T. S. Eliot: The Making of an American Poet, 1888-1922 0271026812, 9780271026817
Late in his life T. S. Eliot, when asked if his poetry belonged in the tradition of American literature, replied: "
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English Pages 468 [491] Year 2005
Contents......Page 8
Preface......Page 12
A Note on Sources......Page 18
Introduction......Page 22
1 1888-1906: Origins......Page 30
2 1902-1914: Early Influences......Page 52
3 1906-1911: Harvard: Out From Under......Page 70
4 1906-1910: Harvard Influences: Teachers, Texts, Temptations......Page 100
5 1910-1911: T. S. Eliot in Paris......Page 136
6 1911-1914: Eliot Absorbed in Philosophical Studies......Page 182
7 1914-1915: American Chaos Versus English Tradition......Page 212
8 1915: An Inexplicable Marriage and the Consequences......Page 238
9 1916: Making Do, Finding Means, Expanding Connections......Page 276
10 1917-1918: T. S. Eliot: Banker, Lecturer, Editor, Poet, Almost Soldier......Page 298
11 1919-1920: Up the Ladder, Glimpsing the Top......Page 342
12 1919-1921: Notable Achievements, Domestic Disasters, Intimate Friends......Page 384
13 1922: Over the Top......Page 408
14 A Glance Ahead: The Making of an American Poet......Page 434
References to Works by T. S. Eliot......Page 448
References to Works by Other Authors......Page 452
Index......Page 472
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The Making of an American Poet, 1888–1922
JAMES E. MILLER JR.
The Pennsylvania State University Press University Park, Pennsylvania
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Title-page illustration of T. S. Eliot used by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University (Call no. *AC.El.Zzx Box , env. a). L I B R A R Y O F CO N G R E S S C ATA LO G I N G - I N - P U B L I C AT I O N D ATA
Miller, James Edwin, – T. S. Eliot : the making of an American poet, – / James E. Miller, Jr. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN --- (alk. paper) . Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns), –—Childhood and youth. . Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns), –—Knowledge—United States. . National characteristics, American, in literature. . Poets, American—th century—Biography. I. Title. PS .LZ ´.—dc
Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA - The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of American University Presses. It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. This book is printed on Natures Natural, containing % post-consumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z.–.
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T O K AT H L E E N F A R L E Y
without whose help and support this book would never have been written “Hold on tight”
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[contents]
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xi xvii [] –:
() Eliot’s St. Louis and “The Head of the Family,” ; () Sons and Lovers: Sex and Satan, ; () A Frail Youth, a Bookish Boy, ; () Early Landscapes, Later Poems, [] –:
() Eliot at Fourteen: Atheistical, Despairing, Gloomy, ; () Poetic Beginnings: Merry Friars and Pleading Lovers, ; () Missourian, New Englander: Double Identity, ; () A Soul’s Paralysis: “Denying the Importunity of the Blood,” [] –: :
() Prologue: A Problematic Student, ; () Bohemian Boston at the Turn of the Century, ; () Bohemian Harvard and Isabella Stewart Gardner (“Mrs. Jack”), ; () A Fellow Poet: Conrad Aiken, ; () “A Very Gay Companion”: Harold Peters, ; () Practicing to Be a Poet: From Omar’s Atheism to Laforgue’s Masks, ; () Poems Written –, [] –: : , , Teachers: () Irving Babbitt: Human Imperfectibility, ; () Barrett Wendell: The Inexperience of America, ; () George Santayana: Philosopher of Reason, ; () William Allan Neilson: Poetic Theorist, ; Texts: () Dante and Eliot’s “Persistent Concern with Sex,” ; () Petronius’s Satyricon: A “Serene Unmorality,” ;
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() Symons/Laforgue: The Ironic Mask, ; () Havelock Ellis, “Sexual Inversion,” ; () John Donne: Thought as Experience, ; Temptations: () The Lure of Europe: Brooks’s The Wine of the Puritans, ; () “T. S. Eliot, the Quintessence of Harvard,” [] –: . .
