Both in America, where he had been born in 1888, and
in England, where he lived from his twenty-sixth year, many people found it
hard to get to know this poet on familiar terms. Even if they did so, some were
unsure what to call him. ‘Will he become “Tom”?’ Virginia Woolf had wondered in
1923, after she had known him for well over two years. By the time The Waste Land appeared in 1922, Thomas
Stearns Eliot, the young, London-based, St. Louis-born, Harvard-schooled poet
who had seemed so formal and reserved, was certainly ‘Tom’ to her, and in the
following year she typeset his remarkable poem for its earliest British publication as a book.
The Waste Land speaks of ruin,
broken-ness, pain and wastage, but, substantially thanks to Ezra Pound’s
editorial guidance, it possessed form and order, repeatedly and tellingly
aligning past and present. Overworked
and exhausted, order was what Tom sought. It was what his bank work demanded,
as he attempted to identify patterns in Europe’s financial turbulence. He worked – officially for forty-four
hours a week- at Lloyds, Head Office Employee number 239- in a small financial
intelligence unit, investigating and monitoring settlement of Great War enemy
debts in the wake of the Treaty of Versailles, a task required reading ten or
fifteen papers a day, writing, printing, publishing and supervising a staff of
three or four women. Often he came in early and worked late.
An
essay he worked on for considerable time before publishing it in 1923 argued
that the sort of ‘mythical method, exemplified by Joyce’s Ulysses (‘the most important expression which the present age has
found’) offered ‘ways of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a
significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is
contemporary history’; The Waste Land
attempted this too. For Tom, faced with potential ruin of all sorts (‘He is
like a person about to break down,’ wrote Virginia Woolf in February), this
search for order was paramount.
His sphinx-like smile, like his wearying sense of having to ‘live in a mask all one’s life’, helped him conceal intimate worries:to compound the economic and social stresses of the post-war situation, the uncertainties of ‘the profession of the poet’, Tom married ‘wrong’; a woman –Vivien- with many physical and mental problems and his religious scruples disallowed divorce.
‘I am worn out, I cannot
go on, he told his virulently anti-Semitic supporter John Quinn, adding splenetically
with regard to The Waste Land’s publisher Liveright, ‘I am sick of doing business
with Jew publishers who will not carry out their part of the contract unless they
are forced to.’ Drawing on his parents’
anti-Semitism and falling in line with Quinn’s complaints about ‘Swarms of
horrible-looking Jews’, he wished he ‘could find a decent Christian publisher
in New York.’ Displays of despair, anger, and prejudice at this time were
symptomatic of his being, as Virginia Woolf put it on 13 March, ‘on the verge
of collapse’. He seemed to her ‘broken down’ when she and others plotted to have
him installed as literary editor of the Nation;
thanking her ‘on the telephone’ ( a means of communication he disliked), he ‘couldn’t
speak for tears.’
Tom was exasperating, Woolf complained: he ‘let drop by drop
of his agonized perplexities fall ever
so finely through pure cambric.’ Dealing with him was ‘dreary work’. She wished
‘poor dear Tom had more spunk in him. He did show a flash of anger that
march when Ben Hecht, a Chicago
journalist with a Jewish surname, wrote of
The Waste Land as ‘a hoax on
the American public’; its poet was a man
who ‘hates Americans.’ Tom the admirer of boxing denounced Hecht as a
‘liar’, mentioned ‘legal action, and implied he would like to take ‘physical
action.’
Eliot found his imaginative freedom pressured by other demands. He joshed about this with Virginia Woolf, but in 1934 she and Leonard also had a much more serious conversation with him when 'suddenly T. spoke with a genuine cry of feeling. About immortality: what it meant to him - I think it was that : anyhow he revealed his passion, as he seldom does. A religious soul: an unhappy man, a lonely sensitive man, all wrapt up in fibers of self torture, doubt, conceit, desire for warmth & intimacy. And I'm very fond of him - like him in some of my reserves & subterfuges." Even though Woolf found his religion hard to take, she understood him with a perspicuity few could match.
A stinging letter from his brother Henry detected a determination in Tom to appear unsullied by everyday life: 'Sometimes you remind me of a gentleman in full evening dress and white gloves attempting to put something right with the kitchen plumbing without soiling his attire. Repeatedly people canvassed Tom's public support for urgent causes but he remained temperamentally loath to commit. He owned up, self-mockingly to having a 'costive kind of mind', not 'satisfied to day anything at all unless every possible shade and qualification demanded by the strictest criteria of scruple can be got down on paper.'
