Young Eliot (9 page)

At ten he was haunted by verbal cadences. He could not get out of his head the Mad Gardener's song from Lewis Carroll's
Sylvie and Bruno
, published just nine years earlier. Carroll's poem begins:

He thought he saw an Elephant,

That practised on a fife:

He looked again, and found it was

A letter from his wife.

‘At length I realise,' he said,

‘The bitterness of Life!'
25

Not yet ready for the bitterness of life, and perhaps feeling that writing poetry called for the invention of a slightly different self, Tom signed his poem ‘Eliot S. Thomas':

I thought I saw an elephant

A-riding on a 'bus

I looked again and found

Alas! 'twas only us.
26

From the very start, in such ludic childish efforts, he seems to have liked poetry's power to cross between mundanity and the wildly imaginative. Several times in the
Fireside
he imitates Carroll's poem, taking from it both ‘a banker's clerk' and ‘a hippopotamus', not to mention a ‘kangaroo'. Judging from how often he followed its form, this was the ten-year-old's favourite poem, a completely mischievous one based on striking discrepancies between appearance and reality. Sometimes awkwardly, Tom made it his own, earthing it in the Mound City he knew:

I thought I saw a kangaroo,

A-jumping on the ground,

I looked again and lo!

It was an earthen mound!
27

Poetry and prose in the
Fireside
suggest, too, an early love of the writings of Edward Lear, a lifelong favourite who had died in the year of Tom's birth. When he presents
Fireside
recipes, Tom often ends with energetic advice on how to get rid of the food: ‘Burn up as fast as possible' or (in the case of ‘broiled fritters') ‘Put out of the window as fast as possible.'
28
In imitative phrasing and inclination these follow Lear's nonsense cookery in ‘To Make an Amblongus Pie', which ends, ‘Serve up in a clean dish, and throw the whole out of the window as fast as possible.'
29

Lear's genius for odd, memorable names – Quangle-Wangle, Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo, Scroobius Pip – is something Tom would develop. From ‘The Story of the Four Little Children Who Went Round the World' he took the name ‘Slingsby', used in one of his early mature poems, ‘Aunt Helen'. Cat-loving Lear's self-portrait in ‘How pleasant to know Mr Lear!' would beget, decades later, ‘How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!', where nonsense words ‘porpentine' and ‘wopsical' are fit to set beside such Learisms as ‘crumpetty' or ‘crumbobblious'.
30
In early 1899, under the guise of ‘anon', he also attempted the literary genre most often associated with Edward Lear, but Tom's limerick about female suffering is below par in form:

There was a young lady name of Lu

Who felt so exceedingly blue

She was heard to state

That it was her fate –

And then she began to bu-hu.
31

Clearly he was absorbing contemporary events, probably from reading newspapers that lay around the house. Tom's mention in
Fireside
, number 4 of a Brazilian balloonist in Paris picks up on the story of the rich young Brazilian Santos-Dumont whose ‘sailing around Paris, driving his cigar-shaped balloon' was reported in the
St Louis Globe-Democrat
on 8 January 1899.
32
Again, Tom's use of comic plutocratic names including ‘Mr and Mrs Bondholder Billion' in
Fireside
, number 3 and ‘Miss Stockenbonds' in
Fireside
, number 11 involves close relatives of the creations of a
Globe-Democrat
cartoonist, Mr and Mrs Stockson Bond.
33

