Young Eliot (2 page)

This is not an official biography. Published fifty years after the poet's death,
Young Eliot
offers an account of his life and work up to and including the first appearance of what many regard as his greatest poem. In due course I hope to publish a second volume,
Eliot after ‘The Waste Land'
. When I wrote
The Savage and the City in the Work of T. S. Eliot
(published in 1987), Valerie Eliot, with whom I corresponded, was generous and encouraging. She allowed me to quote from published and unpublished materials after she had read my typescript. In the 1980s she wrote me a few letters, telling me, for instance, about how, while she ‘darned his socks', Eliot would read to her from Victorian poet James Thomson's despairing masterpiece,
The City of Dreadful Night
.
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At that time I was nervous of Mrs Eliot. I knew that had she refused me permission to quote material, not just my book but my career might have been damaged. Some years later, once as a judge of the T. S. Eliot Prize for poetry and once as a poet shortlisted for it, I met her. She was politely friendly, and I found it easy to talk to her, not least because I wanted nothing from her. My wife had written a book about the English novelist Rose Macaulay, whose notoriously bad driving Mrs Eliot enjoyed recalling. She told me how ‘Tom', sitting in the back seat, had urged ‘Rose' to keep her eyes on the road. Like other people, I was always impressed by the way Valerie Eliot would speak of ‘Tom', using his first name. It was natural for her to do so, but there was also, I think, a strategy involved. It was a way of reminding people that T. S. Eliot was a human being, rather than a remote historic monument.

Setting out Eliot's formative years in fuller detail than ever before and showing how his life conditioned the writing of his best-known poems,
Young Eliot
tries to articulate the magnitude of Eliot's achievement and the very substantial cost involved. In an age when the Eliot Estate is more open to quotation from the full range of Eliot's writings, the challenge is to select details which will humanise this dauntingly canonical poet for new generations of readers, make clear why his work matters and set out the often painful drama of the life that underpinned
The Waste Land.
The recently published volumes of
Letters
and my extensive investigations in Massachusetts, St Louis, New Haven, Cambridge, Oxford, London, Bosham and elsewhere allow me to write a more accurate and intimate account of Eliot's time in America and in England than has been possible previously. From its title onwards, this book advances a case for Eliot's early upbringing as fascinating in itself and central to his identity.

Young Eliot
presents in detail the poet's childhood in St Louis – that French-named city of ragtime, racial tensions, ancient civilisations, riverboats and (in Eliot's words) the real start of ‘the Wild West'.
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Using newly available or previously ignored sources ranging from digitally searchable newspapers to annotated volumes from Eliot's personal library, and from his later letters to his father's diary and his mother's fugitive poetry,
Young Eliot
portrays an ice-cream loving and mischievous but sometimes rather priggish little boy. St Louis made Eliot. He knew that. ‘For his entire life' he went on using a black-barrelled fountain pen believed to have been given to him by his mother when he left the American South in 1905; one of its two gold bands was engraved with the initials ‘T.S.E.'
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Indisputably, in the city of his birth he became ‘T. S. Eliot' of ‘The T. S. Eliot Co., St. Louis'.
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Drawing on the work of local historians and on untapped archival sources,
Young Eliot
reveals not just Eliot's early physical environment but also what it meant to his imagination.

With his early teens divided between education in Missouri and summering in Gloucester, Massachusetts, a constant, deepening pleasure for this boy was his love of reading. Images from books, newspapers and shows stayed with him throughout his life, and some of his earliest literary interests – from
Cyrano de Bergerac
to Edward Lear – subtly conditioned his poetry. Though his schooling was considerably Classical, his teenage tastes in verse reacted against this. They were markedly Romantic, even if his youthful reading was unusually gendered: no
Wuthering Heights
, no
Jane Eyre
. His protested Classicism would become a familiar credo, but the young Eliot's enthusiasm for Romantic poetry was not just something to kick against in later years. Sometimes ironised, it was a lasting presence – from the Byronic epigraph in his first full-length prose book to, several decades later, his following Shelley in recreating Dantescan
terza rima
in English.

