Young Eliot (7 page)

As a boy Tom was taught to swim and given sailing lessons by an old Gloucester sailor nicknamed the Skipper. Predictably, Tom's mother and sisters kept a close eye on the proceedings. The ocean was beautiful, many-voiced and potentially deadly, but ‘I don't regret all the sailing that you and I and father did together, I assure you!' Tom wrote to his mother when he was in his late twenties.
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All his life the sea fascinated him. He relished ‘brilliant' tales such as those of James B. Connolly in
Out of Gloucester
(1902) which recounted the adventures of Gloucester fishermen or ‘bankers' who sailed in summer aboard schooners laden with ‘seines and dories' to ‘the south Banks or “Georges”' and in winter to ‘the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, where the codfish abound', and even as far as ‘Reykyavik, Iceland'.
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Years afterwards, in his late teens and early twenties, Tom would voyage with friends up the New England coast towards the Canadian border, on at least one occasion risking death.

Such experiences, mixed with fact and fiction he had absorbed in successive childhood summers, fuel his later writing in
The Waste Land
manuscripts about an imagined trip from Cape Ann ‘to the eastern banks' in search of ‘codfish' which begins in fair weather, then moves into ‘gale', loss of ‘dories' and a voyage ‘Northward' past ‘the farthest northern islands' in deafening seas, heading eventually into a hallucinatory and lethal seascape far, far from ‘Home and mother': a world of ‘cracked ice', ‘bones' in a ‘whirlpool' and ‘Death by Water'.
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Eventually, most of that material was cut from the published poem, though alert readers will spot the word ‘dory' in the poet's published notes to it. From his most famous early poem, whose last words are ‘we drown', through the storm-blasted seagull of ‘Gerontion', the fogbound, granite-shored seascape of ‘Marina' and the white sails of
Ash-Wednesday
to his extended meditation on fishermen, loss and sheer persistence in ‘The Dry Salvages', Tom's poetry is suffused with material which can be linked, however indirectly, to experiences and reading associated with the New England coast. From childhood onwards, Gloucester shaped him as a poet.

Yet in the 1890s the place was changing. Tom could still explore Whittier's ‘depths of Gloucester woods, / Full of plants that love the summer' and thronged with birdlife.
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The boy from St Louis loved the ‘fir trees, the bay and goldenrod, the song-sparrows, the red granite and the blue sea'.
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Also, situated on Cape Ann where glaciation had left great outcrops of granite, Gloucester boasted nearby quarries which had supplied the stone for Brooklyn Bridge; at Eastern Point between 1894 when Tom was six and 1905 when he was seventeen, the monumental Dog Bar Breakwater, by far the most striking man-made feature of East Gloucester, was being constructed out of locally quarried grey granite. A bell was placed at its seaward end, adding its sound to the whistling buoy southwards. Named after an Eastern Point rock formation, this buoy was called Mother Ann's Cow. Gloucester was on the Boston–Maine railroad, but when Tom was very little the town still had horse-drawn trams – horsecars; the early 1890s saw these replaced by ‘electrics', though they did not run as far as Eastern Point. You could take a short ferry ride across the harbour from Gloucester itself to the East Gloucester landing, and if, like Tom, you knew about boats, you could see that schooners were evolving in subtle ways: the
Rob Roy
with its spoon bow, short foremast and minimal bowsprit, was different from most earlier Gloucester vessels: supposedly a safer design. ‘Since the introduction of the “knockabout rig” – the schooner with a long bow and no bowsprit – there are fewer losses at sea', Tom wrote later, ‘but Gloucester has many widows, and no trip is without anxiety for those at home'.
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Even if he knew it was a port familiar with danger, Gloucester for him was a family refuge. Aged six or seven and clad in his sailor suit – that customary outfit – he had a fine toy sailboat. Enthusiastic about pirates, sometimes he played at sword fights using sticks, but in all his early childhood photographs at Gloucester he is, like his cousins, decorously attired. Every inch a well-cared-for small Eliot, digging in the sand with his spade, he wears dark long trousers; sitting on a verandah in his neat sailor suit holding his model boat he looks kempt, correct and engrossed.

