Young Eliot

by Robert Crawford

  Few readers or hearers, however, fail to detect that the poem contains a pain and a horror by no means ‘academic’. If The Waste Land has come to be read as articulating Western civilisation’s sense of crisis, it can be heard also as a lasting cry, giving voice to a darkness deep in the human psyche. The poem’s universality is astonishingly powerful; its resonances seem to expand forever. Yet, while conscious that The Waste Land could be read as ‘social criticism’, Tom remarked over a decade later, ‘To me it was only the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life; it is just a piece of rhythmical grumbling.’138 Shifting, spiky, flowing, weird, haunting, its rhythms are what convince its auditors. ‘He sang it & chanted it rhythmed it’, wrote Virginia Woolf when Tom first read it aloud to her on Sunday 18 June 1922. She and Leonard would publish it from their Hogarth Press in the following year – the first publication of the work in book form outside America – but her first, accurate impression was less of a text than of sound:

  It has great beauty & force; & tensity. What connects it together, I’m not so sure. But he read till he had to rush – letters to write about the London Magazine – & discussion thus was curtailed. One was left, however, with some strong emotion. The Waste Land it is called; & Mary Hutch, who has heard it more quietly, interprets it to be Tom’s autobiography – a melancholy one.139

  ‘Anguish’ was the word Mary Hutchinson settled on to describe the emotional tenor of such numinous verse.140 His mother recorded of the poem, ‘Tom wrote me before it was published that he had put so much of his own life into it.’141 He had, and Vivien knew her life was in it too. All this helps give the verse its undertow of damage, its longing, its frustrated, ineradicable music.

  It was 15 December when The Waste Land became an American book. One thousand copies were printed, each stamped with an individual number, published from 105 W. 40th Street, New York. Hard at work assembling the contents for the next few issues of the Criterion, Tom opened the small, pale-jacketed volume in his London flat. Slightly heavier than it looked, underneath the dust jacket it was bound in black boards with only the words THE WASTE LAND in gold on the front board. Inside, the poem now carried its Latin and Greek epigraph (though no dedication), and was printed in large type – never more than sixteen lines of poetry per page. Thanks to this generous spacing and to the added prose ballast of the Notes, it managed to fill sixty-four pages. Throughout, the verse carried line numbers (one every ten lines), as if to bind together a work that kept threatening to explode into separate shards. The inside front-jacket flap quoted an early review by Burton Rascoe in the New York Tribune, calling The Waste Land ‘a thing of bitterness and beauty’ and, ‘perhaps, the finest poem of this generation’. The note on the rear flap began simply, ‘T. S. Eliot was born in 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri’, then went on to hail him as ‘without question the most significant of the younger American writers’. Tom, weary and very far from the city of his birth, looked at the name ‘T. S. Eliot’ in plain black print on the title page.

  It was as if he had never been young.

  Acknowledgements

  THIS poet has been part of my life since at least 1974 when I bought his Complete Poems and Plays. In private the music of his poetry captivated me, but that book was practical in public too. It was a talisman I carried in my school bag to ward off mathematics. Eliot, who studied advanced mathematics as a graduate student, might not have approved. After reading his work further while a Glasgow University undergraduate, thanks to the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland and the Snell Exhibition, I went to Balliol College, Oxford, to write a doctoral thesis on Eliot. Only one supervisor was willing to take me on. To Richard Ellmann I owe debts that cannot be repaid; to Mary Ellmann as much. I made my first Eliot-related visit to the USA in 1983, spending time in New York Public Library, at Columbia University, at Yale, and as a visiting scholar at Eliot House, Harvard, where I kipped on a sofa and played loud music in the sombre Matthiessen Room, whose curator George Abbott White was especially welcoming.

  After Kim Scott Walwyn at Oxford University Press published my first book, with help from John Carey and others I worked at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, then at Glasgow University. Since 1989 at the University of St Andrews I have taught Honours-level courses on Scottish literature and on T. S. Eliot, looking out the classroom window over the North Sea while reading ‘Marina’ or ‘The Dry Salvages’. Generations of bright St Andrews undergraduates have confirmed that this was the right thing to do, and I have learned much from their comments. Among my graduate students I would like to thank especially Will Gray and Josh Richards for their insights, help and advice. Over the years all my School of English colleagues at St Andrews have contributed to my understanding of poetry in general, and of Eliot’s in particular.

