Young Eliot

by Robert Crawford

  If Mrs Eliot’s visit was wearing out Vivien, Tom too felt ‘the strain of accommodating myself to people who in many ways are now strangers to me’.78 And, in the midst of all this, another long-running situation developed. For some time, after the demise of Art and Letters, there had been a proposal either to revive it or to start a new quarterly literary journal. Negotiations were now at a particularly delicate stage. Thanks to his expertise, Tom was being lined up as the potential editor. Everything depended on money. The financial backer would be Lady Rothermere, wealthy estranged wife of the publisher of the Daily Mail. Lady Rothermere spoke to Thayer in New York. Lady Rothermere spoke to Tom in London. Lady Rothermere contacted other people too. Would the new magazine be linked to the Dial? Might it be a reborn Art and Letters?

  Her Ladyship could be demanding to deal with, and Tom, whose links to Thayer and other editors mattered to him, knew it. ‘Exceptional tact’ was called for. ‘I am sorry to say’, he confessed to Ottoline Morrell, ‘[I] was obliged to call Vivien back from the country to help me out.’ Vivien was ‘invaluable’. Still, however, Lady Rothermere held back from placing matters on a definite basis. Vivien, whose own opinion of her Ladyship’s plans was that there was ‘nothing in the whole business’, left London once again, ‘worn out’, as soon as she could.79 It had been difficult for her, Tom and Henry to share the Wigmore Street top-floor flat. As the hot July sun beat down through a large skylight, Vivien joked, or half joked, she was ‘becoming gradually insane’. She reminded Thayer in a letter that he had once invited her to drown herself with him. ‘I am ready at any moment.’80 Still, once the in-laws had gone, she expected she and Tom might be off to Paris in October.

  He was attempting too much: to make his mother, brother and sister happy; to ensure things worked somehow with Vivien; to perform his bank duties; to negotiate about a magazine; to write his ‘London Letter’ for the Dial; and to keep the long poem with which he was struggling still alive in his mind. So far he was just about coping, though it was hard to juggle his family and friends as Lottie Eliot traversed England. If Garsington and Lady Ottoline impressed his mother, who kept a detailed diary of her trip, Henry saw things differently. An intelligent man of finance from Chicago, his tolerance for English rural quaintness was limited; he listed picturesque villages whose names sounded like ‘Rotton Eating – Moping Sulky – Ham-on-Rye’. Writing up a mocking account of his visit to aristocratic Garsington with its ‘polygamous buttery’, and interiors of cobalt ‘blue, coral pink, peacock green, dull gold’, Henry cast a sceptical eye on the milieu that appeared to enthral his brother. At ‘Rotting Wold’ he wrote,

  There is a fine gallery of paintings by Picasso, Izzasso, Djingerpop Pfyz, Funiculi-Funicula, and the rest of our little group of intelligentzsia; also a discriminating collection of triptychs, prie-dieu, and moth eaten obscure Florentine Primitives, for Lady Ottoline will tolerate nothing in her collection that is not either hot off the griddle, or petrified with age. Her penchant for Neo-lithic rock drawings and early Senigambiah rattles and teething rings shows how unsullied is her aesh aesthetic [sic] taste. The visitor should not pass up the swimming pool, surrounded by what appears to be, at first glance, stone hitching posts in an advance stage of decay, but which prove on close inspection to be art treasures from Hallicarnassus, or Philippopolis, or somewhere. To appreciate the versatility of our charming hostess, however, one should see her clotting cream, or making cheeses in the buttery, or slaughtering a sheep, in the fold.81

  Tom loved Henry, and shared aspects of his sense of humour. Yet, working on his own avant-garde poem which juxtaposed the supposedly primitive with the very contemporary, he was now at least as close to Lady Ottoline’s milieu as to 2635 Locust Street, St Louis. At times he felt awkward with the people to whom his kinship was strongest. The pull between his mother and his wife was even more difficult. Mrs Eliot, Sr, so loath to let him go, came to feel, she told Henry, that Tom longed for what his family could offer: ‘I think the poor boy misses the affection that makes no demands from him, but longs to help him. Vivien loves Tom, and he her, although I think he is afraid of her.’82 Lottie Eliot had seen a good deal of Vivien, as Tom had hoped; but she remained sceptical. Henry, after living at close quarters with Vivien for several days at Wigmore Street and having corresponded with her for years, was even more so. Discussing Tom’s wife after returning to Chicago, Henry wrote to his mother that October,

