Young Eliot

by Robert Crawford

  Writing this, Tom set out to achieve what he believed his fellow American Henry James had accomplished: to become fully European. In the twenty-first century that may sound odd, presumptuous, too Eurocentric. Yet for Tom it was a move beyond the limitations of national sensibilities that was enabled by being a ‘metic’, by discovering that there was a ‘mind of Europe’ and accepting this as ‘the mind of his own country’ – ‘more important than his own private mind’. Such an overarching ‘mind’ to which the poet had his crucial relationship might change and develop, but did not improve. Neither Homer nor the prehistoric rock art of ‘the Magdalenian draughtsmen’ nor Shakespeare went out of date. Requiring ‘learning’, and depending on ‘relations’, Tom’s aesthetic may owe something to his philosophical training – and not least to his interest in ‘relativism’ and anthropology – as well as to his upbringing and poetic gift.98 This way of thinking about literature across great swathes of cultures was something encouraged by Rémy de Gourmont’s 1902 Le Problème du style. De Gourmont ranged from Homer and the Vedas to modern fiction and poetry; he admired and wrote about Laforgue and the Symbolists. Like Pound, Tom thought him a ‘great critic’.99 The ‘knowledge’ that mattered to poets, Tom argued, was not simply that of ‘examinations’. It was something better: a sense of tradition to which the poet must continually ‘surrender’. As a result, ‘The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.’100

  Such ‘self-sacrifice’ sounds tinged with the religion and family values of his childhood. He presents poetry as a demanding calling, and tradition as a form of communion linking the living to the dead. Yet his talk of ‘extinction’ also hints that poetry can offer a way out of dilemmas in personal life. The artistic process purges away irrelevant quirks of ‘personality’ in an art that may ‘approach the condition of science’ in its ‘depersonalisation’. As Tom explained things a month or two later, ‘In the man of scientific or artistic temper the personality is distilled into the work, it loses its accidents.’ It becomes ‘a permanent point of view, a phase in the history of mind’.101

  Tom left his readers – and one wonders how many were able to do so – contemplating what happens when ‘a bit of finely filiated platinum is introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide’.102 Like so many of his most striking pieces of writing, this one was produced when he was feeling unwell. Once again, it was as if illness let him release material that had been building up, but which he could not otherwise let out. Making sure the piece was ready to appear in the September Egoist, he then set off without Vivien but with the draft of ‘Gerontion’, for his French holiday. ‘Perhaps’, he exclaimed to Mary Hutchinson in a letter, ‘I won’t ever come back!’103

  On 9 August, a very hot Saturday, Vivien saw Tom off at 5 p.m. at London’s Waterloo station. She was going to Eastbourne for a fortnight with the Schiffs, taking her dressmaking with her; he was catching an overnight boat train which would reach Le Havre at 8 a.m. on Sunday morning. Having crossed the Channel for the first time since the war had ended, he soon got into conversation with a French couple. He sailed with them for an hour on a small steamer from Le Havre across the mouth of the Seine to Trouville, a pretty resort town frequently depicted in its airy brightness by the painter Eugène Boudin. Tom delighted in the ‘blazing bright August day, the boat crowded with people going to the races, and men with violins and singers passing their hats’. Out of England, he became elated: ‘It was all so French and so sudden that I was dazed by it.’104 Then he boarded a train from Trouville to Paris. A taxi via the place de la Concorde let him catch another train south. Slightly embarrassed because he had forgotten how to recognise some of the French coins, he had counted out his money slowly for the taxi driver, whose honesty was impressive. ‘“That’s enough”’, the man said, ‘indicating a small tip’. Happy, Tom insisted on giving him more: ‘“That’s because I have not been in Paris for eight years.”’105 The driver roared with laughter, waving as he sped off. Tom travelled overnight south to Limoges, then changed trains, heading into the Dordogne at the start of his three-week vacation.

