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Young Eliot

Page 71

by Robert Crawford


  Residence in England: curtailed visit to Germany (1914); arrives in England from Germany (1914); meets Bertrand Russell in London; meets Ezra Pound in London; goes up to Merton College, Oxford; spends Christmas, 1914 in London; visits Swanage, Dorset (1914); fails to meet F. H. Bradley at Merton College; studies philosophy with Harold Joachim; takes up rowing at Oxford; doctoral thesis on F. H. Bradley; reads ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ to the ‘Coterie’ (Oxford poetry-reading group); gives talk to ‘Heretics’ in Cambridge, England; meets Wyndham Lewis; first publication of his poems in a book (Catholic Anthology, 1915); meets Vivien Haigh-Wood; resigns from teaching post at Harvard; marries Vivien Haigh-Wood; uses the name Stearns-Eliot; literary and artistic introductions by Ezra Pound; adjusts to married life; takes on teaching post at Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe; visits America after his marriage; ‘honeymoon’ in Eastbourne; dependency on Bertrand Russell; teaching post at Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe; mixes with the Bloomsbury set; teaching post at Highgate Junior School; meets Lady Ottoline Morrell; cancels visit to America for his doctoral presentation; moves into flat in Crawford Mansions; visits Garsington; publishes articles in the Monist; review writing; rents house in Bosham, West Sussex; takes on evening lecturing posts; publishes Prufrock and Other Observations; difficulties in his relationship with Vivien; rents Senhurst Farm jointly with Bertrand Russell; friendship with Ezra Pound; relationship with Mary Hutchinson; takes position at Lloyds Bank, London; becomes assistant editor at the Egoist; writes poetry in French; writes booklet on Ezra Pound’s poetry; rents house in Marlow jointly with Bertrand Russell; tries to enrol for military service; visits Bertrand Russell in prison; edits Pound’s poetry; relationship with Vivien; meets Virginia Woolf; death of father; physical collapse and begins writing ‘Gerontion’; owns a dog; publishes Poems with the Hogarth Press (1919); holiday in France with Ezra Pound (1919); grows a beard; Ara Vos Prec published by John Rodker (1920); subscribes to the London Library; visits Paris with Vivien (1920); rivalry with Ezra Pound; visits France with Wyndham Lewis; meets James Joyce in Paris; moves to flat in Clarence Gate Gardens; relationship with Virginia Woolf; uses pen-name ‘Gus Krutzsch’; begins composition of The Waste Land; visit of his mother, brother and sister to England; sees Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring; approached to be editor of Criterion; sees a nerve specialist; takes break in Margate for his health; writes rough draft of Part III of The Waste Land in Margate; travels to Lausanne for treatment with Dr Vittoz; continues composition of The Waste Land in Lausanne; completes The Waste Land and dedicates it to Ezra Pound; moves to Wigmore Street; reported to use violet powder on his skin; takes break in Royal Tunbridge Wells for his health; treated to vacation in Lugano, Switzerland by father-in-law; accused of profiting unfairly from ‘Bel Esprit’ scheme; awarded Dial’s $2,000 prize; reads The Waste Land to Virginia Woolf

  Character and characteristics: anxiety about masculinity; anxiety about sexuality; appearance; childhood anxieties about the body; critical judgements of others; editorial astuteness; interest in natural science; interest in ragtime and music hall; language proficiency; love of childish jokes; musical tastes; nostalgia for America; plays chess; punctiliousness; self-consciousness about ears; sexual gaucheness; sexuality; shyness; speaking voice/speech

  Health: assessed for military service; breathing and nasal problems; headaches and sciatica; hernia and wearing of a truss; links between illness and creativity; lung problems; minor ailments; mother’s anxiety for; ‘nervous sexual attacks’; nervous strain; neuralgia; ‘neurasthenic’; operation on his nose; rheumatism; scarlet fever; suffers from ‘cerebral anaemia’ in Munich; treatment by Dr Vittoz for nervous problems; weight loss