() The Primacy of Paris, –, ; () Jean Verdenal: “Mon Meilleur Ami,” ; () Matthew Prichard: A Blurred Portrait, ; () Henri Bergson: A Brief Conversion, ; () Charles Maurras: The Action Française, ; () Finding the Personal in the Poem: Drafts of “Portrait” and “Prufrock,” ; () Poems Written –, [] –:
() Prologue: The Rise of Harvard’s Philosophy Department and the Santayana Controversy, ; () The Decline and Fall of Harvard Philosophy in Eliot’s Day and After, ; () Eliot and Oriental Philosophies and Religions, ; () Psychology as Philosophical, Religion as Psychological, Mysticism as Magical, ; () Eliot and the Elusive Absolute, ; () Epilogue: The Eliot Controversy, [] –:
() Philosophy in Marburg, War in Europe, ; () London Interlude: Pound and Russell, ; () Oxford, –: Reconsidering Philosophy, ; () New Friends and Old: Culpin, Blanshard, Pound, Lewis, ; () The Mystery of Emily Hale: “The Aspern Papers in Reverse,” [] :
() A Sudden Marriage at the Registry Office, ; () Who Was Vivien? ; () A Flurry of Correspondence, a Day of Decision, ; () An Unhappy Visit Home (Gloucester, July –September ), a Disastrous Honeymoon (Eastbourne, September –), ; () “Bertie” Russell’s “Friendship,” ; () “What I Want Is MONEY!$!£!! We are hard up! War!” ; () Hallucinations, Heavenly and Hellish Poetic Visions: “St. Sebastian” and “St. Narcissus,” ; () Poems Written –, [] : , ,
() “The Most Awful Nightmare of Anxiety”; “Pegasus in Harness,” ; () The Triumph of Poetry over Philosophy, ; () Reviews and Essays, Teaching and Lecturing: Total Immersion, ; () A Widening Circle of Friends and Associates, Writers and Artists,
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[] –: . . : , , , , () Eliot the Banker: March , –November , ; () Eliot the Extension Lecturer, ; () Eliot as Eeldrop, ; () Eliot the Assistant Editor: June –December , ; () Eliot the Poet, ; () America Enters War: April , –Armistice Day, November , , ; () “Writing . . . Again”: The French and Quatrain Poems, ; () Poems Written –, [] –: ,
() Death of a Father, ; () Banking, Teaching, Editing, Writing: Money and Power, ; () Friendships and Relationships: Deeper and Wider, ; () A Voice from the Past;“An Encounter of Titans”; Moving Again, ; () Three New Books: Poetry and Prose, ; () “Gerontion”: Return of Fitzgerald’s Omar, ; () Poems Written –, [] –: , , , () Prologue: Paris and the Pension Casaubon, Paris Again in the Spring, ; () “A Long Poem . . . on my Mind for a Long Time,” ; () A Family Visit: Mother, Brother, Sister—Wife, ; () A Room of One’s Own; Wearing Makeup; Confidante Virginia Woolf, ; () Roommates, “Renowned Pederasts”: Kitchin, Senhouse, Ritchie, [] :
() “The Uranian Muse,” The Waste Land, and “il miglior fabbro,” ; () Publication of The Waste Land, ; () “Out into the World”: The Waste Land Reviewed, ; () Pound’s Financial Scheme for Eliot: “Bel Esprit,” ; () Birth of The Criterion, [] :
() T. S. Eliot and Walt Whitman, ; () An American Poet Discovers His American-ness, . .
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[preface]
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The incubation period of T. S. Eliot: The Making of an American Poet is some thirty years, beginning in the early s, and propelled by the publication of, and response to, my first book on Eliot, T. S. Eliot’s Personal Waste Land: Exorcism of the Demons, in . Since that book is out of print, as a sort of prolegomena to a preface, I propose a brief summary of its genesis, reception, and continuing influence.
A Backward Glance at Eliot’s Personal Waste Land In , when Eliot’s widow Valerie Eliot edited and published the manuscript version under the title T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts, Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound, she placed as an epigraph Eliot’s own statement:“Various critics have done me the honour to interpret the poem in terms of criticism of the contemporary world, have considered it indeed, as an important bit of social criticism. To me it was only the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life; it is just a piece of rhythmical grumbling” (WLF , ). Although the instinct of many readers was to discount this statement, and even to point to the vagueness of its origins (it was quoted by a professor in a lecture, and recorded by Eliot’s older brother, Henry), it is, in fact, quite in keeping with an entire series of such statements made by Eliot in public and for the record. In , in “Thoughts after Lambeth,” Eliot comments: “When I wrote a poem called The Waste Land some of the more approving critics said that I had expressed the ‘disillusionment of a generation,’ which is nonsense. I may have expressed for them their own illusion of being disillusioned, but that did not form part of my intention” (SE , ). When, in his Paris Review interview, Eliot was pressed on this statement, he in effect reaffirmed it: “No, it wasn’t part of my conscious intention. I think that in Thoughts after
