Young Eliot (3 page)

Though he had written fragments of it before he left Harvard, in London around 1919 Eliot began to focus on
The Waste Land
. In its drama of voices fragmentation, lost or illusory love and communion with literary tradition clash jaggedly together. As Vivien made clear in her comments, the poem's pain was also bound up with the hurt of Eliot's most intimate relationship. This biography shows clearly links between Eliot's circumstances and
The Waste Land
, but refuses to reduce that artistically crafted, strenuously edited poem to a mere offshoot of personal crisis. If for Eliot in one mood
The Waste Land
represented an outburst of personal ‘grumbling', offering him ‘the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life', then he understood too the way it came to be interpreted not just as a monument of the ‘modernist' era but an enduring, polymorphous and profound work of art.
20
In pieces, it is the poem of a man ‘going to pieces'; but it is also brilliantly pieced together by Eliot and Ezra Pound. Quickened by Joyce's
Ulysses
and by Stravinsky's
Rite of Spring
, ultimately
The Waste Land
emerges as a poem of desperation. It draws on personal experiences as diverse as its author's interrogation of anthropology and his fondness for dancing, to produce a vision of unending spiritual and physical torture. The ‘Shantih', that peace with which the poem appears to conclude, is perceived, but not achieved.
The Waste Land
is a musical astonishment, one to which Woolf listened with admiration in 1922 as its maker seemed to sing it aloud.
21

Young Eliot
aims to communicate a sense of the tentativeness, the shakiness of the young poet's reputation. His work's acceptance was no foregone conclusion. Repeatedly he felt he had dried up as a poet, and feared he had wasted his life. Not marmoreal, but wounded and sometimes wounding, young T. S. Eliot may be imposingly erudite, but is also conflictedly human.

Where I have gone to the original publications to locate Eliot's prose writings, and have consulted numerous original manuscripts of poetry, prose and drama, future generations will have access to electronic editions of much of this material. Yet there will never be an absolutely definitive biography of Eliot. Each age will crave its own portrait. My aim, no small one, is to offer a convincing account of a great poet whose life was impressive, dauntingly complex and, at times, a mess. Eliot's story, like his poetry, contains deep unhappiness; but at the beginning of his life, as at its end, he was happy. To rob him of that is to distort and caricature him. To treat his life as if it was the history of a monument is wrong. In presenting a full and detailed portrait of this poet, I want to circumvent assumptions about his often defensive persona, and so, in the chapters that follow, I shall call him neither by his surname nor by his famous initials but by the name used by most of the people whom he allowed to get close to him, and by those who knew him best from the start.

 

1

Tom

B
EFORE
he was T. S. he was Tom. That was what his prosperous parents and his four elder sisters called him. In the summer of 1890 his only brother, Henry, wrote from Boston, Massachusetts, to hard-working Papa Eliot at home in industrial St Louis, Missouri. Henry's holiday news was that baby ‘Tom' (then aged two) had just been weighed: 30 pounds.
1
Henry, almost a teenager, seems not to have resented the arrival of another male Eliot. He looks happy photographed beside his alert little brother. Indeed, before long Henry, a bookish boy who liked to go to the Boston Athenaeum to look at the magazines, was taking his own photographs of Tom.

All the baby's surviving siblings were considerably older. When Tom was born, Ada was nineteen, Margaret was seventeen, Charlotte fourteen, Marion eleven and Henry nine. Ada could easily have been mistaken for his mother; she would sit beside him on the stairs at the well-appointed family home, 2635 Locust Street, St Louis, responding to him in a kind of shared vocal game. Later, she told Tom how ‘When you were a tiny boy, learning to talk, you used to sound the rhythm of sentences without shaping words – the ups and downs of the thing you were trying to say. I used to answer you in kind, saying nothing yet conversing with you.'
2

Ada left home while Tom was still little, but he always felt attuned to her. From his early years a mixture of separation and closeness characterised his sense of family. He was loved and happy. He and his mother Lottie treasured memories of his earliest infancy; in adulthood he assured her he still cherished her singing him a song, ‘The Little Tailor', while the firelight made patterns on the ceiling of his childhood home.
3
Yet, years later, Tom suggested to Henry that their parents ‘in spite of the strength of their affection' had been ‘lonely people'.
4
A sense of familial, shared fondness, tradition and values was unusually strong among the Eliots: Tom inherited it; but he also inherited, and worked hard to counter, a sense of isolation in himself.

