Fame & Folly Read online

  There is bad news, as it happens, even in the objective correlative. What was once accepted as an austere principle of poetics is suddenly decipherable as no more than a device to shield the poet from the raw shame of confession. Eliot is now unveiled as a confessional poet above all—one who was driven to confess, who did confess, whose subject was sin and guilt (his own), but who had no heart for the act of disclosure. That severe law of the impersonality of the poem—the masking technique purported to displace emotion from its crude source in the poet’s real-life experience to its heightened incarnation in “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events”—turns out to be motivated by something less august and more timorous than pure literary theory or a devotion to symbol. In the name of the objective correlative, Eliot had found a way to describe the wound without the embarrassment of divulging who held the knife. This was a conception far less immaculate than the practitioners of the New Criticism ever supposed; for thirty years or more Eliot’s close readers remained innocent of—or discreet about—Eliot’s private life. Perhaps some of them imagined that, like the other pope, he had none.

  The assault on the masking power of the objective correlative—the breach in Eliot’s protective wall—came about in the ordinary way: the biographies began. They began because time, which dissolves everything, at last dissolved awe. Although the number of critical examinations of Eliot, both book-length and in periodicals, is beyond counting, and although there are a handful of memoirs by people who were acquainted with him, the first true biography did not appear until a dozen years after his death. In 1977 Lyndall Gordon published Eliot’s Early Years, an accomplished and informative study taking Eliot past his failed first marriage and through the composition of The Waste Land. Infiltrated by the familiar worshipfulness, the book is a tentative hybrid, part dense critical scrutiny and part cautious narrative—self-conscious about the latter, as if permission has not quite been granted by the author to herself. The constraints of awe are still there. Nevertheless the poetry is advanced in the light of Eliot’s personal religious development, and these first illuminations are potent. In 1984 a second biography arrived, covering the life entire; by now awe has been fully dispatched. Peter Ackroyd’s T. S. Eliot: A Life is thorough, bold, and relaxed about its boldness—even now and then a little acid. Not a debunking job by any means, but admirably straightforward. The effect is to bring Eliot down to recognizably human scale—disorienting to a reader trained to Eliot-adulation and ignorant until now of the nightmare of Eliot’s youthful marriage and its devastating evolution. Four years on, Eliot’s centenary saw the publication of Eliot’s New Life, Lyndall Gordon’s concluding volume, containing augmented portraits—in the nature of discoveries—of two women Ackroyd had touched on much less intensively; each had expected Eliot to marry her after the death of his wife in a mental institution. Eliot was callous to both. Eleven years following her first study, Gordon’s manner continues respectful and her matter comprehensive, but the diffidence of the narrative chapters is gone. Eliot has acquired fallibility, and Gordon is not afraid to startle herself, or the long, encrusted history of deferential Eliot scholarship. Volume Two is daring, strong, and psychologically brilliant. Finally, 1988 also marked the issuance of a fat book of letters, The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Vol. I: 1898–1922, from childhood to age thirty-five (with more to come), edited by Eliot’s widow, Valerie Eliot, whom he married when she was thirty and he sixty-eight.

  “The man who suffers and the mind which creates”—these inseparables, sundered long ago by Eliot himself, can now be surgically united.

  IF ELIOT HID his private terrors behind the hedge of his poetry, the course of literary history took no notice of it. Adoration, fame, and the Nobel Prize came to him neither in spite of nor because of what he left out; his craft was in the way he left it out. And he had always been reticent; he had always hidden himself. It can even be argued that he went to live in England in order to hide from his mother and father.

