Young Eliot

by Robert Crawford

  In Marlow for most of July, behindhand with The Sacred Wood, apparently Tom tried to persuade Murry to publish some of Pound’s poems in the Athenaeum.42 Poets, as ever, had to look out for one another. Still, each had to find his own way of working. Once his essay collection was delivered, Tom was considering a further foray to rural France, maybe visiting Pound and going on a walking tour before rendezvousing with Vivien in Paris. He hoped things would turn out better than at Easter time; possibly he could contact ‘anybody worth seeing’ in the French capital – and particularly, because they had not yet met, James Joyce.43

  Even as he struggled to shape The Sacred Wood, discovering that assembling a prose book was a dauntingly ‘colossal task’ compared to writing individual essays, Tom’s professionalism brought him further offers of work, though not necessarily remunerative ones.44 He had been ‘invited to collaborate’ in La Revue de Genève, an international journal seeking to draw together post-war European culture.45 In 1920 it was publishing writers from Joseph Conrad to Sigmund Freud and from Ernst Robert Curtius to Georges Duhamel. Tom did not have time to take on this task, but the idea of such a magazine appealed to him. More locally, Wyndham Lewis sought his help in launching a new ‘art and literature review’ to occupy the ground vacated by the now defunct Art and Letters.

  Tom was due to holiday in France with Aiken during August, but Aiken pulled out at short notice; so, having finished The Sacred Wood in late July while ‘supposed to be ill’, he took a few days off from the bank, still with thoughts of crossing the Channel.46 He and Lewis had been planning the new magazine: since Lewis was to run it, Tom suggested its core comprise writing about art, with literature playing a subsidiary role. He liked, though, ‘the idea of a large number of (anonymous) topical paragraphs’, and wanted to consult Pound.47 The magazine, Tyro, would not emerge until the following spring, with Tom contributing prose and the first new poem he had published in a journal for almost two years.

  Summer brought professionally useful socialising. At the very end of July the Eliots travelled to Garsington; Ottoline Morrell photographed Vivien, inviting her to return for a solo stay. Aldous and Maria Huxley were there, and Mark Gertler; Vivien, having felt ill, grew worse: Tom decided he ‘ought to have prevented’ the visit.48 Back in London, she took to her bed, but got up to accompany her husband and his visiting American cousin Abigail (‘very young for her age’) to the theatre; the following weekend, Vivien insisted on going with Tom to the Schiffs at Eastbourne.49 Wyndham Lewis and some Italian visitors were fellow guests, and it was around this time that Tom and Lewis decided to excurse to France together. At Eastbourne, chattering in English and Italian, the Schiffs’ visitors enjoyed hot, sunny weather. Taking chairs out into the garden, they sat among flowering shrubs by the greenhouse, then motored along the coast road to Burling Gap where they strolled beside the cliffs and took photographs. In pale three-piece suit and bow tie, Tom appeared happy and relaxed. He smiled affectionately at his wife as she photographed him with their friends. Vivien found the trip rekindled their sex life. Possibly her sense that he would soon leave for the Continent intensified her feelings. She wrote to Mary Hutchinson, implying this was the first time for a while that things had felt right in the bedroom: ‘I had rather an affair with him … It began when we were staying with the Schiffs for the Peace weekend. Don’t you yourself find that staying in people’s houses together is very conducive to reviving passion?’50

  Lewis and Tom went to France on Saturday 14 August. Vivien was returning to Eastbourne to stay with the Schiffs.51 Tom had dashed off a hasty letter to Joyce on the Wednesday, saying he would be staying on Sunday night at the hôtel de l’Elysée on the Left Bank at 3 rue de Beaune, where Joyce himself, Pound and other avant-garde figures had resided. Entrusted with a brown-paper package from Pound – a gift for the Irish novelist – Tom wondered if they could meet for dinner that evening about 6.30. There was no time for Joyce to reply, but he turned up with his son Giorgio and Tom handed him the parcel. When Joyce unwrapped it, he found inside a second-hand pair of brown shoes. ‘“Oh!”’ he exclaimed, ‘very faintly’.52 Rather like Joyce’s subsequent meeting with Marcel Proust, his encounter with Tom, important in retrospect, was low-key, and slightly comical. Lewis, Joyce, Tom and the art critic of the Petit Parisien, poet Fritz Vanderpyl, all dined together at a nearby restaurant. Carrying a straw boater, Joyce was their generous host, tipping the waiter munificently but saying nothing specifically memorable. Still, the food was acceptably French, and Fritz’s knowledge of cuisine encyclopedic; he knew the finest Parisian restaurants, and was, in Tom’s view, ‘an archimage in the arts of eating and drinking’.53