When he was born in St Louis in 1888, both his parents were forty-five. Lottie – Charlotte Champe Eliot – gave birth around 7.45 a.m. on Wednesday 26 September. Anxiety mingled with jubilation. Three years earlier Lottie's daughter Theodora had been born severely deformed. Her frail physique had failed to develop. Relatives outside the immediate family worried about how Theodora had so ‘wound herself' round her parents' hearts during the sixteen months of her short, stricken life, that they transferred to baby Tom a morbid sense of trepidation that later conditioned his boyhood.
5

Few mothers in their mid-forties who had recently watched a baby die would not have worried at a subsequent birth, even if they were, like Lottie, of ‘unusual character'.
6
The new baby's father Hal – Henry Ware Eliot – sent a telegram immediately to relatives in Oregon: ‘Lottie and Little Thomas are well.'
7
Thomas Stearns Eliot's name was chosen with care. Stearns had been Lottie's maiden name. Having called their first son Henry Ware Eliot Junior, after his father, the couple gave their new son the first name of Hal's elder brother, the Oregon-based Reverend Thomas Lamb Eliot, a minister in the Unitarian Church that meant so much to all these Eliots.

A year or so before Tom's birth, Hal, with his customary taste for kith and kin, had subscribed to
A Sketch of the Eliot Family
(1887). He has a short entry in it as Eliot ‘No. 163', and close family members feature in its ‘Index of Eliots'.
8
Familiar to him and to Lottie, surnames such as Adams, Cranch, Greenleaf, Peabody, Stearns, Stetson and Thayer populate its ‘Index of Other Names'. Tom, who later spotted this book in his ‘father's library', grew up with a strong, sometimes constricting sense that the world, like this book's indexes, could be divided into Eliots and non-Eliots.
9
Certainly his family tree, was formidable. A distant ancestor, Andrew Eliot, had emigrated from East Coker in Somerset, England, to Beverly in Massachusetts around 1670. Through him the St Louis Eliots could claim kinship with a substantially Unitarian New England elite. The scholar Eric Sigg has pointed out that through his tangled family tree baby Tom was related, distantly, to poets John Greenleaf Whittier and James Russell Lowell; to novelists Henry Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne; to memoirist Henry Adams; and to the second and sixth presidents of the United States, John Adams and John Quincy Adams.
10
Few squealing infants have had quite so much to live up to.

Worried or not at the time of his birth, the new baby's parents were both strong characters. They treasured their sense of familial inheritance; yet in each there was also something unfulfilled or repressed. Active in local women's clubs and religious as well as cultural societies, Charlotte cared deeply about education and social welfare. She campaigned for the rights of children in the courts. Her passions encompassed poetry, philosophy and religion; but her own education had not included university study, and the poetry she wrote found only limited outlets, often in Unitarian journals where she had links to the editors. Educated at Washington University in St Louis, her businessman husband had been expected to follow his elder brother and their father into the Unitarian ministry. Hal's father was the Harvard-educated Reverend William Greenleaf Eliot – Eliot ‘No. 161' – founder of Washington University, pillar of Unitarianism, writer, ‘unflinching supporter of the temperance cause', advocate of ‘woman suffrage' and ‘helper of the colored race'.
11
Yet Hal had not become a minister: ‘too much pudding choked the dog' as he put it; he simply ‘gagged'.
12
Nevertheless, Hal, whose cursory short entry in the
Sketch of the Eliot Family
was dwarfed by the Reverend W. G.'s magisterial three pages, ‘gave as a layman' to his church ‘the kind of service that ministers rarely find', becoming ‘a living stone of its spiritual structure and usefulness. His face bore the stamp of real spirituality.'
13
Tom was shaped by his parents' hopes and histories; what he became was guided and abraded by what they had accomplished; and, sometimes, by what they had not.