  Vivien always recites some account of her migraines and malaises in her letters. But I suppose that is natural; it is a relief to talk about one’s pains. I do not think she takes proper care of herself, though. I have seen her drink coffee at midnight. I have a feeling that sub-consciously (or unconsciously) she likes the role of invalid; and that, liking as she does to be petted, ‘made a fuss over’, condoled and consoled, she unconsciously encourages her breakdowns instead of throwing them off by a sort of nervous resistance. It is hard to tell how much is physical and how much mental and uncontrollable by will power; but I think that if she had more of ‘the Will to Be Well’ she would have less suffering. To acquire this sort of willpower unaided is something like pulling oneself up by one’s boot-straps; but I think some strong impulse from outside, some change in her circumstances, might call forth the necessary willpower to be well. She needs something to take her mind off herself; something to absorb her entire attention.83

  Doing his best with his family, Tom continued wheeling and dealing over the possible new magazine. Having taken time off to entertain his guests, he had to immerse himself in bank business. Where once as head of the new Information Department, he had enjoyed a fine office overlooking the streets of London, now he was underneath them. He called this new workplace ‘my cave’.84 I. A. Richards, who visited him in a Lloyds basement office, described him ‘stooping, very like a dark bird in a feeder, over a big table covered with all sorts and sizes of foreign correspondence’. About a foot above Tom’s head was a window made of panes of reinforced ‘thick, green glass squares’ set into the pavement ‘on which hammered all but incessantly the heels of the passers-by’. It was a relentlessly oppressive, claustrophobic atmosphere: ‘There was just room for two perches beside the table.’ Richards thought that the concentrated work required in sorting out the ‘highly tangled story’ of the materials on that table must have been ‘a big, long headache’.85

  The headache continued. Tom’s family left for America on Saturday 20 August. He and Vivien saw them off. ‘Stunned’, Vivien became very emotional. She fretted afterwards lest her mother-in-law and sister-in-law might have thought she ‘behaved like “no lady”, and just like a wild animal’. These Americans struck her as oddly ‘emotionless’; she felt she had made ‘a fearful mess’ of getting to know Henry.86 Her natural vivacity was the opposite of old-school, Boston-trained reserve. It had attracted Tom, but she worried it horrified his family. She saw in them the constricting reserve that so many people detected in Tom. ‘Be personal, you must be personal’, she soon urged Henry, ‘or else it’s no good. Nothing’s any good.’87 ‘Polite, formal, even stiff, black-clothed New Englanders’ was how Osbert Sitwell remembered Lottie and Marion Eliot.88 Henry, deeply sympathetic towards his younger brother and knowing what mattered to him, had taken away Tom’s old typewriter and replaced it with a brand new one. ‘A bloody angel’, Vivien called him.89 He had left her a bunch of roses too.

  ‘Vivien is not well at all’, Tom confided to Sydney Schiff, confessing that the ‘strain’ surrounding his family’s departure had left him with a ‘reaction’ that was ‘paralysing’.90 He wrote to his mother to say how they missed her, how they felt their Clarence Gate Gardens flat had become her flat – scarcely a feeling Vivien was likely to welcome. It took them some time to move back in, along with their small cat, ‘a very good mouser’.91 Tom was ‘completely exhausted’, but while all this was going on, the plan for Lady Rothermere to back the new magazine gathered pace.92 He committed himself to becoming ‘sole responsible editor’. His s
olicitor drew up a letter of agreement which Her Ladyship signed: she was to provide £600 annually for three years to cover running costs and payment to Tom of at least £100 per annum. He would have ‘entire control of the literary contents’.93 This, at least, was a major success; but in his vulnerable state the responsibility, while exciting, made him ‘more worried than anything’.94 Sceptical about Lady Rothermere’s ‘inadequate’ largesse, Vivien had her own worries as she underwent further consultations with specialist doctors.95

