Young Eliot (10 page)

As a mature poet, he knew that he had learned not just from the opportunities to access elite culture that his childhood environment offered, but also from growing up in Locust Street with a sense of urban decay in

A neighbourhood which had become shabby to a degree approaching slumminess, after all our friends and acquaintances had moved further west. And in my childhood, before the days of motor cars, people who lived in town stayed in town. So it was, that for nine months of the year my scenery was almost exclusively urban, and a good deal of it seedily, drably urban at that.

He came to realise that in his poetry ‘My urban imagery was that of St. Louis, upon which that of Paris and London have been superimposed.'
50
He made verse that has its roots in a childhood sense of a tension between propriety and its enemies.

At ten, Tom copied out the first verse of Longfellow's early poem ‘The Village Blacksmith': Longfellow was a poet taught at Smith Academy. Yet Tom knew, too, of other kinds of verse. In 1898 some St Louis men had established a local Indiana Society, and had invited Indiana ‘genius' James Whitcomb Riley to read.
51
Riley had begun by imitating other poets, particularly Edgar Allan Poe, before becoming celebrated, as the
Globe-Democrat
explained, for his ‘Annals of the Poor', his ‘Character Sketches', and works such as ‘Little Orphant Annie'. Hailed as someone who would ‘one day stand at the head of American classics', Riley read this last poem to a packed theatre in St Louis in 1898, the local audience relishing Annie's account of the ‘little boy' who refused to say his prayers and went ‘to bed at night, away upstairs' only to be eaten alive:

An' the Gobble-uns'll git you
Ef you
      Don't
          Watch
              Out!
52

In
Fireside
, number 14, Tom Eliot (who would use English and American dialect in his own, very different, mature poetry) wrote a little verse, ‘The fate of the Naughty Boy', about ‘A Boy who went to bed one night' only to be eaten by ‘The Goblins', and in number 4 he included an advertisement for an invented work, ‘“The Bloomer Girl”, A Poem, By J. W. Riley', accompanying it with a drawing of a female cyclist wearing bloomers, a piratical eye patch, and smoking a cigarette. No doubt she is one of those ‘new women' noted by an 1896
St Louis Globe-Democrat
parodist of Longfellow's ‘Hiawatha' as ‘Riding bikes and clad in bloomers'; Tom's sisters had been known to cycle, and several, perhaps all, shared his mother's commitment to extending opportunities for women.
53
Though belonging to none of the twenty ‘Women's Clubs of St Louis' which, in 1898, discussed topics ranging from Michelangelo to the
Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
, Tom grew up well aware of debates around culture and gender.
54

The little boy who not so long before had been smitten by a girl acting the part of a cherished, dying lass in a play at a seaside hotel continued to be interested in actresses. His story ‘Pretty Belle, the Belle of the Actresses' mentions
The Belle of New York
, performed in St Louis in 1898.
55
This hit musical starred beautiful Edna May as a Salvation Army girl who ends up marrying a millionaire. Its Pretty Belle's most famous song was published later in the St Louis press:

I'm sure I look demure enough, as I go 'round the city;

And do my best to hide the fact that I am young and pretty;

And I therefore cannot see, when I go out to preach,

Why men must say to me that I'm a perfect peach!

With her teasing refrain that sings of young men and ‘the light of faith', concluding that ‘they never proceed to follow that light, but always follow me!', this Belle of New York was rather different from the ladies of 2635 Locust Street.
56
But, however flippantly, Tom was interested in such a theatrical milieu. Edna May was back in St Louis in early 1899, by which time he was also mentioning, in
Fireside
, number 13, another, more scandalously vivacious actress, Paris-born Anna Held.