  Literary influences: Aiken, Conrad; Andrewes, Lancelot; Aristophanes; Arthurian myths and the Grail quest; Augustine, St; Baudelaire, Charles; Bhagavad Gita; Browning, Robert; Burns, Robert; Byron, George Gordon, Lord; Carroll, Lewis; Cocteau, Jean; Conan Doyle, Arthur; Conrad, Joseph; Dante; Davidson, John; Dickens, Charles; Donne, John; Dryden, John; Fitzgerald, Edward; French Symbolists; Gautier, Théophile; Goldsmith, Oliver; Gourmont, Rémy de; Hawthorne, Nathaniel; Heraclitus; The Ingoldsby Legends; James, Henry; Jonson, Ben; Joyce, James; Keats, John; Khayyám, Omar; Kipling, Rudyard; Kyd, Thomas; La Rochefoucauld, François de; Laforgue, Jules; Lear, Edward; Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth; Lowell, James Russell; Mallarmé, Stéphane; Malory, Sir Thomas; Marvell, Andrew; Maurras, Charles; Milton, John; Nerval, Gérard de; Ovid; Petronius; Philippe, Charles-Louis; Poe, Edgar Allan; Pope, Alexander; Pound, Ezra; Reid, Mayne; Renaissance drama; Rossetti, Dante Gabriel; Shakespeare, William; Shelley, Percy Bysshe; Spenser, Edmund; Stendhal; Stevenson, Robert Louis; Stoker, Bram; Swinburne, Algernon Charles; Tennyson, Alfred, Lord; Upanishads; Verlaine, Paul; Virgil; Wagner, Richard; Webster, John; Xenophon

  Religious influences: early reading about non-Christian religion; fascination with martyrdom; interest in Buddhism and Eastern thought; interest in Catholicism; interest in mysticism; Puritan family influence; religious anxiety; and scepticism; Unitarian background

  Views and comments: on academic life; admiration for Ezra Pound’s poetry; anti-Semitism; on being American in England; on Bertrand Russell; on Browning; on the composition of poetry; on Cubism; on difficulty in poetry; on the English; on English literary life; on English women; francophilia; on Henry James; on his early commitment to poetry; on his literary success; on his marriage; on his New England ancestry; on his responsibility towards Vivien; on his sense of displacement; on the influence of his grandfather; on James Joyce’s Ulysses; on Katherine Mansfield; on marriage; on national cultural identity; and Norbert Wiener’s ‘Relativism’; on Paris; on studying Indian philosophy; on Virginia Woolf; on war; on writing The Waste Land

  Poetic works: see separate entries for ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ and The Waste Land; ‘Ballade pour la grosse Lulu’ (1911); ‘The Boston Evening Transcript’; ‘Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar’; ‘The Confidential Clerk’; ‘Conversation Galante’; ‘A Cooking Egg’; ‘Dans le Restaurant’; ‘The Death of Saint Narcissus’; ‘The Death of the Duchess’; ‘Eeldrop and Appleplex’ (short story); ‘Entretien dans un parc’; Four Quartets; ‘Gerontion’; ‘The Hippopotamus’; ‘The Hollow Men’; ‘Hysteria’; ‘Interlude in London’ (1911); ‘La Figlia Che Piange’; ‘Le Spectateur’ (later retitled ‘Le Directeur’); ‘The Love Song of St Sebastian’; ‘Lune de Miel’; ‘Marina’; ‘Mélange Adultère de Tout’; ‘Morning at the Window’; ‘Mr Apollinax’; ‘Mr Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service’; Murder in the Cathedral; ‘Nocturne’ (1909); ‘Ode on Independence Day, July 4th 1918’ 232; ‘Opera’ (1909); ‘Petit Epître’; ‘Portrait of a Lady’; ‘Preludes’; ‘Reflections on Vers Libre’ (essay); ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’; ‘Song to the Opherian’; ‘Spleen’; ‘Suppressed Complex’; ‘Sweeney Agonistes’; ‘Sweeney Among the Nightingales’; ‘Sweeney Erect’; ‘Tristan Corbière’; ‘The Triumph of Bullshit’; ‘Whispers of Immortality’

  Prose works: Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry (1918); ‘The Lesson of Baudelaire’; ‘London Letters’ (written for Dial magazine); The Sacred Wood; Selected Essays (1932); ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’; ‘Ulysses, Order, and Myth’

  Eliot, Valerie (née Fletcher)

  Eliot, Vivien (née Haigh-Wood): characteristics and background; engagement with Charles Buckle; relationship with Scofield Thayer; meets TSE; marries TSE; belief in TSE’s literary genius; persuades TSE to stay in England; ‘honeymoon’ in Eastbourne; relationship with Bertrand Russell; takes dance lessons; fears for TSE joining up; corresponds with TSE’s mother; attempts career as an actress; spends time in a nursing home; unwillingness to travel to America; and The Waste Land; meets TSE’s mother; makes appointment for TSE with nerve specialist; proposes name for Criterion; Aldous Huxley on; Bertrand Russell on; Lady Ottoline Morrell on; Virginia Woolf on

  Ill-health: childhood tuberculosis; colitis; dental work; doctors unable to diagnose; exhaustion, insomnia,
mental strain; eye problems; falls ill immediately after marriage; fever; laryngitis; manipulative use of; migraines; mood swings as a girl; nervous complaints; neuralgia; physically undeveloped; rheumatism; treatments for; TSE blames himself for; TSE’s mother gives advice on; Aldous Huxley on; Henry Eliot on

  Eliot, William Greenleaf (TSE’s grandfather)

  Elkin Matthews (publisher)

  Ellmann, Richard

  Ellwood, Charles Abraham

  Emerson, Ralph Waldo

  English Review (journal)

  Epstein, Jacob

  Epstein, Jean, La Poésie d’aujourd’hui

  Etchells, Frederick

  Eucken, Rudolf Christoph

  Fabian Society

  Fauchois, René

  Finck, Hermann

  Fitzgerald, Edward, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

  Flaubert, Gustave

  Fletcher, Graham Bruce

  Fletcher, John Gould

  Flint, F. S.

