Bankerly professionalism carried over into his literary dealings too, and sometimes into domestic life. He contained elements of calculating ruthlessness that young poets – not least male ones – often possess. His work for the Athenaeum and his Egoist editorial activities overlay his earlier experience at the Harvard Advocate. Thoroughly familiar with how journals operated, he knew about reviewing from the reviewer’s side as well as from the perspectives of author and publisher. He could boost his income by critiquing the same book for two paying periodicals. Professionally he became one of the best networked younger figures in London literary publishing. J. C. Squire had tried to court him to write for the new London Mercury. Politely Tom declined; he thought its editorial standards too low. Squire might be ‘the cleverest journalist in London’, but ‘he knows nothing about poetry’.10 As far as possible, Tom wanted to associate only with people whose professional judgement he trusted. He was more favourably disposed when during January 1920 publisher John Rodker sounded him out about becoming a ‘Director’ for a ‘scheme’ he was hatching; at around the same time he was visited by Lincoln McVeagh, a former Harvard student now working with Scofield Thayer at the New York Dial, to see if Tom would help secure work from English writers.
Though he introduced McVeagh to Murry, Tom was wary; he didn’t want to solicit work from friends, only to find they were not treated with professional courtesy by the Dial. So, mixing helpfulness with a certain bossiness and signing himself ‘Yours ever, Tom’, he wrote direct to Thayer, advising him to come and hire ‘a person of discrimination and intimate knowledge of London letters’ to commission material ‘on the spot’. Thayer might have thought Tom just such a person. However, matters were finessed by John Quinn and others so that Ezra Pound was made ‘agent’ at a salary of $750 (then worth about £200) per annum. Slyly, Thayer, who had met Pound and knew his name might disconcert people, kept it off the Dial’s notepaper.11
In March, Tom, who had already used his ‘influence to get [Wyndham] Lewis into the Athenaeum’, seems to have wangled Pound’s appointment by Murry as that journal’s theatre critic; fed up with England, Pound was spending much of his time in France, so this arrangement was short-lived and not entirely friction-free.12 Conscious that ‘Pound’s lack of tact has done him great harm’, Tom made sure to deploy manners, tenacity and skill to avoid antagonising influential people, whatever he thought of them. Socialising with minor poets including Osbert Sitwell, four years his junior, he was well aware Sitwell produced ‘rather clever imitations of myself’.13 Observing English society with a foreigner’s amusement, he explained to his mother that on 24 February he had dined at the Woolfs’ home with Sydney Waterlow, ‘Lord Robert Cecil’s right hand man’ – ‘very pompous and smokes cigars’. On Saturday he responded to Sir Algernon Methuen’s invitation to have a volume considered for publication.14 Though the Egoist Press had already announced that they would be publishing Tom’s essays, this was a better offer, and he accepted it.15
Essay-writing consumed a good deal of his time. Occasionally he contributed to Sydney Schiff’s favoured Art and Letters; he sent a much revised ‘Brief Treatise on the Criticism of Poetry’ to Monro’s Chapbook; he went on writing, provocatively, for the Athenaeum, suggesting William Blake with his ‘peculiarly terrifying’ honesty was no mere ‘wild pet for the supercultivated’, and examining why, in the age of ‘Mr. James Joyce or Mr. Joseph Conrad’, Swinburne’s verse was ‘no longer’ enjoyed. Provocatively, he mocked the ‘Civilized Class’ for their failure to support performances of plays by Dryden, Webster and other classic English dramatists revived by London’s Phoenix Society – a group whose work he championed.16 All this writing was insightful, and often commandingly professional. For the critic, Tom stated later that year, ‘there is no method except to be very intelligent’.17 Such crisp judgements indicate an authoritative confidence accompanying his sense of being grounded in the art he professed: ‘all the best criticism of poetry is the criticism of poets’.18 His earnest professionalism, his literary socialising and his telling his mother how very busy he was established a pattern which became second nature: using professional obligations to cover up deeper troubles.
