Young Eliot (13 page)

Though Tom took part in ‘gymnasium training' with the other boys, his mother was clear he ‘could not participate in football and other such strenuous sports'. He was, she realised, ‘almost the only fellow debarred from football'. She agonised about his ‘physical limitations' and paid careful attention to what the family physician said when he examined Tom's ‘congenital rupture'. By 1905 the doctor thought the condition ‘
superficially
healed, but as the abdominal muscles are weak, care must still be exercised'.
31
Personally as well as professionally, even if perhaps she ‘saw herself as a failure as a teacher', Mrs Eliot cared passionately about bringing up children, and worried about their welfare.
32
Throughout Tom's early teens she was a leading, successful campaigner for the rights of youngsters in the St Louis penal system; by 1903 she had been ‘for a number of years one of the managers of a temporary home for children'.
33
She knew how to influence her family too, encouraging them to continue her preoccupations: her eldest daughter Ada, already a student at Radcliffe during Tom's infancy, was secretary of Boston's Family Welfare Society when Tom started high school. Ada, who had once mouthed sounds to her baby brother, went on to specialise in child welfare issues, winning early in her distinguished social work career the nickname ‘Angel of the Tombs'.
34
Yet, as Mrs Eliot grew increasingly deaf, and as Tom's siblings left home, the frustrated poet who was his mother grew all the closer to her shy, poetry-loving younger son. Sometimes she worried the nature of their closeness might be oppressive for Tom. ‘I talk with him', this strong-willed woman wrote when he was sixteen, ‘as I would with a man, which perhaps is not so good for him as if he had young people about him.'
35

In the early 1930s, a few years after his mother died, and at a time when he had grown familiar with psychoanalysis, Tom remarked to a small audience of American students that the treatment of ‘mother-love' in D. H. Lawrence's
Fantasia of the Unconscious
was ‘better than all the psychoanalysts' had to say on the topic.
36
Lawrence (one of whose ‘conspicuous weakneses', according to Tom, was that he ‘gave his best to his mother') writes of how the middle-aged mother in particular can demand ‘more love' from ‘one who will “understand” her. And as often as not she turns to her son.'
Fantasia of the Unconscious
saw such an engulfing situation as ‘a dynamic
spiritual
incest, more dangerous than sensual incest, because it is more intangible and less instinctively repugnant'. Such circumstances produced ‘introversion' in sons when ‘Child and parent' were ‘intensely linked in adult love-sympathy and love-will', yet the child's developing sexuality, though roused by parental love, could not find adequate expression through the intense parent-child bond and so clashed against it. For Lawrence this state of affairs was bound up with the child's ‘own shame and masturbation, its own cruel, secret sexual excitement and sex
curiosity
 … There is an aversion from the normal coition act. But the craving to feel, to see, to taste, to
know
, mentally in the head, this is insatiable.' To suggest that every detail of Lawrence's argument should be read back into Tom's relationship with his mother would be unfair; but it is striking that he later called attention to this account of ‘mother-love' as especially perceptive. Revealingly, where Lawrence (though he does write about love between a mother and a son) uses the non-gendered expression ‘parent love', Tom substituted ‘mother-love'.
37
The boy whose Mamma fretted over his health, and who shared with her a deep love of poetry, grew up to become the thirty-one-year-old poet who gratefully accepted her offer to make him a new pair of pyjamas: ‘it would seem to keep us nearer together'.
38

Little or nothing is known about sex education or possible instances of homosexuality at Tom's single-sex school, but traditionally Smith Academy did give its boys at the age of twelve or so some instruction in ‘Physiology' through ‘familiar talks'; at home Tom's father's strict views on sex and sex education grew severe as he aged.
39

I do not approve of public instruction in Sexual relations. When I teach my children to avoid the Devil I don't begin by giving them a letter of introduction to him and his crowd. I hope that a cure for Syphilis will never be discovered. It is God's punishment for nastiness. Take it away and there will be more nastiness, and it will be necessary to emasculate our children to keep them clean.
40