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Lambeth, I was speaking of intentions more in a negative than in a positive sense, to say what was not my intention. I wonder what an ‘intention’ means! One wants to get something off one’s chest. One doesn’t know quite what it is that one wants to get off the chest until one’s got it off.” It was later in this same interview that Eliot made this astonishing statement (when asked to compare his two long poems): “By the time of the Four Quartets, I couldn’t have written in the style of The Waste Land. In The Waste Land, I wasn’t even bothering whether I understood what I was saying. These things, however, become easier to people with time. You get used to having The Waste Land, or Ulysses, about” (INT , , ). In his lecture, “Virgil and the Christian World,” Eliot made perhaps his most intriguing statement about The Waste Land without naming the poem:“A poet may believe that he is expressing only his private experience; his lines may be for him only a means of talking about himself without giving himself away; yet for his readers what he has written may come to be the expression both of their own secret feelings and of the exultation or despair of a generation. He need not know what his poetry will come to mean to others; and a prophet need not understand the meaning of his prophetic utterance” (OPP , ). In all of these statements, direct and oblique, about The Waste Land, Eliot emphasized more and more the personal, private matter that went into the poem and his astonishment at the way the poem came to be read as a public statement about the modern world. In the last of the comments quoted above, he has perhaps put his feelings in their most complex language. Could it possibly be that Eliot believed he was expressing only his “private experience” in The Waste Land? That the lines of this most famous poem of the twentieth century were for the author “only a means of talking about himself without giving himself away”? Giving himself away? Giving what away? What was there to conceal? Presumably what nobody had, by the lecture, discovered, or at least discovered and revealed. Could it be that the essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” with its elaborate and tortured “impersonal theory” of poetry, had been a sophistic or sophisticated defense for someone wanting to write poetry “talking about himself without giving himself away”? It is of considerable interest that Cleanth Brooks waited until to reveal that he had sent his essay in manuscript (“The Waste Land: An Analysis,” later titled “The Waste Land: Critique of the Myth”) to Eliot, hoping to get his approval. Brooks had followed F. O. Matthiessen (Matthiessen, –) in assuming that a Rupert Brooke letter had been an important source for some lines of The Waste Land. Eliot replied that he didn’t recollect ever reading the Brooke letter, and added: “but actually this particular
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passage approximates more closely to a recollection of a personal experience of my own than anything else, and indeed is as nearly as I could remember a verbatim report [of the personal experience]” (Brooks, Cleanth, , ). What is the passage in The Waste Land that Eliot described as a “verbatim report” of his “personal experience”? It is the opening lines of The Waste Land. Rupert Brooke described in his letter a friend’s reaction upon hearing that England was at war with Germany. The friend “climbed a hill of gorse, and sat alone, looking at the sea. His mind was full of confused images, and the sense of strain. In answer to the word ‘Germany,’ a train of vague thoughts dragged across his brain. . . . The wide and restful beauty of Munich; the taste of beer; innumerable quiet, glittering cafés; the Ring; the swish of evening air in the face, as one skis down past the pines; a certain angle of the eyes in the face; long nights of drinking and singing and laughter . . . certain friends; some tunes; the quiet length of evening over the Starnbergersee” (Matthiessen, –). Readers familiar with the opening lines of The Waste Land could, like Matthiessen and Brooks, easily believe that this letter was a source for Eliot. But none would be likely to doubt Eliot’s firm statement that the opening lines of The Waste Land were a “verbatim report” of his “personal experience.” And his biography reveals that in , during his academic year in Paris, Eliot did indeed visit Munich and the Starnbergersee nearby. If there was increasing agreement over time that Eliot had reason to call The Waste Land a personal poem, critics were left with the even more baffling question: what is the nature of this personal dimension? The British poet Stephen Spender published his Penguin Modern Masters volume T. S. Eliot in and noted: “Eliot once referred to The Waste Land as an elegy. Whose elegy? His father’s? Jean Verdenal’s—mort aux Dardanelles in the war?” Spender’s book does not identify sources; are we to assume that the remark was made by Eliot to Spender personally? Shortly after this passage, Spender wrote: “‘Death by Water’ crystallizes the hidden elegy that is in The Waste Land—hinted at, as we have seen, in ‘Those are pearls that were his eyes’” (Spender, TSE , , , emphasis added). Although much younger than Eliot, Spender had come to know Eliot in the s, and had included him in his critical work, The Destructive Element: A Study of Modern Writers and Beliefs (). Spender’s personal acquaintance with Eliot and knowledge of his poetry renders it quite plausible that Eliot would comment to him in casual conversation on the elegiac nature of his most famous poem. We might assume that with the publication in of The Waste Land manuscripts, Eliot’s statements about his poem might have challenged reviewers and critics to find out what he meant, to look for clues for the concealed private experience. By and large the commentators on the poem, many
