Young Eliot

by Robert Crawford

  Meanwhile, Vivien had been hoping to accompany him to a party with Mary Hutchinson, and was excited about what she called ‘my new house’ at Marlow, but she worried Tom might not be well enough to dance.141 He had a two-day holiday from the bank on 25 and 26 December, and no lectures for three weeks. A sense of ‘nervous strain’ oppressed him; he felt it would be ‘a sad Christmas’.142 Vivien told Mary he was ‘overworked and tired of living’.143 On Christmas Day when they opened their presents, he found his brother had sent him a portfolio of family photographs and familiar American scenes. Tom pored over them intently, as he confessed to Henry, with ‘a lot of pleasure, some of it of a pathetic (but pleasant) sort’.144 Christmas lunch was spent with Vivien’s parents at their Hampstead home; Vivien would have preferred dinner in the evening, but a full moon made air raids more likely: after lunch she and Tom headed for the country before work at the bank resumed. As they both coughed, nursing colds in the December English weather, they felt miserable. Her sympathy tinged with a dash of spite, Vivien expressed a wish that Tom ‘could break his leg, it is the only way out of this that I can think of’.145

  12

  American

  AS the war continued, Tom’s thoughts focused more intently on American relations with Europe. Justifying his commitment to a literary career in England, he began to articulate views that would become among his best known. Soon, trying to enrol for military service, he had to confront in new contexts the consequences of being an American. As it had done when he lived there, his native land frustrated and even infuriated him; but it also defined him. His Americanness both excited and annoyed Vivien.

  He was preparing a special issue of the Egoist memorialising an exemplary novelist from the United States. Henry James had died in early 1916. The previous year, partly in protest against America’s refusal to declare war against the Kaiser, James had become a British subject, but to Tom he mattered most as a literary artist. Though Pound and others contributed to this special issue, published in January 1918, it was Tom’s idea, emerging from his ‘great admiration’ for James’s combination of the creative and the critical.1 He agreed with most of James’s criticism of New England life; whether considering James or Turgenev (another émigré writer he admired), he argued for ‘the benefits of transplantation’. Tom sought examples of ‘how to maintain the role of foreigner with integrity’; yet at the same time, in language that now seems problematic, he asserted ‘a writer’s art must be racial – which means, in plain words, that it must be based on the accumulated sensations of the first twenty-one years’.2 Apart from his boyhood visit to Quebec, his own first twenty-one years had been spent wholly in the United States.

  Proclaiming itself ‘the most notable magazine of its kind in the world’, London’s Poetry Review had paid no attention to Prufrock. Instead, in 1917 it had featured ‘Alan Seeger: America’s Soldier Poet’, killed in France on 4 July 1916.3 Tom, to whom Seeger’s work was so manifestly ‘out of date’, thought his former classmate’s poems ‘not unworthy of the attraction they have attracted’; but the future was Jamesian.4 Seeing James’s friend Edith Wharton as ‘the satirist’s satirist’, Tom praised her New England novel of sexual betrayal and unhappy marriage, Summer, in the January 1918 Egoist, interested both in its attack on sentimental localism and in its ‘suppressing all evidence of European culture’.5 James himself was even better: he had taken on Europe and triumphed. ‘I do not suppose that any one who is not an American can properly appreciate James’, Tom wrote. ‘It is the final perfection, the consummation of an American to become, not an Englishman, but a European – something which no born European, no person of any European nationality, can become.’6

  As Europe’s warring nationalities tore the Continent apart, this insolent argument made a kind of sense. It may have goaded both English and American readers, but it let Tom follow in James’s wake by turning his perceived New England provincialism into an asset. Bringing with him American perspectives to which he had added French, some German and English ones, he argued that the literature of England was too provincial. England’s Georgian poets seemed weakened by lack of engagement with French verse. James, the transplanted American, had relatively few readers who understood him; but for Tom, who had even fewer, he was an inspiration:

  The fact of being everywhere a foreigner was probably an assistance to his native wit. Since Byron and Landor, no Englishman appears to have profited much from living abroad. We have had Birmingham seen from Chelsea, but not Chelsea seen (really seen) from Baden or Rome. There are advantages, indeed, in coming from a large flat country which no one wants to visit: advantages which both Turgenev and James enjoyed.7