Eliot recalled himself as indecisive. Sometimes he blamed his parents. ‘It is almost impossible for any of our family to make up their minds', he complained in 1920.
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In his student days, though far from St Louis, he wrote regularly to his mother, continuing to do so for the rest of her life. Even when in 1906 the fledgling poet went to a Harvard ruled over by President Charles William Eliot, he continued within a circle where the influence of his extended family and its code of social service prevailed. Rebelling against this, Eliot conformed to it too. He exhibited a similarly conflicted stance towards the nationality of his birth and towards American literature. Just as the avant-garde French Symbolists, whose poetry fascinated the Harvard student, had learned from the Edgar Allan Poe whose work Eliot had devoured in childhood, so Eliot's great favourite Jules Laforgue was a French poet particularly influenced by American writing. Arrestingly, Eliot's student imitation of the Whitman-loving Laforgue was true to the grain of nineteenth-century American poetry, even as it seemed a shocking, Eurocentric departure.

Francophile before he ever set foot in France, young T. S. Eliot might have died in Cambridge, Massachusetts. During the early summer of 1910 he was hospitalised there with a life-threatening infection. Instead, recovered, he proceeded, as planned, to Paris, working hard to reinvent himself. Brilliant, yet still immature, he felt dogged by failure. Eliot's life was no neat progress towards literary canonisation, towards a form of sainthood or simply towards a Nobel Prize. It was much rawer than that, more jagged, frayed and damaged. An often gruelling existence nourished his poetic vitality. Some of his life's most important experiences, the ones that changed its course, were accidental. Those accidents could be disastrous.

He wrote ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', his greatest early poem of anxious masculinity, in 1910–11. Differing in length, its opening lines are conversationally over-familiar yet also weirdly estranging in imagery. The young Eliot who went to Paris has mastered Laforgue's idiom, and then convincingly surpassed it:

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherised upon a table …
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Even the tiniest verbal gestures here – not ‘an operating table', or even ‘the table', but the more mundanely domestic ‘a table' – are unsettling. Yet if ‘Prufrock' sounds out unmistakably the new note of modern poetry, then this poem was written alongside other, wilder, less polished works including ‘The Triumph of Bullshit'. Young Eliot (who introduced the word ‘bullshit' into literature) tries hard to sound shockingly knowing. Fuelled by prejudice and laddishness, his scurrilous and obscene poems too are part of his development: student attempts at writing which struggle to cover with a fabricated voice of experience the poet's own sexual shyness, cerebral sophistication and troubled sense of lack. Triumphantly, in ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' he manages to create a male voice which is vulnerable and sexually floundering at the same time as intellectually alert. In so doing he moves beyond effortful posturing to produce a poetic masterpiece that nonetheless draws on aspects of his own psyche.

Too much writing on Eliot over the last two decades has treated him as a thinker more than a poet. True, one of the most ‘heavily annotated' books in his personal library was his copy of the philosopher F. H. Bradley's
Appearance and Reality
; yet among his lifelong ‘most precious' volumes were editions of Virgil and Dante – poets who, like Eliot, were nourished by philosophical thought.
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My narrative attends to Eliot's graduate student interests in philosophy. It salutes his intellectual brilliance, detailing his work with Masaharu Anesaki on Japanese Buddhism and with Charles Lanman on Sanskrit. Yet these intellectual adventures were neither more nor less important to his creative imagination than were his death-defying youthful navigation of Mount Desert Rock and his explorations of the coast in a sailboat – dramatic and entertaining events that undergird later poems, including
The Waste Land
.