  This book could not have been written without the award of a British Academy/Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellowship for the academic session 2012–13, supplemented by a semester’s research leave awarded by the University of St Andrews. Lecturing to the T. S. Eliot Society in St Louis, addressing the T. S. Eliot International Summer School in London and reading ‘Little Gidding’ with Seamus Heaney to the T. S. Eliot Society of the UK at Little Gidding, as well as the invitation to deliver the British Academy’s Warton Lecture on English Poetry in 2009, were among the immediate spurs to the writing of the book. Crucial has been the long-standing support of my shrewd, demanding editor at Jonathan Cape, Robin Robertson, who commissioned this biography; to Jonathan Galassi, my editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, I owe gratitude for his trust. Patient help was supplied by Clare Bullock at Cape and by Christopher Richards at FSG. My agent David Godwin and his colleagues at David Godwin Associates in London have been essential to the project, supplying characteristically deft support. For copy-editing I thank the meticulous Lin Vasey and for indexing Marian Aird.

  Going way beyond the bounds of friendship, my former student Dr Richard King and Dr Stephen N. Sanfilippo (editor of Seasongs) ingeniously tracked down the ballad about the schooner Lapwing which Eliot recalled hearing as a young man: Richard and Stephen, I salute your skill and generosity, as well as the assistance of Mr William Plaskon of the Jonesport Historical Society, Maine, and Ms Susan M. Sanfilippo, Curator, Pembroke (Maine) Historical Society. Carey Karmel alerted me to the Ether Monument in Boston, and Mark Storey to Eliot’s application to join the London Library. Graciously, Aisha Farr and Cliff Boehmer went out of their way to take several photographs of buildings where Eliot lived; Rachel Falconer and colleagues at the University of Lausanne sent me copies of pictures of that city taken around 1921. Late in the writing of the book Jeremy Hutchinson, Lord Hutchinson of Lullington, shared with me his mother’s memoirs of Eliot and let me record a substantial interview with him at his home. That was, as I anticipated, a delight, and gave me what I never expected: the chance to chat with someone in 2013 who remembered Eliot before the publication of The Waste Land.

  Warm thanks are due, too, to many people for advice, guided tours, winks, drinks and staunch support. Among them are Michael and Mary Alexander; Struther and Greta Arnott; David Bradshaw; Jewel Spears Brooker; John Burnside; Marilyn Butler; Peter H. Butter; Robert Christie; Tony Cuda; Robert M. Cummings; Robert Davis; Frances Dickey; Douglas Dunn; Ulla Dydo; Melanie Fathman; Graham Bruce Fletcher; Elizabeth Glass; Lyndall Gordon; John Haffenden; Jason Harding; Henry Hart; Hugh Haughton; Seamus Heaney; Roger Highfield; Rosalind Ingrams; Manju Jain; Iman Javadi; David Kinloch; Joan Langhorne; Sara Lodge; Jim McCue; Arthur E. Meikle; Edward Mendelson; Elizabeth Micakovicz; Edwin Morgan; Les Murray; Don Paterson; Diana Franzusoff Peterson; Richard Price; Patrick Reilly; Louise Richardson; Christopher Ricks; John A. M. Rillie; Carl Schmidt; Ronald Schuchard; Susan Sellers; Fiona Stafford; Jayme Stayer; Archie Turnbull; Paul Turner; Clifford Tym; Lynda Tym; Margaret Vickers; Mark Webster; Hamish Whyte.