In distress, Eliot turned to reading poetry. In mid-May on the train between London and
Chichester he devoured the Poesies de A. O. Barnabooth by Valery Larbaud, one
of the Criterion’s European
contributors. One particularly striking poem expressed ‘a feeling which I have
felt myself very strongly. The persona in ‘The Gift of Myself” speaks of
something ‘de’infiniment aride’
(infinitely arid) at his heart: an inner being with a life of its own
nonetheless lives the speaker’s life and listens impassively to his conscience,
appearing
(A being, if it is possible, made of nothingness,
Indifferent to my physical sufferings,
Who does not cry when I cry,
Who does not laugh when I laugh,
Who does not blush when I commit a shameful act,
And who does not groan when my heart is injured;
Who stands stock still and offers no advice,
But seems to say eternally:
Here I am, indifferent to it all).
Many artists feel in themselves such a phenomena. For Tom this feeling
was coupled with acute self-consciousness, and a conviction he had to keep a
part of himself steeled to go on working, earning, and conducting everyday affairs-otherwise
everything world be lost but not everyone found his coping mechanism
attractive. When he dined with the Woolf’s on 17 May, Virginia, knowing ‘Mrs.
Eliot has almost died at times in the last month’, found him ‘infinitely
considerate,’ yet also ‘perfectly detached’; she likened him to a monk in a
‘chilly’ cell.
It vexed Tom that Vivien had not revealed until long after their wedding just
how extensive had been her history of ill health. In mid-February, just after
he had been ailing, Vivien ‘got out of bed and fell down’; a week later, he wrote, she ‘has been sleeping most of
the time ever since. He was at his wits end, his ‘judgment and will’ were
‘paralysed’. Virginia Woolf, who wrote of Tom on 30 March as having about him
something ‘hole and cornerish, biting in the back, suspicious’, later joked to
Mary Hutchison about his ‘mamoreal heart’, but, however much he hid his
feelings, he was deeply unsettled. He worried that he was behaving ‘like a
frightened rat.’**
Attending a performance of King Lear
together both Woolf and Eliot jeered the performance but subsequently Eliot
reviewed the performance as ‘almost flawless’ then went on to complain ‘that the
incapacity for surrender or allegiance to something outside of oneself, which
is a frequent symptom of the soul of man under democracy.’ When Woolf taxed him
‘lightly’ with contradicting his earlier reactions, she was annoyed at his
suspicious, elaborate, uneasy manner. Woolf’s frustration with Tom was
exacerbated by his having published Wyndham Lewis’s ‘masterpiece’ of satire on
Bloomsbury, apparently without having time to ‘read and expunge’ it. Tom tried to smooth things
over with a degree of flirtatious self-mockery, caricaturing himself as someone
likely to make Woolf ‘expire of boredom', and jokingly indicating she knew he
had developed a taste for ‘Divine
Service on Sunday Morning’ and as the result of publishing the satire he might
be found ‘dismembered’, like a hero of Grecian Tragedy.
Eminent within the literary world now, Eliot had learned how to operate its levers of
power. Yet his judgment was not infallible. Few today would choose to read
Lewis’s One-Way Song, which Tom
selected for Faber’s 1933 poetry list, rather than the poems of the
Eliot-detesting William Carlos Williams which Tom confessed meant very little
to him. The poetry of Dylan Thomas-
which he encouraged- slipped through his editorial hands. But he did sign up
and take under his wing George Barker, Michael Roberts and Janet Adam Smith. He
had an unsettling insightful way of presenting the ‘dark embryo’ that develops
into a poem and he discussed sympathetically with the authors on his list the
challenges, droughts, and demands that accompanied the writing of poetry –
including his concern that the poet ‘may have wasted his time and messed up his
life for nothing.’
Often uncompromising, even as he strove to be fair and through his writings, taste and networks he shaped the poetry of his era. Few, however, saw the full, complications of his personality. To Woolf, who had his measure, he revealed more than most. Virginia went on sensing ‘the heavy stone of his self-esteem’. Later in 1934, after they had dined together, she recorded how he sat ‘very solid- large shoulders- in his chair, talks easily but with authority. Is a great man, in a way, now: self-confident, didactic. But to me, still, a dear old ass.’
