Young Eliot

by Robert Crawford

  Tom’s specialist’s advice had been to leave immediately for three months, and remain apart from all contacts, resting his mind completely and adhering strictly to a set of rules, which included reading only ‘for pleasure, not profit’ two hours a day.112 Tom was not so sure. He thought of simply giving up the bank and living off his journalistic wits; but felt that would bring added stresses. With Aldington, who was kind and generous to him, he discussed the idea of writing a book on Wren’s London churches; but it would be unremunerative. Still unsure about the specialist’s advice, but recognising he must try to get better, he wrote that he had asked Vivien to accompany him to the Kent seaside resort town of Margate ‘and stay with me as long as she is willing’.113 He aimed to spend a month there, after which Lady Rothermere had offered him the use of her Mediterranean villa at La Turbie near Monte Carlo. Vivien would travel with him to France, he hoped, but then go somewhere else ‘healthy’.114 Helping Tom with his voluminous correspondence, she wrote to Thayer to say, ‘Tom has had rather a serious breakdown.’115 Vivien ended her letter by stressing how keen she had been to get out of England for years, and hinted she might come to visit Thayer, who was then in Vienna.

  At Margate Vivien and Tom stayed at the ‘nice, comfortable’, sea-facing Albemarle Hotel in Cliftonville from 15 October.116 1920s Margate prided itself as a place where ‘Weary men of business are rejuvenated and invigorated by the magical air’; it catered for ‘the jaded city dweller, pale and worn’ who sought to be ‘restored to vigour and activity’.117 With its chalk cliffs, expansive beaches and many entertainments, the seaside town was a popular summer destination; in 1921 even in late October and early November it boasted entertainments from a performance of Handel’s Messiah to cinemas showing Charlie Chaplin comedies or romantic dramas such as Wasted Lives, Puppy Love and Cupid Hires a Taxi-cab.118 From the Eliots’ four-storey hotel, one could stride from Cliftonville into town along a walkway at the foot of the cliffs, cutting at low tide across broad sands that in summer were crowded with deckchairs but in winter almost deserted. Tom, ‘not unhappy’, as Vivien put it on 26 October, kept ‘regular hours’ and was ‘out in this wonderful air nearly all day’.119 She was going to return to London next day, leaving him at the hotel, but she stayed with him a few days longer, sure he showed ‘great improvement already’.120

  Before she left, Tom, who had been practising ‘scales on the mandoline’, had decided he needed less ‘a nerve man’ than ‘a specialist in psychological troubles’.121 Ottoline Morrell had recommended he travel to Lausanne in Switzerland to consult Dr Roger Vittoz, who had treated her as well as helping Aldous Huxley’s brother Julian. Tom wrote to Julian Huxley, asking him just ‘how brilliant a physician’ Vittoz was, particularly ‘as a psychologist’.122 A full recommendation came by return. Vivien agreed Vittoz sounded appropriate. She wrote to Bertrand Russell, saying so, and sending love from them both. She also congratulated the philosopher on becoming a first-time father. Tom joked that if the baby did not have Russell’s characteristic pointed ears, nevertheless ‘they will sharpen in time’.123

  He could not quite switch off. He read The Times Literary Supplement, and sent in letters to the editor, one of them after noticing correspondence from George Saintsbury about his piece on the Metaphysical poets. He mailed a postcard to Aldington, then wrote him a short note in which, bluntly, he described the poetry of H. D. as ‘stucco’; he added, a couple of weeks later, that he disliked its ‘neurotic carnality’.124 One day around the start of November he walked to the Nayland Rock shelter that overlooks the expansive Margate sands and is close to a memorial to some drowned sailors, one of whom had the unusual surname Crunden – a name familiar from his St Louis childhood. ‘Sitting’ in one of the individual dark-varnished wooden seats on this covered ‘shelter on the front’, he wrote ‘a rough draft of part III’ of his evolving poem, running to ‘some fifty lines’.125

  Some of these presented a confessional speech uttered, apparently, by a woman (like Tom’s bank colleague Miss Holt) from Highbury, where he had taught. In his original pencil draft, he first of all had a speaker talk of going ‘on the river’. There is recollection of how ‘I raised my knees / Stretched on the floor of a perilous canoe’. A lover promises ‘“a new start”’; but that seems not to have worked out, and ‘There were many others’.126 What survives in the finished poem are the famous lines:

  ‘On Margate Sands.

