Young Eliot (54 page)

—‘Certes, c'est un homme de moeurs impures.'

‘Ne nie pas l'existence de Dieu?'

—‘Comme il est superstitueux!'

‘Est-ce qu'il n'a pas d'enfants?'

—‘Il est eunuque, ça s'entend.'

‘Pour les dames

Ne réclame

pas la vote? Pédéraste, sans doute'

[—‘Certainly, he's a man of impure morals.'

‘Doesn't he deny the existence of God?'

—‘How superstitious he is!'

‘Are there no children?'

—‘He is a eunuch, I've heard.'

‘Doesn't he claim

The vote

For women? A pederast, no doubt.']
102

In poetry Tom liked to provoke. In life he suffered, but also joked: a not unusual human combination. He could play tennis, yet his teeth were ‘falling to pieces'.
103
Recently he had to use reading glasses, and had endured rheumatism, but soon he was receiving fan mail (though hardly a lot) for
Prufrock
,
and going sailing at Bosham – his new Gloucester. A few highs countered the lows, but his relationship with Vivien was recurrently exhausting.

Still, his thinking about poetry assumed a more confident shape. Pound had edited a selection of letters by Irish painter Jack Butler Yeats, and Tom enjoyed reading them. Overworked himself, he prized the way Yeats had ‘the kingdom of leisure within him' so that he wrote ‘well even when not writing for publication'. Convinced that ‘England seems drifting toward Americanization', Tom relished the painter's sense of Americans as unable to feel ‘the inward and innermost essence of poetry, because it is not among the American opportunities to live the solitary life … Poetry is the voice of the solitary.' Quoting these words with approval, Tom, with only some qualification, made the point in his first article for the
Egoist
that ‘It is only in England, Mr. Yeats thinks, that in the modern world poetry is possible.'
104

As well as editing these Yeats letters, Pound, one of literature's consummate plotters, had managed to install himself as Foreign Editor of the
Little Review
while also remaining Foreign Correspondent for
Poetry
. Nominated by him, Tom had agreed to write a booklet championing Pound's work for New York publisher Alfred A. Knopf. ‘Few poets have undertaken the siege of London with so little backing', Tom wrote of the fellow American who had supported him staunchly in the same enterprise. In
Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry
, masked by anonymity, Tom stood up for his own ideals. While separating Pound from the ‘deadness' of ‘scholarship in American universities', he defended this English-based American as ‘one of the most learned of poets', his knowledge drawn not least from ‘Gautier, Laforgue and Tristan Corbière' (Tom wrote a poem called ‘Tristan Corbière' around this time.) But he stressed also Pound's variety. Among the poems quoted entire in the booklet was ‘A Girl', the piece which had so impressed Vivien just before she met her future husband. ‘Any poet, if he is to survive as a writer beyond his twenty-fifth year, must alter', wrote Tom, interested that Pound had now embarked on a much longer work.
105
Though he did not say so, he knew much of his own verse in
Prufrock
had been written by a poet under twenty-five.

Stray references in the Pound booklet – to myth, Malory and Arthurian legend, for instance – show that topics which had long fascinated Tom and would resurface in
The Waste Land
were abiding reference points. His authoring of this pamphlet was an act of generosity, showing how close he and Pound had become. In the August
Egoist
, Tom wrote about Pound's work on Japanese Noh theatre. At times the two Americans worked hand in glove. Tom's review of Pound's selection of Yeats letters was followed closely in the July 1917
Egoist
by Pound's piece on ‘vers libre', which, Pound argued, ‘has become a pest'.
106
Pound must have supplied Tom with many of the reviews quoted in
Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry
. Moreover, it was Pound who suggested French exemplars which Tom imitated, and who (along with Toulouse-born, London-based book illustrator Edmund Dulac) scribbled on poems Tom produced in French and English in 1917.