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of them a part of the critical establishment with vested interests in the received “public” reading of The Waste Land, found renewed confirmation of the traditional reading, and expressed their admiration for Ezra Pound’s skill in revising and radically cutting the poem. There were some who made limited gestures to define the personal content of the poem as revealed by the manuscripts, but no very persuasive new reading seemed to emerge from the publication. It was about this time that I came across “A New Interpretation of The Waste Land,” by Canadian professor John Peter, published in the July issue of the British journal Essays in Criticism. Peter analyzed the poem as a dramatic representation of the speaker’s falling in love with a “young man who afterwards met his death” by drowning. The article did not suggest that Eliot was the speaker, nor that he had based his poem on his own experience. But lawyers for Eliot reported to Peter that their client had read his article with “amazement and disgust” and said it was “absurd” and “completely erroneous”; they threatened to bring a lawsuit against Peter and the editor of Essays in Criticism if they did not withdraw and destroy the issue containing it. Peter offered to publish a retraction, but the solicitors were firm in their decision that he should not, perhaps because a published retraction would likely result in more embarrassment to Eliot. Peter and the journal quickly agreed to the withdrawal, and the matter not only seemed to be settled, but disappeared from public view. But, after Eliot’s death in , Peter republished the article together with a long “Postscript” in Essays in Criticism in April , in which he added details of what he frankly asserted was a biographical interpretation: the major identification was that of Phlebas the Phoenician as Jean Verdenal, the friend Eliot met in Paris during his year of study abroad in –. Inspired by Peter’s article, the additional evidence of the facsimile, and Peter’s letter to me that he did not plan to write anew about the matter, I set aside a book I was writing on the American long poem and wrote a short book, mining the Waste Land manuscripts that supported the thesis that the poem was in effect an elegy. I published the book in under the title, T. S. Eliot’s Personal Waste Land: Exorcism of the Demons, and with an epigraph that would reveal the source of the second half of the title: “he is haunted by a demon, a demon against which he feels powerless, because in its first manifestation it has no face, no name, nothing; and the words, the poem he makes, are a kind of form of exorcism of this demon” (OPP , ). The source of these lines is Eliot’s “The Three Voices of Poetry,” which is given the date in Eliot’s volume On Poetry and Poets. T. S. Eliot’s Personal Waste Land provoked harsh criticism. Writing in the
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Times Literary Supplement of October , , Christopher Butler denounced “the homosexual interpretation of Eliot’s life and work.” Several reviewers felt that the book was persuasive. For example, in The New York Times Book Review, April , , Robert Langbaum wrote: “By reminding us of the young Eliot’s anguish, Miller’s book serves as a corrective to the monumental figure Eliot cut in his later years,” but noted that “a responsible biography” would have to be based on further information, especially an edition of the letters. More than a generation later, the academic context for discussing the homoerotic aspects of literary works had been transformed, almost beyond recognition. The growth of scholarly interest in gay themes has broadened and deepened our understanding of what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has suggestively called “the epistemology of the closet.” Wayne Koestenbaum in Double Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration () is but one of the many studies that have built on my reading of Eliot in T. S. Eliot’s Personal Waste Land.
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[a note on sources]
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The main thrust of my book was not Eliot’s life but his poetry, exploring ways in which the fragmentary details shaped and illuminated the poems. My reinterpretation of The Waste Land was not dependent on biographical reconstruction and thus the firm establishment of the full facts of Eliot’s early life was unnecessary. Since then, The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume One, –, edited by Valerie Eliot, was published in . Eliot’s widow arranged the correspondence chronologically up through , covering some pages, promising another volume in , which has not yet appeared. The letters in Volume are incomplete because, as the editor of his letters writes in the volume’s introduction,“On the deaths of his mother and brother, in and , recovered his correspondence with them and burnt a good part of it, together with their side, thus removing the family record of his final school year [at Milton Academy in Massachusetts], his student days at Harvard and the period in Paris” (LTSE , xv). In short, letters written during the first twenty-six years of his life (up to ) as well as letters to him from family members were destroyed. Two sketchy “biographies” had appeared in the early seventies: Robert Sencourt’s T. S. Eliot: A Memoir () and T. S. Matthews’s Great Tom: Notes Towards the Definition of T. S. Eliot (). But they did not have permission from Valerie Eliot for use of letters and other manuscript materials. The first groundbreaking biographical volume to appear making full use of unpublished letters and private papers was Eliot’s Early Years () by Lyndall Gordon. In , Peter Ackroyd, who also had access to unpublished materials, produced his engaging and important T. S. Eliot. Gordon’s second volume, Eliot’s New Life, appeared in . And in , Gordon revised and combined her two volumes, publishing the magisterial T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life. In Carole Seymour-Jones, also drawing on much unpublished material, published a life of Eliot’s first wife, entitled Painted Shadow: A Life of Vivienne Eliot.
