Young Eliot (70 page)

Mail went unposted. Meetings had to be rescheduled. Though he tried to slog on at the bank, in early November he was in bed for several days. It was mid-November before they completed the move to their new flat; but Mr Haigh-Wood's illness dragged on for months. Eventually he regained most of his strength, but recurrent ‘fluctuations' left Vivien ‘completely exhausted'.
102
Appalled at what she saw as an ongoing ‘long losing battle against
horrible
illness, unimaginable pain, doctors' mistakes – obstinacy – stupidity – delays – family's blindness', she told Mary Hutchinson she never went to bed without fear.
103
Each morning she woke struggling to summon up the courage to pick up the telephone in their new flat and make the call to her father's house.
104

Visiting his father-in-law regularly, Tom kept going by hardening his shell. ‘There are times, I think', he wrote to Schiff (whose wife Violet was both a talented musician and an invalid), ‘when one must try to seal one's intellect hermetically, to prevent it from being destroyed by circumstances which it cannot mend'.
105
He was impressed that Vivien managed to endure, and he emphasised to his mother that he wanted the insurance policy on his life kept up for his wife's sake.

Forced to cut back on engagements, he did fulfil a commitment to speak at a dinner given by the Poetry Circle of the Lycaeum Club, where he encountered a woman with an interest in Tarot cards. He also dined with the Woolfs. As often, Virginia Woolf was struck by the way Tom bottled things up. She noticed, too, an intensity underlying his armature of propriety. He was ‘all caught, pressed, inhibited; but great driving power some where – & my word what concentration of the eye when he argues!'
106
Others, less perceptive, were more hostile. Having been reviewed harshly by Tom, on 4 December Irish essayist Robert Lynd published an attack on
The Sacred Wood
which saw its author as ‘Buried Alive'. Reviews of that book were mixed. Some, including those by Murry and Aiken, came from people who knew Tom well, and discerned that his literary theory owed significant debts to Rémy de Gourmont. Other reviewers found ‘a dessication of the emotions' and an arrogance or self-righteousness in league with a demanding intelligence.
107
In New York Knopf bought 350 copies of the Methuen edition, giving it a small but effective American circulation.

The Eliots' new flat at 9 Clarence Gate Gardens had been built shortly before the Great War, not far from 221B Baker Street, fictional home of Tom's childhood hero, Sherlock Holmes. After Crawford Mansions, the Clarence Gate Gardens interiors were roomier, with higher ceilings. The apartment had one more room, and was in ‘a much better block' in a superior area, a mere stroll from Regent's Park and close to the Francis Holland Church of England School for Girls.
108
On either side of the relatively narrow road were ‘very respectable looking' six-storey red-brick blocks with basements. The street was comparatively dark, but its buildings handsome. To the rear the brickwork was grey and there was a small courtyard with a garden. The frontage was more imposing, with wrought-iron balconies and iron railings. The entrance to the Eliots' block (numbers 1–21) sported substantial brass-handled double doors between twin sets of pillars, leading to an inner stairwell and an elevator. Their flat was ‘only one flight up', Tom assured his mother, and ‘will do beautifully for you when you come'. Vivien liked it too – efficiently managed, ‘quiet, warm, well ventilated'.
109
Here the Eliots might feel happy hosting Tom's family or new acquaintances such as the poet Walter de la Mare. In an attempt to minimise disturbance, they had taken over the flat along with its fittings, but nothing was ever straightforward. The old lady who had lived there previously ‘insulted us'. ‘Maliciously', Tom complained, she ‘had the electricity, gas, and telephone cut off so as to put me to the trouble of putting them on again'.
110

Adjoining the Eliots' new home was the red-brick Parish Church of St Cyprian. Built in 1903, it was dedicated to the third-century Bishop of Carthage, a Latin author who had been martyred in
AD
258 for denying the pagan Roman gods and holding true to his Christian faith. The white and gold interior was beautiful, adorned with a statue of the saint and stained-glass windows showing among other things the martyrdom of St Sebastian. If it seemed odd to be living in twentieth-century London beside a site associated with ancient Carthage, then that is an oddity which
The Waste Land
– swirling from modern London street scenes to the St Augustine of ‘To Carthage then I came' – would replicate.
111