There were hints of sadness in verses he quoted. He recalled for their ‘beauty’ in January 1920 lines of Shelley he had known since boyhood, and that came to haunt him with their melancholy:
Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heaped for the beloved’s bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.19
It was now over five years since he had asked Aiken to buy roses for Emily Hale, but considerably later when Tom was well into his forties and had visited an English garden with her, those lines came back to him; they help explain why it is not roses but ‘rose-leaves’ which lie under dust as he ruminates in ‘Burnt Norton’ on lost possibilities.20 In early 1920 as an example of Blake’s ‘naked vision’, he quoted a stanza about an unhappy love match:
Love seeketh only self to please,
To bind another to its delight,
Joys in another’s loss of ease,
And builds a Hell in Heaven’s despite.21
Yet there were also moments of affection and respite. Early in the year, one Sunday morning he joined Vivien and one of her women friends for a ‘dancing practice’.22 Both Eliots still enjoyed dancing. He knew they appeared an odd couple, if not to casual observers then certainly to the folks of Bloomsbury and Garsington whose sex lives made their own seem tame. ‘I live’, Tom explained to Henry in March, ‘among a set of people some of whom would probably shock your friends (all of them) terribly by varieties of “immorality” with no pretense; but these people are capable of being shocked in the way that I am. (They may consider myself and Vivien exceptionally moral, but they do not think any the worse of us for that – it merely seems to them interesting).’23
Seeking to bring his American family and his London life into balance, Tom used his professional judgement to advise his mother about finances, and pressured her relentlessly to travel to England. Writing to her, his brother Henry found this almost obsessive: ‘Tom seems to be worrying himself sick over the prospect of your not going; it seems to be on his mind all the time.’24 Tom urged her to ‘seize the opportunity’ and arrive ‘next spring’. Otherwise, he would cross the ocean to America, ‘because I should regret it every hour of my life if I did not’.25 Well into her seventies, bereaved, suffering from ‘renal troubles’ and still having to face moving house to Massachusetts, Lottie Eliot prevaricated.26 Ostensibly, Tom’s reluctance to travel to the States was because even if the bank granted him extra leave, his visit would be painfully short; he wanted his mother to see London and their life there, and maintained he could not afford to pay transatlantic fares for himself and Vivien. Yet, with Woods still trying to recruit him to Harvard that spring, and with Vivien remaining fearful about voyaging to the land of the Eliots or about being ill if Tom went there, other psychological factors were involved. Tom’s mother was a clever, sometimes domineering woman. His arguing with her was a battle of love as well as a trial of wills that he needed to win.
For months he had been saving up. He took Vivien to Paris for Easter, securing the necessary leave of absence from the bank. They went to glut themselves on the French capital in springtime: ‘Paris est si gai’ (Paris is so jolly), he wrote in a postcard to Mary Hutchinson. Both Eliots were ‘very happy’ in a post-war city of flourishing patisseries, galleries and dance halls. It was a place where one could enjoy everything from chic new hats to Dadaist magazines; from quaint horse-drawn carts to books and prints sold from lock-up boxes perched on the parapet wall beside the Seine near Notre Dame. Their time was short, but ‘nous avons à voir tout’ (we want to see the lot), he wrote.27 Yet, after all their anticipation, Tom caught flu in Paris. They returned exhausted, and almost immediately Vivien went off with friends to rest. Tom soldiered on determinedly, conscious he had a book to del
iver to a publisher in June.