Names such as Prufrock (which graced St Louis's Prufrock Furniture Co., a ‘manufacturer of parlor furniture' one of whose branches in 1899 was ‘between Locust Street & St Charles Sts') and Stetson (Mrs Stetson, a niece of Harriet Beecher Stowe, lectured to the Wednesday Club in January 1899) stayed with Tom, absorbed apparently unconsciously, before emerging years later in his mature poetry.
34
Into the
Fireside
he also copied the picture of ‘Dr Sweany' which regularly featured in the
Globe-Democrat.
This gentleman was one of several local pedlars of remedies for male ailments who advertised routinely throughout Tom's boyhood. Asking in anxiety-inducing capital letters, ‘ARE YOU LACKING IN ENERGY, STRENGTH AND VIGOR … MEN WHO ARE WASTING AWAY?' and using such terms as ‘Nervous Debility', Dr Sweany's advertisements addressed problems including nervousness and loss of manliness. Rhetoric of this sort flourished in an era when George M. Beard's
Practical Treatise on Nervous Exhaustion (Neurasthenia)
and its 1881 sequel
American Nervousness
were often reprinted, warning Americans that ‘the relative quantity of nervousness and of nervous diseases that spring out of nervousness, are greater here than in any other nation in history'.
35
Shy, truss-wearing Tom, whose later verse would deal repeatedly with anxieties about manliness and who would develop poems featuring ‘Apeneck Sweeney', copied from newspaper advertisements the doctor's substantial beard. In the printed ads, this hirsute appendage completely obscured Sweany's neckline. Tom also copied a version of the doctor's slogan – ‘When Others Fail Come to
Me
' – and highlighted Sweany's ability to deal with insomnia.
36
Ironically, in Tom's 1920s melodrama ‘Sweeney Agonistes', Sweeney's nightmares render him unable to sleep.

Other
Fireside
figures included ‘Woodbury, The Facial Contortionist', based on John H. Woodbury who advertised ‘painless operations for correcting featural irregularities'.
37
As a child Tom was acutely embarrassed by the perceived featural irregularity of his own protruberant ears. Sitting between two girls at a children's party he overheard one whispering to the other that she ought to look at this boy's ears. As a result, Tom bound a rope around his ears when he went to bed at night, but his mother removed it, telling him not to worry: in time the ears would fold themselves back.
38
In the childhood picture taken in the studio of ‘Holborn's Dainties, 2320 Washington Avenue', those ears stick out like the handles on proverbial jugs.
39

Conscious, too, of orthodontic problems, in the
Fireside
the boy drew an advert for ‘Dr Chase, dentist' under which there is a picture of a protuberant-eared male with dog-like fangs.
40
From the age of ten, Tom was made to attend the dentist twice a week to have his teeth straightened. Over many visits, as he awaited this ordeal, he read all through an entire set of Edgar Allan Poe's
Collected Works
that were in the waiting room.

Nineteenth-century tooth-straightening could be gruesome, and Poe's narratives of horror may have seemed an appropriate preparation. The scholar Steven Matthews points out how ‘The Assignation', one of Poe's
Tales of Mystery and Imagination
, especially impressed Tom when he read it before his regular dental appointment. This story of doomed love, attempted murder and the suicide of a beautiful young woman in Venice twice quotes lines from the seventeenth-century poet Henry King, memorialising his wife:

Stay for me there! I shall not fail

To meet thee in that hollow vale.

Tom went searching for that poem. Steven Matthews, calling attention to details in Poe's story, such as the hair ‘in curls like those of the young hyacinth', makes a convincing case that not only did this reading resurface at moments in Tom's later poetry with its ‘hyacinth girl', but it also prepared him for encounters with the often erotic and broodingly violent aspects of Elizabethan and Jacobean literature from which Poe liked to quote.
41
'The Assignation', for instance, cites George Chapman's ‘vigorous words' in the Jacobean tragedy
Bussy D'Ambois.
Later, Tom developed a marked taste for such plays, but his boyhood experience brought together his personal pain at the dentist's with darker aspects of literary imagination. Poe's work, so important to Baudelaire, underlay too the French Symbolist poetry Tom would come to love in his student years. Attracted to suffering women, Poe – recounter of mysterious crimes, morbidly erotic poet of ‘For Annie' and provocative poetic theorist – went on mattering to him.

Whether it was his teeth, his ears or his hernia, his body was at times a source of anxiety, even before this shy boy reached puberty. The body in his mature work would be a recurrent focus for worry and pain. However casually, humiliatingly or light-heartedly, such a nexus of associations grew in Tom early, and was with him even as a ten-year-old. A good number of
Fireside
's advertisements, usually copied from the newspapers, relate to ill health: Wine of Cardui was a tonic for female ailments; Munyon's Cures ministered to a plethora of ills, including common colds; Dr Franck's Grains of Health were good for ‘C. C. and Headache'; Carter's Little Liver Pills, Dr Pearce's Pleasant Pellets for Pink People and Smith's Bile Beans spoke for themselves. Whatever else Tom Eliot was aware of, he certainly knew about illness.