  His mother, Charlotte Stearns Eliot, was a frustrated poet who wrote religious verse and worked for the civic good. His father, Henry Ware Eliot, was an affluent businessman who ran a St. Louis brick-manufacturing company. Like any entrepreneur, he liked to see results. His father’s father, an intellectual admired by Dickens, was good at results—though not the conventional kind. He had left the family seat in blueblood Boston to take the enlightenment of Unitarianism to the American West; while he was at it he established a university. Both of Eliot’s parents were strong-willed. Both expected him to make a success of himself. Both tended to diminish his independence. Not that they wanted his success on any terms but his own—it was early understood that this youngest of six siblings (four sisters, one of whom was nineteen years older, and a brother almost a decade his senior) was unusually gifted. He was the sort of introspective child who is photographed playing the piano or reading a book or watching his girl cousins at croquet (while himself wearing a broad-brimmed straw hat and a frilly dress, unremarkable garb for upper-class nineteenth-century male tots). His mother wrote to the headmaster of his prep school to ensure that he would not be allowed to participate in sports. She wrote again to warn against the dangers of swimming in quarry ponds. She praised Eliot’s schoolboy verse as better than her own, and guaranteed his unease. “I knew what her verses meant to her. We did not discuss the matter further,” he admitted long afterward. At his Harvard commencement in 1910, the same year as the composition of “Portrait of a Lady” and a year before “Prufrock,” he delivered the farewell ode in a style that may have been a secret parody of his mother’s: “For the hour that is left us Fair Harvard, with thee, / Ere we face the importunate years …” His mother was sympathetic to his ambitions as a poet—too sympathetic: it was almost as if his ambitions were hers, or vice versa. His father took a brisk view of Eliot’s graduate studies in philosophy: they were the ticket to a Harvard professorship, a recognizably respectable career.

  But Eliot would not stay put. To the bewilderment of his parents—the thought of it gave his mother a “chill”—he ran off to Paris, partly to catch the atmosphere of Jules Laforgue, a French poet who had begun to influence him, and partly to sink into Europe. In Paris he was briefly attracted to Henri Bergson, whose lectures on philosophy he attended at the Collège de France, but then he came upon Charles Maurras; Maurras’s ideas—“classique, catholique, monarchique”—stuck to him for life, and were transmuted in 1928 into his own “classicist, royalist, Anglo-Catholic.” In 1910 the word “fascist” was not yet in fashion, but that is exactly what Maurras was: later on he joined the pro-Nazi Vichy regime, and went to jail for it after World War II. None of this dented Eliot’s enduring admiration; Hommage à Charles Maurras was written as late as 1948. When Eliot first encountered him, Maurras was the founder of an anti-democratic organization called Action Française, which specialized in student riots and open assaults on free-thinkers and Jews. Eliot, an onlooker on one of these occasions, did not shrink from the violence. (Ackroyd notes that he “liked boxing matches also.”)

  After Paris he obediently returned to Harvard for three diligent years, doing some undergraduate teaching and working on his doctoral degree. One of his courses was with Bertrand Russell, visiting from England. Russell saw Eliot at twenty-five as a silent young dandy, impeccably turned out, but a stick without “vigour or life—or enthusiasm.” (Only a year later, in England, the diffident dandy—by then a new husband—would move with his bride right into Russell’s tiny flat.) During the remainder of the Harvard period, Eliot embarked on Sanskrit, read Hindu and Buddhist sacred texts, and tunneled into the investigations that would culminate in his dissertation, Experience and the Objects of Knowledge in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley. Screened by this busy academic program, he was also writing poetry. When Harvard offered him a traveling scholarship, he set off for Europe, and never again came back to live in the country of his birth. It was the beginning of the impersonations that were to become transformations.


  He had intended an extensive tour of the Continent, but, in August of 1914, when war broke out, he retreated to England and enrolled at Oxford, ostensibly to continue his studies in philosophy. Oxford seemed an obvious way station for a young man headed for a professorial career, and his parents, shuttling between St. Louis and their comfortable New England summer house, ineradicably American in their habits and point of view, could not have judged otherwise, or suspected a permanent transatlantic removal. But what Eliot was really after was London: the literary life of London, in the manner of Henry James’s illustrious conquest of it three decades before. He was quiet, deceptively passive, always reserved, on the watch for opportunity. He met Ezra Pound almost immediately. Pound, a fellow expatriate, was three years older and had come to London five years earlier. He had already published five volumes of poetry. He was idiosyncratic, noisy, cranky, aggressive, repetitively and tediously humorous as well as perilously unpredictable, and he kept an eye out for ways to position himself at the center of whatever maelstrom was current or could be readily invented. By the time he and Eliot discovered each other, Pound had been through Imagism and was boosting Vorticism; he wanted to shepherd movements, organize souls, administer lives. He read a handful of Eliot’s Harvard poems, including “Portrait of a Lady” and “Prufrock,” and instantly anointed him as the real thing. To Harriet Monroe in Chicago, the editor of Poetry, then the most distinguished—and coveted—American journal of its kind, he trumpeted Eliot as the author of “the best poem I have yet had or seen from an American,” and insisted that she publish “Prufrock.” He swept around London introducing his new protégé and finding outlets for his poems in periodicals with names like Others and BLAST (a Vorticist effort printed on flamingo-pink paper and featuring eccentric typography).