  Wanting to record something of this dinner, Tom sketched the scene in a letter: the four men in hats, Joyce with goatee beard and spectacles. The author of Ulysses, like Lewis, was six years older than Tom, but all three had a strong sense of being artistic contemporaries. As they sized each other up, though Tom and Lewis worried that the Irish could appear ‘Provincials’, the observant, reserved novelist of Dublin deeply impressed the shrewd, shy poet from St Louis.54 Mr Joyce, Tom wrote a few days later to Schiff, was ‘a quiet but rather dogmatic man, and has (as I am convinced most superior persons have) a sense of his own importance. He has a sort of gravity which seems more Protestant than Catholic. He is obviously the man who wrote his books – that is, he impresses you as an important enough personage for that.’55 While detecting an arrogance underlying Irish politeness, Tom liked conversing with Joyce, with whom he dined again on his return journey. Over the next couple of weeks, as they travelled together, Lewis and Tom chatted more extensively. ‘I do not know anyone more profitable to talk to’, Tom decided; ‘highly strung, nervous’, Lewis was also ‘witty and amusing’.56 The two men had more in common than art and writing: both had recently lost their fathers, and Lewis, for all his combative reputation, had suffered recent bouts of illness. Together these two North American-born Francophiles holidaying from England excursed via Nantes to Vannes, on the north coast of the Bay of Biscay. Vannes turned out to be unseasonably cold, so they headed inland to Tours and Saumur in the Loire: a new part of France for Tom.

  If he had felt exhausted when he left London, then, as so often, France revived him. He relished, not least, its ‘good wine’, even if each evening Lewis saw him tot up ‘most scrupulously in a small note-book the day’s expenses’, then reach the decision that ‘There was not much more he could spend before he got into bed.’57 When, after hiring bicycles at Saumur, Lewis crashed and injured his knee, Tom used his fluent French to persuade a local landlady to ply his companion with brandy. Taking charge, Tom headed to Saumur, ‘chartered an open barouche’, and, with the driver’s help, brought Lewis and his faulty bicycle back to the bicycle shop where they argued vehemently with the owner.58 Vehemence was one of Lewis’s hallmarks.

  While Tom was rescuing his friend with savoir faire, Vivien in England was growing increasingly jittery. The day after he left, she had ‘a most incredibly horrible migraine’. She wrote to tell him so, anxious he keep her constantly posted about his address, ‘so that I can get at you. I must write. I am not very well, but will be allright if I can keep in touch with you, and not have uncertainty and upsets.’ In her next sentence she assured Tom she was not ill. Receiving these unsettling, contradictory signals, he sent her at least two wires and a postcard during his first five days in France. Clearly she missed him intensely, and was in a state of anxiety – for him as well as for herself . She wanted him to know how much she loved him. Her first letter to him on this trip is signed ‘Yr. most adoring. V.’ 59

  The two letters Vivien sent her husband on this French trip are the only correspondence between them that survives from their early married years. Both notes are markedly anxious. The second, mailed from Eastbourne on 20 August, addresses him fondly as ‘my darling’, and again shows her missing him acutely: ‘Yesterday I felt so ill and despairing that I went to my room and cried and called yr. name. Toda
y I am so much better.’ Repeatedly this letter sends mixed signals: Vivien is having a fine time; Vivien is ill. Photographs taken at Eastbourne show her looking strikingly pretty and enjoying the company of Sydney Schiff’s ‘nephew in law’; with Tom away, her ‘actress’ side came to the fore, and she and this man had fun, capering and striking poses in the garden.60 Her correspondence emphasises that while getting ‘the last ounce of health’ out of his holiday, Tom must keep in touch yet should ‘not think about me at all’. Other concerns surface too. Fearful lest Sydney Schiff ‘fall into K[atherine] M[ansfield]’s hands’, Vivien presses Tom to write to him.61 Yet the most striking thing about this rather self-involved second letter to Tom is that it begins, ‘My dearest Wonkypenky’.62