  At the Houghton Library, Harvard, thanks are due especially to Leslie Morris, Susan Halpert and their colleagues; at the Archive Cen
tre of King’s College, Cambridge, to Patricia McGuire and her colleagues. Other libraries and archives to be thanked for their consistent support and helpfulness include the Beinecke Library, Yale University, and the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the British Library; the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds; Glasgow University Library; Harvard University Archives; Haverford College Library; High Wycombe Library; the Library of Congress (not least for such digital resources as the Chronicling America newspaper database); the London Library; Margate Library; Marlow Library, Buckinghamshire; Merton College Library; Missouri History Museum; the Mitchell Library, Glasgow; the National Library of Scotland; New York Public Library, Astor, Lennox, and Tilden Foundations; St Andrews University Library; University of Missouri Library; Washington University, St Louis.

  For permission to quote from the published and unpublished work of T. S. Eliot I thank the Estate of T. S. Eliot and Faber and Faber Ltd; particularly, I acknowledge their permission to quote poetry from Faber volumes including Collected Poems 1909–1962 by T. S. Eliot, Inventions of the March Hare by T. S. Eliot (edited by Christopher Ricks), and The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript by T. S. Eliot (edited by Valerie Eliot); their permission to quote prose from Selected Prose by T. S. Eliot (edited by Frank Kermode), and from The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volumes 1 and 2 (edited by Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton); also for their permission to quote from uncollected prose, property of the Estate of T. S. Eliot, and from unpublished prose, poetry, and other materials which are also property of the Estate of T. S. Eliot. I owe a debt of gratitude to Clare Reihill and to Emma Cheshire for their patience and attention. I am grateful also for permission to quote in the United States and related territories excerpts from Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909–1917 by T. S. Eliot (text copyright c. 1996 by Valerie Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company; all rights reserved); also excerpts from The Letters of T. S. Eliot published by Yale University Press. Other quotations from published works in Young Eliot are used under the terms of fair use, and sources are cited in detail in the endnotes to this book.

  For help with and/or permission to reproduce manuscript materials in their collections I am grateful to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (particularly Nancy Kuhl, Curator of Poetry, Yale Collection of American Literature); to the Bodleian Library, Oxford (where Dr Judith Priestman expedited my request); to the Cambridge Historical Society of Brattle Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts (particularly Gavin W. Kleespies); to the Hayward Bequest, King’s College, Cambridge, England (where, as ever, the College Archivist Patricia McGuire and her colleague Peter Monteith were especially helpful); to the Houghton Library, Harvard University (thanks again to Leslie A. Morris, Curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts, and her colleagues Susan Halpert, Christina Linklater, and Mary Haegert); to the Warden and Fellows of Merton College, Oxford, for permission to quote from College records (thanks to Dr Julia Walworth and to Julian Reid); and to other rights holders. Though permissions to reproduce photographs in this book are acknowledged separately in the list of plates, I would like to thank especially the Bertrand Russell Archive at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, and Rick Stapleton, Archives and Research Collections Librarian there for generous help; also once again the Hayward Bequest, King‘s College, Cambridge (especially Patricia McGuire); the Houghton Library, Harvard (especially Leslie A. Morris); the National Library of Scotland (Sarah Moxey); and the Archives of Smith College (Nichole Calero).

  Though the online publication of The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition (the first two volumes of which are now published by Johns Hopkins University Press along with Faber and Faber) and the new edition of Eliot’s collected poetry (forthcoming from Faber) were not available in time for me to consult, I would like to thank Professor Ronald Schuchard, overall editor of The Complete Prose, for his guidance and generous support throughout this project and over many years; and I want to thank also Jim McCue and Professor Sir Christopher Ricks, joint editors of the poetry, for exchanging intelligence as they and I were working on our respective projects – and for their sheer wisdom. Future writers on Eliot will be in these great editors’ debt.

  My mother and father nurtured my love of the poetry of T. S. Eliot; my wife Alice and our children, Lewis and Blyth, have sustained it, sometimes to the limit. Without them this book would not have been written. Thank you.

  R.C., St Andrews, 2014

  Abbreviations

  Books by T. S. Eliot

  CC: To Criticize the Critic and Other Writings (London: Faber and Faber, 1965).

  CPP: The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1969).

  Facsimile: The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts including the Annotations of Ezra Pound, ed. Valerie Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1971). Facsimile pages on even-numbered pages, transcriptions on facing pages.