Though these sentences date from 1914, they reflect the sexual code Tom's father passed to the boys in what Tom's older brother called ‘such a fanatically conservative family as ours'.
41
Later Tom's brother became conscious of being attracted to girls who seemed exciting but unsuitable; he married late, happily, and had no children. For Tom, shy and sometimes fastidious, his father's attitude to sex was unlikely to relieve any anxiety he may have had about his body, not least when conscious of potential weakness caused by his congenital hernia. Yet photographs of him with his father suggest there was clear physical affection between them. As a couple, Lottie and Hal Eliot had produced seven children. Tom's parents were strict, but hardly sex averse.

On at least one occasion during his Smith Academy years Tom moved beyond parental control. In 1904, rather than staying for the summer at Eastern Point, he headed further north to Quebec. Though in another country (this was his only boyhood trip abroad), he was still in Eliot territory. The previous year his uncle, the Reverend Christopher Rhodes Eliot of Boston, had visited the St Louis Eliots and preached at the Church of the Messiah.
42
Around that time Christopher also bought land on the shore of Canada's Lake Memphremagog. This became the site of a fifty-four-acre family camp, Camp Maple Hill, where everyone slept in tents. At Camp Maple Hill Christopher Eliot's Scottish wife Mary liked to read aloud Walter Scott's ballads, encouraging visitors to join in impromptu songs and amateur theatricals.
43
When Tom went in 1904, it was the camp's first season. His cousin Frederick was there, as were nine women and girls, including several other cousins.

There were trails to mark out on this plot of land, garden ground to plant, even a log cabin to build. This life by shores and forests was a world away from Locust Street, and much more basic than vacationing at Eastern Point. At least one of his cousins noted that it was liberating for Tom to be away from his parents.
44
He went swimming in the lake. He rowed on it. The weather was hot. He took part in an expedition to climb a 3,000-foot mountain from whose summit he could see as far as Mount Washington in the United States and Montreal in Canada.

Something of his excitement can be sensed in a verse letter he sent from this camp to his sister Charlotte. Married the year before to architect George Lawrence Smith, son of a Harvard Classics professor, she seems to have been unwell after the birth of her daughter, Tom's little niece Theodora. ‘Hoping you are better, / At least enough to read my letter', fourteen-year-old Tom tells his sister about his expedition:

We after breakfast took a start,

Four of us, in a two horse cart

Together with a little luncheon,

Including things quite good to munch on …

Part gauche rhyming, part mischievous excitement, this letter exudes fun, though the writer does not seem entirely sure how his sister will receive it. ‘I suppose now I should desist, / For I am needed to assist / In making a raft'.
45

Raft-building was the sort of thing boys did in Captain Mayne Reid's stories. This summer delighted Tom, and at least one aspect of it entered the heart of his mature poetry. His time at Camp Maple Hill explains why the ‘Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop' of
The Waste Land
is accompanied by a note that sounds surprisingly personal as it details, with its reference to Chapman's
Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America
, ‘the hermit-thrush which I have heard in Quebec Province'.
46
Tom here brings together a memory of his time among the lakeside trees with the bird book his mother had given him. Under the surface of the mature poem are memories of relative freedom from his parents as well as a treasured maternal link. A sense both of escape from the constraints of home and of a powerful awareness of ties to his upbringing would condition all Tom's adult life. His first taste of this came in Quebec.