‘Avez vous
Fireside
?' ask that magazine's numbers 13 and 14; numbers 2 and 3 offer readers a story about ‘duelests' (
sic
) set among ‘the busy streets of Paris' complete with ‘gamins'. Like Poe's tales, and like the
St Louis Globe-Democrat
, which often ran stories about life in Paris and London,
Fireside
aimed to be Francophile and cosmopolitan. In December 1898 translations of Edmond Rostand's play
Cyrano de Bergerac
(which, as well as featuring French duellists, deals with men who find wooing an intellectual woman difficult) were selling out in Tom's home city.
42
This was because the actor Richard Mansfield and a large theatrical entourage were in town to perform at the Olympic Theatre ‘the great play … for the first time in St. Louis'.
43
Rostand's drama juxtaposes poetic eloquence with chronic male shyness exacerbated by bodily oddity: Cyrano has a huge nose. A local fancy-goods store presented a prominent picture of Cyrano in its
Globe-Democrat
advertisement of 8 January and Mansfield's ‘masterly production' got a rave review two days later. Here was ‘a strong play, a great play, a beautiful play … perfection in a play' that featured ‘a love song, the tenderest ever told'.
44
Though he would write his own, very different ‘Love Song' eleven years later, this production also caught the attention of young Tom. He recorded in the
Fireside
of 28 January that it had caused ‘a great sensation'. His chronicling that ‘Mr Mansfield had a lame leg' suggests that either he or other family members may have seen it.
Fireside
's ‘funny artist' provided an illustration of Cyrano complete with sword, elaborate hat and convincingly voluminous nose.

The small boy editor was interested in other kinds of drama too. His piece on ‘The Theatre' mentions as well as
Cyrano
the melodrama
Over the Sea
, then playing at the Music Hall, and the ragtime comic opera
By the Sad Sea Waves
with its lyrics by J. Sherrie Matthews and Harry Bulger. Matthews and Bulger played two wastrels taken on as instructors at a sanatorium where they wreak havoc. The show featured Gilbert and Sullivan parodies and minstrel songs which included the hit ‘coon song and chorus' entitled ‘You Told Me You Had Money in the Bank', published later that year.
45
This song began ‘Mr Gideon Strong you've treated me wrong', and here too the ragtime mix of catchy tunes and lyrics that fused vernacular idiom with cheeky use of rhyme was perhaps all the more appealing for belonging to a world so different from that of Tom's parents.

As a student, Tom's brother had a taste for Tin Pan Alley songs. Writing his own advert for a ‘great show' called
A Hot Time
, Tom also pencilled a lyric about ‘Hasty Red, the Negro Hustler', and noted ‘The coon dance': like the Eliots' odd-job man, Stephen, both African Americans and whites regularly used the words ‘nigger' and ‘coon' in the 1890s.
46
St Louis was clearly a city where African Americans, while no longer slaves, were regarded as an underclass; in newspapers such as the
Globe-Democrat
(whose politics were, like Tom's father's and like his uncle Ed's, Republican), they feature, if at all, largely in caricature drawings, in stories about crime or disease, or in entertainments such as the ‘Coon Carnival'.
47
Tom grew up with a sense of a ‘colour bar', but also with an awareness that there was valuable material in a wide spectrum of culture. His
Fireside
is evidence of that.

In his little magazine and in local newspaper cartoons, hoboes too were figures of fun. He showed them being given food by Mrs Rogers, apparently the Eliot family's cook, or begging in the street, sleeping rough or spending time in a lock-up. Spread across numbers 5, 6 and 7, the longest of the
Fireside
's tiny short stories is about the adventures of a hobo called Mosly Wrags. Mosly has a taste for ‘a saloon' where he can ‘drown his sorrows'. The previous year in St Louis police raided ‘cheap saloons where the hoboes hang out', and sixty-six hoboes had been rounded up; many found themselves jailed.
48
Released from his lock-up, Mosly Wrags returns to begging. His young creator, while clearly intrigued, turns away with mock fastidiousness: ‘But
we
shall have no more to do with him.'
49
An interest both in the tones of decorum and in what contradicts or disrupts them would be characteristic of poems Tom wrote a decade later: readiness to mix high and low life, evident in the pages of this tiny journal, would remain part of his gift.