Partially deaf by the time of Tom's childhood, his father had once been an eager musician, artist and poet. Hal's
Pocket Diary and Almanac
from 1864, when he was twenty-one, records purchases of books including Thomas Hood's
Poems
. He strummed the guitar, sang, played the flute. In his diary a poem, ‘Life', dated ‘April 27 '64', begins, ‘Must I suffer ere my spirit, / Shall attain the highest goal'. To his liking for spiritual verse, Hal added a taste for popular song. That same year, the second last of Abraham Lincoln's presidency and while the Civil War still raged, he wrote down lines from ‘Lorena', a lyric of loss and regret sung by many during a time when perhaps a million Americans were killed.

We loved each other then Lorena

More than we ever dared to tell

And what we might have been Lorena

Had but our loving prospered well …
14

Much later, Ezra Pound wrote of meeting in Venice a woman who remembered a young Hal Eliot in St Louis writing poetry and not appearing at all like a businessman.
15

Hal's father was recalled as ‘one of the staunchest supporters of the Union in a city in which it was doubted, for a time, whether it would go with the Union or the Rebellion'.
16
In the early 1860s, to his family's alarm, Hal had followed his elder brother Thomas in volunteering to serve on the Union side in the Hallek Guard, mustered to defend St Louis against attack by Confederate forces which had earlier been driven out of Missouri. Yet by the late 1880s when his last child was born, those days were long gone. True, Hal still enjoyed drawing humorous sketches – not least of cats – and Tom remembered in adulthood ‘a wonderful set of comic animals that he drew long ago, and were kept in an album together – I think he did them for a fair'.
17
By Tom's childhood, however, Hal the clean-shaven, sometimes nervous-looking young poet had been repressed and replaced by Henry Ware Eliot, Sr, the bearded, chess-playing businessman who had moved through several commercial jobs to become a prominent figure in the management of the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company of St Louis.

Aspects of Hal's well-read, older self survived. Having studied Classics in his youth, ‘Papa', as his children called him, liked to quote Latin tags around the house, peppering his conversation, Tom observed, with occasional phrases such as ‘quam celerrime', and retaining into old age a taste for bow ties and ancient Greek oratory, which, in his disciplined retirement, he reread in the original. He lived surrounded by books – the Bible, Latin and Greek texts, Americana from the age of Emerson and before – and retained a love of American history and political anecdotes. Tom remembered his father advising both his sons ‘not to take up his own business'.
18
To the outside world, however, Hal was not a literary man but principally a sound, successful commercial manager. He helped found a local association of building material dealers. He looked after financial matters for his extended family. He rose, eventually, to become president of his firm and a director of several other brick companies.

In Lottie Eliot the vein of poetry was not repressed. Three months pregnant with Tom, she wrote, as she often did at the advent of spring, a poem celebrating Easter. Lent and Easter were important points in the Unitarian calendar, and often involved concerts at the Eliots' church. While Lottie's verse advocates the eschewing of ‘wanton pleasures', she liked to celebrate how ‘Spring returns with joy and mirth'.
19
During the second year of Tom's life she wrote ‘An Easter Song', and in 1891 ‘An Easter Hymn'.
20
Much, though not all, of her verse was religious in tenor; liking to read theology and the Bible itself before she wrote, she had a high sense of artistic mission: ‘The artist's soul must expression find / And give of its riches to all mankind, / Their vision to complete.'
21
As a girl she had studied ‘Mental Philosophy'; as an adult she ‘sometimes read Philosophy as a preparation for writing'.
22

Steeped in high-mindedness, Lottie Eliot's poetry invokes a divine ‘Infinite Mind' (a term favoured by Unitarians). Its topics range from ‘The Raising of Lazarus' and ‘Force and God' (1887) to biblical paraphrases and poems dealing with episodes in the lives of saints and martyrs.
23
She transcribed in Latin and English Fortunatus' medieval hymn in honour of the Holy Cross, with its details of crucified palms and ‘wound on wound'; she wrote her own verse ‘Vision of St Francis' seen ‘Rapt in the ecstasy of his devotion'.
24
Sometimes, as in ‘Raphael's “Ste. Marguerite”', she took inspiration from paintings. Tom's mother hung reproductions of religious pictures in her bedroom alongside ancestral portraits and pictures of her children. Martyrdom and scenes of violent self-discipline fascinated her. Tom's brother Henry remembered from his earliest infancy an engraving in her room of the Emperor Theodosius and St Ambrose, about which she wrote a poem. Her accompanying prose gloss explains to less learned readers that,