Spending part of his summer working in St Louis, Tom's prosperous father loved Gloucester too. Built in 1896 on land which he had purchased in 1890, Henry Ware Eliot's substantial summer residence at Eastern Point, called the Downs, was very close to the shore: a three
-
storey detached dwelling with a verandah overlooking the sea, a very spacious family room with a great brick fireplace, and a garden path leading down to the beach. Indoors, above the upper-storey bedrooms, the Downs had plenty of attic space where the boys in the family could indulge their taste for play; a painted skull and crossbones with the word ‘Blood' and the initials ‘HWE' can still be seen there. Henry, Tom's brother, liked to take family photographs. Some show 1890s visits to nearby places connected to the extended Eliot family, past as well as present: to the large, well-appointed house of Thomas Heywood Blood at Sterling, Massachusetts, and to the house and gravestones of Blood's parents, Samuel (d. 1834) and Lucretia (d. 1827); to the Cushing family home at Lunenburg in the same state – Tom's sister Marion had the middle name Cushing from her ancestor Colonel Charles Cushing (1744–1809); to the house of Tom's grandfather, Thomas Stearns, at North Lexington where his parents had married.
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This sort of delving into the New England past quickened in Tom's brother a taste for American history – in 1897 his Paul Revere essay won second prize in a competition; but such excursions also reinforced a strong sense in Tom of his extensive New England ancestry. In later years he would sometimes say that he came from St Louis, sometimes that he hailed from New England.

Being a little boy in Gloucester was not all ancestor-worship. Sometimes Tom's father took him riding in a pony and trap, played chess with him or accompanied him on the golf course. A surviving photograph shows the father playing golf, the son looking on from a safe distance. In Gloucester his parents rarely went to church, and some prohibitions were relaxed. Tom liked the 4th of July celebrations in this New England port, associating them with fireworks, a yacht race (there was a substantial yacht club at East Gloucester) and strawberry ice cream.
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For all the hard life of those local captains courageous, Gloucester was fun. Later, the sort of experiences he had there re-emerged, transmuted into poetry: ‘There might be the experience of a child of ten, a small boy peering through sea-water in a rock-pool, and finding a sea-anemone for the first time: the simple experience (not so simple, for an exceptional child, as it looks) might lie dormant in his mind for twenty years, and re-appear transformed in some verse context charged with great imaginative pressure.'
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Tom's father had some interest in natural science and in 1902 was elected President of the Academy of Science of St Louis which had received a splendid collection of butterflies. A 1901 photograph of one of the rooms in the Locust Street house shows a framed butterfly on the wall. In Tom's Missouri there were ‘high limestone bluffs where we searched for fossil shell-fish'.
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In Massachusetts he enjoyed gathering algae on the shore, drying them out and classifying them.
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He had a microscope at Gloucester, watched crabs and possessed a child's interest in small creatures, such as the field mice that got inside the Downs. Aged nine, he wrote in late June from Gloucester to his father who was still in St Louis, concerned that a box of butterflies had got broken, and saying that he was hunting for birds with his sister Charlotte.
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These interests stayed with him. In Missouri he loved ‘the flaming red cardinal birds', but, in New England, Eastern Point, a staging post for many migratory birds, was and is an ornithologist's paradise.
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For his fourteenth birthday his mother gave him ‘a much coveted birthday present', the new sixth edition of Frank M. Chapman's black-leather-bound volume whose gilded lettering read
Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America
. Lottie wrote her son's name on the flyleaf, and the date of his birthday: no ‘with love', but it was a loving gift.
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The volume included descriptions of plumage, nest and eggs, as well as accounts of ‘haunts and habits'. Specialist articles, such as that on page 400, ‘
Turdus aonalaschkae pallasii
' (more familiarly, the hermit thrush), detailed many different aspects of bird behaviour, not least birdsong: ‘The Hermit thrush bears high distinction among our song birds. Its notes are not remarkable for variety or volume, but in purity and sweetness of tone and exquisite modulation they are unequalled.'
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Remembered and longed for, years later that bird's song would become part of the concluding section of
The Waste Land
, heard at that moment in ‘What the Thunder Said':

Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees

Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop …
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This was a cherished sound that belonged to the poet's boyhood – to the deep part of him that was always Tom.