In 1905 he saw Ada married to Alfred D. Sheffield, an instructor at Harvard Preparatory School, Springfield, Massachusetts. The Unitarian marriage ceremony was a quiet one held at the family home in Locust Street. Christopher Eliot presided alongside the Reverend John William Day, who had replaced Reverend Snyder as minister of the Church of the Messiah. A significant figure during Tom's early teens, Day had established himself as a clergyman with marked philosophical concerns, at least some of which Tom would come to share. Day maintained that knowledge was in an important sense relational. He believed that ‘every created thing is part of some larger life than its own. Learning about the world is a process of learning to what things belong. We do not know a thing by knowing that thing alone, we know it by knowing of what it forms a part.' Discussing the way ‘the agnostic attitude … assumes that the part is the whole', this pastor argued for a ‘logic of knowing' which made the ‘valid inference, like the inferences of science' that the part can be related to ‘the whole'. While he spoke up for ‘The profound, indisputable significance of the resurrection of Jesus', Day saw this as affirming ‘a science of the soul, a larger order than the order of birth and death'.
47
This for him was the meaning of Easter. Mixing philosophical rhetoric with invocations of Christ, Day continued his predecessor's custom of making the Unitarian Lent and Easter services a cultural as well as a religious festival. So, for instance, when Tom was eleven, Day preached in the Church of the Messiah at services where members of the St Louis Choral Symphony played, and singers and narrators performed parts of Gounod's ‘Redemption' oratorio.
48
Like Lottie Eliot, this pastor emphasised the importance of those who had suffered for faith: in a sermon on ‘The Cheer of Suffering', delivered when Tom was twelve, he stressed that, ‘In all the bright armory of fame, nothing shines with quite the luster which is reflected from the deeds of those who have been tried as by fire and have not been found wanting.'
49

In a 1901 Easter sermon on ‘Death in Life and Life in Death', the intellectually ambitious Day examined the German philosopher and scientist Ernst Haeckel's thought. Day considered ‘the result of mind and will being concentrated on one kind of reality, so that they lose all sense of every other kind'.
50
Tom's parents regularly took him to church. The boy who listened to this philosophically minded Unitarian preacher later developed into a student who would write on such matters as degrees of reality and who would question in his poetry what was real and ‘Unreal'.
51

While he could never match up to the Reverend William Greenleaf Eliot, the balding, bearded Reverend Day, who championed ‘the survival of the faithful', shared several of Tom's parents' interests, secular as well as religious.
52
Not least, he argued that their Church should play a full part in the 1904 St Louis World's Fair, with aspects of whose planning Hal and Lottie, too, were involved.
53
Like those of the Eliots, Day's cultural loyalties lay with the legacy of New England transcendentalism, and in the spring of 1903 he held an ambitious evening at the Church of the Messiah to celebrate ‘the centennial of the birth of Ralph Waldo Emerson'. At this event, speaking about philosophy, Professor A. O. Lovejoy argued that Emerson's teachings had ‘done much to counteract “the modern disease of personality”'.
54
Tom Eliot would grow up to make fun of Emersonian optimism in his poetry, but he too would present a critique of ‘personality'.

Tom's minister championed Unitarianism precisely because it was ‘a denomination which publishes no authoritaritative declaration of faith' yet represented ‘intellectual and spiritual strength'.
55
Day believed that ‘human nature improves'. Though Tom would come to react strongly against such Unitarian beliefs, aspects of the faith shaped him. Preaching traditional adherence to the Ten Commandments, Day urged his congregation to ‘Condemn our modern idolatries with the law which condemned ancient idol worship.' What he advocated was what Tom and his family generally practised: ‘Reverence, sanctity, honor to parents, respect for life, chastity, honesty, truth and unselfishness'.
56
This was a lot to live up to, but the Eliots were schooled and churched to live up to it. In Tom's sixteenth year the Church of the Messiah celebrated Lent with a concert at which ‘Several numbers were heard for the first time in St Louis, one of the most interesting being the Angels' Chorus from Elgar's “Dream of Gerontius”' with its libretto by the famous English Catholic convert Cardinal Newman.
57
There had been discussion of Elgar's oratorio in St Louis beforehand and given that this performance was one of the highlights of his church's year, Tom was bound to have heard about it. ‘Gerontius' gave him a name that, like other names garnered from St Louis, lingered in his mind. Retuned, it emerged fifteen years later in that geriatric poem-title, ‘Gerontion'.