Young Eliot (6 page)

Some of the worst devastation was by the river, where a long line of steamboats and wharf boats had been overturned, crushed, sunk, or had their superstructure torn away. One boat, swept from its wharf, was blown to the foot of Locust Street; entire structures as well as vessels were pulverised along the levee; in the city streets buildings collapsed, roofs were torn off and raging fires lit up the night sky, their flames reflected in the Mississippi beyond the wreckage of steamboats. Eventually the conflagration was put out by the sheer intensity of the rain.

Though Locust Street was some distance from the epicentre of the storm, its power was evident there as elsewhere in a large industrial city where smokestacks and church towers collapsed, and buildings on Jefferson Avenue (where Annie sometimes took Tom to her church) were destroyed. While the Eliots' own place of worship survived, its younger St Louis sibling, the Unitarian Church of the Unity at whose dedication Tom's grandfather had preached, was so badly damaged that it required rebuilding.
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We know Tom was at home at the time of the cyclone because on the following morning he was photographed (probably by his brother) along with his mother, two of his sisters and a cousin in front of their house. Hands clenched, his mother stares resolutely straight at the camera; cousin Henrietta looks at the photographer too; but Tom, who has climbed up on to the struts of the front gate, is looking westwards along the street. So is his sister Margaret (who was particularly sensitive to the sound of thunder); Marion Eliot can hardly be seen, but she has one hand to her head. Though the people are neatly dressed, this is not a calm, carefully composed photograph, but a record of a family conscious of themselves as survivors.
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More than eight thousand buildings were destroyed in the cyclone, but the Eliots' house, about a mile and a half inland from the Eads Bridge, kept even its front windows intact. No doubt the family did what they could to protect the little boy not just from the storm but also from the gruesome accounts of horror that circulated afterwards. Inside 2635 Locust Street, even if the house shook, the weather made its presence felt principally as terrific sound: thunderclaps, blasts of wind, torrential deluge. Yet no one who went outdoors in St Louis in the days that followed could fail to see the desolation. ‘Death and Destruction Everywhere' read one of the headlines in the
Globe-Democrat
two days later. The newspapers were full of how, just across the river, parts of East St Louis were ‘one vast charnel house' where famished homeless people roamed the streets among the groans of the injured in ‘a living graveyard'.
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Accompanying these news stories a picture of the Eads shows mangled girder-work, fallen blocks of masonry, crashed rail carriages and downed wires. Across much of the city telegraph, telephone, electricity and gas supplies remained cut off for several days. Tales circulated of children buried alive, people blown out of their houses, even of corpses being driven through the streets on coaches pulled by storm-crazed horses. Safe and surely shielded from much of this, seven-year-old Tom left no surviving account. A quarter of a century later, however, nourished by the advanced study of Sanskrit texts and Classical learning, he would produce in the astonishing soundscape of ‘What the Thunder Said' the most famous thunderstorm in world poetry, part of a work,
The Waste Land
, which envisages urban destruction, with the dead walking modern city streets, rain, a great river and scenes of horror. He was by no means writing the story of the 1896 St Louis cyclone, but he knew perhaps better than any other English-language poet what an apocalyptic thunderstorm sounded like.

After the cyclonic astonishments of the natural world came the measured anticlimax of school. Annie Dunne took him to his first educational establishment, which was run by an impressive teacher. Ellen Dean Lockwood (whose name suggests her parents relished
Wuthering Heights
) was an American Unitarian who had spent time in Brazil with her husband Robert in the early 1880s. The couple returned to the States in 1884 with their baby son and set up at 3841 Delmar Avenue in St Louis a small co-educational primary school which catered especially for prosperous and distinguished families. Tom recalled it as being ‘beyond Vanteventer Place', a recently built gated community that was one of the city's most select enclaves.
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Shortly before instructing Tom and his friend Thomas McKittrick, ‘Miss Lockwood', as Tom called her, had taught the withdrawn and intense nine-year-old Sara Teasdale, helping that fledgling poet overcome her shyness and giving her the confidence to proceed to the Mary Institute. Mrs Lockwood had also taught her own son, Dean; he was a Latinist by the age of ten, went on to study Classics at Harvard and became a distinguished scholar. This was the sort of educational trajectory that the Latin-quoting Hal and the educationalist Lottie Eliot wanted for their shy, bright youngest child.