  IMH: Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909–1917, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Faber and Faber, 1996).

  L1: The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1: 1898–1922, revised edn, ed. Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton (London: Faber and Faber, 2009).

  L2: The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 2: 1923–1925, ed. Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton (London: Faber and Faber, 2009).

  L3: The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 3: 1926–1927, ed. Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden (London: Faber and Faber, 2012).

  L4: The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 4: 1928–1929, ed. Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden (London: Faber and Faber, 2013).

  OPP: On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber and Faber, 1957).

  SE: Selected Essays, third enlarged edn (London: Faber and Faber, 1951).

  UPUC: T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, Second Edition (London: Faber and Faber, 1964).

  VMP: The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry, ed. Ronald Schuchard (London: Faber and Faber, 1993).

  Individuals

  CCE: Charlotte Champe Eliot (TSE’s mother)

  EP: Ezra Pound

  HWE: Henry Ware Eliot (TSE’s father)

  HWE, Jr: Henry Ware Eliot, Jr (TSE’s brother)

  TSE: Thomas Stearns Eliot

  VE: Vivien Eliot (TSE’s first wife)

  Institutions

  Beinecke: The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

  Hayward Bequest: The Papers of the Hayward Bequest of T. S. Eliot Material, Kings College Archive Centre, Cambridge, England

  Houghton: The Houghton Library, Harvard University

  Notes

  Introduction

      1.    CPP, 16, 37 (‘Gerontion’), 78, 69.

      2.    CPP, 89 (‘Ash Wednesday’).

      3.    Valerie Eliot, in BBC TV programme, ‘Arena: T. S. Eliot’, broadcast on 6 June 2009 (these remarks were made first in a 1971 interview).

      4.    Graham Bruce Fletcher, ‘The Silly Songs of T. Stearns Eliot – a Private Memoir Made Public’, Exchanges (T. S. Eliot Society (UK)), 6.2 (Summer 2013), 7.

      5.    SE, 337 (‘In Memoriam’).

      6.    CPP, 182 (‘East Coker’).

      7.    Ronald Schuchard, ‘Valerie Eliot and the State of Eliot Studies’, opening address, T. S. Eliot International Summer School, London, 6 July 2013.

      8.    Valerie Eliot to the present writer, 18 October 1983.

      9.    TSE, ‘American Literature and the American Language’, CC, 44.

    10.    Clare Reihill, quoted in Felicity Capon, ‘T. S. Eliot’s fountain pen replaces Dickens’s quill at the Royal Society of Literature’, Daily Telegraph, 19 March 2013 (accessed online).

    11.    [TSE], Fireside, Number 2 (Houghton MS Am 1635.5 (2)).

    12.    L1, 457.

    13.    CPP, 13.

&
nbsp;   14.    Valerie Eliot to the present writer, 28 June 1983.

    15.    Sir Herbert Read, ‘T. S. E. – A Memoir’, in Allen Tate, ed., T. S. Eliot: The Man and his Work (London: Chatto and Windus, 1967), 13.

    16.    L3, 208.

    17.    The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol. IV, ed. R. L. Rusk (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), 338–9.

    18.    L4, 137–8.

    19.    Clive Bell, ‘How Pleasant to know Mr Eliot’, in Tambimuttu and Richard March, eds, T. S. Eliot: A Symposium (New York: Tambimuttu and Mass, 1965), 16.

    20.    TSE, quoted by Theodore Spencer, recorded by HWE, Jr, and put into print by Valerie Eliot in Facsimile, [1].

    21.    Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume 2, 1920–24, ed. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), 178.

  Chapter 1 – Tom

      1.    HWE, Jr, to HWE, ‘Saturday June 1st’ [1901], (Houghton bMS Am1691(60)); 1 June 1901 was a Saturday.

      2.    L1, xxxvii.

      3.    L1, 222.

      4.    L1, 324.

      5.    These phrases are quoted from family correspondence in Cynthia Grant Tucker, No Silent Witness: The Eliot Parsonage Women and their Unitarian World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 225. Theodora had only ‘one pair of limbs’.