Professional literary life brought strain as well as pleasure. As always among poets, there were excitements, jealousies and sniping. Tom happily mocked reviewing: ‘From the point of view of any man of the slightest intellect or taste, there is not enough good verse to occupy a reviewer one week out of the year.’ However, he was enjoying new verse in manuscript by his close friend and compatriot Pound, whose ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’ he acclaimed in March. ‘There is,’ he declared,
no more useful criticism and no more precious praise for a poet than that of another poet:
‘Fu miglior fabbro del parlar materno …
e lascia dir gli stolti…’28
These words from Dante’s tribute to the supremely musical Provençal poet of heterosexual love Arnaut Daniel (whom Pound had translated) acknowledge him as ‘a better craftsman of the mother tongue … and let the fools mutter…’ In Purgatory Arnaut sings as he goes, grieving over his past erotic follies while aspiring towards possible salvation. This passage preoccupied Tom, who had his own secret follies and hopes. Arnaut’s speech had already supplied his title Ara Vos Prec, and the concluding line in which Arnaut vanishes – ‘Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina’ (Then he hid himself in the fire that refines them) – would feature in The Waste Land, a work eventually dedicated to Pound, whom Tom liked to think of as sometimes operating ‘behind the mask of Arnaut’, as ‘il miglior fabbro’.29
There was a competitive aspect to Tom’s friendship with Pound. The two Americans read one another’s work regularly, occasionally with envy; Pound had a book of essays forthcoming from Boni and Liveright in New York early that summer; Tom still had not finished his. Cultural incest was part of avant-garde life, but could be enlivening. Mischievously, Tom in the Athenaeum had already described his own verse as ‘curious’; gladly he had written the booklet Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry. However, the niceties of professional conduct were harder to negotiate when Murry wanted Tom to review for the Athenaeum a new verse play by none other than Murry himself. Featuring locations including ‘Nectarine’ and ‘Aspidestra’, and with characters ‘to whom he gives names like Cinnamon, Angelica, Caraway, and Vanilla Bean’, Murry’s play was dreadful. Tom managed to write fifteen hundred words around it without ever saying just how bad it was, while maintaining a teasing tone that Murry may have smiled at wincingly: ‘It is … a real pleasure, an exceptional pleasure, to have a patient like Mr. Murry extended on the operating table; we need our sharpest instruments, and steadiest nerves, if we are to do him justice.’30 Tom’s review appeared on 14 May; the Eliots dined with Murry and Mansfield that evening. After Tom and Vivien left, Mansfield wrote in her diary that the room was still ‘quivering’. If there was jokey unease between the two men, between the women there was intense dislike. ‘She really repels me’, Mansfield confided to her diary. ‘I am so fond of Elliot … But this teashop creature…’ Tom sided with his wife, ‘leaning towards her, admiring, listening, making the most of her’, and later told Pound that Mansfield was ‘a dangerous WOMAN’ (the capitals carry a sexist spite), and that she and her husband were ‘sentimentalists’. 31
Yet Murry and Tom could be allies of a sort. In the hothouse, gossipy world of Bloomsbury and environs, Virginia Woolf, publisher of Tom’s 1919 Poems, revealed later in 1920 that Murry had asked her to review that very publication for the Athenaeum. Eventually Leonard Woolf had written the piece, and, at Murry’s request, Virginia had reviewed in the Athenaeum Murry’s own essay, The Critic in Judgment, despite having published it herself at the Hogarth Press. Now, if Tom wished, Leonard ‘would very much like’ to write about Tom’s book of essays – again for the Athenaeum.32 Murry then went on to review Tom’s book elsewhere, while Leonard Woolf produced a further appraisal of Tom’s work, quoting with approval a poem which the Woolfs had published.
If such shenanigans seem less than professional, they are hardly unknown in the literary world, and neither Tom nor his reviewers wrote sycophantically. He continued to depend on personal contacts. In America one of the most important of these would be his wife’s old admirer, Scofield Thayer. He cabled Tom in March to check about the suitability of E. E. Cummings as a benign reviewer for the Knopf edition of Tom’s poems. In London, Tom’s publisher Rodker brought out Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley in June; Tom suggested to Rodker that it be sent to the Athenaeum for review. His position at the heart of London’s poetry and reviewing scene made T. S. Eliot a figure that younger writers, including the twenty-seven-year-old Yorkshire-born poet and critic Herbert Read, looked up to. Often, as Tom made clear to his mother that summer, all this made him feel older than he was.
I do not know why it is, but men five years younger than I seem to me much younger, and if they become my friends I feel a sort of paternal responsibility, yet men five years older seem to me about the same age. Murry is my age, Pound is four years older, Lewis is five years older, and Strachey is nearly forty; so is Sydney Waterlow. But Osbert Sitwell and his brother, Aldington, Huxley, Herbert Read, and several Americans whom I only know by correspondence, all seem children almost.33
Ill health, his own and Vivien’s, added to their sense of being older than their years. ‘Tired and depressed’, Tom was off to Marlow for three or four weeks, he told Murry in April, ‘to rest and to work’.34
He was polishing his book of essays, The Sacred Wood, and overworking. Murry seems to have suggested he might apply for a lectureship at ‘a provincial university’; having avoided Harvard, Tom chose not to. If he ever left the bank, he favoured the relative freedom of journalism, rather than the ‘fatiguing and worrying’ business of endless lectures.35 Throughout spring and summer 1920 he and Vivien engaged in bouts of flat-hunting. In the wake of several arrests near Crawford Mansions, they decided there was too much ‘noise and sordidness’; Tom was aware of ‘prostitution’ in the area.36 Annoyingly, the flats they viewed were unsuitable or unaffordable. They contemplated living without a servant; but, so long as finances allowed, aimed to keep on their current domestic, Ellen. She would work for them only if they did not move too far off.