  Tom loved the way James refused to present Americans as ‘commercial buccaneers’; instead, rejecting stereotypes that even Americans relished, James exemplified nuance. Tom had read with interest Frank Norris’s 1903 novel, The Pit, which (as would The Waste Land) juxtaposed snatches of opera with urban commercial life; its artistic St Louisan, Corthell, falls in love with Laura but, despite her ‘married life’ being ‘intolerable’, and despite her ‘affair’ conducted with Corthell in richly ornate, plutocratic rooms, she remains with her businessman husband.8 Norris’s narrative came into Tom’s mind in early 1918, convincing him James’s work was much subtler in its psychology and sense of Americans. James’s ‘superior intelligence’ could make both America and England so uncomfortable that this writer’s death, if properly understood, might have ‘cemented the Anglo-American Entente’.9

  Resistant to the ‘all-American propaganda’ of Amy Lowell, Tom brooded on what it meant to be an American author, while contending that ‘Literature must be judged by language, not by place.’ ‘Provinciality of material may be a virtue’, but ‘provinciality of point of view’ was ‘a vice’.10 He had been thinking more widely, too, about tradition and theology. To innovate, he argued, required consciousness of tradition, even if only to avoid repeating what had been accomplished already. Yet ‘Tradition’ with a capital T could be a mere repository of unexamined practices. Strikingly, when reflecting on contemporary poetry in late 1917, he had suggested that ‘for an authoritative condemnation of theories attaching extreme importance to tradition as a criterion of truth’ readers should consult a nineteenth-century papal encyclical.11 Few perusers of the Egoist are likely to have done so, but Tom’s commitment to avant-garde work by Joyce and Wyndham Lewis accompanied his reading of Catholic theologically-minded philosophers including Father John Rickaby, Cardinal Joseph Mercier (whose Manual of Modern Scholastic Philosophy was published in English in 1917) and Father Peter Coffey on interpretation of the tradition of ‘modern Catholic thought’. Tom belonged to no church. Yet, visiting Anglo-Catholic City churches in his lunch hours, he was conscious of Catholicism as ‘the only Church which can even pretend to maintain a philosophy of its own, a philosophy, as we are increasingly aware, which is succeeding in establishing a claim to be taken quite seriously’.12 Despite mocking the ‘True Church’ in ‘The Hippopotamus’, as he continued reading philosophy and anthropology, he went on pondering literature side by side with religion.

  Some details that caught his attention seem revealing. In late 1917 he was writing about Eugenics Review articles which dealt with sexual problems and arguments for birth control – ‘as in cases when a woman lacks the physical strength for child-birth’.13 Probably Vivien viewed herself in such a light, and Tom may have been aware that his mother (as she put it later) did not consider his ‘an eugenic marriage’.14 Writing with approval about marital conditions in Burmese culture where ‘marriages are civil and can easily be dissolved on reasonable grounds, even on the ground of incompatability’, he suggests that ‘the primitive Shan tribes are undoubtedly more civilized than ourselves’.15 Even as he remained locked into many of his society’s conventions, his habit of aligning the supposedly ‘primitive’ with the present day, familiar from his Harvard studies, guided his poetry and criticism. He warmed to ‘the anthropological aspect’ of
Durkheim’s thinking about the relationship between ‘group-consciousness’ and ‘individual consciousness’. In late 1917 he wrote about Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of the Religious Life with its ‘reinterpretations of the principal social phenomena of primitive peoples’.16 Such concerns recalled his earlier graduate-student paper on interpreting primitive ritual. Along with recent reflections on literary and Catholic tradition, they fed, too, into one of his most important essays, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’. That work was not published until 1919, but there are anticipations of it in his articles throughout the previous year.

