Virginia Woolf on T. S. Eliot by Robert Crawford

 

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