Though he seems to have had crushes on girls in childhood, the young Eliot who customarily wore a truss was sexually gauche. His first serious falling in love was with Emily Hale, a Bostonian Unitarian preacher's daughter with a mentally ill mother. Later, his disastrous marriage to the young ‘pretty vivacious' Englishwoman Vivien Haigh-Wood helped hurt him into further poetry, especially that of
The Waste Land.
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Vivien's and his own apparently unending ill-health put them in a state of frequent personal crisis. ‘Why does Tom love me?' Vivien wondered a few years after
The Waste Land
appeared. ‘I love Tom in a way that destroys us both.'
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Young Eliot
strives to strike the right balance between the outward form of living which mattered to this bankerly poet and other, sometimes wounded kinds of inner life to which readers have limited access, yet which were vital to his intimate existence and to his writing. The verse is nowhere here treated merely as a crossword puzzle or source-hunter's labyrinth. Consciously crafted artistic work, it nonetheless transmutes personal agonies, treasured images and insights. While some of it can bristle with learning, it can also scald. However much he might have resisted the idea, knowledge of his life heightens a sense of Eliot's finest work as fusing finessed artifice with unmistakable
cri de cœur
.

I cannot claim to be in sympathy with all of Eliot's ideas, and I do not attempt to disguise anti-Semitic moments in his work, or other elements of racism and sexism deeply ingrained in his society and never fully outgrown. This poet was the grandson of a preacher whom Ralph Waldo Emerson considered to be a true ‘Saint'.
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Yet, though preoccupied with sainthood and tainted mortification from at least such early poems as ‘The Death of Saint Narcissus', Eliot was no saint and should not be presented as such. From boyhood onwards he had a fascination with asceticism and religious experience which became increasingly important. Still, for all he read about such experiences, he refused to fake them in himself. The young Eliot's philosophical training led to an intense scepticism and relativism; in poems, including ‘The Hippopotamus', he could attack Christianity with blasphemous vigour and guile. These facets of his sometimes conflicted personality make him all the more beguilingly complex. His biography is that of a very complicated, often subtle, sometimes prickly human being, but also one whom readers can come to understand to a perhaps surprising degree. Throughout this book, rather than employing paraphrase, I have taken care to give readers frequent and direct contact with Eliot's own words, published and unpublished, and with the words of his contemporaries. The aim is to offer a close-up view and, cumulatively, through successive brushstrokes, to make a nuanced and intimate portrait.

In some ways young Eliot knew himself well. He discerns a ‘Mélange Adultère de Tout' that makes a man in different places and circumstances a professor, a journalist, a banker, a philosopher, a Parisian flâneur, and also something much wilder – that insight is astute in its self-perception. Articulated in his second language, French, it may be an obliquely voiced analysis of how Eliot managed to cope. He had an acute sense of himself as multiply displaced, and wrote on the day of England's patron saint, St George's Day, in 1928:

Some day I want to write an essay about the point of view of an American who wasn't an American, because his America ended in 1829; and who wasn't a Yankee, because he was born in the South and went to school in New England as a small boy with a nigger drawl, but who wasn't a southerner in the South because his people were northerners in a border state and looked down on all southerners and Virginians, and who so was never anything anywhere and who therefore felt himself to be more a Frenchman than an American and more an Englishman than a Frenchman and yet felt that the U.S.A. up to a hundred years ago was a family extension.
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This is a writer who could view himself with obsessive, complexly inflected self-consciousness. Yet it is important to see him, too, through the eyes and words of others. His most perceptive observers included Vivien Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Mary Hutchinson and Conrad Aiken. While drawing on their viewpoints, however,
Young Eliot
presents a portrait of an individual, not a panorama of his life and times; but it shows the part Eliot played in his era, from his immersion in World War I enemy debts handled by the Colonial and Foreign Department of Lloyds Bank in London to his participation in small magazines, lectures and social gatherings. Increasingly haggard and ill, he often masked his shyness and tenacious ambition with a businessman's demeanour. In writing, his unflinching examination of his own pain was both shielded and made possible by an aesthetic of impersonality. This is the man Virginia Woolf came very close to loving, and whom she was reported to have described as a poet in ‘a four-piece suit'.
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