Tom had been ‘trying to write a little', he confessed to Schiff on 6 December, but was finding his ‘brain quite numb'. Vivien encouraged him to take a break: he should ‘have a change' – a brief spell in Paris. Shortly before Christmas he set off for a reinvigorating week. Maurice Haigh-Wood was with him for part of the time, and Tom met old and new French acquaintances, including Fritz Vanderpyl and several writers and painters. For Vivien he bought a small picture by ‘one of the best of the modern painters, Raoul Dufy'. Dufy's lightness and brightness might lift her spirits. Tom was delighted to find French intellectuals whom he met knew him by reputation, even if they did not read English. He lodged at the Pension Casaubon, where he had billeted as a student a decade earlier. The Casaubons had died, but their grandson now ran the place. ‘If I had not met such a number of new people there', he wrote to his mother, ‘Paris would be desolate for me with prewar memories of Jean Verdenal and the others.'
112
His old tutor, Alain-Fournier, too, was dead; but Fournier's brother-in law, Jacques Rivière, now edited
La Nouvelle Revue Française.

When he got back, Tom found Vivien still worried about her father. Tom was late in sending Thayer the first of the ‘London Letters' he was to write for the
Dial
; he also pondered Thayer's confidential invitation to manage, for a substantial fee, an ‘English edition' of that magazine, but concluded it would be ‘physically impossible' given that he was working in ‘an office six days a week' from ‘9.30 to 5', and did not feel able to resign from the bank.
113
Managing an English
Dial
would do nothing to advance the poem he wanted to write; but the notion of taking charge of a magazine had its attractions. For the moment, however, there were more pressing concerns. Mr Haigh-Wood remained ill. Christmas was difficult, though it brought the customary gifts from America. Turning their minds to Lottie Eliot's proposed visit in the spring, the couple began to think how best to accommodate this mother-in-law whom Vivien had never met.

 

15

To Lausanne

I
N
London if Tom gave voice to his cosmopolitanism, sometimes he did so in spite of the place. Having thought recently about
La Nouvelle Revue Française
and a possible English edition of the American
Dial
, he continued to contemplate the editing of magazines, and specifically the one that his friend Wyndham Lewis was about to launch,
Tyro
. Like Lewis, he felt a growing disaffection with London literary reviewing. He complained to Maxwell Bodenheim in January 1921 about ‘the placid smile of imbecility which splits the face of contemporary London' and about ‘the putrescence of English literature and journalism'. However, he also sniped at Prohibition-era America, saying he wanted to stay in England and see if the English ‘can ever be roused to anything like intellectual activity'. To Americans, when he wished, he could take that tone; to English people he usually expressed himself differently. Able to get along with – and quarrel with – writers from both countries, he had ‘got used to being a foreigner everywhere, and it would fatigue me to be expected to be anything else'.
1

Talk of ‘fatigue' and ‘putrescence' was understandable. Though convalescing, Charles Haigh-Wood continued to be seriously ill. Vivien dreaded making engagements in case either she or her father needed help. She was undergoing a ‘course of treatment for her stomach'.
2
Pondering her situation, she bought, she told Mary Hutchinson on 5 January, ‘a copy of Tom's book to send to my lover of the past, anonymously'.
3
Vivien, whom Tom's ‘social English friends' had nicknamed the ‘river girl', kept in the flat a copy of J. Ivo Ball's illustrated volume
Down the Silver Stream of the Thames
, which bore the signature of her former lover, Charles Buckle; its title is an allusion to Edmund Spenser's wedding poem, ‘Prothalamion' with its ‘silver streaming Thames' and its lyrical refrain, ‘Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song, / Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long'.
4

Tom used those words in the more sordid context of the dirty, littered modern Thames in the long poem he worked on during 1921. He followed them with words from another Renaissance love poem, Andrew Marvell's ‘To His Coy Mistress'. In an article on Marvell published on 31 March, he argued that ‘A whole civilization resides in these lines.'
5
Blending a sense of an addled culture with anxieties about a mind gone wrong, Tom added Marvell's words to his own; conscious of modern London's face-splitting ‘smile of imbecility', he clearly links sex with thoughts of death,