  Eliot felt encouraged enough by these successes to abandon both Oxford and Harvard, and took a job teaching in a boy’s secondary school to support the poet he was now heartened to become. His mother, appalled by such recklessness, directed her shock not at Eliot but at his former teacher, Bertrand Russell (much as she had gone to the headmaster behind the teen-age Eliot’s back to protest the risks of the quarry pond): “I hope Tom will be able to carry out his purpose of coming on in May to take his degree. The Ph.D. is becoming in America … almost an essential condition for an Academic position and promotion therein. The male teachers in our secondary schools are as a rule inferior to the women teachers, and they have little social position or distinction. I hope Tom will not undertake such work another year—it is like putting Pegasus in harness.” Eliot’s father, storming behind the scenes, was less impressed by Pegasus. The appeal to Russell concluded, “As for ‘The BLAST,’ Mr. Eliot remarked when he saw a copy he did not know there were enough lunatics in the world to support such a magazine.”

  Home, in short, was seething. Within an inch of his degree, the compliant son was suddenly growing prodigal. A bombardment of cables and letters followed. Even the war conspired against the prodigal’s return; though Pound was already preparing to fill Eliot’s luggage with masses of Vorticist material for a projected show in New York, the danger of German U-boats made a journey by sea unsafe. Russell cabled Eliot’s father not to urge him to sit for his exams “UNLESS IMMEDIATE DEGREE IS WORTH RISKING LIFE.” “I was not greatly pleased with the language of Prof. Russell’s telegram,” Eliot’s father complained in a letter to Harvard. “Mrs. Eliot and I will use every effort to induce my son to take his examinations later. Doubtless his decision was much influenced by Prof. Russell.” Clearly the maternal plea to Russell had backfired. Meanwhile Harvard itself, in the person of James H. Woods, Eliot’s mentor in the philosophy department, was importuning him; Woods was tireless in offering an appointment. Eliot turned him down. Three years on, the family campaign to lure him home was unabated: the biggest gun of all was brought out—Charles W. Eliot, eminent educational reformer, recently President of Harvard, architect of the “five-foot shelf” of indispensable classics, and Eliot’s grandfather’s third cousin once removed. “I conceive that you have a real claim on my attention and interest,” he assured his wayward young relative.

  It is, nevertheless, quite unintelligible to me how you or any other young American scholar can forego the privilege of living in the genuine American atmosphere—a bright atmosphere of freedom and hope. I have never lived long in England—about six months in all—but I have never got used to the manners and customs of any class in English society, high, middle, or low. After a stay of two weeks or two months in England it has been delightful for me to escape …

  Then, too, I have never been able to understand how any American man of letters can forego the privilege of being of use primarily to Americans of the present and future generations, as Emerson, Bryant, Lowell, and Whittier were. Literature seems to me highly climatic and national … You mention in your letter the name of Henry James. I knew his father well, and his brother William very well; and I had some conversation with Henry at different times during his life. I have a vivid remembrance of a talk with him during his last visit to America. It seemed to me all along that his English residence for so many years contributed neither to the happy development of his art nor to his personal happiness.

  … My last word is that if you wish to speak through your work to people of the “finest New England spirit” you had better not live much longer in the English atmosphere. The New England spirit has been nurtured in the American atmosphere.

