Young Eliot

by Robert Crawford

Even as he completed The Waste Land, Tom was getting ideas for another extended work in verse. Unfinished, unpublished, it would lie for several years. Like The Waste Land, ‘Sweeney Agonistes’ is patterned on anthropological interpretations of literature (in this case Aristophanic ancient Greek comedies) which detected fertility rites undergirding literary forms. In both works sexual fertility has gone wrong. Tom’s fragmentary drama would fuse these ideas with jazz-age songs and rhythms. In the wake of their meetings in Paris, he and Pound had been comparing notes on Greek plays, while Tom reread Aristophanes. Pound had odd ideas about human sexuality: he had opined that the ‘brain’ might well be ‘in origin and development, only a sort of great clot of genital fluid’.18 He liked to see himself as a phallic force to be reckoned with, and suggested to his friend: ‘Aristophanes probably depressing, and the native negro phoque melodies of Dixee more calculated to lift the ball-encumbered phallus of man to the proper 8.30, 9.30 or even ten thirty level now counted as the crowning and alarse too often katachrestical summit of human achievement.’19 Benignly, he wrote to Tom, ‘May your erection never grow less’, and explained that ‘I had intended to speak to you seriously on the subject’ in Paris.20 This suggests that Pound realised The Waste Land was bound up profoundly with Tom’s sex life; a few days earlier Pound had implied that the poem represented an ‘exuding’ of ‘deformative secretions’.21 In ‘Sweeney Agonistes’, however satirically treated, Tom’s articulation of sexual torment would continue. The poet who in life had fine yacht-club manners created a drama featuring a man who wants to ‘do a girl in’.22

  Tom and Vivien were reunited in London when she returned to the flat around 25 January to find him still ill with flu. ‘V. sends you her love’, Tom wrote to Pound just after she was back, adding that she ‘says that if she had realised how bloody England is she would not have returned’. He had been feeling ‘excessively depressed’.23 Nevertheless, he donned his dinner jacket on 2 February to dine with Lady Rothermere and Richard Cobden-Sanderson who was to become the publisher of the new magazine he would edit. He also tried to catch up with correspondence. A letter arrived from Thayer, offering $150 for Tom’s new poem, sight unseen. Possibly sensing continuing tensions between the Eliots, as St Valentine’s Day approached Thayer sent ‘Valentinian love to Vivien and yourself!’24 On 14 February Tom lunched not with Vivien but with Conrad Aiken, telling him he was seeking an American publisher for his new long poem. Aiken recommended the Dunster House Press in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but, though Tom pursued it, this idea came to nothing.

  He had begun showing The Waste Land to friends, including Aldington. Instead of accepting Thayer’s offer (worth about £35), Tom cabled asking for at least £50, but his cable was garbled in transmission. Meanwhile he was writing more prose: London letters for the Nouvelle Revue Française and the Dial as well as a short piece for Lewis’s Tyro arguing that ‘literature is not primarily a matter of nationality, but of language’. He did not want productions that were only of ‘local importance’ like most modern writing from England, America and Ireland. He sought work like Joyce’s, that had ‘not only the tradition but the consciousness of it’.25 That was what the completed Waste Land possessed to an astonishing degree. It sent deep taproots into English-language verse, then went even further, in strong, sustaining contact with other European and non-European traditions.

  Yet still he despaired. His Dial ‘London Letter’ for May emphasised ‘the particular torpor or deadness which strikes a denizen of London after his return’ from an absence of ‘three months’. English and American poetry seemed, for the most part, ‘conventional and timid’. This Waste Land poet who would go on to write ‘The Hollow Men’ pondered the frightening idea of ‘the man who has no core’, and detected a lack of true ‘moral integrity’ in modern poetry. American work, including the ‘uninteresting’ verse of Robert Frost, had its own ‘torpor’.26 Tom could debate the finer points of Jacobean drama, but his domestic situation was as bleak as ever. His own wife terminally sick, Middleton Murry understood such strains. Spending a weekend in Murry’s company during February, Tom was able to set aside their aesthetic differences, replacing them with a sense of shared difficulties. A doctor told Vivien she should go at once to a nursing home. She could not sleep and Tom found it hard to cope with her. She went. Arranging to sublet their flat, he moved back to 12 Wigmore Street, waiting for her to return.