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In the writing of my biography, I have drawn from the archival materials in Gordon, Ackroyd, and Seymour-Jones. Not a conventional biography, my book is rather a supplement and complement to these works. It might be called a biographical interpretation. Over the years, more and more Eliot critics became convinced that indeed Eliot’s poetry was a personal poetry, but the view did not bring about specific agreement as to how to read—or analyze—his personal poems. As for the several biographies that have been published, nearly all of them have been by British writers who, though skillful biographers, have tended to write skimpily about Eliot’s American years— his first twenty-six years, excepting his – year in Paris. I decided that I would write a biography (perhaps the first volume of a full biography) that would emphasize these formative years, covering Eliot’s early life in St. Louis on the Mississippi River, his summering in New England, his education at Harvard (with a year in Paris), and his final settling in London, through the period of his writing and publishing The Waste Land and establishing his little magazine, The Criterion—i.e., through . Three books by Douglass Shand-Tucci have provided fresh material and insight into the goings-on at Harvard, Cambridge, and Boston in the years shortly before Eliot arrived—goings-on that would have been much the same in the first decade of the twentieth century. The first of these is entitled Boston Bohemia, – (), the second is The Art of Scandal: The Life and Times of Isabella Stewart Gardner (), and the third is The Crimson Letter: Harvard, Homosexuality, and the Shaping of American Culture (). In the last of these, T. S. Eliot becomes something of a leading character. In short, these books must be factored into any imaginative re-creation of Eliot’s college years. Especially rich resources from Eliot’s London years are the works of Virginia Woolf, particularly The Diary of Virginia Woolf, edited by Anne Olivier Bell, and The Letters of Virginia Woolf, edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, both in several volumes. A number of biographies have proved important sources for Eliot’s life and his acquaintances, but one is particularly valuable: Michael Holroyd’s Lytton Strachey: The New Biography (). Holroyd published his first biography of Strachey in the s, and various revisions appeared in subsequent years. The version, some pages in length, has to be the definitive biography of this fascinating rebel and it reveals that many individuals who figured in Strachey’s life also figured in Eliot’s. Michael Hastings’s play Tom and Viv () has become a primary source for Eliot scholars because of Hastings’s meticulous research, particularly his many interviews with Vivien’s brother Maurice Haigh-Wood before writing it. The interviews took place over five months in , when Maurice was
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eighty-six. He was clearly a primary source of information about its two main characters. I have drawn on the play as well as Hastings’s long introduction. As for Eliot’s poetry beginning as a boy through , I have tracked down all the poems and read and used them when called for in my biography. A signal event occurred in with the publication of Inventions of the March Hare: Poems –, edited by Christopher Ricks. That edition made easily available for the first time Eliot’s early, unpublished manuscripts of the Notebook poems, including poems Eliot had withheld from publication. I have also found useful John T. Mayer’s T. S. Eliot’s Silent Voices (), from which I have frequently quoted readings or interpretations of individual poems. Chapters , , , , and all conclude with sections on Eliot’s poetry as well as lists and sources for all of Eliot’s poems written and/or published during each period. Readers interested in finding and reading any of Eliot’s poems of this period should consult the appropriate list. More recent Eliot scholarship has turned to an examination of his American roots. I must mention another of Ronald Bush’s important additions to the body of Eliot criticism:“Nathaniel Hawthorne and T. S. Eliot’s American Connection” (Southern Review, ). Eric Sigg’s The American T. S. Eliot: A Study of the Early Writings places Eliot in an American aesthetic tradition; I have profited from his essay “Eliot as a Product of America.” Lee Oser explores the American dimension in T. S. Eliot and American Poetry (). Manju Jain’s T. S. Eliot and American Philosophy: The Harvard Years () is an impressively researched book about the shaping of Eliot by his Harvard professors and the courses he took under them. I have relied on Ronald Schuchard’s Eliot’s Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art (), especially chapter , “In the Lecture Halls,” focusing on the extension courses Eliot gave in London from into , and including syllabi, reading lists, term paper topics, and so forth—all valuable in revealing Eliot’s views and understanding of the authors he had read and taught. In the s there began to appear a number of books exploring the relation of literary works to gender studies and to what has been dubbed “queer theory.” In , for example, Colleen Lamos explored erotic themes in Deviant Modernism: Sexual and Textual Errancy in T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust. George Chauncey’s Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, – () does not feature T. S. Eliot, but it explores a subject matter that is highly relevant to my understanding of Eliot. If I were to express my appreciation for all the authors that have helped me write this biography, I would have to devote all my pages to that task.
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However, special notice must go to James F. Loucks, compiler of “The Exile’s Return: Fragment of a T. S. Eliot Chronology,” with whom I carried on a long e-mail conversation and who provided me with leads, information, and encouragement. In my text, I have cited all works I have quoted and summarized, and I now express my gratitude to the authors of all of them. I want to thank Peter Potter, Cherene Holland, Patty Mitchell, Steve Kress, Jennifer Norton, and all those at Penn State Press who have guided the manuscript through the stages of production—and also Jennifer Smith and Diana Witt. Many helped to make the book better; its flaws are those of the author alone.