  What Eliot thought—three years before the publication of The Waste Land—of this tribal lecture, and particularly of its recommendation that he aspire to the mantle of the author of “Thanatopsis,” one may cheerfully imagine. In any case it was too late, and had long been too late. The campaign was lost before the first parental shot. Eliot’s tie to England was past revocation. While still at Oxford he was introduced to Vivien Haigh-Wood, a high-spirited, high-strung, artistic young woman, the daughter of a cultivated upper-class family; her father painted landscapes and portraits. Eliot, shy and apparently not yet relieved of his virginity, was attracted to her rather theatrical personality. Bertrand Russell sensed in her something brasher, perhaps rasher, than mere vivaciousness—he judged her light, vulgar, and adventurous. Eliot married her only weeks after they met. The marriage, he knew, was the seal on his determination to stay in England, the seal his parents could not break and against which they would be helpless. After the honeymoon, Russell (through pure chance Eliot had bumped into him on a London street) took the new couple in for six months, from July to Christmas—he had a closet-size spare room—and helped them out financially in other ways. He also launched Eliot as a reviewer by putting him in touch with the literary editor of the New Statesman, for whom Eliot now began to write intensively. Probably Russell’s most useful service was his arranging for Eliot to be welcomed into the intellectual and literary circle around Lady Ottoline Morrell at Garsington, her country estate. Though invitations went to leading artists and writers, Garsington was not simply a salon: the Morrells were principled pacifists who provided farm work during the war for conscientious objectors. Here Eliot found Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence, Lytton Strachey, Katherine Mansfield, the painter Mark Gertler, Clive Bell, and, eventually, Leonard and Virginia Woolf. Lady Ottoline complained at first that Eliot had no spontaneity, that he barely moved his lips when he spoke, and that his voice was “mandarin.” But Russell had carried him—in his arms, as it were—into the inmost eye of the most sophisticated whorl of contemporary English letters. The American newcomer who had left Harvard on a student fellowship in 1914 was already, by the middle of 1915, at the core of the London literary milieu he had dreamed of. And with so many models around him, he was working on disposing of whatever remnants of St. Louis remained lodged in his mouth, and perfecting the manner and accent of a high-born Englishman. (If he was grateful to Russell for this happy early initiation into precisely the society he coveted, by 1931—in “Thoughts After Lambeth,” an essay on the idea of a national English c
hurch—he was sneering, in italics, at Russell’s “gospel of happiness.”)

  Meanwhile his parents required placating. A bright young man in his twenties had gone abroad to augment his studies; it was natural for him to come home within a reasonable time to get started on real life and his profession. Instead, he had made a precipitate marriage, intended to spend the rest of his days in a foreign country, and was teaching French and arithmetic in the equivalent of an American junior high school. Not surprisingly, the brick manufacturer and his piously versifying wife could not infer the sublime vocation of a poet from these evidences. Eliot hoped to persuade them. The marriage to Vivien took place on June 26, 1915; on June 28 Ezra Pound wrote a very long letter to Eliot’s father. It was one of Eliot’s mother’s own devices—that of the surrogate pleader. As his mother had asked Russell to intervene with Eliot to return him to Harvard, so now Eliot was enlisting Pound to argue for London. The letter included much information about Pound’s own situation, which could not have been reassuring, since—as Pound himself remarked—it was unlikely that the elder Eliot had ever heard of him. But he sweetened the case with respectable references to Edgar Lee Masters and Robert Browning, and was careful to add that Robert Frost, another American in London, had “done a book of New England eclogues.” To the heartbroken father who had looked forward to a distinguished university career for his son, Pound said, “I am now much better off than if I had kept my professorship in Indiana”—empty comfort, considering it was Fair Harvard that was being mourned; what Pound had relinquished was Wabash College in a place called Crawfordsville. What could it have meant to Eliot’s father that this twenty-nine-year-old contributor to the lunatic BLAST boasted of having “engineered a new school of verse now known in England, France and America,” and insisted that “when I make a criticism of your son’s work it is not an amateur criticism”? “As to his coming to London,” Pound contended,