  With a rucksack on his back, stepping off the train at Périgueux at 7.30 a.m. and looking for breakfast, he remembered being there before as a student in January 1911. Ahead of him now lay a walking tour through the Dordgone and Corrèze regions, a part of France Ezra Pound had written about a few years earlier in his poem ‘Near Perigord’ – all medieval castles, pine trees, poplars and rivers ‘filled with water-lilies’.106 Tom found it ‘beautiful’, and there to meet him on his arrival was Pound himself.107 Tom’s delight was no less for the wave of tiredness that hit him: as soon as they reached the hotel, he went to bed and slept till lunchtime. Then, ‘I stuffed myself with good French food.’108

  They spent several days together in Excideuil, the village where Pound and his wife Dorothy were holidaying from Toulouse. With its narrow streets, pale stone dwellings, castle associated with troubadour poetry and ruined tenth-century monastery, Excideuil was a fine place in which to recharge. Sunburnt, Tom savoured the taste of fresh melons, mushrooms called ceps, free-range country eggs, truffles, and, as he put it, ‘good wine and good cheese and cheerful people’.109 Lloyds Bank this was not; he loved it. He feasted too on ‘Roman ruins, and tall white houses, and gorgeous southern shrubs, and warm smells of garlic – donkeys – ox carts’.110 Leaving Dorothy sketching, he and Pound hiked together through the small, picturesque medieval towns of Thivier (proud of its foie gras and set between the Rivers Cole and Touroulet) and Brantôme on the Cole with its beautiful abbey and historic bell tower, said to be among the oldest in France. Occasionally, Tom postcarded Vivien. Pound informed Dorothy, ‘T. has 7 blisters.’111 When Tom showed him ‘Gerontion’, his friend scribbled suggestions on it; if Pound’s poetry is a trustworthy record, Tom also revealed something of his ongoing wrestling with religion: ‘I am afraid of the life after death.’ Then he paused and added with satisfaction that at last he had managed to shock his companion.112 Even in the French sunshine a dark substratum of religious anxiety continued to perturb him, filling him at times with a sense of dispossession, of emptiness, though usually he hid this from his friends.

  After Pound headed back to rejoin his wife, Tom walked on alone to see the Magdalenian prehistoric art of the grottoes at Font de Gaume and Les Eyzies, south of Périgueux. His mention of ‘Magdalenian draughtsmen’ in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ suggests that he had those places in mind when he wrote the essay, but, given that it had to be typeset for publication in the September Egoist, and that Tom got back from France on 31 August, he may have been anticipating his trip when he wrote it. On Tom’s return, his wife was surprised to see he had ‘begun to grow a beard’; Pound was bearded, but for Tom this was an unusual look.113 Though she had not told him when she wrote to him in France, Vivien had felt ill during his absence, as had the dog Dinah. Tom’s return was ‘Very nice at first’, but in her diary Vivien added the words ‘depressed in evening’.114 Later that week, Dinah grew worse: Tom accompanied Vivien in a taxi to take the dog to the vet, who ‘put her to death at once’.115

  The next day Vivien felt dreadful, but spent the morning packing. She and Tom were off to the coast, to Bosham. The weather was good, and there was a pleasant picnic with the Hutchinsons. Vivien stayed in Bosham for several weeks; Tom came down from the bank at weekends. Sometimes she felt ‘very very nervous’.116 She had a pain in her side and, though she enjoyed sea bathing, sketching and long talks with Mary, her exhaustion returned; she complained of neuralgia. Meanwhile, in London, Tom’s new Lloyds Bank Information Department had been set up, giving him a ‘fine impressive room’ one floor above the entry level at 75 Lombard Street. Here, at the heart of British imperial finance, he could work at a table beside a large south-facing window looking out ‘over the square toward the Mansion House’.117 Bearded, he was a rarity in the City, and might well make a bad impression. The clean-shaven young e
x-army officer Aldington feared as much when he arranged for the hirsute banker to meet the considerably older editor of The Times Literary Supplement, Bruce Richmond, on 29 September. Richmond wanted to know if Tom would write for the paper. In ‘derby hat and an Uncle Sam Beard’, Tom, thought Aldington, ‘looked perfectly awful, like one of those comic-strip caricatures of Southern hicks’.118 Richmond, whose reviewers had damned Tom’s earlier work, was not deterred, but wary. He published just two pieces by this young American during the next twelve months.