  Fokine, Mikhail

  Forbes, Edward Waldo

  Ford, Ford Madox (Ford Hermann Hueffer)

  France, Anatole

  Franke, Kuno

  Frazer, J. G.; The Golden Bough

  Freud, Sigmund

  Frost, Robert

  Fry, Roger

  Fuller, Benjamin Apthorpe

  Gardner, Isabella Stewart

  Garsington, Oxfordshire

  Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri

  George V, King of England

  Gertler, Mark

  Gide, André

  Gilbert, Charles

  Gloucester, Massachusetts

  Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von

  Gold, Matthew

  Goldsmith, Oliver

  Goossens, Eugene

  Gordon, Lyndall

  Gosse, Sir Edmund

  Gourmont, Rémy de

  Gozzaldi, Amy de

  Grant, Duncan

  Graves, Robert

  Griffin, Nicholas

  Haigh-Wood, Charles

  Haigh-Wood, Maurice; war experiences

  Haigh-Wood, Vivien: see Eliot, Vivien (née Haigh-Wood)

  Hale, Edward Everett

  Hale, Emily: background and upbringing; in the Cambridge Social Dramatic Club; TSE falls in love with; writes to TSE; TSE sends roses to; TSE still in love with when he marries Vivien; TSE asks Eleanor Hinkley for news of; TSE writes to

  Hall, Dick

  Hallowell, Robert Canby

  Happich family

  Hargrove, Nancy

  Harris, W. T.

  Harvard University; Fogg Museum; Harvard faculty; Harvard Union

  Hatch, Roger Conant

  Hawthorne, Nathaniel

  H. D. (Hilda Doolittle)

  Held, Anna

  Heraclitus

  Herbert, George

  Hesse, Hermann

  Hinkley, Barbara

  Hinkley, Eleanor (TSE’s cousin): summers in Gloucester, Massachusetts with TSE; neighbour of TSE in Cambridge, Massachusetts; interest in drama; introduces TSE to Emily Hale; TSE’s correspondence with

  Hocking, William Ernest

  Hoernlé, R. F. A.

  Hogarth Press

  Holt, Edwin B.

  Homer, Winslow

  Horne, Edward Hastings

  Horne, John Van

  Hosmer, James Kendall

  Howarth, Herbert

  Hueffer, Ford Hermann: see Ford, Ford Madox

  Hugo, Jean

  Hulme, T. E.

  Hume, David

  Huneker, James

  Hunt, Edward Eyre

  Huntington, E. V.

  Husserl, Edmund

  Hutchinson, Barbara

  Hutchinson, Jack

  Hutchinson, Jeremy

  Hutchinson, Mary: at Bosham, West Sussex; relationship with Clive Bell; relationship with TSE; admires Prufrock and Other Observations; friendship with Vivien Eliot; TSE publishes short story by; supplies TSE’s address to Virginia Woolf; sexuality; on TSE; and Ezra Pound’s ‘Bel Esprit’ scheme; on The Waste Land

  Huxley, Aldous; on Vivien Eliot

  Huxley, Julian

  Huxley, Juliette

  Huysmans, Joris-Karl

  Imagism

  Inge, W. R.

  International Journal of Ethics

  James, Henry

  James, William

  Janet, Pierre

  Jepson, Edgar

  Jerome, Jerome K.

  Joachim, Harold

  Johnston, J. A. H.

  Jones, David

  Jones, Jane

  Jones, Stephen

  Jonson, Ben

  Joplin, Scott

  Jourdain, Philip

  Journal of Speculative Philosophy

  Joyce, James; TSE’s admiration for; meets TSE in Paris; TSE on; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Ulysses

  Julius, Anthony

  Kant, Immanuel

  Kaufmann, Julia Juvet

  Keith, Elmer

  Kelly, E. H.