Though not formally an ‘Imagist', Tom approved of many Poundian and Imagist doctrines: ‘Only in something harder', he wrote that summer, ‘can great passion be expressed; the vague is a more dangerous path for poetry than the arid'.
107
American males allied in a foreign land, Tom and Pound shared enthusiasms, literary techniques, banter and attitudes. Whether rejoicing in transatlantic slang, obscenity, tones of masculinist superiority towards ‘the feminisation of modern society' or subtle shrewdness, they went on corresponding and working in tandem.
108
‘You let
me
throw the bricks through the front window', Pound reportedly quipped. ‘You go in at the back door and take the swag.'
109

If Tom was generous as well as insightful in praising his friend, then Pound did more than ensure the London debut of
Prufrock
; in June 1917 he also attempted, unsuccessfully, to get it published by Knopf in New York. In this Pound was seconded by John Quinn. Quinn sent Knopf a copy of the English printing in August, remarking that he relished everything about the book except its title. ‘I do not know whether it is great poetry or not', Knopf replied, but it was ‘great fun and I like it.' However, the publisher maintained the collection was too small to issue ‘except to give it away as advertisement'.
110
The booklet on Pound was even shorter, but would supplement Knopf's publication of Pound's poems. Tom would have to wait several more years before a collection of his own poetry appeared in his native land.

Until then, though he published a few poems, he hoarded more. Editing his oeuvre fiercely, he was also thrifty. From his 1917 work published in magazines he would recast and recycle material in later books. By far the best known part of ‘Dans le Restaurant' is not the reminiscence of childhood sexual fumbling but the conclusion where, apparently in a more ancient time, ‘Phlébas, le Phénicien', a trader concerned with profit and loss, drowns at sea under ‘les cris des mouettes et la houle de Cornouaille' (the cries of gulls and the sea-swell of Cornwall). Tom had been to sites in Dorset sometimes associated with Phoenician tin traders, also said to have visited Cornwall; he probably associated Cornwall, too, with Tristan and Isolde. More recently, he and Vivien had had to confront their fears of death at sea in the dangerous wartime Atlantic. Typically, in ‘Dans le Restaurant' as elsewhere, he has drawn on aspects of his own life, but has ‘othered' them. Conceivably his imagination was guided by a novel he may have encountered in childhood,
The Wonderful Adventures of Phra the Phoenician
by Edwin Lester Arnold, son of Sir Edwin Arnold whose
Light of Asia
Tom relished as a boy. In this fantasy tale, a time-travelling Phoenician sailor falls in love with a beautiful Englishwoman and accompanies her to Britain after he has witnessed from his ship the crew of another vessel drowning, ‘swirled about' and ‘drawn by the current' as overhead ‘gulls were screeching'.
111

Drawing on his fears, emotions and experience, yet transforming and distancing those by meshing them with other writings and allusions became Tom's modus operandi. Though he had worked this way previously, now he did so in a more deliberately allusive style. Vivien quoted from at least three literary works in the sometimes self-dramatising letter she sent Scofield Thayer that July. Some of her habits of mind surely nourished Tom's – sometimes for good, sometimes not. He seems, for instance, to have been fond enough of Joseph, his precociously money-wise Jewish office boy at Lloyds Bank; yet Vivien's dislike of ‘Horrible Jews in plush coats by the million' from ‘the East End of London' reinforced a familiar prejudice that Tom did not always subvert in his poems where ‘red-eyed scavengers are creeping' from London's traditionally Jewish areas of ‘Kentish Town and Golder's Green'.
112

Though her husband flitted between Bosham and London for part of August and September 1917, Vivien stayed in Bosham much of the time. When not at the bank, Tom spent his spare hours preparing two further sets of evening lectures to be given at opposite ends of London: twenty-five Friday lectures on Victorian literature for delivery at the County Secondary School in Sydenham from 28 September; and for Southall, Middlesex, on Mondays until the following Easter, a series entitled ‘Modern English Literature'. These extended from Emerson to Hardy. Limbering up for such demanding commitments, he immersed himself in nineteenth-century authors, some of whom (‘Brontë, George Eliot, Emerson') he knew ‘very little' about.
113

Since Mary Hutchinson and her husband often holidayed near Bosham, Vivien and Mary enjoyed being in touch. Vivien wanted Tom to read a short story Mary had shown her; it appears to draw on Mary's own affair with Clive Bell, and its sophisticated, Mary-like protagonist, Jane, comes to doubt the ‘reality' of relations with her lover. Jane's Francophile friend Sabine, described as a ‘panther' as she eats, advises her to seek out ‘Some poet … who can appreciate you'.
114
Eventually Tom published Mary's story in the
Egoist
after discussing with its author the handling of emotion in literature: ‘I like to feel that a writer is perfectly cool and detached, regarding other people's feelings or his own, like a God who has got beyond them; or a person who has dived very deep and comes up holding firmly some hitherto unseen submarine creature.'
115
In his letters he still called her ‘Mrs Hutchinson', and signed himself formally ‘T. S. Eliot'.