  Writing his ‘London Letter’ that September, Tom recalled Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and how it had made a new music through transforming ‘the rhythm of the steppes into the scream of the motor horn, the rattle of machinery, the grind of wheels, the beating of iron and steel, the roar of the underground railway, and the other barbaric cries of modern life’ which Tom regarded as ‘despairing noises’.96 He was seeking to do something similar in his own long poem, but the adjective ‘despairing’ revealed his state of mind. Richard Aldington, now permanently separated from his wife the poet H. D., having difficulties with his own mother, and used to dealing with writers’ problems, sensed Tom was suffering from nervous exhaustion. To Aldington Tom was ‘the one friend I have made since my return’ from fighting in the war. The returned soldier wanted to help his struggling ally, and defended Tom against the New England wariness of fellow poet Amy Lowell, telling her that Tom had ‘a soundness, a coolness, an urbanity, Ezra never could have. He is quite unprovincial, which is perhaps the highest praise one can give an Anglo-Saxon writer. He is certainly the most attractive critical writer ever produced by America; I for one am extremely grateful to him for living in England and not a little proud that he prefers to.’97 Aldington invited Tom for a weekend to stay near his home, Malthouse Cottage, in Lower Padworth, on the banks of the Kennet and Avon canal close to Aldermaston station, easily reached by train from London.

  While Tom was there around the start of September, Aldington lent him a French book. Tom read it on the train back to London and during bank lunch hours. Jean Epstein’s La Poésie d’aujourd’hui: Un nouvel état d’intelligence was newly published in Paris. Epstein discussed the fusion of ‘L’intelligence et la sensibilité’ in modern literature, including the writing of Proust, whom he associated with an ‘aristocratie névropathique’ (a neurasthenic aristocracy). Modern poets from Baudelaire to Cocteau were associated with ‘nervosité’, and sometimes with kinds of ‘dissociation’ that gave their work a ‘hermétique’, difficult quality. Epstein discussed ‘Précision et brièveté’ as well as incantatory ‘répétition’ – qualities Tom had long admired in verse – and the Frenchman linked poetry and science as well as verse and illness. Sometimes poetry had to evade rules of logic and even grammar, making it ‘difficile’. Poetry might involve sensing before understanding; as Cocteau had argued, it demanded ‘la bataille contre l’inexprimable’ (the struggle against the inexpressible). Epstein, who went on to become a film director, linked poetry to ‘le cinéma’ (rather than to theatre) because of its intimate powers of suggestion; fascinated by the ‘esthétique de succession’ of ‘movies’, he argued a poem could be made out of ‘une bousculade de détails’ (a rush of details). This was an aesthetic of quick transitions and striking metaphors, at once poetic and cinematic. The third part of Epstein’s book, mentioning ‘magasins des mythes’ (stores of myths), linked modern literature and the new poetry of extreme rapidity to a sense of intellectual ‘fatigue’ at once personal and civilisation-wide. Most attuned to this were people who brought together creativity, intelligence and ‘la fatigue nerveuse’.98

  Having ‘enjoyed immensely’ his weekend with Aldington, Tom told him he found all this ‘most interesting’. He disagreed with some of the conclusions, ‘but it is a formidable work to attack, and therefore very tonic’.99 Just after reading Epstein’s book, he wrote to Aldington about feeling ‘tired and depressed’, making reference to ‘neurasthenics like … myself’.100 As so often, illness and creativity seemed bonded for him; and Epstein’s book supplied an aesthetic to reinforce the combination. In this same letter he mentioned he had just finished ‘an article, unsatisfactory to myself, on the metaphysical poets’. Here he argued that

  It appears likely that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult. Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning. (A brilliant and extreme statement of this view, with which it is not requisite to associate oneself, is that of M. Jean Epstein, ‘La Poésie d’aujourd’hui’.)101

  Though Tom did not take on board Epstein’s theories lock, stock and barrel, he did deploy the psychological term ‘dissociation’, maintaining that a ‘dissociation of sensibility’ had set in during the seventeenth century, leading to Romantic poets who ‘thought and felt by fits, unbalanced’. As elsewhere, he aligned his favoured English Metaphysical poets, especially Donne, with his cherished French poets, particularly Laforgue. Taking issue with Samuel Johnson who had complained that in Metaphysical verse ‘the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together’, he also set out one of the most brilliant descriptions of how poetry is composed.