Determined, but also possessing a ‘lovable disposition', Mrs Lockwood had struggled for some years with curvature of the spine and showed ‘unusual vitality and will power'. Lottie knew this sensitive, cosmopolitan teacher through the Church of the Messiah as weIl as through a local women's group, the Wednesday Club. A schooling with her was likely to make Tom suitable for admission to the Mary Institute's partner establishment, Smith Academy, where his brother Henry had been studying. At Mrs Lockwood's school Tom seems to have done well. His friend and classmate ‘Tom Kick' found it hard to keep up with him. The two boys were among Ellen Lockwood's last pupils. She died young in December 1898, when Tom was in his first term at Smith Academy.
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Before he went there, he summered as usual for about three months in Massachusetts. Since earliest childhood he had travelled outside St Louis, sometimes considerable distances. As a baby he was taken, as he recalled, to Louisiana, though another family member recorded that his earliest travels were with his mother to Pass Christian, then a small yachting town, in Mississippi on the Gulf of Mexico. According to this account, not long after Tom's birth his sister Charlotte was ill and their mother took her there, along with Tom and Henry, to convalesce.
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Though Tom was too young to remember, it may have been a difficult time for Lottie; she looks rather thin and tired in photographs. With a family of six, one of whom was ill in Tom's early infancy, Lottie Eliot had to face several demands. Such circumstances, and his mother's continuing commitment to social reforms in St Louis, brought Tom even closer to Annie Dunne.

The earliest holidays Tom remembered were vacations in coastal New England. From his fifth year onwards the family went to summer at the fishing and resort town of Gloucester, on the Cape Ann coast ‘about forty miles north-east of Boston'.
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To start with they stayed at the recently constructed Hawthorne Inn. Built at Wonson's Point in East Gloucester, this large establishment had a multi-storey seafront block whose verandahs and decking extended on to the rocks of the shoreline. Surrounded by a complex of other lodgings, it was strikingly literary in its nomenclature. Not only was the hotel itself named after the great early-nineteenth-century novelist of New England Puritanism, Nathaniel Hawthorne, but the surrounding buildings, such as Seven Gables and Blythedale, were named after the titles, places and people of his works.
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Hawthorne became one of Tom's favourite novelists, an author preoccupied with ‘spiritual problems', whose work he read from his early teens onwards and whom he related to his own New England ancestry as well as to a line in American writing which included Henry James and, by implication, himself.
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In an unusual way as a young child, he had holidayed among Hawthorne's works.

It was probably at this most literary of hotels that, as very small boys sometimes do, he fell in love for the first time. ‘I had my first love affair', he recalled in 1939 in a tone at once self-mocking and embarrassedly honest, ‘at (as nearly as I can compute from confirmatory evidence) the age of five, with a young lady of three, at a seaside hotel. Her name was Dorothy; that is all I know. My feeling towards her was expressed entirely by bullying, teasing, and making her fetch and carry: yet I remember clearly that I pined for a bit after we were separated in the autumn.'
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A shy, truss-wearing, youngest child in a predominantly female household, the five-year-old boy made the most of having a little girl playmate to boss around. Yet, over four decades later and half jokingly relating this experience to Dante's meeting with the child Beatrice in the
Vita Nuova
, he knew such early encounters could be important. Recalling that ‘My relations with later inamoratae(?) were more distant and respectful', he mentions in the same letter being enamoured of ‘a young lady with ringlets (name unknown) who took the part of the angel child who died, in a performance called “The Birds' Christmas Carol” at another seaside resort'.
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This little girl, playing the part of Carol in a dramatisation of a once popular sentimental story by the American writer Kate Douglas Wiggins, would have been acting the part of a beautiful, suffering invalid battling with long-term illness and inspiring her loving family at Christmas before succumbing to her fatal malady. The story was a popular one (there would be a reading from it at Tom's school when he was fourteen), and dramatisations of it often involved singing and elements of dance.
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Whether or not Tom was aware of his sister Theodora's premature death or of how in 1864 his cherished aunt Ada (after whom one of his sisters was named) had drowned aged sixteen while skating on a pond, associations between mortality, suffering and female love were part of his childhood even before (aged about eleven) he read the works of Edgar Allan Poe in which such a nexus of ideas is common.

However shy in Missouri, he enjoyed meeting little girls at Gloucester, and at least one other little boy. A series of photographs taken on the boulder-strewn shoreline and on the sand show him around 1896 in the company of his cousins Barbara and Eleanor Hinkley and Frederick Eliot. Sometimes Fred's sisters, Abigail and Martha, came too. These Massachusetts relatives were his summer playmates. Similar in age, privileged upbringing and Unitarian background, they got on well together. They dug in the sand, carefully supervised by their nannies, or sat, all smiles, in a row on a hammock; or clambered over rocks, examining rock pools. Sometimes, wearing a hat with a brim to protect him from the summer heat, Tom played on top of a big boulder where he had erected a flagpole as if it were a fort. Less than a mile away, Fort Hill Avenue led to the remains of an actual Civil War fortification which became a military campground again in the summer of 1898 during the Spanish-American War. As Tom played by his flagpole on the rocks, his ever-vigilant mother stationed herself nearby.