  Keynes, John Maynard

  King, Henry

  King, Willie

  Kingsley, Charles

  Kipling, Rudyard

  Kite, Thomas Brown

  Kittredge, George Lyman

  Knopf, Alfred A. (publisher): publishes TSE’s booklet on Ezra Pound; turns down Prufrock and Other Observations; turns down book of prose criticism; publishes Poems (1920); publishes The Sacred Wood; turns down opportunity to publish The Waste Land

  Kyd, Thomas, The Spanish Tragedy

  La Rochefoucauld, François de

  La Rose, Pierre

  Laforgue, Jules

  Lake, Frederick Clinton

  Lambert, Gerard

  Langfeld, Herbert Sidney

  Lanman, Charles Rockwell

  Larbaud, Valéry

  Larisch, Marie

  Lawrence, D. H.

  Lear, Edward

  Léautaud, Paul, Poètes d’Aujourd’hui

  Lesourd, Homer W.

  Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien

  Lewis, Wyndham: and Blast magazine; first impression of TSE; unwillingness to publish ‘offensive’ material; exhibits in the Second London Group Exhibition (1915); TSE socialises with in London; planned New York Vorticist exhibition; serves in the First World War; sexually explicit story published in the Little Review; TSE’s admiration for; TSE arranges contribution to the Athenaeum; and Tyro magazine; meets James Joyce in Paris with TSE; holidays in France with TSE; TSE’s friendship with; TSE shows The Waste Land to

  Lionberger, Isaac H.

  Lionberger, Margaret

  Lippi, Fillippo

  Lippman, Walter

  Literary World (journal)

  Little, Clarence

  Little, Leon Magaw

  Little Review (Chicago journal)

  Liveright, Horace

  Liverpool Daily Post and Mercury

  Lloyd, Marie

  Lloyd George, David

  Lockwood, Ellen Dean

  Loeb, James

  Loisy, Alfred

  London Library

  Long, Haniel

  Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

  Loti, Pierre

  ‘Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The’: TSE completes while in Munich (1911); TSE shows to Conrad Aiken; TSE reads aloud to the ‘Coterie’ (Oxford poetry reading group); published in Poetry magazine (1915); published in Prufrock and Other Observations; read aloud by Katherine Mansfield;

  Themes and influences: anxieties about masculinity; Arthur Symons and Laforgue; Charles-Louis Philippe’s Bubu de Montparnasse; criticism of James Huneker; fog imagery in; influence of Laforgue; The Ingoldsby Legends; ‘Interlude in London’; Jean Verdenal; name taken from St Louis Prufrock Furniture Co.; Oscar Wilde’s Salomé; ‘Pervigilium Veneris’; poetic form; Seeger’s translation of Dante’s Inferno; sense of age; title anticipated by Longfellow’s ‘The Courtship of Miles Standish’; TSE’s study of Italian art

  Lovejoy, A. O.

  Lowell, Abbott Lawrence

  Lowell, Amy
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  Lowell, James Russell

  Lugano, Switzerland

  Lynd, Robert

  MacAvity, Ronald A.

  MacCarthy, Molly

  MacDiarmid, Hugh

  Mackenzie, Compton

  MacVeagh, Rogers

  Mahler, Jacob

  Mallarmé, Stéphane

  Malleson, Lady Constance

  Malleson, Miles

  Malory, Sir Thomas, Morte d’Arthur

  ‘Mama Lou’ (Letitia Lula Agatha Fontaine)

  Man Ray

  Manchester Guardian

  Manning, Frederic

  Mansfield, Katherine; reads ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ aloud at Garsington; ill-health; on TSE; dislike of Vivien; Vivien’s dislike for; TSE criticises to Ezra Pound

  Marburg, Germany

  Marc, Franz

  Marsden, Dora

  Marvell, Andrew

  Massine, Léonide

  Matisse, Henri

  Matthews, Steven

  Matthews, T. S.

  Maurras, Charles

  McAlmon, Robert

  McCarthy, Desmond

  McKittrick, Thomas (‘Tom Kick’)

  McLennan, John Ferguson

  McVeagh, Lincoln

  Melville, Henry

  Merrick, Leonard

  Merton College, Oxford

  Methuen, Sir Algernon

  Meyerstein, E. H. W.

  Miller, James E.

  Milton, John, Samson Agonistes

  Milton Academy, Massachusetts

  Moffatt, Adeleine

  Monist (journal)

  Monk, Ray

  Monro, Harold

  Monroe, Harriet

  Montmorand, Maxime Bernier de

  Moore, Clifford Herschel

  Moore, Marianne

  Moore, T. Sturge

  More, Paul Elmer

  Morgenstern, John

  Morrell, Lady Ottoline; TSE meets in London; depicted by D. H. Lawrence in Women in Love; encourages publication of TSE’s poetry; and Garsington; Henry Eliot on; and plans to raise an Eliot Fellowship Fund; recommends Dr Vittoz to TSE; on TSE; and Vivien Eliot

 

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