  I can connect

  Nothing with nothing.

  The broken fingernails of dirty hands.

  My people humble people who expect

  Nothing.’

  la la127

  Elsewhere this section juxtaposes the modern, oil-and-tar-polluted Thames with the historic love affair between Queen Elizabeth I and the Earl of Leicester, who sailed on a river barge – ‘A gilded shell’.128 Next come strange fragments of singing, quoted from the Rhine maidens in Wagner’s opera Götterdämmerung (The Twilight of the Gods); then the Margate passage. Later Tom explained this part of his poem as ‘The Song of the (three) Thames-daughters’. It is followed by allusions to St Augustine arriving in Carthage (where he encountered ‘a cauldron of unholy loves’) and to the ‘burning’ of the Buddha’s Fire Sermon. Whatever else is going on here, there are river girls, sex gone wrong and a movement from erotic pain to ‘asceticism’.129 Its fleeting voices sound a poetry of torment.

  Tom wired Dr Vittoz in Lausanne. Receiving a favourable response, he prepared to depart via London. Set on this course, he felt more confident; he had already attempted self-diagnosis. ‘I am satisfied, since being here’, he wrote to Aldington, ‘that my “nerves” are a very mild affair, due, not to overwork, but to an aboulie and emotional derangement which has been a lifelong affliction’. He may have had difficulties with lack of willpower and emotional problems, but there was ‘Nothing wrong with my mind’.130 He was eager both to show Vivien the new parts of the poem he had been writing and to take the whole lot ‘away with me’ to Lausanne.131 On 16 November he saw Mary Hutchinson – a ‘great pleasure’.132 Then, the following day, a Thursday, he and Vivien set off from London for the Hôtel du Pas-de-Calais, 59 rue des Saints-Pères, Paris.

  When he saw them in Paris, Pound thought Tom ‘looked not too badly’.133 In the French capital the Eliots spent several days together, which Vivien found ‘very perfect’.134 Then, at 9.20 on a November evening she saw her husband on to a train as he headed for Switzerland. Suddenly alone on the platform, she felt stunned, as if hit on the head with ‘a broomstick’.135 Though she had decided to visit ‘a man’ she knew in Cologne (probably her old admirer, Thayer), nonetheless Vivien stayed on in Paris. She saw the Pounds from time to time, and Joyce who struck her as vain and egotistical. ‘The man from Cologne’ (whose identity she kept secret when mentioning him to Mary Hutchinson) said he would come and stay with her towards the end of December, but it is not clear if he ever did. Thayer’s letters show he remained on affectionate terms with Vivien, but also suggest he was wary of becoming entangled with this woman with whom six years earlier he had enjoyed flirting, yet who was now Tom’s wife.136 One of Thayer’s purposes in coming to Europe was to undergo analysis with Freud in Vienna; he too had been feeling under strain.

  Vivien considered remaining in Paris, if finances allowed; she decided residence there would suit her husband better too, but she felt confused. Sometimes she thought she had ‘even forgotten Tom’. At other moments, ‘No-one seems at all real to me.’137 As so often, her own health seemed almost to parallel his; Thayer had sympathised with her in late October about ‘nervous breakdowns’ that were ‘both in the same family’.138 She was uncertain what the future held. ‘About Tom – I don’t know I don’t know’, she wrote to Mary Hutchinson, whose company and conversation she missed.139