  The way this odd term of endearment is used suggests ‘Wonkypenky’ was Vivien’s intimate nickname for Tom. ‘Wonky’ is English slang for ‘faulty’, and, though the word is not in the Oxford English Dictionary (which lists only the verb to ‘penk’, meaning to throb), it seems clear ‘penky’ is slang for penis. So the letter, anxious and affectionate, also hints that Vivien was used to Tom having physical problems: ‘wonkypenky’ surely implies a difficulty in sexual performance. Though he had mentioned his hernia in a letter to his mother when he was undergoing his military medical examination, it does not seem to have troubled him unduly for some time. However, in the early 1920s there are indications that its condition deteriorated: by 1923, when he was ‘examined by the doctor for Life Insurance’, he was told, ‘my hernia was worse (on the other side) and I should wear a truss and perhaps have an operation.’63 Intimate physical trouble may have intensified a wider sense of woundedness within the Eliots’ marriage, and may even have quickened Tom’s imaginative interest in Jessie Weston’s wounded Fisher King and his Waste Land. Still, Vivien uses the nickname ‘Wonkypenky’ endearingly – not reproachfully – and her letter reveals as much about its writer as about its addressee. This characteristically anxious short note, in which she has underlined a dozen separate words and phrases, confirms their sex life as problematic, with clear difficulties on his side.

  Vivien signs her letter, ‘Your loving Wee’.64 Though ‘Wee’ can refer to urine in modern English slang, this seems a fairly recent usage; more probably, she is engaging in baby talk that refers either to a childish pronunciation of her first initial, or to her height: she was wee, slim and elegant; when she walked beside Tom the top of her head was level with his shoulder. At times biographers have sought to speculate in detail about the couple’s sex life and medical conditions. Peter Ackroyd, who had access to her brother and to people who had known the Eliots in early married life, thinks Vivien’s periods were unduly heavy and hard to manage; he claims that she regularly stained sheets, so much so that she insisted on removing bedlinen from hotels, then sent it back after it had been laundered.65 Yet the evidence of Vivien’s 1919 diary suggests her periods were regular, and there are dangers – when considering Vivien or Tom – in advancing theories for which evidence is so slender and which risk sounding too reductive or even misogynistic. What the tiny amount of surviving correspondence between wife and husband suggests is that their relationship was anxious, loving and, while containing elements of passion, sexually awkward. Vulnerabilities on both sides, Vivien’s adultery, Tom’s longing for Emily Hale and possible physical difficulties as well as flirtations in which both husband and wife engaged could not have helped. Later, at the end of the 1930s, Tom wrote of how his ‘desire for progeny’ had been ‘very acute once’, but he came to accept being childless. In his most despairing recollection (in 1939) he wrote that ‘I never lay with a woman I liked, loved or even felt any strong physical attraction to’, yet, early in their relationship at least (as Aldous Huxley among others had detected), there had been a strong element of sexual attraction between himself and Vivien.66

  At his City bank Tom was the professional Mr Eliot; in literary company he was the sometimes inscrutable poet; in his most intimate moments with ‘Wee’ he was ‘dearest Wonkypenky’. Unlike most folk he was remarkably intelligent and had a genius for verse, but like the majority of people he had public and private selves which could seem hard to reconcile. His triumph in his greatest poetry was to be able to draw on all of these, fusing them together and transmuting them through language that acquired almost infinite reach. He reshaped public and private issues into forms at once designedly impersonal, yet shot through with searing personal pain.

  Getting to know him better in 1920, Virginia Woolf suspected he had ‘a good deal of concealed vanity & even anxiety’ about his own writing. She perceived ‘A personal upheaval of some kind’ had happened to him ‘after Prufrock’, and had ‘turned him aside from his inclination – to develop in the manner of Henry James’. Woolf found him fascinating, but hard to read as a man: ‘There is much to be said about Eliot from different aspects – for instance, the difficulty of getting in touch with clever people – & so forth – anaemia, self-consciousness; but also, his mind is not yet blunted or blurred. He wishes to write precise English; but catches himself out in slips…’ Yet while she registered Tom’s punctiliousness, and associated him at times with ‘anaemia’, as Woolf watched him she was aware of a deeper life underlying his solemnity, and a sometimes stinging self-reproach.