  The ‘primitive mind’ compelled his interest. He thought ‘The psychoanalysis of myths, pursued by some of Freud’s disciples’, could cast light on it.17 Conrad Aiken was devoted to deploying Freud’s ideas, but Tom, whose path diverged more and more from Aiken’s, was wary of doing so crudely.18 Nevertheless he knew work by Freud’s exponent Ernest Jones, and had read Edwin B. Holt’s The Freudian Wish and its Place in Ethics which he thought ‘possibly’ one of the most ‘notable productions’ among recent philosophical works.19 Strikingly, Holt’s book had linked a fixation with a woman’s ‘teeth’ to ‘hysteria’. The terms ‘suppressed’, ‘complex’ and ‘dissociation’ were borrowed by Holt from Freud and Janet; in turn, they were adopted by Tom, not just in his poems ‘Suppressed Complex’, sent to Aiken in 1915, and ‘Hysteria’ (in which a woman’s ‘teeth’ are ‘accidental stars’), but also in subsequent essays where the ‘dissociation of sensibility’ (a partial echo of Bostonian Morton Prince’s 1906 Dissociation of a Personality) would become famous.20

  If Tom’s awareness of Freud made him concerned about his own sex life, more evident was his annoyance at America’s prudery in depriving ‘the small public that cares for literature’ of Wyndham Lewis’s sexually explicit story ‘Cantleman’s Spring Mate’. Under a US law that declared ‘“non-mailable”’ by the postal service any material with a ‘“tendency to excite lust”’, distribution of the Little Review had been halted in early 1918, despite legal efforts by John Quinn in New York.21 Tom in the Egoist expressed outrage. He wanted a literature ready to face up to the seismic complexities of sex.

  Long used to erotic vagaries, Bertrand Russell was looking forward now to an ongoing relationship with Vivien, while hoping to continue sleeping from time to time with Lady Constance Malleson; he was annoyed that Lady Malleson had become pregnant by another of her lovers. Spending several weeks in the New Year at Ottoline Morrell’s Garsington, Russell wrote to Malleson on 6 January, ‘My work-a-day life will be at Marlow, with Mrs. E. I shall come up to London one or two nights a week, according to how busy I am. If you are prepared to give me those nights & a day, we shall keep in touch…’22 Unsurprisingly, his relationship with Malleson continued to be stormy, but other squalls, too, were brewing. Before he could establish a life ‘at Marlow, with Mrs. E.’, Russell was charged in early February with publishing statements ‘likely to prejudice His Majesty’s relations with the United States of America’.23 He was found guilty in a London court, having suggested that, if war continued, an ‘American Garrison’ in England would be used for ‘intimidating strikers, an occupation to which the American Army is accustomed when at home’.24 While appealing against his conviction, Russell went on delivering public lectures on ‘The Philosophy of Logical Atomism’. Still in London with Vivien and having suffered a bout of flu, Tom calmly and supportively reviewed Russell’s Mysticism and Logic in the Nation: ‘Mr Russell reaches the level of the very best philosophical prose in the language. The only contemporary writer who can even approach him is Mr Bradley.’25

  Among those who rallied to Russell’s support were the editor of the liberal free-trade paper Common Sense, of which Tom approved, and Raphael Demos, Tom’s philosopher friend from Harvard, who visited him at the bank while in London. Tom had a detailed conversation with Russell about philosophy and the biological sciences in March, not long before Russell was once more reconciled with Constance Malleson. Later, in early May, the former don was gaoled for six months, his loneliness in Brixton prison alleviated by a flow of visitors, including Tom. Vivien was not on Russell’s prison-visitors list, but Tom’s readiness to support his devious mentor is striking: a triumph, perhaps, of generosity and intellectual loyalty over common sense. Certainly Russell’s imprisonment meant the Eliots’ marriage was less imperilled, though the strain caused by Vivien’s adultery contributed to other stresses. In the midst of chilblains, neuralgia and exhaustion, she and Tom looked forward to small pleasures: letters, American newspapers, dancing, Orange Pekoe tea from St Louis.

