Young Eliot

by Robert Crawford

  In 1922, for anyone feeling strain and needing somewhere to recuperate, Lugano’s Hotel Bristol was an excellent choice, particularly if someone else was paying. When Tom arrived around 22 May, the mountain views across Lake Lugano were breathtaking. The whole region was idyllic: nearby was a settlement called Paradiso. Capital of the Italian-speaking Swiss canton of Ticino, Lugano was home to about 15,000 people. Set on an elevated site, the Bristol, opened two decades earlier, was the city’s first Grand Hotel. Extensive grounds sloped down to the waterfront. Guests could ascend from or descend to the lakeside in a private cable car. Transposed from Tunbridge Wells, Tom savoured red ‘Barolo’ wine, white sparkling ‘Asti Spumante’, an Italian Swiss lakeside festival and, at night, a display of fireworks.56 He walked; he boated on the lake; he bathed – all ‘good for me’.57 Yet his father-in-law’s gift of this holiday indicated how difficult his marriage was. The Swiss resort would have been the perfect place for a couple; but Charles Haigh-Wood, a loving father who knew his daughter as well as anyone, and who respected Tom, realised his son-in-law had to get away. Despite Lugano’s ‘American trippers’, Tom relished the gift. ‘I shd like’, he wrote to Lady Ottoline, ‘six months of Italy and heat and sunshine, and have never felt quite so lazy and languid.’58

  He met Hermann Hesse, to whom he had written. Hesse, who had known depression and was deeply interested in Buddhism, had moved in 1919 to the Casa Camuzzi in nearby Montagnola. There he had been writing his Indic novel Siddhartha. Like Tom in The Waste Land, he sought to fuse perceptions of East and West. After World War I, again like Tom, Hesse had championed the unity of European culture, even if the book Tom so admired, Blick ins Chaos, was filled with foreboding. It argued ‘the Downfall of Europe is foretold’ by Dostoevsky, especially in The Brothers Karamazov. ‘This downfall’, wrote Hesse, ‘is a return home to the mother, a turning back to Asia, to the source, to the “Faustischen Müttern” and will necessarily lead, like every death on earth, to a new birth’.59 Encouraged by Tom, Sydney Schiff would publish these words as part of his translation of Hesse in the June Dial. Tom’s unpublished long poem also had a ‘turning back to Asia’ in its use of the Buddha’s Fire Sermon and in ‘What the Thunder Said’. Yet in the newly revised Waste Land, even if the wasted, infertile terrain were to be reborn through the coming of the rain invoked in the final section, that would bring only a cyclic return to the poem’s hurtful beginning. Whatever Tom and Hesse discussed, both envisaged a gruelling future. However, Tom, meeting a man whose thinking he so admired, was delighted that Hesse would contribute an article on recent German poetry to his new journal. ‘Ich erinnere ich mich immer an meinem Besuch bei Ihnen’, he wrote: ‘I am still full of memories of my visit to you.’60

  He made another visit, too. Crossing into Italy, he spent a couple of days with his staunch friend Pound who was then in Verona. They spoke at length. Tom found Pound ‘delightful’, but remained wary of Bel Esprit.61 Pound’s idea was to recruit supporters in New York (including Quinn, who pledged $300), and to have Aldington look after British operations. However uneasy, Tom did not veto this. Pound asked him about his marriage. To Quinn, setting out Tom’s problems, Pound wrote in early July, ‘Eliot has always been very reserved about his domestic situation, so much so that I thought Mrs. E. had syph; and marvelled that they didn’t get a dose of 606 [arsphenamine, a compound used to treat syphilis]. Last time I saw him I got down to brass tacks. And find that the girl really has a long complication of things, tuberculosis in infancy, supposed to have been cured.’ As Tom outlined Vivien’s symptoms, Pound thought the problem was probably pituitary. Later that summer he asked Louis Berman, author of The Glands Regulating Personality (1922), to speak to Tom; but Tom made it clear that no one could work out just what Vivien’s illness was. ‘I find’, Pound told Quinn, ‘that she has all along behaved very finely [deleted: wanted separate establishment, so she shouldn’t get on Tom’s nerves, and prevent his working], is ready to live by herself if it will help T. to write etc. And in general ready to do anything she can to help his work. He can’t simply chuck her in the Thames, even if he were so disposed, which he aint.’62 Vivien, as ever, believed in Tom’s talent; their marriage was hurting them both.