She also recognized that Tom was ‘not a dramatist. A monologist’, as The Times’ critic judged The Family Reunion: though ‘intellectually
intriguing, it was an arid essay lacking ‘stage vividness’- the intensification
of illusion which is the only purpose of any dramatic convention.’ More than
one reviewer located in the character of Harry the same fault Eliot had found
in Hamlet: ‘an emotion which is inexpressible,
because in excess of the facts as they appear’.
Back from a vacation in Wales in September 1934 Virginia , aware that ‘dear old
Tom looked 10 years younger: hard, spry, a glorified boy scout in shorts &
yellow shirt, was struck, nevertheless, by how maintaining ‘some asperity’
towards Vivien, he would not ‘admit the excuse of insanity for her –thinks she
puts it on’. She described Tom as now ‘tight & shiny as a wood louse’, but
she detected in him both the ‘well water in him, cold & pure and an exclusive
hardness’. “Yes I like talking to Tom. But his wing sweeps curved & scimitar
like round to center himself. He’s settling in with some severity to be a great
man.’ Later in her diary entry she added, with a rhetorical flourish, ‘when you
are thrown like an assegai into the hide of the world – this may be the
definition of genius- there you stick; & Tom sticks. To shut out, to
concentrate –that is perhaps – perhaps- one of the necessary conditions’. Woolf
was sensitive about her (not entirely inaccurate) intuition that Tom, even
though they had published each other’s work, substantially shut out her own
writing.Yet despite this indifference and disagreement about religion they remained friends.
Visiting his new lodgings at 9 Grenville Place with Aida Monro the following
year, Virginia, while appreciating Tom’s tea and ‘rolls in frills on paper’
found his small angular room ‘not a lovely one’
It had ‘dark green blotting paper wall paper’; bookcases with missing
shelves contained ‘rather meager’ books; there was a gas fire, and a bathroom
shared with curates: ‘The hot water runs very slowly.’ Tom sat on a ‘hard
chair.’ Conversation was difficult. As the women left, he showed them his small
bedroom ‘with the railway underneath it’. He seemed to Woolf ‘priestly, ill at
ease with the presbytery’s ‘maid in cap and apron.’ It ‘all’, she wrote in her
diary, ‘somehow depressed me.’
Ottoline Morrell feared Tom was now ‘a queer lonely isolated figure’ in
‘complete removal from the ordinary world’- ‘an Ostrich who hides his head to
prevent himself seeing Life.’ She blamed his ‘Calvinist forefathers’. They made
him, for all his ‘kind side’ perceptibly ‘cruel’. And ‘a very sick man.. Yet as
a publisher and editor he had to deal with day-to-day work in away that Lady
Ottoline did not. His massive brain-power, stamina and nimbleness – one minute
considering ‘The Theology of Economics’, the next magisterially surveying
eighteenth and nineteenth Shakespearean criticism – remained dauntingly
effective. Still, Morrell was hardly wide of the mark. ‘To surrender individual
judgment to a Church is a hard thing,’ Tom stated in an early 1934 Criterion ‘Commentary’;
but he was sure.’ What ultimately matters is the salvation of the individual
soul.’ Later that year he described himself to Faber as ‘by temperament but not
in doctrine, and old-style hellfire Calvinist.'
This seems to me an inaccurate assessment because the creed of the Anglican Church IS Calvinist, nor is Calvinism, by temperament
‘gloomy’ or ‘hard-hearted. The most striking Calvinist features of Eliot’s
character was his religious imagination combined with Humanist learning and attraction to church
governance in which ‘seculars’ play a significant role. But that's a complicated historical analysis which I will pursue in connection with Hugh Trevor Roper's biography of Thoedore de Mayerne.
Visiting the Woolfs in Sussex in 1939 he enjoyed ‘hilarious small talk’, and
Virginia though him ‘more subtle, less caked & rigid than of old. His
teaching, he told me, is one that improves with age.' Like his flatmate John
Hayward she remained a determined non-believer and noted Tom’s customary sense
of ‘the working of the divine spirit which as usual he adored at 8 on Sunday
morning, receiving communion from Mr. Ebbs
[ the local vicar] – who did not impress him.’