Anna Held was in St Louis acting the part of Suzette in
The French Maid
, a Ziegfeld extravaganza. Suzette at a seaside resort romances the entire British fleet. ‘“Brazen”, “sensual”, “bawdy” and “wanton”', Held represented, as her modern biographer puts it, ‘everything that was glamorous about Broadway, everything that was naughty about Paris'.
57
Already notorious for her 1897 ‘kissing marathon' and for being reported as bathing, like Cleopatra, in milk, she became one of the most photographed actresses in America, featuring in the St Louis press several times during Tom's boyhood and teens. When he mentioned her in 1899's
Fireside
(and mention her is all he did), she was being billed at St Louis's Century Theatre as ‘the Peerless Parisian Beauty'. For the
Globe-Democrat
's theatre reviewer she made ‘a combined assault upon the sense of decency of every man and woman who went to that playhouse'; this was because of her tendency to ‘“skin down” closer in the matter of clothes than any other woman now before the public'.
58
Again, this seems a world away from the behaviour of Tom's mother and sisters, but the little boy, who was learning French and who noted a local performance of
Othello
starring Lawrence Hanley, paid just as much attention to the presence of Anna Held in
The French Maid.
She, too, was part of the allure of Paris, a city whose fashions, Moulin Rouge and risqué theatre life all featured in the St Louis papers. Paris was synonymous with style and sinfulness.

The ‘editor' of the
Fireside
, whose vocabulary outpaced his spelling, liked to record ‘flirtation' and ‘elopments'. He also dedicated two issues of his magazine ‘To My Wife', giving those two words triple underlining and an exclamation mark in number 6.
59
Who ten-year-old Tom's wife was we may never know. The boy's ‘inamoratae' around this time or a little later included his freckled, athletic contemporary Margaret Lionberger, daughter of St Louis millionaire attorney, Isaac H. Lionberger, whose Henry Hobson Richardson-designed mansion at 3630 Grandel Square assuredly outclassed Tom's Locust Street home. Where the Eliots stayed put, the Lionbergers moved several times to more and more upscale neighbourhoods.
60

Other local girls Tom had his eye on included Jane Jones (readily remembered decades later); Effie Bagnall ‘whose family were considered distinctly
nouveaux riches
', probably because their money came from that newfangled thing an electricity company; and ‘the reigning beauty of the dancing school: Edwine Thornburgh herself, who subsequently became Lady Peek of Peek Frean & Co Ltd.'
61
Tom met these fledgling eligibles from ‘St Louis's smart set' at Professor Jacob Mahler's Dancing Academy, 3545 Olive Street, today the site of St Louis's Centene Center.
62
His parents consigned him to this Dancing Academy, often to his great discomfort: ‘how I dreaded those afternoons, and my shyness'.
63

Girls who danced with him in St Louis were struck by his shyness, and by his unreconfigured ears – that continuing source of embarrassment. Margaret Shapleigh, whose brother was a classmate of Tom's at Smith Academy, whose mother belonged to the Wednesday Club and whose doctor father lectured on ‘diseases of the ear', called him ‘Big-eared Tom'. So did her friends. Though not among his ‘inamoratae', she recalled dancing with him at a fancy-dress party when his outfit was rather different from his usual attire:

My clearest remembrance of him is when he was attending a ‘Farmers' Party' because everyone was in farmers' costumes. I was a shy girl but on that occasion I saw (or thought I saw) my brother who from the rear looked exactly like every other boy (blue jeans, plaid shirt & huge straw hat). So being partnerless I tapped him on the shoulder and said ‘Hi, kid, let's dance.' The form turned around. It wasn't my brother – just Tom turning redder than a turkey cock. I too was stunned – but we danced.
64

Confronting and overcoming shyness, Tom danced in his boyhood and teens and grew to love it; twenty years later he would roll back the carpets of his London flat and foxtrot with his wife; he waltzed in old age. If dancing in St Louis brought him into contact with ‘inamoratae', it also set a pattern. Just as he was interested in actresses, so he liked dancers. If he recalled his childhood in terms of shyness and being ‘protected from … sexual precocity', he knew too that, for good and ill, his childhood had made him.
65
At Professor Mahler's and elsewhere, sometimes gauchely, it encouraged him to dance.