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[ introduction]
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Randall Jarrell (–), poet, novelist, critic, served in the Air Force in World War and attracted attention with the publication in of his volume of vivid but bitter war poems. Now largely forgotten, during his life he published a great deal of both poetry and prose, but ultimately it was as a critic that he had the greatest influence. In his essay entitled “Fifty Years of American Poetry,” first delivered as a lecture in , he said of T. S. Eliot: “Won’t the future say to us in helpless astonishment: ‘But did you actually believe that all those things about objective correlatives, classicism, the tradition, applied to his poetry? Surely you must have seen that he was one of the most subjective and daemonic poets who ever lived, the victim and helpless beneficiary of his own inexorable compulsions, obsessions? From a psychoanalytical point of view he was far and away the most interesting poet of your Century. But for you, of course, after the first few years, his poetry existed undersea, thousands of feet below the deluge of exegesis, explication, source listing, scholarship, and criticism that overwhelmed it. And yet how bravely and personally it survived, its eyes neither coral nor mother-of-Pearl but plainly human, full of human anguish!” ( Jarrell, –). The essay remains an excellent brief account of the American poetic renaissance that began in and lasted some fifty years, producing such remarkable poets as Robert Frost,Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound,William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and John Crowe Ransom. Jarrell devoted a few paragraphs in his essay to these and other poets, bestowing both praise and blame. When he came to Eliot, he remarked: “And then there is Eliot. During the last thirty or forty years Eliot has been so much the most famous and influential of American poets that it seems almost absurd to write about him, especially when everybody else already has” (). Jarrell then wrote the words recorded above. In that passage, he assumed the voice of some future critic who is looking back at how the critical establishment reacted to the complex poetry of T. S. Eliot, generally adopting some approach to poetry
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that Eliot himself had set forth in his multitude of essays. It is a bit of prophecy that was to be fulfilled only after the passage of another half-century, when the leading Eliot critics and biographers revealed that they regarded Eliot’s poems as personal poems, written out of and about his personal experiences—physical, mental, and emotional. I had originally wanted to entitle my book T. S. Eliot’s Uranian Muse: The Making of an American Poet, –, because I had in mind a particular definition of the unusual word “Uranian” that comes from a special poem written by Eliot’s friend and mentor, Ezra Pound, on a very memorable occasion. Pound had just finished his resurrection of a long poem from its premature burial in a mass of Waste Land manuscripts that Eliot had in frustration brought to him. The poem was entitled “Sage Homme” and was contained in a letter to Eliot ( January , ). In it, Pound characterizes Eliot’s poems as begotten by “the Uranian Muse,” with a “Man” for a “Mother” and a “Muse” for a “Sire.” The “printed Infancies” resulted from “Nuptials . . . doubly difficult” because “Ezra performed the caesarean Operation” (LTSE , ). In effect, Pound is invoking the “Uranian muse” because Eliot’s poem was born by the union of two males, Eliot and Pound.“Uranian” was, in the early part of the twentieth century, in competition with other words to refer to same-sex love. Pound’s poem is ambiguous, and no doubt intentionally so. At some deep level it reflects his response to the images of sexuality abundant in the Waste Land manuscripts. Of course, Pound never placed this private and intimately personal poem among his published poems (although it did appear in part in his volume of Letters). But more important, my book combines an American account of the life and times of T. S. Eliot together with a comprehensive survey of the poetry he wrote from his first poems in through , with the appearance of The Waste Land. It is only natural that, since Eliot began living in England in his twenty-sixth year and became a British citizen in the late s, most of the biographies of Eliot have been written by British scholars. But as it is universally agreed that the early years of a poet’s life are the most important in shaping his or her imagination, I set about writing this biography by focusing on his life in the city where he was born and went to his first schools, St. Louis, Missouri, and following him in the summers when he vacationed with his family in their Gloucester, Massachusetts, home perched on the Atlantic Ocean’s edge. And I remained in pursuit of him when he finally came out from under the immediate presence of his family and was, in at the age of seventeen, on his own for one year at Milton Academy near Boston, and then from until at Harvard, first in undergraduate work and then in graduate work in philosophy—with the extraordinarily