 

2

Hi, Kid, Let's Dance

F
OR
Tom, returning from Gloucester to St Louis in late summer involved a very long rail journey in the inevitable direction of the classroom. Papa headed back to the routines of his Brick Company office. Mamma committed herself again to her social causes and cultural interests, including her poetry. From early childhood Tom was aware of his mother's verse. On 17 September 1896, for instance, not long after the family returned from Gloucester, she took pride in a public reading of one of her hymn-like poems. It proclaims her characteristic high-mindedness, invoking the ‘God of our fathers' and George Washington, while surveying the ‘savage' past of America and a ‘happy' seaside present-day where ‘ships pass ceaseless by'.
1

After a summer watching ships pass Eastern Point, the Eliots recommitted themselves to the city that was, for most of the year, their happy home. The St Louis they returned to, from that first summer in their newly completed Gloucester house, was still rebuilding after the devastation of the cyclone. Nonetheless, it was thriving. Tom stepped off the train into his hometown's monumental Union Station whose frontage extended for over six hundred feet. Opened two years earlier, this statement of municipal pride provided another opportunity for good works: a local women's philanthropic group which his mother belonged to had arranged for it to contain boxes into which travellers could post unwanted reading matter suitable for distribution to the poor.

More railroads converged on St Louis than on any other American city. Traversing Union Station's Grand Hall, travellers saw an impressive pictorial window depicting three white female figures sitting on a bench: those at either end represented New York and San Francisco; between them sat St Louis. That was how the city regarded itself, a midpoint in the mighty United States. With a population of around 600,000, by 1900 St Louis was its nation's fourth largest urban settlement: ‘too far north to be a Southern city, and too southern in its social characteristics to be a Northern city; with all the polish and finish of an Eastern center, and yet toned by all the warmth and spirited verve of a Western metropolis'.
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Its French past was still discernible in local street names such as Lafayette, Chouteau and Soulard; but by the late nineteenth century German and Irish influences mixed with African American and Jewish culture. Home to the world's largest brewery, and producing everything from bricks to newspapers, St Louis saw itself as an industrial and mercantile powerhouse. It was dominated by a rich, sometimes progressive, white elite to which the Eliots belonged.

Though the 1896 cyclone destroyed some businesses, and others suffered during a serious economic depression between 1893 and 1897, rebuilding and local population growth were good for Tom's father's Hydraulic-Press Brick Company. Large urban parklands and tree-lined streets in the better-off areas might be loud with cicadas, but towards the river were rows of poorer brick houses, while tall, imposing shops and office blocks thronged the downtown area. Smokestacks belching out fumes from soft Illinois coal dominated the horizon, dirtying the pale stone of the grand domed State House building. St Louis fogs were as thick as those in some of Tom's favourite childhood reading – recently published detective stories with ‘illustrations' by Sidney Paget featuring London's Sherlock Holmes.
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‘A thick fog rolled down between the lines of dun-coloured houses, and the opposing windows loomed like dark, shapeless blurs through the heavy yellow wreaths.'
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Many years later, Tom stated that Prufrock's ‘yellow fog' was drawn from that of his industrial birthplace, but even in his childhood St Louis fog was mixed with Conan Doyle's imaginings.
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Tom's father supported moves to improve air quality, and a smoke abatement ordinance introduced when Tom was five had some beneficial effect, but was soon ruled unconstitutional. For most of Tom's boyhood the air was generally worse than it had been in 1885 when Frenchman Charles Croonenbergh had commented that ‘the pasty dust from American coal smoke falls so thick in the streets, that one is satisfied by an afternoon walk in St Louis as if one had eaten a heavy dinner … Everyone coughs.'
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‘Yellow fog' and ‘brown waves of fog' billow through Tom's early urban poetry, a fog coated with ‘soot that falls from chimneys'.
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The cough in ‘Gerontion' is the most insistently memorable in English-language verse. Recalling St Louis as ‘very smoky' – and opining that New England brought a literal ‘change of climate' that did one good – in adulthood Tom suffered increasingly from lung problems; eventually he died from emphysema.
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Not all of that can be blamed on his later fondness for cigarettes and London.