Though Vivien had been seeing Russell earlier that summer, now he was off vacationing in Shropshire with his lover, Lady Constance Malleson. After they returned, he suggested to Constance they have a child together, but she demurred, and her husband Miles was growing tired of feeling sidelined. The Eliots had some sense of what was going on. Tom and Russell had been talking, as had Tom and Miles Malleson. Aldous Huxley came to visit and, passing on gossip, Vivien told Mary Hutchinson on 9 October that ‘he quoted a saying of Gertler's that rather amused us – viz. that the Mallesons might be said to keep “
open bed
”. It's true, from all I hear!'
116
While Tom, facing the possibility of military service and an attendant medical examination, was corresponding with his worried mother about his apparently healed ‘Rupture' – his hernia – Russell was turning his attentions to Vivien again and thought he was finding encouragement.
117
Having caught influenza on returning from Bosham after spending hours shivering in the cellars of Crawford Mansions during air raids, Vivien feared further bombing. With Tom's agreement she was searching for a place to rent outside London. On 3 October Tom told his mother the plan was that he would commute into London ‘every day', but Vivien struggled to find anywhere suitable.
118

‘Bertie', Vivien wrote to Mary Hutchinson that day, ‘now says he wants to go shares in a country cottage. That will probably mean being out of the frying pan but
in
the fire!'
119
As during the early days of the Eliots' marriage, so once again, while his relations with Lady Constance and Lady Ottoline were fraught, Russell now used his clout and connections to share accommodation with Vivien and his former student, Tom. He saw a manipulative opportunity. Writing on 16 October to Lady Constance, who had been growing close to a man called Maurice Elvey, Russell mentioned that

I found accidentally that the Eliots don't want to go on being always together, and that she was looking out for a place where she could live alone in the country and he would come for week-ends. So I suggested that, as I too wanted to live in the country, we might be less dreary if we lived in the same house. She was pleased with the idea, and no doubt it will happen. I want, for everyday, reliable companionship without any deep striving of emotion; if I don't get it, I shan't do any more good work. I feel this plan may hurt you, and if it does I am sorry; but if I let myself grow dependent on you, we shall have all the recent trouble over again next time, and I can't face that, and I don't suppose you can.
120

Very soon Vivien was installed at Senhurst Farm, surrounded by pine woods in a high hollow among the hills two miles from Abinger Common in rural Surrey. Previously, as Tom put it to his mother on 24 October, the farmer and his wife had been ‘gardeners to Lord Russell'; however ‘fairytale', the old farmhouse was six miles from the nearest rail station. With his commitments to Lloyds Bank, lecturing and the
Egoist
, Tom could ‘only be there at weekends'. This, Vivien told Tom's mother on 22 October, was ‘a great disappointment'.
121
Vivien stayed at the farm for three weeks, during which time, on at least one weeknight, she slept with Russell, and, afterwards, sent him her ‘very happy letter'.
122

‘I distrust the Feminine in literature', Tom wrote to his father from London on 31 October. He was explaining how things were at the
Egoist
, though he also sniped at ‘the women' in his bank. Mentioning how ‘beautiful' and ‘delightful' the farm and its food were, he explained, ‘As you know, Vivien has been in Surrey, which suits her very well, and I have been with her over weekends. This will be the last.'
123
However little or much she told him about her affair with Russell, Tom knew Vivien, knew Russell and was no fool. Russell (who seems to have destroyed most of Vivien's letters to him) told Lady Malleson he felt an ‘odour of corruption' and a ‘nausea' after what had happened. Protesting himself ‘tortured and miserable', he felt he would ‘have to break Mrs. Eliot's heart and I don't know how to face it. It mustn't be done all of a sudden.'
124
Nonetheless, following an ecstatic making-up with Constance Malleson, he met Vivien on 6 November after her return to London, presumably while Tom was at work. Next day Russell pronounced the encounter ‘very satisfactory'. He had ‘got out of the troublesome part of the entanglement by her initiative – she behaved very generously – it is a
great
relief'.
125
Vivien went on writing to him, and they met again a week later. Russell dreaded encountering Vivien once more, he explained to Lady Constance, with whom he was about to share a flat. However, they were due to rendezvous on 13 November. He felt that ‘the relief of having done something irrevocable persists, though I feel this is shameful.'
126
On 13 November, he was delighted: ‘Mrs E. behaved like a saint from heaven', he wrote next day. ‘She put away her own pain & set to work to make me less unhappy – & she succeeded.'
127