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important exception of the year –, which he spent studying in Paris. I have attempted to deal, fully and frankly, with all aspects of his personal and public life, examining in detail his physical, intellectual, spiritual, imaginative, creative, and sexual growth—with special attention to relationships and friendships as well as beliefs, views, and opinions. And I have scrutinized (and utilized) Eliot’s poetry throughout my book, with some sections devoted fully to the most revealingly personal—and impressive—poems. These passages are aimed not only at explication and evaluation of individual poems, but also and primarily at mining them for whatever biographical information might be buried in them. We are told by Eliot that he knew exactly when and why he decided to become a poet. At the age of fourteen, in , Eliot came across a copy of Edward Fitzgerald’s free translation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám and it in effect took over his imagination. This influence affected his personal life deeply (about which more later), but of most importance he was inspired to set about writing verses of his own, most of which he later destroyed. But we accept the date of his birth as a poet as , although the number of poems that survived during these very early years is scant. And we follow his development as a poet through , the climactic year of the appearance of The Waste Land, which (as the preface indicates) is analyzed in my first Eliot book, T. S. Eliot’s Personal Waste Land: Exorcism of the Demons (). To clarify the value of a fresh approach to the intertwining of Eliot’s life and work in this formative period, consider several passages from Eliot’s prose in which, I believe, he reveals in condensed form his approach to the writing of poetry. The first of these comes from a letter to his Harvard friend, Conrad Aiken ( January , ). In this letter Eliot opens with an explanation of why he has been too busy to write first by listing all of the problems in his life: He is teaching, rewriting his thesis, has a sick wife and financial worries, his “friend Jean Verdenal has been killed,” conscription for military service is near and his “putative publisher will probably be conscripted,” and “we are very blue about the war” and “living is going up. . . .” He then bursts into poetry: “King Bolo’s big black bassturd kween / That airy fairy hairy un / She led the dance on Golder’s Green / With Cardinal Bessarian // . . . King Bolo’s big black bassturd kween / Her taste was kalm and classic / And as for anything obscene / She said it made her ass sick // . . . . King Bolo’s big black bassturd kween / Was awf ’ly sweet and pure / She said ‘I don’t know what you mean!’ / When the chaplain whistled to her” (LTSE , –). At the time he wrote these lines, we now know, Eliot had displeased his mother and angered his father by marrying his first wife, Vivien, and then
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choosing to pursue a literary career in England rather than an academic career teaching philosophy in America. His father had refused to finance his son beyond the small allowance he had given him to supplement his Harvard fellowship for his supposed “one-year” (–) of study abroad. In order to get out of graduate classes at Oxford and into the literary scene in London, Eliot turned down Harvard’s offer of a renewal of his fellowship. Thus he was left with his father’s meager subsidy. He was forced, therefore, during his second year in England, to take whatever jobs he could get to cover living expenses for him and his new wife. When he broke into his bawdy verses (about “King Bolo’s kween”) to his college friend who had heard them before, it was like breaking into a nervous laugh after describing some near-tragic experience. Clearly Eliot had suffered mightily given all that he had been through in , but the revelatory lines in his letter came later: “I hope to write, when I have more detachment. But I am having a wonderful life nevertheless. I have lived through material for a score of long poems, in the last six months. An entirely different life from that I looked forward to two years ago” (). It is astonishing to hear Eliot describing his dire situation as a “wonderful life.” The critical words here, however, are “I have lived through material for a score of long poems”; and it is surely the acquiring of this vital “material” (“lived through,” not imagined) for poems that turned the desperate years into fruitful ones for Eliot. Important elements of that material are his troubled marriage with Vivien, Vivien’s various illnesses, the death and loss of his Paris friend, Jean Verdenal. Now consider a second passage that comes from one of Eliot’s letters to John Hayward when Eliot was trying to find a way of improving the last of the Four Quartets, “Little Gidding,” first published in . Eliot wrote to Hayward that he was “particularly unhappy about Part [which contains the lines about the ‘familiar compound ghost’],” and believed that it required “some sharpening of personal poignancy.” Eliot then added: “The defect of the whole poem, I feel, is the lack of some acute personal reminiscence (never to be explicated, of course, but to give power from well below the surface) and I can perhaps supply this in Part ” (quoted in Gardner, CFQ , ). These are only two of many such passages that convinced me that Eliot’s poems were all meant to be personal poems, written out of a great intensity of passion and feeling that had been aroused by some “acute personal reminiscence.” Lying deep beneath the surface, this “reminiscence” is, says Eliot, “never to be explicated.” Many critics would question whether it is possible that such power or effect can have a source that is never revealed, either by the poet or the reader.