  Back in London and feeling refreshed, Tom found that his wife, too, thought her problems might be glandular in origin. Tensions between them continued. Despite having said in May to Ottoline Morrell that visiting Garsington on 16 June ‘will suit us very well’, Tom now explained that there had ‘been a misunderstanding’. He blamed Vivien. ‘She knew that I had already told her that I could not leave London for a weekend until she went to Bosham in July.’63 After keeping Lady Rothermere waiting for most of a year, he felt under pressure to produce his magazine’s first issue. If he had more leisure, he explained to Ottoline, he could do all sorts of things; but he had not, and could not. Advised by Lady Ottoline, Vivien had seen a new specialist. He had told her at once, in addition to glandular problems, she had ‘poisoning from colitis’. The cure, Tom told Ottoline on 15 June with a degree of resigned annoyance, was ‘perfectly new and violent’. For four weeks Vivien was to consume cachets called Ovarian Opocaps containing ‘the glands of animals’ on a ‘purely experimental’ basis, in addition to having ‘a very strong internal disinfection, and going without food completely for two days a week’.64 Meanwhile, the Eliots were moving back from 12 Wigmore Street into their 9 Clarence Gate Gardens flat.

  On weekdays Tom squeezed in lunchtime literary meetings at Ye Olde Cock Tavern, 22 Fleet Street, a characterfully tall narrow building which still exists and boasts associations with a variety of writers. Here he plotted his new magazine. Restless and dissatisfied, he had no sooner moved into Clarence Gate Gardens than he cabled Quinn on 21 June to say he was unhappy about Liveright’s Waste Land contract. Apologetically, he asked Quinn for help, which was forthcoming immediately. In effect the busy New York lawyer acted as Tom’s agent. Over the next few months he negotiated a significantly better deal, then assisted with typescript and proofs. At first Tom had not even told Quinn the title of his new volume; Quinn took it all on trust. When, eventually, he read The Waste Land in typescript, he regarded it as ‘poems’ rather than a poem.65 ‘I thank you from the depth of my heart for your kindness’, Tom wrote, and soon made it clear he would present Quinn with the bundle of surviving manuscripts.66

  Around the same time, perhaps as part of a theatre visit, Mary Hutchinson arranged for Tom to meet Massine. Tom thought this ‘very sweet’ of her, and, signing his letter ‘With love, Tom’, told her so. ‘Do you think Massine liked me? and would he come and see me, do you think?’67 His continuing warmth towards Mary and his excitement at meeting Massine reveal eagerness to find distractions from the situation at home. Vivien ‘starved’ herself as the doctors ordered. One night in late June while she did so, Tom escaped to dinner and an ensuing dance, then headed to the Wigmore Street flat (not yet fully vacated), finishing off there what was left of a bottle of vermouth. He packed up his remaining clothes to move them back to Clarence Gate Gardens. ‘Rather fun’, he described his evening to Mary, hoping to see her soon.68

  By 25 June both Vivien and Tom were uneasy about her new treatment. She arranged to see a different Harley Street specialist, and, unsure how to proceed, sent Pound details of her symptoms. These included colitis, temperatures of almost 100°F (37.8C°), exhaustion, insomnia (‘this has been going on for eight years’), migraines, and what she called ‘Increasing mental incapacity’. That last symptom she explained by saying, ‘I have a horror of using my mind and spend most of my time in trying to avoid contact with people or anything that will force me to use my mind.’ Though despairing at times, she was determined to try to get well. She confided to Pound that she and Tom planned a week’s holiday together in Paris in late September; if she could find ‘intelligent doctors’, she might go on to Switzerland or Germany. Tom thought there was more to the illness than Vivien had revealed, noting she was ‘very ill and exhausted�
�.69

  Rumours spread that his proposed new journal might never appear. While sympathetic to his situation, Lady Rothermere wanted progress. She seemed to favour the title the London Review; Tom thought that ‘weak’.70 Supportively, Vivien came to the rescue, proposing that the magazine be called the Criterion. Tom liked that idea, and so did Cobden-Sanderson. Lady Rothermere agreed, and preparations for a launch in October gathered pace. Tom experienced the usual editor’s problems: some contributors exceeded their word limit, others did not deliver what he expected. He decided the first two parts of The Waste Land would appear in issue one, due on 1 October, the rest following in issue two. All going well, early contributors might include Virginia Woolf, Hermann Hesse and Marcel Proust. In a brave but risky move, the quarterly Criterion would contain more work by foreign writers than was customary. Tom was gambling his literary reputation and perhaps even the balance of his mind on his new poem and his new periodical together.