  He contacted Pound, who was soon in touch with Scofield Thayer, telling him, ‘Eliot has merely gone to pieces again. Abuleia, simply the physical impossibility of correlating his muscles sufficiently to write a letter or get up and move across a room.’ This was, Pound opined, ‘a pathological state, due to condition of his endocrines’.27 Reflecting on Tom in late February, Katherine Mansfield decided he was ‘attractive’ yet ‘pathetic’: ‘He suffers from his feelings of powerlessness. He knows it. He feels weak. It is all disguise. That slow manner, that hesitation, side long glances and so on are painful. And the pity is that he is too serious about himself, even a little bit absurd. But its natural; it’s the fault of London that. He wants kindly laughing at and setting free.’28 Mary Hutchinson felt similarly about this man she was so fond of, and ‘tried hard to “loosen him up”’.29 Pound, too, perceived his good friend needed to be emancipated from at least some of his troubles, and strove to buy him time to write without anxiety. Judging the situation desperate, Pound urged Thayer to find a way of getting Tom money – perhaps through a prize offered by the Dial, or maybe via a loan or subscription. Around this time Tom substituted that new epigraph to The Waste Land ending with those Greek words meaning, ‘I want to die’.30

  He was angry at Thayer, whom he felt was exploiting him. Their history of rivalry complicated friendship: eager for the success of the Dial, Thayer had been less than rapturous about Tom’s editing a new magazine that might become a competitor. Tired, sometimes thin-skinned, Tom asserted the value of his own poetry in demanding more cash for The Waste Land. Drawing on the businessman part of his character, he pulled himself together and wrote to Pound, setting out terms he had agreed for his new, London-based but internationally oriented journal. He solicited Pound (who had turned against England’s literary culture) as a contributor, hoping his friend might also attract work from Continental writers including Cocteau. Tom wrote, too, to Valéry Larbaud, asking to publish a lecture on Joyce that Larbaud had delivered in Paris during December. It would form part of the first number of the new ‘critical review’.31 He secured a contribution for the same issue from Hermann Hesse on ‘Recent German Poetry’, and convinced Sydney Schiff to translate Blick ins Chaos.

  On 13 March, having moved flats to 12 Wigmore Street and sublet 9 Clarence Gate Gardens until June, Tom described himself (probably accurately) as ‘irritable and exhausted’. However, his magazine planning showed he believed he could cope with his problems as before – by throwing himself determinedly into work. Having been edited so effectively by Pound, he became all the more a committed editor, sourcing contributions and composing business letters with consummate aplomb. Sometimes he immured himself in protective editorial reserve; writing a short note to Thayer about Schiff’s translation of Blick ins Chaos, he signed himself ‘Sincerely yours, T. S. Eliot’, as if he and Thayer maintained a purely commercial relationship.32 Yet, better than most people, Tom knew the business of writing. He understood that good authors valued style first, but cared, too, about financial reward.

  Having received a garbled telegram apparently indicating Tom wanted at least £856 for his new poem, Thayer sent a frosty but not belligerent reply. Pound was wary of Tom’s new magazine; offering £10 per 5,000 words, it was likely to pay less than the Dial. Yet he remained concerned about Tom. ‘Eliot is at the last gasp’, he wrote to William Carlos Williams in America on 18 March.33 Having been the beneficiary of John Quinn’s largesse, Pound had been developing a scheme he called ‘Bel Esprit’. Using a subscription model, the aim was to channel money to talented artists – ‘captives�
�� needing ‘release’. Sending Williams an outline of his idea, he explained that Aldington and he had already pledged £10 each per annum. ‘Leisure’, Pound contended, was essential to the true artist, but Tom had returned to the ‘bank, and is again gone to pieces, physically’, along with his ‘invalid wife’. Bel Esprit was less a charity than a way to ‘restart civilization’, bolstering artistic excellence.34 Branches of it might be set up in various European and American locations to support the arts generally. Tom must be its first beneficiary.

  Soon Pound publicised this heady scheme in several places. He wrote about it for the New Age magazine. He distributed a private circular, making clear the plan had been hatched without Tom’s knowledge. He also stated Tom’s ‘bank work has diminished his output of poetry, and … his prose has grown tired’. Pound proclaimed The Waste Land a ‘series of poems, possibly the finest that the modern movement in English has produced’.35 This was a big claim for a ‘series’ that almost no one had read, but several subscribers pledged cash. May Sinclair matched the money committed by Pound and Aldington. As the plan developed, Tom felt increasingly awkward.