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Not long after writing the letter to Conrad Aiken quoted above ( January , ) exulting in personal experiences that would furnish him material for his poetry, Eliot published the essay famous for its introduction of a “theory of impersonal poetry,” entitled “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” It was published in two parts in the September and December issues of the Egoist, a little magazine Eliot was helping to edit. In some three years, after telling his friend Conrad Aiken that he had “lived through material for a score of long poems,” we find Eliot inventing this theory of poetry, in which he formulates his method for using not the biographical data of these experiences but rather the emotions evoked by them for the writing of poems. The essay was to become the first in the initial volume of Eliot’s essays, The Sacred Wood, published in , and remained in this prime position in his Selected Essays throughout Eliot’s career. It concludes with a highly significant comment:“Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things” (SE , , ). Here Eliot seems to be admitting that the “lived through” experiences he wrote to Aiken about could not, by their very nature, be the direct subject of his poems—as they would reveal too much about him, and his strangely mixed-up sexual feelings, i.e., distaste for a wife he seems never to have loved and passion for a friend killed in the Great War. He was no doubt aware of the reaction, or ambivalent response, to the poetry of comradeship written by the soldiers of that war, especially those whose companions (or “mates”) were killed in the terrible and seemingly endless trench warfare—as, for example, Siegfried Sassoon (–) and Rupert Brooke (–). But Eliot never denies that “personality” and “emotion” have played a formative role in his poetics. On the contrary: To admit that poetry might “represent an escape from personality” is to confess that “personality” plays a large, if hidden, role in its composition. Kristian Smidt, whose book Poetry and Belief in the Work of T. S. Eliot was first published in English in and appeared originally in Norwegian in , wrote to Eliot enquiring as to the identity of the companion accompanying the title character in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Eliot wrote in his letter of reply: “As for ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ anything I say now must be somewhat conjectural, as it was written so long ago that my memory may deceive me; but I am prepared to assert that the ‘you’ in ‘The Love Song’ is merely some friend or companion, presumably of the male sex, whom the speaker is at that moment addressing, and that it has no emotional content whatever” (quoted in Smidt, ). This somewhat
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ambiguous comment, with what appears to be a defensive conclusion, needs to be placed beside another comment that Eliot made about “Prufrock” later in a interview in Granite Review. There he said that “‘Prufrock’ was partly a dramatic creation of a man of about . . . and partly an expression of feeling of my own. . . . I always feel that dramatic characters who seem living creations have something of the author in them” (quoted in Bush, TSESCS , –). Accepting all of these passages stressing Eliot’s murky or hidden presence in his poems as embodying his basic approach to poetic composition, I have tried to discover all of the various layers of meaning in the poems I analyze, as well as the personal “lived through material” underneath. But since, some years back, I was educated in literature classes devoted to the “new criticism,” which attempted to divorce the work from the author, I have inevitably also tended to read a given poem as a work that stands alone, with a meaning independent from its relationship to a particular author. In this book, I have focused on the events of Eliot’s life, and whether minor or major, I have tried to concentrate on those elements that shaped Eliot into what he became. An early example is the book written by his grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot (who died shortly before Eliot was born), entitled Lectures to Young Men—a book heretofore overlooked. It was widely circulated by the Young Men’s Christian Association, and in it are to be found severe warnings about drinking alcohol, which results in “lust” and the “lewd and lavish act of sin”—the violation of a woman’s purity. It was perhaps strictures like this that led Eliot to become an avid fan of Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It not only inspired Eliot to begin the writing of poetry, but clearly in its celebration of drinking and the other pleasures of life, particularly physical, caused Eliot to become (as he affirmed) “atheistical, despairing, gloomy” (see Chapter , Section ). In effect he found himself to be an American Omar. Unfortunately, Eliot destroyed the first poems that he wrote under Fitzgerald’s/ Omar’s influence, but the influence continued for the next ten years—as he remarked repeatedly throughout his later years. As an undergraduate at Harvard, Eliot deepened his rebellion against his family’s religiosity by associating with the Boston Bohemians, and particularly those who revolved around Isabella Stewart Gardner (Mrs. Jack), whose Boston house and museum became a center for those who were devoted to unconventional lifestyles and behavior. Eliot had a wider acquaintance of Mrs. Jack’s followers than has heretofore been realized. And it should be no surprise that, when Eliot settled in London, he chose to become associated with the Bloomsbury Group, including Virginia and Leonard Woolf, the
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Strachey family (especially Lytton), John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster, and others who were in some sense the British counterparts of Mrs. Jack’s intellectual and sexual rebels. In this work I have attempted to present a narrative of Eliot’s life, essentially chronological, with necessary digressions to examine influences on him during crucial phases in his intellectual development, such as Henri Bergson and Havelock Ellis. Bertrand Russell’s role in the married life of the Eliots is given close examination. Among other things, I have also attempted to detail the interdepartmental politics of the Harvard Philosophy Department at the time Eliot was there. In sum, my table of contents reveals the subjects treated as well as the structure of the work, and it provides an accessible index or, as one reader has said, a “bookmark” into the book. When I was beginning work on this biography of Eliot some years ago, I was invited to teach American literature at the