  France had refreshed Tom, and he knew it. Hoping to go to Italy the following year, he was wondering if, instead of his travelling to America, his mother might visit him. He tried to convince his brother that this plan would give their mother ‘the chance to rest that she badly needs’ after her bereavement and her proposed removal to Massachusetts.119 For the moment, because Murry had gone to the Riviera with Katherine Mansfield whose tuberculosis was worsening, Tom had extra commissions for the Athenaeum. He was writing several reviews, including what became his celebrated piece on Hamlet – ‘the “Mona Lisa” of literature’, but a ‘failure’.120 Convinced that ‘the notes upon poets by a poet’ were worth reading, he was willing to risk unusual and provocative judgements: George Chapman (whose work he used in ‘Gerontion’) was a ‘great poet’, fit to set beside Donne.121 The ‘failure’ of Hamlet, this play about ‘the “guilt of a mother”’, came from the fact that, ‘like the sonnets’, it was ‘full of some stuff that the writer could not drag to light, contemplate, or manipulate into art’.122

  As he considered embarking on a new, long poem of his own which would deal with, among other things, problems of sexual relations and religion, Tom attributed to Shakespeare difficulties that he was having to face himself. He was fascinated by Hamlet as ‘a stratification’: it ‘represents the efforts of a series of men, each making what he could out of the work of his predecessors’. This makes Shakespeare’s play sound a little like a repeated ritual of the sort Tom had considered at Harvard; it conjures up, too, his own poems where, through quotation and allusion, he builds on, alters and recontextualises the work of earlier poets. Consideration of Hamlet led him to confront another challenge essential to his poetry: how to express emotion. He did not emote as, say, Murry did. Several critics censured Tom’s verse as unfeeling. Instead, he argued,

  The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.123

  This assumption that great art finds an ‘exact equivalence’ for emotion, so that the precise emotion can be recreated in the reader, seems too neat. It rather assumes all readers can be controlled in an identical manner. Yet finding a way to eschew sentimentality while profoundly moving the reader’s feelings was of fundamental importance.

  Hamlet, Tom argues, experiences a ‘disgust’ provoked by his mother’s conduct, a disgust that is excessive and goes far beyond that behaviour: ‘It is thus a feeling which he cannot understand; he cannot objectify it, and it therefore remains to poison life and obstruct action.’ Tom’s writing about this resonates more generally in ways that include not just his literary audience but also himself.

  The intense feeling, ecstatic or terrible, without an object or exceeding its object, is something which every person of sensibility has known; it is doubtless a study to pathologists. It often occurs in adolescence: the ordinary person puts these feelings to sleep, or trims down his feeling to fit the business world; the artist keeps it alive by his ability to intensify the world to his emotions.124

  In another piece written around this time, Tom saw contemporary poets as divided between struggles to convey ‘pure feeling for which there is no equivalent in the visible world’ and perhaps less ambitious attempts to write according to the doctrine of ‘the Image’.125 He sought in his own poetry to negotiate between these, yet was preoccupied, too, by something deeply bottled up.

  The most profound disturbances in his own adolescence would seem to have been around sex and his insistent shyness, and around the religion linked to his mother and father. Marriage to Vivien, sexual difficulties and living with adultery had only heightened his discomfort; philosophical investigations had quickened both his scepticism and a confused religious hunger. Later in 1919, considering the sermon as ‘perhaps the most difficult form of art’, his poet’s imagination would do what no one had done before: connect the Church of England sermons of Donne and Lancelot Andrewes with ‘the Fire-Sermon preached by the Buddha’.126 Tom’s complex knot of feelings and thoughts about loss, sex and religion had not yet found full expression, even if ‘Gerontion’ was a crafted groan of despair. Reviewing recent work by Aiken (which, yet again, contained inferior echoes of his own) he saw a failed but ‘consistent direction’ which was ‘to express the inexpressible by expressing the impossibility of expression’.127

  As so often in his life, success and hurtful failure intersected awkwardly. He felt physically healthy again. His career at the bank was taking off; he looked prosperous: for the winter, with Vivien’s encouragement, he bought a 10-guinea coat of ‘the best cloth, and lined with wool’.128 With luck, in early 1920 London would see two volumes of his essays – one on the art of poetry, expected from the Egoist Press after the demise of the Egoist magazine, and the other on Renaissance drama due from the elegant publisher Richard Cobden-Sanderson, son of Bertrand Russell’s godfather. Thanks to Quinn’s outstanding drive and efficiency, Knopf would be publishing his poetry in New York in the spring. Yet Tom’s marriage was freighted with pain, and his sense of religion, occasioning his use of a ferocious tiger image in ‘Gerontion’, involved distress but little consolation.