  Lausanne throughout the second half of November and December was calm and foggy – so overcast that for much of his stay Tom could not even see the spectacular surrounding mountains. Though he remained mainly i
n the town itself, in December he visited Berne where he acquired Hermann Hesse’s 1920 Blick ins Chaos: drei Aufsätze (A Look into Chaos: Three Essays), which suggested that at least half of Europe was sliding towards complete disorder. Confirming his own sense of decaying civilisation, the book filled him with ‘admiration’.140 If perception of impending chaos matched his personal breakdown and nourished his evolving long poem, his anxieties were countered by Vittoz’s treatment and by Lausanne’s comparative tranquillity. Its streets sloping down to the shores of Lac Léman where lake steamers and small boats were moored, this well-heeled place of banks and chocolatiers was quiet after London and Paris. The castle, cathedral, casino, gift shops and cobbled streets attracted appreciative tourists. With 70,000 inhabitants, Lausanne, chief city of Switzerland’s Vaud region, was contained but cosmopolitan. Its grandest hotel, the Beau-Rivage Palace at Ouchy, overlooked the Lake with its smart yachts and mountain views: ‘un symbol prestigieux’ of Lausanne’s bon ton.141 If not quite so imposing, Tom’s hotel was assuredly elegant. The Hôtel-Pension Ste-Luce, on the corner of the avenue Ste-Luce further up the hill, had high-ceilinged rooms that looked out on to lawns adorned with mature trees and a pale, dinky summer house.142 Lady Ottoline had recommended it, and the staff told Tom they had put him into what had been her room. Talking French, he was among ‘many nationalities, which I always like’.143 Vittoz’s clinic, which formed part of his house, the villa Cimerose in the avenue Linden, was just a short stroll downhill.

  Then almost sixty, Dr Roger Henry Melling Vittoz, whom Tom liked ‘very much personally’, had been born near Lausanne, the son of a history professor resident for a time in England.144 Trained in Lausanne and Geneva, the doctor had been influenced by Pierre Janet, whose work Tom knew. As well as coining the psychological term ‘dissociation’, Janet had written about rather Prufrockian problems of the will including ‘l’irrésolution’ in Les Obsessions et la psychasthénie.145 A kindly, rather formal man, the tall, balding Vittoz soon offered a ‘diagnosis’ of Tom’s problem, which the poet regarded as ‘good’.146 While in Lausanne, Tom used Janet’s terminology to describe the condition for which he was being treated as ‘psychasthénie’, sometimes associated with fatigue and anxiety.147 Dr Vittoz, he wrote to Ottoline Morrell on 30 November, ‘inspires me with confidence’ and was ‘putting me through the primary exercises very rapidly’.148

  Tom read the 1921 edition of Vittoz’s book, Traitement des psychonévroses par la rééducation du contrôle cérébral and marked in his copy a passage concerning ‘Aboulie’ (lack of will).149 Julian Huxley, who had been experiencing problems with ‘any attempt to reach a decision, even in trivial matters’ a few years earlier when Lady Ottoline had recommended Vittoz to him, recorded in old age a description of the Swiss physician’s initial ‘exercises’:

  His method was to propose some simple subject on which to concentrate, such as visualizing a circle or a square, or solving an easy mathematical problem, and to test the validity of my efforts with the side of his hand on my forehead, whereby he claimed that he could feel and estimate the special brain-pulse accompanying genuine concentration. Gradually more complex subjects for concentration were propounded and the exercises became easier to carry out.150

  Vittoz believed ‘insufficient brain control’ was at the root of illnesses such as Tom’s, which could be brought on by ‘sorrow, or excessive worry in work’. The brain had ‘two different working centres’: ‘the conscious or objective’ which controlled ‘reason, judgment and will’; and ‘the unconscious or subjective’ which was ‘in a general way the source of the ideas and sensations’. Under conditions of ‘insufficiency or instability of control’ the objective brain grew weak; the balance between the two ‘centres’ was thrown out of kilter, producing at times ‘a whirl of unconnected and uncontrolled ideas’.151 Strengthening the will let patients regain ‘control’. Having written about the need to overcome poetry’s ‘dissociation of sensibility’ some months before encountering Vittoz, Tom had developed an aesthetic that chimed with aspects of this physician’s thought. The American poet came, too, from a family whose strict New England ancestry relished a flinty emphasis on self-control. The better he got to know Vittoz, the more convinced he became he had made the right choice.

  Vittoz encouraged ‘concentration on the idea of calm’, asking a patient to ‘imagine’ the ‘brain in a state of calm’ by focusing on an ‘object’ that would ‘evoke in his mind some idea which will itself produce that feeling’. The physician did not use the term ‘objective correlative’, but his method accorded with Tom’s poetics. An appropriate object to focus on might be a landscape or a piece of music or a ‘prayer’. A favourite exercise was to concentrate alternately on ‘the mathematical symbol of infinity’ and then on the numeral 1.152 Another thought-exercise involved focusing on a word, then making sure that it was ‘rubbed out letter by letter’, before applying the same process ‘to a sentence’.153 This sits interestingly alongside the compositional technique of eliminating parts of sentences (and even words) that Tom was essaying already:

  To Carthage then I came

  Burning burning burning burning

  O Lord thou pluckest me out

  O Lord thou pluckest

  burning154

  Vittoz’s ideas, techniques and treatment functioned as encouragement and confirmation. They followed soon after Tom read in Jean Epstein’s book that neurasthenic conditions might heighten creativity.