Tom remembered the Dancing Academy as deliberately ‘Select', catering ‘for the jeunesse dorée [gilded youth] of St. Louis'.
66
The Academy had its own printed ‘catalogue' which could be mailed out to families wishing their children to attend.
67
Each season, from October until March, the theatrically imaginative Professor – who also organised small children's shows with ‘fairy drills and cupid marches' – held a good number of dances at his house for local teenagers from the upper stratum of St Louis Society, as well as Saturday matinee events in his ballroom, typically including a ‘Valentine matinee' and a ‘farmers' party' like the one at which Tom danced with Margaret Shapleigh.
68
Jacob Mahler has been described as ‘a terpsichorean titan, despite his light, lithe build and despite the fact that he always wore velvet ballet slippers'.
69
Well-off parents entrusted their children to this man's care, confident that ‘the responsibility, the unseen but nevertheless unmistakable subtle refining influence, the ease of manner, and all the other essential things which go to make young people well bred are in the safest of hands when Mr. Mahler has the helm'.
70

In his teaching Mahler was an enthusiast for the work of François Delsarte, the French theorist whose work influenced Isadora Duncan and who sought to relate mental to physical articulation, grounded in philosophy and theology.
71
Idealistic in its conviction that ‘the artist needs an exactly-formulated definition of art', the Delsarte System was just the sort of dancing that was appropriate for high-minded Lottie Eliot's younger son.
72
Though Tom liked some of the girls at Mahler's, he disliked several of the boys. His ‘most loathed enemy' was Atreus Hargadine von Schrader, Jr, who teased him mercilessly. When he was younger Atreus had lived nearby at 2648 Locust Street, but when Tom was nine the rich and ambitious von Schraders had moved away to more salubrious quarters.
73

Soon so did another boy who aggravated him at Mahler's dancing classes. Lewis Dozier, Jr, sang in the Smith Academy Glee Club and was a rival admirer of Edwine Thornburgh. Though shorter than Tom, Lewis exuded self-assurance that only heightened Tom's shyness. In 1899 the Dozier family migrated to Westmoreland Place, arguably in Tom's boyhood the city's swankiest street.
74
Mixing with these very rich kids, and coming from a prosperous family himself, the boy who wrote up in the
Fireside
‘Miss Stockenbonds', ‘Mrs Insessent Snob' and ‘the Bondholder Fortunnes' was able to make fun of social pretension in a milieu where ‘Miss Kamchatty de Havens gave a small tea of twenty covers.'
75
From a very young age he was able both to participate in polite elite culture and to mock it. That mixture of impulses would be crucial to the poems of his first collection; it never left him.

He read constantly. Photographed aged eight, he hunches, engrossed in a book while sitting at an odd angle, one leg curled under him, on a rocking chair on the porch of the house at Gloucester. In a portrait in oils, painted by his art-student sister Charlotte about five years later, Tom sits formally upright on a dining chair. He is wearing what looks like a dark jacket and white bow tie, reading one of the red leather-bound volumes of the Temple Shakespeare edition which his mother had given him and which remained in his library all his life. Tom remembered how his ‘family advised or exhorted me to read' approved works, ‘for they concerned themselves about my reading, and I remember my mother's anxiety because I devoted too much attention to the novels of Mayne Reid – she tried to interest me in Macaulay's History [of England] instead'.
76

Unauthorised reading was exciting. Captain Mayne Reid, whose popular Victorian adventure stories included
The Boy Hunters
and
The Forest Exiles or the Perils of a Peruvian Family amid the Wilds of the Amazon
, was just the author to appeal to the St Louis lad whose
Fireside
contained such little tales as ‘Up the Amazon', ‘Rattlesnake Bob' and ‘“Pony Jim” by Dimey Novles'.
77
Tom may have seen pieces such as ‘Up the Paraguay River' in the
Globe-Democrat
.
78
He had a taste for Mayne Reid-style adventures involving deserts and jungle locations, striking flora and fauna (the ‘humming-bird' whose ‘throat … glitters' in
The Boy Hunters
re-emerges as the ‘glitter' of the ‘hummingbird' in the 1930 poem, ‘Marina'), and accounts of rites such as that of the ‘“rain-maker”' which are ‘the
first dawning of religion on the soul of the savage
'.
79
These were tales Tom found for himself, some time after he had inherited from his older siblings the ‘beloved Rollo books' authored around the time of his father's birth by New England clergyman and educationalist Jacob Abbott.
80
Abbott's educational stories about a polite little American boy, who learns about the world and eventually travels abroad (
Rollo in London
,
Rollo in Paris
), were the genteel, approved counterparts of the adventures among supposedly primitive peoples offered by Mayne Reid. Tom absorbed the lot.