  When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.102

  His own long poem carried a strong sense of the ‘chaotic, irregular, fragmentary’, splicing together various voices, some of them distinctly nervy. For the time being, he had given it the title ‘HE DO THE POLICE IN DIFFERENT VOICES’,taken from chapter sixteen of Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend where a boy reading newspaper reports aloud is praised because ‘He do the Police in different voices.’103 Its sonority and resonance unforgettably compelling, Tom’s poem depends throughout on intercut voicing and revoicing.

  The first two parts, ‘The Burial of the Dead’ and ‘In the Cage’, had been typed on his old typewriter, probably in May, during a ‘fine hot rainless spring’ with its ‘crop of murders’.104 Other shorter poems, including the sexually tormented one entitled in typescript ‘Song for the Opherion’, were also candidates for possible inclusion. Though most of the long poem’s bleak encounters appear heterosexual, he built in allusions to many shades of sexuality, whether (in part three) that of Mr Eugenides – whose name means ‘good breeding’ and who seems to be gay – or to Tiresias – a man who, the poet Ovid recounts, spent seven years as a woman. In so doing, Tom let his poem speak not just for and from different eras, places and languages, but also (like the work of other modernists including Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray – photographed cross-dressed as Rrose Sélavy in New York Dada that April) for and from different sexualities. All are linked by a pervasive sense of torment, infertility, waste. Several poems and fragments would be incorporated, in whole or part, into the larger structure; others would be cut adrift.

  Repeatedly that summer, he pondered how to reconcile the wearying raggedness of life with large-scale ordering principles in art. The sometimes jagged, cut-up angularities of ‘cubism’ were not ‘licence, but an attempt to establish order’, he wrote in July. To be ‘surprising’ was ‘essential to art: but art has to create a new world, and a new world must have a new structure’. Joyce had succeeded in Ulysses; Woolf’s best short stories, more ‘feminine’ and bound up with ‘contemplating the feeling rather than the object which has excited it’, were often ‘remarkable’ but ‘examples of a process of dissociation’. Tom was writing here for readers of the Dial, but also thinking aloud in ways relevant to the bundle of papers, thoughts and
feelings he was trying unsuccessfully to finesse into his new poem. ‘What is needed of art is a simplification of life into something rich and strange.’105 Those last words echo a song about drowning in Shakespeare’s Tempest; Tom alluded to the same song that year in ‘Dirge’ (about a drowned ‘Bleistein’ who has, unsettlingly, ‘Graves’ Disease in a dead jew’s eyes’) and in untitled lines beginning ‘Those are pearls that were his eyes’. Neither piece became part of his long poem. However, another drowned man, ‘Phlebas the Phoenician’, would feature mesmerically in its chilling fourth part, ‘Death by Water’. There drowning brings forgetting of ‘profit and loss’, and a concluding memento mori invites ‘Gentile or Jew’ to ‘Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you’.106

  Classing himself among the ‘neurasthenics’ by September, Tom was, he told Aldington in confidence, ‘seeing a nerve specialist’.107 Vivien had made the appointment, and accompanied him. The specialist strongly recommended a complete change of scene. Valuing Tom’s service, Lloyds Bank granted three months’ leave. Friends did what they could. Virginia and Leonard Woolf hosted him at their seventeenth-century country cottage, Monks House, near Lewes in Sussex, for the weekend of 24–25 September. Virginia Woolf enjoyed seeing him, a little ‘disappointed to find that I am no longer afraid of him’.108 Back in London Tom got quotations for printing and publicising his proposed magazine – ‘about the size of the Nouvelle Revue Française’; but its launch was put on hold.109 Even from a distance, people who knew him detected something was wrong. Katherine Mansfield wrote to Violet Schiff in October: ‘Poor Eliot sounds tired to death. His London letter is all a maze of words. One feels the awful effort behind it – as though he were being tortured. But perhaps thats all wrong and he enjoys writing it. I don’t think people ought to be as tired as that, though. It is wrong.’110 To his brother Henry Tom wrote candidly, ‘I have been feeling very nervous and shaky lately, and have very little self-control.’ This hints at flare-ups of temper, but also depression. He wrote that Vivien needed ‘change and stimulus’. His family’s visit had been unsettling, but their leaving cut him to the quick: ‘Your having been here seems very real’, he confided to Henry, ‘and your not being here but in Chicago seems as unreal as death’.111 He tried to make light of his troubles to his mother, but she worried nonetheless.