  As was becoming his habit, Tom managed to numb himself with work. Some weekends he spent all Sunday labouring on the Egoist, or preparing lectures. Weekdays, there was the bank; Saturday had long been the only time when he was free to meet his literary friends for extended conversation over lunch. A sense of personal pressures, intensified by the constant background menace of the war, disturbed both the Eliots, though they tried to cope in different ways. ‘Everything looks more black and dismal than ever, I think’, Tom wrote to his mother on 4 March. ‘The whole world simply lives from day to day; I haven’t any idea of what I shall be doing in a year, and one can make no plans. The only thing is to try to fill one’s mind with the things in which one is interested.’26

  One thing that interested him was editing. Harriet Weaver and he hoped to publish ‘Mr. James Joyce’s new novel, Ulysses’. It was to begin appearing in March in serial form in the Egoist simultaneously with publication in the Little Review, but very soon there were ‘difficulties in regard to the printing’.27 Wartime England’s paper shortages continued. More challengingly, Joyce’s work could be considered obscene, rendering its printers liable to prosecution. The Egoist Press brought out its second edition of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in March. Tom, Weaver’s assistant editor, was right behind her in trying to get Ulysses published in Britain, commenting in June that Joyce was ‘The best living prose writer’ and his new novel ‘superb’.28 His frustration at American refusals to countenance publication of Lewis’s short story in March should be seen in the context of the Egoist’s struggles that same month to publish Ulysses.29 Campaigning for and regularly conversing with other writers, Tom was at the very centre of literary life in London. His knowledge of tradition, theory and practice came to him through face-to-face discussion as well as via his remarkable formal education and a lengthening list of correspondents.

  His work with Weaver introduced him to the travails of book publishing – both as author and editor. It confirmed, too, that he had an outstanding editorial eye – evident not just in material he published in the magazine, but also in his reviewing. He could take an eleven-line poem and see that it would be far better if ‘the first four lines’ were ‘printed alone’. He could point out to a poet – his new friend Osbert Sitwell – that the word ‘“gigantic” should not be followed by “immense” in the next line’; and, having done so, he could remain friends.30 The courtesy that may have been problematic in Tom’s relations with Russell came into its own when he was making stringent but accurate editorial interventions. He took pride in knowing how to review work by his allies without betraying his principles. Interested in Pound’s move towards longer poems – the first Cantos – he also went over some of his friend’s verse before it was submitted for magazine publication. In due course, honed and strengthened, such skills would make Tom the twentieth-century’s most celebrated literary editor. Pound, whose work in 1918 he valued ‘far higher than that of any other living poet’, certainly repaid the favour.31

  Tom learned the hard way too: in early 1918 a rumour reached him from New York that recently established New York publishers, Boni & Liveright (‘young Jews’ as the sometimes virulently anti-Semitic Quinn termed them) aimed to produce a pirated American edition of Prufrock.32 Actually, this firm was interested in publishing Tom’s book in a perfectly legal way, but Quinn advised him to delay until he had enough mat
erial for a more substantial American debut with a publisher such as Knopf. Grateful for Quinn’s staunch support, Tom was prepared to wait, but concern that his work might be pirated increased his vexations: he had ‘only written half a dozen small poems in the last year’ and was usually ‘too tired to do any original work’.33 Often he would write letters or lectures until very late at night. One weekend Vivien worried he had spent a whole day without moving from his seat, except to eat. She found the days before his lectures ‘terrible’, and told Lottie Eliot how white and thin he looked. In describing her husband, Vivien expressed something of her own anxiety. ‘It is more than one can endure to see a young man so worn and old-looking … It wears me out to see him.’ Such statements exerted pressure on the Eliot parents, whose support continued – in cash as well as in kind. Tom got two new suits, ‘a very jolly-looking over-coat’ and a new hat to supplement the sweater, muffler and pyjamas sent across the Atlantic by his ever anxious septuagenarian mother.34

  Frustrated in her earlier search for employment, Vivien was trying her hand at ‘cinema acting’, but with little or no success.35 When they both felt well enough, she played the part of hostess at home, too, assisted by Ellen Kellond, the household servant on whose labour they relied. That March the Eliots hosted their most ambitious lunch to date, packing their small dining-room-cum-library with five guests who joined them in tucking into fish and spaghetti. Determinedly, they kept the ‘obsessing nightmare’ of war at bay; Tom, eager to ‘preserve values’, tried to do this in almost all his writing.36 Yet occasional moments of civilised poise and personal success were swept aside: Vivien failed to sustain her career as an actress; Tom missed small things like the boneless cod boxed by Gorton and Pew in Gloucester or the Sunday evenings with baked beans, toast, cocoa and chat about friends at Eleanor Hinkley’s Berkeley Place house. He felt pangs of nostalgia for America and his family, even as he resolved to stay in England.