  Bel Esprit, too, seemed a gamble. The further the proposal advanced, the more awkwardly entangled he felt. Discussing Pound’s ideas at length with Aldington, he made clear he appreciated the motives which led his friends to try to buy him out of the bank, but could hardly accept or reject the scheme until it was reasonably certain what his ‘income, tenure, and security’ might be.71 ‘Precarious’ was his word for the planned arrangements; increasingly he believed Bel Esprit smacked of ‘slightly undignified charity’.72 Rodker, one of very few potential backers to have seen The Waste Land, had already printed, strictly for private circulation, that circular in which the work was hailed as a triumph of ‘the modern movement’.73 Again, regardless of the outcome of Bel Esprit, this made publication of The Waste Land in the Criterion and in book form crucial to Tom’s entire future.

  ‘It is a risk’, Pound admitted with regard to Bel Esprit. ‘So is an oil well.’74 Tom was willing to venture a good deal on his poem and his magazine, but Bel Esprit looked too problematic. Hearteningly, it showed his friends rallying round, yet the way several of its contributors were also producing paid work for the Criterion made the network almost strangulatingly incestuous. It was, he explained to Aldington, ‘embarrassing and fatiguing to me in spite of the motives, which I appreciate’.75 As discussions grew protracted over the summer, Virginia Woolf found people more ready to offer one-off lump sums to Tom himself; some feared Pound might ‘drink it all first’. ‘Poor Tom’, Woolf termed her friend.76 Lady Ottoline started distributing further forms. There was to be a new committee, on which Aldington and Woolf were to serve, to raise money specifically for an Eliot Fellowship Fund. Mary Hutchinson, Lytton Strachey and others seemed eager to donate. Leonard Woolf was sceptical. Virginia encountered opposition. ‘I am told that most people are as badly off as Tom’, she wrote to Lady Ottoline on 18 August, ‘and as most people have to earn their livings, they don’t see why they should bind themselves for ever to earn £10 yearly for some one else’.77

  Tom’s view was that provided he kept his bank position then at least he remained independent of friends’ charity. Even if £300 per annum were raised, he would still have to earn a further £300 from time-consuming literary journalism in order to match his current £600 salary. So why should he commit himself to giving up Lloyds Bank? He worried ‘everybody concerned’ would ‘be made ridiculous’.78 He was distressed, too, lest people think his family wealthy enough to fund him; to Pound he had explained that his mother’s circumstances were reduced. In the midst of all, while pursuing his day job as if everything was well, he had to summon up the shrewdness and energy for negotiations involving Criterion contributors and would-be contributors – some to be lured in, others headed off; many were his friends or his friends’ contacts. Difficult in a different way was coping with Vivien’s illness. Largely, he kept that private. As money-raising schemes linked to Bel Esprit took on a life of their own, he seemed unsure whether to deflect them, accept them or try to direct them. How much should he tell his family in America and his in-laws about what was going on? Then always there were his commitments to the Dial and to other journals that had asked him for prose; throughout these troubles, he strove to keep faith with his insistent conviction that he was, after all, a poet.

  Pressures mounted. He was having advertising circulars for the Criterion printed. ‘You know that I have no persecution mania’, he told Aldington on 13 July, but he was ‘quite aware how obnoxious I am to perhaps the larger part of the literary world of London and that there will be a great many jackals swarming about waiting for my bones.’ If things fell flat, he would have to accept huge loss of ‘prestige and usefulness’, and might ‘retire to obscurity or Paris like Ezra’.79 There was nervous jokiness in his phrasing, but it was clear-eyed. He had much to be nervous about.

