s attention, she now played her trump card. She sent a message to Eastern Point that she was ‘very ill’, convincing Tom that he must sail ‘at once’ for England. Without even having time to deliver all the presents he had brought, Tom booked a passage back, setting sail on 21 August, though still telling Professor Woods that he did ‘not anticipate that her illness will prevent my return before the opening of college’.31 Tom’s sister Margaret was struck by the family’s ‘anxiety’ over Tom’s leaving for London; but they could not stop him.32 As she had tried to do earlier with Thayer, so now Vivien invoked her illness as a way of exerting control over her husband. ‘I fought like mad to keep Tom here’, she wrote later, ‘and stopped his going back to America. I thought I could not marry him unless I was able to keep him here, in England.’33

  She and Bertrand Russell had been making plans. Vivien and Tom would move into the spare bedroom in Russell’s London flat at 34 Russell Chambers, Bury Street. By early September, when the young couple had what Russell snidely termed ‘their sort of pseudo-honeymoon’ at Eastbourne, that was settled.34 Back with Vivien, Tom wrote to Thayer apologising for his earlier letter. He hoped Thayer would visit London soon. Having succeeded in using her illness to retain Tom, Vivien established a pattern that would be repeated over the ensuing years; Tom would learn to respond with illnesses of his own, and by steeling himself. Both he and Vivien could be manipulative. She seemed confident of her power over the middle-aged Russell also, and Russell was all too ready to offer help to his former student and his petite young wife. His motives, as Ottoline Morrell recognised, were scarcely disinterested. ‘I don’t think it would help her and help towards making the Eliot life happier to let her fall in love with you’, she warned him.35 It was too late.