Exhausted or not, Tom kept abreast of literary developments. Probably it was on 27 May in The Times Literary Supplement that he first came across a detailed account of Jessie L. Weston’s new book From Ritual to Romance. In a substantial piece the reviewer showed how, gladly accepting Frazer’s Golden Bough and anthropologists’ accounts of vegetation rites, Miss Weston claimed ‘to have connected the secret ritual of a Fertility Cult dating from far-away antiquity, and its survivals in the present, with the Grail romance of the Middle Ages’. Fascinated by Arthurian tales since boyhood, and long familiar with links between anthropological and literary materials, Tom was interested in Weston’s argument that more recent narratives were patterned on ancient ones. As the sympathetic reviewer explained,
in what relates to the Fisher King and the Waste Land, there is evidently postulated a close connexion between the vitality of the one and the prosperity of the other; and the hero’s task consists in renewing the vigour of the ruler so that the land may cease to be desolate. The case is excellent, and excellently well pleaded. Behind the elements Christian or semi-Christian, and the Celtic elements of the high legend, there is reference to the hoary mystery cults of Fertility of Life that is victorious over evil and darkness and death. The Holy Grail and the Golden Bough henceforth are like to be associated in memory.37
Exactly when Tom got hold of Weston’s book is not clear, but the Houghton Library at Harvard possesses a first edition with his inscription: ‘This is the copy I had before writing The Waste Land.’ It is virtually unannotated. Pages 137–40 and 141–4 remained uncut.38 Nonetheless, this book gave him a mythic structure in which the sexually wounded mythical Fisher King seeks to be healed in order that the waste land may thrive. Weston linked that structure to the Arthurian Grail quest and Wagner’s Parsifal. Bringing in everything from Tarot cards to Sanskrit scriptures, she ranged across history and cul
tures providing antecedents and parallels in a search for fertility and healing. Much more jaggedly and emotionally, as its parts came together over the next eighteen months, Tom’s long poem would follow a related trajectory.
All this took time to happen. More pressingly, Conrad Aiken was in London (‘stupider than I remember him … in fact, stupid’, Tom added spitefully), with a younger American writer, Max Bodenheim. Bodenheim, whom Tom had published in the Egoist, arrived with his heavily pregnant wife, hoping Tom could help him establish himself in English literary life. ‘Being Semites I suppose they will survive somehow’, Tom remarked to Pound, unattractively; he did try to help this young fellow countryman, but explained that
I told him my history here, and left him to consider whether an American Jew, of only a common school education and no university degree, with no money, no connections, and no social polish or experience, could make a living in London. Of course I did not say all this; but I made him see that getting recognised in English letters is like breaking open a safe – for an American, and that only about three had ever done it.39
With a photograph of him propped on her typing table, it was in response to this letter that Tom’s mother confessed to her ‘Dearest Son’ her ‘instinctive antipathy to Jews’.40 Readers may detect readily where Tom’s prejudice originated, even if his thinking about how hard it was for Americans, Jewish or otherwise, to crack the safe of literary London may have been correct. Impressively and imperiously, Lottie Eliot set out her plans for the visit that, at last, she was proposing to make to London in the spring of 1921.
Though hardly the man to be troubled by Tom’s attitude to Jews, Pound, who was in Paris, worried about his friend’s ongoing incarceration in London banking – not Pound’s preferred haven for poets. In strict confidence Tom explained that if he were ever to give up the bank, he would want an income of £800 per annum ‘and must provide for old age’.41 The idea of spending an extended spell abroad, as Pound was doing, held some appeal, but Tom wanted to maintain a London flat. He thought if he escaped the bank he might produce an article a week. On average throughout 1920 he published something every three weeks, though sometimes his productions were simply letters to the literary press. Principally Pound hoped to spring his friend from the City for the sake of poetry.
Young Eliot Page 49