  Virginia Woolf had suffered frightening bouts of chronic insomnia the previous summer, then a relapse in January. She was still under the weather when she saw Tom in early March. Intelligently and unpatronisingly nice to her, he made her smile. She found him ‘grown supple as an eel; yes, grown positively familiar & jocular & friendly, though retaining I hope some shreds of authority. I mustn’t lick all the paint off my Gods.’ He told her about his nascent magazine and wanted her to contribute – Leonard Woolf too. Work would be needed by 15 August. Then he discussed his new poem. It would take up about ‘40 pages’ and they agreed the Hogarth Press would publish it ‘in the autumn’. Tom does not seem to have shown the Woolfs The Waste Land yet. He was hoarding it. ‘This is his best work, he says’, Woolf wrote in her diary. ‘He is pleased with it; takes heart, I think, from the thought of that safe in his desk.’ They gossiped, not least about Murry, whom they considered dishonest as a writer, and probably as a man. ‘I’ve ceased even to think about Murry. I’ve forgotten all about him’, Tom maintained. Woolf, a connoisseur of such gossip, had heard from Clive Bell, via Mary Hutchinson, that Tom used ‘violet powder to make him look cadaverous’.36 Tom, though he could seem cheerful to Woolf, was run down again: the powder may have been a nod to Baudelaire (a poet who advocated wearing ‘make-up’), but it may just have been for a skin complaint.37

  His situation grew little better. Moving had been ‘hell’, and by 16 March Vivien, back from her nursing home, was ‘in bed with fever’. Once more he had been ‘very tired and depressed’.38 Finding out about Bel Esprit hardly cheered him. If news of it reached the bank, where he was trusted and had just been given a special period of leave, it could be seen as a slur on his employer. Pound, having sounded Tom out about his financial needs, meant well, but a scheme that required thirty guarantors each to pledge £10 per annum sounded unreliable. Also, it could embarrass Tom and his friends. Over the coming months, it did.

  By early April he was still keeping The Waste Land hidden from the Woolfs. ‘My dear Tom’, Virginia Woolf wrote to him, slipping in a request to see it.39 No poem arrived. Nor had he arranged for it to be published in book form in America. He had, though, received an offer from Pound’s publisher, Liveright, who had been impressed by Tom in Paris. Boni and Liveright remained keen to publish the poem in New York that autumn, but there was a contractual complication: Tom was obliged to offer Knopf two books following the 1920 New York edition of his Poems. The American-issued Sacred Wood had been the first of these two; now Tom asked if The Waste Land might be the second. Oddly, as he had done with Thayer, so with Knopf he expected a decision without the publisher having seen the work. He simply told Knopf that Liveright had offered him $150, and he expressed eagerness to ‘get the poem published as soon as possible’.40 Given Tom’s apparent impatience, Knopf advised him to accept Liveright’s offer. So Alfred Knopf lost the opportunity to publish The Waste Land, and said simply that he would look forward to Tom’s next book of prose.

  Vivien’s return to England and to her husband brought a deterioration in her health. On 3 April Tom told Lucy Thayer (herself in Europe) that Vivien ‘evidently really needs to get away from London and from England for long periods together’.41 There was no suggestion he might accompany her. Still, he supported her decision to head to Paris in early April. Unfortunately, she fell ill as soon as she got there, returning home with ‘a temperature of 100’.42 Her doctor advised her ‘not to see anyone or talk’. ‘Frightfully vexed’, she wanted to speak with Mary Hutchinson about ‘most important matters’.43 Like Vivien, Tom found Mary’s company a solace, but his wife’s return seems to have coincided more or less with his becoming unwell again too. Awkwardly, the Eliots tried to aid each other, whether that meant their being apart or together. Togetherness could make them both suffer.

  To Tom’s satisfaction he had recently received from Sylvia Beach, an American in Paris who ran the bookshop Shakespeare & Company, a ‘beautiful broché [paper-backed] copy of Ulysses’.44 Beach was the European publisher of Joyce’s novel and Tom was due to review it for the Dial. He produced no ‘“full dress” review’, but eventually submitted his important essay, ‘Ulysses, Order, and Myth’, which appeared in November 1923. Vehemently he contested Aldington’s criticism in the April 1921 English Review that Ulysses was designed by a ‘great undisciplined talent’ so as ‘to disgust us with mankind’.45 Regarding Joyce’s novel as a masterpiece, Tom hoped that, if his intuition and Pound’s comments were accurate, The Waste Land might be fit to stand beside it.