By February 1940, when Tom sniped in print that the prose idiom of the
sixty-five-year old ‘Mr. Churchill” was ‘like a court dress of rather tarnished
grandeur from a theatrical costumiers’, the ‘Woolves’ had returned temporarily
to 37 Mecklenburgh Square, a short walk from Russell Square. The blackout meant
‘no lighted windows;, which ‘depressed’ Virginia. At her dinner party for Tom
and other friends, conversation turned to ‘Civilization.’ Most of the diners
were pessimistic. Tom had grown concerned about whether it was possible to
maintain ‘a common mind’ between England and France as war pressures increased.
Tom had been following the debates, too, about American neutrality. The American
ambassador in London, Joseph Kennedy, expected that Britain would be defeated.
Though the Christian News-Letter had
just reported on a dissenting “Declaration of American Christians’, most American
Episcopalians, like many other Americans, inclined towards neutrality. Tom’s
strong-willed US Episcopalian correspondent Dr. Iddings Bell took this stance,
describing the conflict as ‘this relatively
insignificant brawl going on in Europe.’ Tom had written to the Church Times that January, stating he
considered Bell ‘grossly mistaken’, yet declaring himself among Bell’s ‘English
friends’. Emily Hale was hinting Tom should come to Princeton. “If I had lived
in America, and come to anything like my present position, I believe that it
would have been the Church of Rome that I should have accepted and not the
Episcopal Church’, he mused, once again resisting her overtures. This, he knew,
was not what she ( a Unitarian and hoping he would marry her one day) wanted to
hear.’ Virginia Woolf's opinion of Emily was not favorable, ascribing to her the persona that Ottoline Morrell inscribed on Eliot.
With America reluctant to intervene and Germany so strong, Britain’s situation
looked unpromising. At the Woolf’s dinner party on 14 February the consensus
seemed to be that ‘the barbarians will gradually freeze our culture’, with ‘the
light going out gradually.’ Virginia watched Tom closely. A couple of weeks
earlier, around the time he wrestled with the phrase ‘Taurus ire’ in the poem ‘East
Coker’, he had been reading Rupert Gleadow’s forthcoming Faber book Astrology in Everyday Life; his star
sign was Libra and he had joked to Virginia glumly that he shared it ‘with Hitler’.
Now scrutinizing his face, she observed:
Tom’s great yellow bronze mask all draped
upon an iron framework. An inhibited, nerve drawn; dropped face – as if hung on
a scaffold of heavy private brooding; & thought. A very serious face. &
broken by the flicker of relief, when other people interrupt.
Since just a few days later Tom sent Hayward a complete draft of ‘East
Coker’, Woolf’s pen-portrait depicts the poet during the period when that poem
took its full form. What she saw on Tom’s ‘scaffold’ face was a more profound
version of what Tom in ‘East Coker’ noted on the faces of wartime London Underground
passengers: ‘you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen’. It was a
look of blankness and worry- not an uncommon expression on British faces in the
early months of 1940.
In London on 3 April 1941 Tom received the news that shocked him at least as
much as the loss of Joyce. ‘The death of Mrs. Virginia Woolf’ was reported in The Times. ‘For myself and others,’ Tom
wrote to Leonard the next day from Shamley Wood, ‘it is the end of a world.’ He
felt ‘numb’. Woolf had gone for a walk by the River Ouse on 28 March, leaving a
note telling Leonard she feared the onset of another episode of ‘madness’; her
body was not found until 18 April. Virginia’s death depressed him, more than he
realized at the time. He had come to regard Woolf ‘like a member of my own
family’. Even though, he confessed, he ‘did not know her work very well’, and
his interests was ‘entirely personal’, he had felt at ease with her’ in some
ways even more than with his kith and kin. He found it hard to express how intensely
he missed her.
Though Tom would not have seen the letter, Woolf had written
to her sister five years earlier, rather wistfully making clear how close she
felt to her sometimes infuriating friend: ‘I had a visit, long long ago from
Tom Eliot, whom I love, or could have loved, had we both been in the prime and
not in the sere: how necessary do you think copulation is to friendship?’ Their
closeness is affirmed by the body language of a telling photograph, taken in
the late summer of 1932. Tom is smiling, standing very close to Virginia. They
look every inch a couple. Also in the picture is Vivien, but she stands apart
from them, as if an interloper. Now Virginia was gone.
Eliot After The Wasteland by Robert Crawford; Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
New York, 2022