But at my back in a cold blast I hear

The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.
6

For Vivien to send anonymously her husband's book to her ex-lover was spiteful. It suggests she sought to prove to Buckle, and perhaps to herself, that she had been right to marry Tom. Her championing of her husband's genius gave her a sense of purpose, but their relationship grew more troubled. ‘I am alive and well, but very tired', Tom told his mother in a short, mid-January note; Vivien was ‘showing signs of breaking up'.
7
His early 1921 piece ‘Prose and Verse' begins with talk of the ‘disconnected' and ‘lifeless', of ‘worn nerves' and ‘arthritic limbs'.
8
Painfully fatigued herself, Vivien watched Tom come home weary each dinner time, ‘more inclined for a quiet evening of reading, and early to bed, than to begin the real business of his life, and sit up late'.
9

February brought Knopf's publication of
The Sacred Wood
, but the New York edition, which simply added a Knopf title page to Methuen's first-edition pages, and comprised just 365 copies, was small. There were few reviews. In London, far, far away, Tom could feel isolated, even misunderstood. Virginia Woolf saw him in company looking ‘pale, marmoreal'. He seemed ‘like a chapped office boy on a high stool, with a cold in his head, until he warms a little, which he did. We walked back along the Strand. “The critics say I am learned & cold” he said. “The truth is I am neither.” As he said this, I think coldness at least must be a sore point with him.'
10

At home with Vivien, some evenings he wrote to his mother about arrangements for her visit; or read in its colloquial German the Jewish writer Arthur Schnitzler's ‘brilliant' stream-of-consciousness novella about a young man with woman trouble who contemplates suicide,
Leutnant Gustl.
11
As Tom knew, Schnitzler's notorious ‘new play',
Reigen
(
La Ronde
), dealing with ‘the most intimate problems of sexual life', had been ‘very badly treated' by the Berlin public.
12
Vivien watched him. She had a strong sense of what was ‘the real business' of her poet husband's life, but was less certain what was the real business of her own.

‘Fearfully run down', she seemed about to contract bronchitis. Mary Hutchinson came to visit. She talked to Tom, while Vivien remained ‘shut in her room'.
13
Tom welcomed Mary's conversation, and, sensing ‘crisis', turned to Brigit Patmore for advice in early March.
14
Ready to help, Vivien's old friend Lucy Thayer had a flat nearby at 12 Wigmore Street. Herself sometimes unstable, Lucy understood something of the Eliots' problems. She offered them the use of her flat if Tom's mother, brother and sister arrived to occupy Tom and Vivien's apartment. Given Lottie Eliot's age and health, this seemed appropriate: at Clarence Gate Gardens the visiting Eliots could be looked after by Ellen Kellond. Yet moving out of their own home and into Lucy Thayer's flat while their visitors were in town threatened to be stressful for Vivien and Tom.

Nevertheless, convinced they should vacate their own apartment and offer it to their visitors, Tom assured his mother on 6 March, ‘Vivien and I have absolutely the same opinion about this.'
15
Perhaps; but Vivien's health grew perilously worse. Invited to dinner on 13 March Tom came ‘alone', Virginia Woolf noted in her diary, ‘since his wife is in a nursing home, not much to our regret'. She found her visitor, ‘Eliot', rather remote: ‘Will he become “Tom”?'
16
His cares weighed on him heavily. On 17 March he told Brigit Patmore that his wife had spent four days ‘lying in the most dreadful agony with
neuritis
in every nerve, increasingly – arms, hands, legs, feet, back'.
17
Though her father was making a remarkable recovery, having to contemplate the arrival of her formidable mother-in-law did nothing to ease Vivien's ordeals. ‘Neuritis', as understood at the time, was a disease involving ‘the inflammation of one or more bundles of nerve fibres' and, ‘in severe cases' could ‘last for months'.
18
Never having seen such a bad case, Vivien's doctors could offer no certain hope. Tom worried his wife might die. She seemed to be losing touch with reality, and he registered her hurt. ‘Have you ever been in such incessant and extreme pain that you felt your sanity going', he asked Brigit Patmore on 17 March, ‘and that you no longer knew reality from delusion? That's the way she is.'
19