  Not for the first time he managed to write from the heart of his illness at the same time as drawing strength from his cure. Vittoz explained that there might be physiological symptoms of anxiety ‘due to insufficient brain control’ such as ‘excessive excitability which makes the sufferer aware of the slightest noise, and is very frequently a cause of insomnia’.155 Tom marked that passage in Vittoz’s book, and wrote the word ‘handwriting’ beside a section dealing with how under conditions of ‘exhaustion’ arising from ‘over-tension’ often ‘the muscles are at first more or less contracted and sometimes painful’.156 This may relate to problems with his fingers; in a photograph taken with his mother that summer, he is wearing a finger stall.157 It is impossible to know exactly what he confided to Dr Vittoz, but some months later he wrote of how ‘Whenever I get very tired or worried I recognise all the old symptoms ready to appear, with half a chance, and find myself under the continuous strain of trying to suppress a vague but intensely acute horror and apprehension. Perhaps the greatest curse of my life is noise and the associations which imagination immediately suggests with various noises.’158 Helping patients control their brains through a strengthened will, Vittoz aimed to cure both psychological and physiological symptoms. Tom’s long poem filled up with a cacophony of noises: car horns, an out-of-tune church bell, animal cries, shouts, thunderclaps.

  For Vittoz ‘an uncontrolled idea’ was ‘like a rudderless vessel’.159 Concentration brought the mind back into balance, helping it resist aboulie. Exercises, such as listening for short spells to a metronome or writing down the figure 1, then speaking it ‘mentally’ three times with an interval between each time, increased the power of concentration.160 So did very deliberate attention to conversation and ‘Concentration on the idea of control’. Several of Vittoz’s exercises involved sounds and listening. He stressed the need to avoid the ‘cliché’, by which he meant ‘bad impressions’ which had become ‘crystallized in the brain’ and so ‘always reproduce the same symptom mechanically’.161 Patients had to understand how to rid themselves of clichés. What poet could disagree with that?

  After just over a week of this psychotherapy Tom enthused about how ‘at moments I feel more calm than I have for many many years – since childhood – that may be illusory – we shall see’.162 He listened to the sounds of the Swiss city, noisy when ‘children come downhill on scooters over the cobbles’, pleasant when a local ‘Good orchestra plays “The Love Nest”’, a hit from the 1920 Broadway show Mary, its tune simple and sentimental to
the point of monotony, and its description poignantly remote from Tom’s situation.163 Asking her how she was, he mentioned it to his own close friend Mary Hutchinson in England.

  Just a love nest

  Cozy with charm,

  Just a love nest

  Down on a farm.

  A veranda with some sort of clinging vine,

  Then a kitchen where some rambler roses twine.

  Then a small room,

  Tea set of blue;

  Best of all, room –

  Dream room for two.

  Better than a palace with a gilded dome,

  Is a love nest

  You can call home.164

  Tom listened as the Lausanne band played, and was very far away from all that.

  In an odd way, there was a lot of American culture around him: Tarzan, Les Nuits de New-York and Charlie Chaplin at Lausanne’s several cinemas; Broadway musical tunes in its streets; even in the local newspaper mention of ‘tourbillons’ (tornados) near the Mississippi.165 Thinking of his family, he sent a ‘Christmas letter’.166 In lines written in Lausanne, but later dropped from his poem, he wrote of how ‘Aeneas’ mother, with an altered face, / Appeared once in an unexpected place’. This allusion to a classical mother, Aphrodite, who is recognised by her son as ‘a goddess’, is compared to the way ‘The sweating rabble in the cinema / Can recognise a goddess or a star’.167 Such fusing of the ancient maternal with the erotic power of the screen ‘goddess’ is telling. Like other aspects of the poem, it hints how much older mythological patterns underlie modern urban life; but it shows too a rather awkward attempt to reconcile the maternal with the erotic: a challenge for Tom in his life.