Gloucester was very different from St Louis. Twenty years before Tom's birth, Philadelphia-based
Lippincott's Magazine
called it ‘the most extensive fishing port in the world'.
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In the 1890s, with three centuries of documented history behind it, the place was very much a working harbour, full of local boats and gear, busy with the salting and packing of fish; but Gloucester's increasingly well appointed hotels also lured wealthy vacationers from Boston and beyond. In the late 1880s and 1890s on land sold off at Eastern Point, some wealthy men, including Tom's father, built extensive second homes in what is today an exclusive gated community.

Decades earlier, Gloucester's combination of setting and marine light had attracted American painters of the Luminist school; in 1880 Winslow Homer had created some of his finest watercolours while living in a lighthouse on a tiny rocky island in Gloucester harbour; the area continued to appeal to artists and writers. Graced by Protestant, Catholic and Unitarian churches, this place was also sanctified by art. ‘It has', wrote Tom later, ‘the most beautiful harbour for small ships on the whole of that coast.'
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Though Gloucester's growing population in 1900 hovered around 25,000, the town's eminence as a locus of fishing, fish smoking, boatbuilding and heroic voyaging endured. Tom saw how ‘on the long rows of drying racks that lie behind the wharves, the salt fish is dried in the sun'. He watched fishing ‘schooners' as they set out ‘for their cruises of several weeks'.
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(Locals claimed to have coined the word ‘schooner'.) These vessels with their huge white sails thronged Gloucester throughout Tom's boyhood; proudly he claimed he had seen the
Rob Roy
launched in 1900.

During this time, as they had done for many, many years, schooners in quest of cod, halibut, haddock and herring voyaged from Gloucester round Eastern Point at the tip of Cape Ann, then headed north up the New England coast. Small boats called dories would be lowered over the side; men on board would row out to fish for cod. Drownings were frequent. ‘Between 1830 and 1897', wrote the twentieth-century Gloucester historian Joseph Garland, ‘668 of Gloucester's vessels never returned around Eastern Point, nor 3775 of her men'.
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Songs and poems (including verse by Whittier) commemorated heroism and losses beyond ‘the gray rocks of Cape Ann / And Gloucester's harbor-bar';
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and in the summers of 1894 and 1895 Rudyard Kipling resided in a hotel on Eastern Point Road, absorbing local lore for his story of Gloucester fishermen,
Captains Courageous
.

Serialised in 1896–7 and published immediately afterwards in book form, this was a tale young Tom Eliot read. Opening in North Atlantic fog and drawing to a close with a litany of drowned fishermen that forms part of late May Memorial Day commemorations in Gloucester, Kipling's novel has as its hero a fifteen-year-old boy with a wealthy businessman father and ‘a strict Unitarian' mother. Harvey Cheyne, Jr, is rescued from drowning and finds himself with the Gloucester fishing fleet, listening to traditional tales of ‘boats smashed to splinters' and ‘ships that sailed in the fog' to such locations as ‘Mount Desert', Cape Breton, ‘the Maine ports' and ‘the ice between the mainland and Prince Edward Island'. Mixing dialect and standard English, Kipling's book was full of places Tom knew or had heard about: one character whistles a song about sailing past Eastern Point and nearby Thacher Island where in the seventeenth century twenty-one out of twenty-three members of a family had drowned. Early in the year of the publication of
Captains Courageous
, the real-life Gloucester schooner
Yosemite
was wrecked on a Newfoundland voyage, its crew either killed or marooned in a snowstorm; a few survived, swimming through icy waters, bodies of others were frozen into the rocks.
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Such stories were part of local life in Gloucester and surrounding ports; reminders of them were unavoidable. The most famous local sailor of Tom's boyhood was Gloucesterman Howard Blackburn who had returned frostbitten and fingerless from the waters of Newfoundland after being separated from his ship, the
Grace L. Fears
, whilst fishing in a dory; Blackburn was a familiar sight on Gloucester Streets.
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On 20 August 1901, when Tom was almost thirteen, the
Gloucester Daily Times
published an item telling how a teenager had picked up a bottle on a local beach; inside was a message from a courageous captain whose vessel had gone down with all hands four years earlier: ‘We are sinking in the
Grace L. Fears.
Whoever finds this, hand it to my wife.'
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