  The Waste Land was his greatest achievement, but he worried circumstances might conspire against him. Recognising that Vivien had had a particularly ‘bad time recovering herself’ while she also had a sick husband ‘on her hands as well’, on 20 April he complained to Sydney Schiff that he felt ‘about ready to chuck up literature altogether and retire’.46 Meanwhile Pound (as he said he had done in Paris in January) was trying to get his friend to send The Waste Land to the Dial. Pound wanted Thayer to pay handsomely for it.47 Thayer, however, decided Tom was insulting him, demanding far beyond the going rate for a work he had not even set eyes on. Negotiations stalled.

  Complaining of ‘incessant illness’, but sure they were fit enough to travel and needed a change, Tom asked Ottoline Morrell on 26 April if she could recommend a hotel in Brighton where he and Vivien might recuperate.48 Feeling a bit stronger, he had gone to the London Coliseum to see Léonide Massine of the Ballets Russes dance – ‘more brilliant and beautiful than ever’. Adopting the accents of Bloomsbury, Tom told Mary, ‘I (having never been so close before) quite fell in love with him.’ Mary had sent news about Massine, and Tom, considering the dancer ‘a genius’, wanted ‘to meet him more than ever’.49 For the moment, though, he stressed that he and Vivien were trying to get away together for the sake of their health. On 5 May Aldington had told Amy Lowell Tom was ‘very ill, will die if he doesn’t get proper & complete rest’.50

  Instead of going to Brighton, the Eliots went to Royal Tunbridge Wells, a historic spa town in Kent about thirty-five miles from London by rail. They stayed at the four-storey, ivy-covered Castle Hotel which faced on to a three-hundred-acre common. During the week Tom commuted daily to London’s Cannon Street, but Vivien felt ‘very seedy’. Probably sensing his son-in-law would benefit from a break, and doing what he could for the Eliots’ marriage, Vivien’s father stepped in. Having been at death’s door not so long before, the old artist had made a spirited recovery. Now he wanted to treat Tom to a fortnight’s Swiss vacation in Lugano from 20 May until 4 June; Tom had two weeks’ holiday from the bank. Vivien was trying to decide whether to accompany her husband as far as Paris, or ‘go miserably to the seaside in further search of health’.51 Again, there seemed no suggestion she and Tom would remain together while abroad, though they did plan to go as a couple to visit Garsington in mid-June
.

  Tunbridge Wells failed to revive them. Repeatedly Tom had postponed a piece on Seneca he was supposed to be writing for The Times Literary Supplement. Before heading for Lugano he struggled to construct his Dial ‘London Letter’ for July. Vivien recalled him as ‘in a state of collapse – so ill – he asked me what he should say’. She made suggestions. He wrote them down, ‘not caring’.52 Though Vivien’s memories (penned about six weeks later when she was annoyed) may be coloured by her own circumstances, Tom’s ‘London Letter’ was unusually short. He mocked English politics (‘the Liberal is merely a drifting Conservative’) and suggested that the University of Oxford should choose as its next professor of poetry ‘an American, Professor Irving Babbitt’.53 It did not.

  He was certainly fed up. When the Chapbook, where he had published a substantial essay in 1920, sent him a questionnaire about poetry, his answers were honest but dourly monosyllabic:

  1. Do you think poetry is a necessity to modern man?

  No.

  2. What in modern life is the particular function of poetry as distinguished from other kinds of literature?

  Takes up less space.54

  Given that he had already written in four hundred and thirty-three lines what Ezra Pound had told him was ‘the longest poem in the Englisch langwidge’, these answers made sense.55 They were also shorter than Pound’s.

  Editing a magazine demands stamina. The Woolfs had allowed Tom to hand-copy a list of about six hundred names and addresses of potential subscribers supplied by the Hogarth Press. He felt too exhausted to type this up before departing for Lugano. Nonetheless, preparations for his journal’s first issue were going ahead, necessitating liaison with the publisher, Richard Cobden-Sanderson. Just before leaving, Tom received for his magazine from Leonard Woolf the ‘Plan of the Novel, “The Life of a Great Sinner”’ by Dostoevsky, which Virginia Woolf had co-translated; Tom also wrote to Knopf, confirming that he would accept Liveright’s offer to bring out The Waste Land as a book in the autumn. This would help him secure American copyright, while he might still offer Knopf a future prose volume. Then he set off. While he was in Lugano, Vivien would spend several days relaxing in her old seaside haunts at Eastbourne.