  Aldington took umbrage at Tom’s ‘London Letter’ for July (submitted before he went to Lugano), which implied leading English critics were second-rate. Tom was getting ‘bitter and hypercritical’. An American, after all, he did not fully understand the ‘very subtle’ English ‘repulsion for everything which seems to be assuming superiority’. Tom made light of this ‘little difficulty’, but it rankled.80 He wrote one more short ‘London Letter’ for the Dial, then, saying he felt he could not maintain an appropriately high standard, suggested they find another correspondent. Over time a ‘breach’ developed between him and Aldington.81 Even more, that July, Aldington’s reproach angered Vivien. Maintaining that her husband ‘always leaves his letters behind for me to read’, without Tom’s knowledge she informed Aldington his note was ‘unkind, and not friendly. It is exactly the letter to upset Tom, and to harden his pride, and to help to precipitate the disasters we all foresee and which you cheerfully say he is asking for.’ She told Aldington she was largely responsible for the ‘London Letter’ which had so annoyed him; that she was behind the title of Tom’s new journal – a title Aldington disliked; and Vivien added that, though she had fought to keep Tom in England when they were first married, she hated the place now. ‘I hope Tom will soon get out.’ Her bleakest words were, ‘You know I am ill and an endless drag on him.’82

  Once again, Vivien remained fiercely loyal to what she saw as her husband’s genius. She perceived he was taking a big risk, and wanted him to win. ‘He does stand or fall by this review’, she wrote with regard to the Criterion. ‘Each person who gives him a push now gives him a push out of England. And that will be damned England’s loss.’83 Vivien fought from a position of weakness. She saw Tom’s temper, his pride, his vulnerability, and wanted to do what she could to help. Yet she also recognised how worn out he could become, and sensed that she could exhaust him. As usual, he hardened his shell to survive. Failure would help neither of them.

  When Vivien moved to an ‘inconceivably tiny’ cottage in Bosham for the summer, Tom weekended there with her, staying in London for the rest of the week. In town on 19 July, he met Dorothy Pound who handed him over 4,000 Italian lira (then worth about £40) from Bel Esprit; as if anticipating the money, Vivien had hired two household helps, ‘one in the mornings and one for the evenings’. She thought she and Tom might go and live in Paris after Christmas, if only he left the bank. Having told Aldington a few days before how much she hated England, now, thinking of Bosham, she informed Mary Hutchinson, ‘there is no country I like better than English country’, and offered the opinion that London was far better than Paris.84 Tom would try to buy a bungalow near Bosham in mid-September, conscious Vivien now ‘hated’ leaving the place, but he failed in his attempt.85

  If his wife could be demandingly unpredictable, Tom could come over as difficult too. Virginia Woolf detected that when she met him with Roger Fry and Clive Bell in London at the end of July. Bell had been full of gossip, but then attempted his ‘best behaviour’. Tom, Woolf noted, ‘was sardonic, precise, & slightly malevolent, as usual’.86 He could put on a façade. Pound knew this, and thought him like a possum, an idea that appealed to Tom. The two poets took to refering to each other as ‘Rabbit’ and ‘Poss
um’ – using nicknames from the white Southern writer Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus stories, popular in America from the 1880s onwards. To ‘play possum’ means to act as if dead, and Harris’s characters Brer Rabbit and Brer Possum derived, ultimately, from African American folk-culture. ‘What do you think of “The Possum” for a title?’ Tom asked Pound, thinking about the emergent Criterion.87

  Pound had suggested Tom ‘send Vivien over to Paris’ for a rest and for medical advice, but Tom thought she was too ill. Neuralgia, neuritis, eye trouble and colitis were among her sufferings, though it is tempting for twenty-first-century observers to speculate she was afflicted with depression. In accord with early-twentieth-century medical guidance, all her meat was minced three times in a machine; she took vitamins and protein supplements each day, and needed ‘the best sealed medical milk’. Tom, who had a bout of neuralgia himself in early August, hoped this newly recommended diet was ‘really doing her good’.88 Maybe they would go to Paris in October, after the Criterion was published. Tasks associated with the magazine proliferated: one Tuesday night after work at the bank he wrote at least ten letters. Still, having kept his wife’s troubles largely private from Pound for so long, he showed a certain relief in being able to discuss them more freely. Impressed and amused by Pound’s assumed expertise in the physiology of love (he had, after all, been translating de Gourmont’s book on sex), Tom hailed him as ‘student of the Kama-Sutra’, wishing him ‘Good fucking, brother’.89