  On his thirty-first birthday, a Friday, he was in London; Vivien remained at Bosham. She wished she had gone back to be with him, but she had her period and a migraine. Aching, her face grew slightly swollen, but she packed her things to travel to London on the chilly Saturday, only to find a railway strike meant she could not go. Wretched, eventually she paid 30 shillings for a seat in a car leaving Chichester on Monday. She rose at 6 a.m. and wired Tom to say she was coming, but there was a mix-up. In London Vivien waited, exhausted, at Putney Bridge with a hamper and blackberries she had picked to make jam, expecting her husband to arrive; but Tom had gone to London Bridge instead. After two hours and no lunch she abandoned her luggage and managed to get home. Where was Tom? He came back at 7 p.m., having hung on for nearly four hours at London Bridge. They ‘wept’.129

  For society as a whole, these were testing times. As in the United States, so in post-war Britain social unrest led in 1919 to several large-scale strikes. Tom now defined himself as ‘Liberal’ in politics, but was not in sympathy with the coalition government led by Liberal Prime Minister Lloyd George.130 Thanks to stoppages, for several days that September he had to walk the four miles to work. However, fresh from hiking greater distances in France, he coped. He was above such things, and, while he might feel distressed in private, could appear loftily elitist. For his new book of poems, the small one (opening with ‘Gerontion’) to be published in London by Rodker, he chose the title ‘Ara Vus Prec’, a quotation from Dante meaning ‘Now I pray you’. It seemed to him ‘non-committal’ and ‘unintelligible to most people’.131 He approved of ‘the individual against the mob’, but this de haut en bas tone got him his comeuppance.132 It turned out that, not knowing Provençal and following a faulty edition of Dante, he had got the quotation wrong. That is why, embarrassingly, the book appeared in December with Ara Vus Prec on the title page, but Ara Vos Prec on labels pasted outside.

  Tom made sure to tell his mother he had been invited to write for The Times Literary Supplement, and might be producing ‘the Leading Article from time to time. This is the highest honour possible in the critical world of literature.’1
33 He also told her he expected to have ‘three and possibly four books out next year’: new editions of his poems in London and New York, as well as the two planned books of essays. When, in October at the Conference Hall, Westminster, he addressed the Arts League of Service on modern poetry, he reported the size of the audience (three hundred): ‘My lecture was said to be a great success.’134 His need to impress his family remained strong; he was in correspondence, too, with his siblings.

  Yet, at a deeper level, his imaginative work was developing. Where his relatively short quatrain poems had stacked allusions to earlier texts and myths in variegated strata, now he was fascinated by ways of doing so, as Ulysses did, on a larger scale – one hinted at when ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ ranged from the prehistoric to the contemporary. Reviewing an anthology of Native American chants for the Athenaeum, he had no time for these as drawing-room exotica. They did, though, rekindle his sense of the importance of anthropology, that subject whose influence seemed inescapable.

  Within the time of a brief generation it has become evident that some smattering of anthropology is as essential to culture as Rollin’s Universal History. Just as it is necessary to know something about Freud and something about [the entomologist] Fabre, so it is necessary to know something about the medicine-man and his works. Not necessary, perhaps not even desirable, to know all the theories about him, to peruse all the works of Miss Harrison, Cooke, Rendel Harris, Lévy-Bruhl or Durkheim. But one ought, surely, to have read at least one book such as those of Spencer and Gillen on the Australians, or Codrington on the Melanesians. And as it is certain that some study of primitive man furthers our understanding of civilized man, so it is certain that primitive art and poetry help our understanding of civilized art and poetry. Primitive art and poetry can even, through the studies and experiments of the artist or poet, revivify the contemporary activities. The maxim, Return to the sources, is a good one. More intelligibly put, it is that the poet should know everything that has been accomplished in poetry (accomplished, not merely produced) since its beginnings – in order to know what he is doing himself. He should be aware of all the metamorphoses of poetry that illustrate the stratifications of history that cover savagery. For the artist is, in an impersonal sense, the most conscious of men; he is therefore the most and the least civilized and civilizable; he is the most competent to understand both civilized and primitive.