  The odd thing about Eliot is that his eyes are lively & youthful when the cast of his face & the shape of his sentences is formal & even heavy. Rather like a s[c]ulpted face – no upper lip; formidable, powerful; pale. Then those hazel eyes seeming to escape from the rest of him. We talked – America, Ottoline, aristocracy, printing, Squire, Murry, criticism. ‘And I behaved like a priggish pompous little ass’ was one of his comments on his own manner at Garsington. He is decidedly of the generation beneath us – I daresay superior – younger, though.67

  If Woolf, six years his senior, might be struck by something youthful in thirty-two-year-old Tom, few people saw it. In June 1920 Richard Aldington thought Tom ‘a really polished American’ whose ‘conversation’ was ‘really witty, his point of view always finished and sometimes profound’; yet Katherine Mansfield complained in September 1920 that his writing had an ‘opaque frigidity’; she thought he never ‘risks himself’.68 As Vivien, worried lest Mansfield turn the Schiffs against them, urged him to do, Tom wrote to Sydney Schiff from France, making clear he regarded him as a true friend, and sending him the sketch of dinner with Joyce. The Eliots’ friendship with the Schiffs was genuine, even if, awkwardly, he described them to his mother (perhaps to counter her prejudice) as ‘very nice Jews’.69

  Returned to London from Eastbourne, Vivien took to bed with influenza symptoms. She hoped to go to Bosham soon and to see Mary Hutchinson, with whom she enjoyed discussing Tom. Such talks were ‘an exciting joy that I couldn’t be without.’70 She also wanted to sort out any possible offence Tom had caused Mary in a letter. Vivien’s time without her husband had taught her she should try, if possible, to feel less reliant on him. Just as when he was applying to join the American military forces she had attempted to school him in what to say, so she still harboured such an impulse, but strove to resist it. ‘In future’, she told Mary, ‘I am going to simply wash my hands of Tom and refuse politely to explain him or interpret him or influence or direct him. I mean to have some sort of individual existence, and Tom must manage his own muddles.’71 Being Mrs T. S. Eliot was difficult.

  For some time Tom had been hoping to turn again to poetry. To Edgar Jepson, who had praised his work along with that of Pound, he mentioned before going to France that ‘perhaps I shall try some verse now’.72 Returned, he told Schiff he aimed soon ‘to show you what I hope to have written’.73 Yet the material did not come as desired. Complaining of ‘the spiritual decadence of England’, he was grumpy.74 ‘As the world becomes worse to live in, every month’, he wrote despondently to his brother in mid-September, ‘so the minutiae of existence seem to consume more time and energy’. He and Vivien were once more seeking a new apartment, while still aspiring to mainta
in a place ‘in the country’.75 At the same time ‘younger men’ were constantly after him for literary advice. Blighted by war, they seemed an ‘unfortunate generation’.76 Tom felt afflicted by a keen sense of ‘the horrible waste of time, energy, life, of the struggle with post-war machinery of life’.77

  In September 1920, just as they thought they had secured a new flat, and while Tom, with a view to moving in mid-October, was negotiating about alterations, the proofs of The Sacred Wood arrived. Methuen wanted to publish in October. Ezra and Dorothy Pound helped Tom proofread, correcting mistakes not least in quotations. His prose sorted, verse pressed in on him. ‘I feel maddened now’, he wrote on 26 September, ‘because I want to get settled quietly and write some poetry; there seems no likelihood of it for some weeks at best’.78 Henry wrote about selling St Louis Hydraulic-Press Brick Company stock left to Tom by his father. Turning his professional banker’s brain to the matter, Tom calculated that interest from the sale of the stock could give him additional income of at least £100 a year. While not a huge fortune, added to his salary it was a marked help. Money from the United States continued to boost his London household finances, but never seemed quite enough. The new flat would cost more, and it looked as if moving would eat up time in October when Tom had hoped to ‘take Vivien away’.79 It might be November before he could settle to verse.