Young Eliot (29 page)

He was far from the only clever Harvard man excited by Bergson's rhetoric. In a piece in the 1909
Hibbert Journal
(a magazine Tom sometimes read), William James had enthused about the ‘lucidity' of Bergson's style: ‘It seduces you and bribes you to become his disciple. It is a miracle, and he a real magician.' Harvard enthusiasm for Bergson was part (though only part) of what made Tom so keen to reach Paris in 1910. Iconoclastically, this French philosopher challenged the supremacy of the intellect, and the belief ‘that fixity is a nobler and worthier thing than change'. Emphasising the vital ‘flux of life', Bergson, explained James, argued that ‘Thought deals … solely with surfaces. It can name the thickness of reality, but it cannot fathom it.' You must ‘Dive back into the flux itself, then, Bergson tells us, if you want to
know
reality.' With regard to past, present and future as well as other supposedly different categories, Bergson's philosophy in
Matter and Memory
and
Creative Evolution
(both of which Tom read eagerly in French) ‘presents,
as if they were dissolved in each other
, a lot of differents which retrospective conception breaks life's flow by keeping apart'. Like Tom for a time at least, James was captivated. ‘Open Bergson, and new horizons open on every page you read. It is like the breath of the morning and the song of birds. It tells of reality itself, instead of reiterating what dusty-minded professors have written about what other previous professors have thought.'
50
Sitting in Bergson's presence, Tom felt the full force of this almost messianic figure. He experienced a ‘conversion'. It would only be ‘temporary'.
51

By the time he listened to Bergson, his French had improved. He was greatly assisted by a private tutor, recently married Henri Alain-Fournier, the brilliant young writer who lived with his wife at 2 rue Cassini in Montparnasse. To reach their house Tom headed southwards about half a mile along the rue Saint-Jacques. Just two years his senior, Alain-Fournier was at the heart of Parisian literary life. So was his twenty-four-year-old friend and brother-in-law, Jacques Rivière, whom Tom also visited ‘chez lui' (at his home), who had recently begun to write for
La Nouvelle Revue Française
, and who knew Tom's fellow-lodger Verdenal.
52
‘Gauche' Tom had published nothing outside school and student magazines.
53
Yet these young men, virtually his own age, were already writing for leading publications in Paris, a city whose international ‘predominance' in literature was then, he was sure, ‘incontestable'.
54
Observing and listening to them, he learned not just how to improve his French but also how to raise his game.

He eyed not only the internationally-minded
Nouvelle Revue Française
, to which he soon subscribed, but also other journals including the philosophically and socially engaged
Les Cahiers de la Quinzaine
with its stark ‘cover of austere grey paper'.
55
This was a world away from the
Harvard Advocate.
Yet Alain-Fourier, whom he recalled as a ‘quiet-spoken, witty, elegant young man, who spoke with real conviction of his ambition to write a great novel in the tradition of the established French masters', had a combination of ambition, sense of tradition (he made Tom ‘recite passages from the classics' of French literature) and apparent reticence that came close to aspects of Tom's own personality.
56
Tom was given suggestions about what to read: not older French classics, but recent work which, like Laforgue's poetry, helped show this young American writer how he might draw on aspects of what he knew already. ‘When I came first to Paris', he recalled, ‘I first read
Bubu de Montparnasse
.' This relatively little-known novel of slum life by Charles-Louis Philippe became for him ‘a symbol of the Paris of that time' and was admired by Alain-Fournier and Rivière.
57
Around December 1910 when Tom's ‘Fourth Caprice in North Cambridge' became ‘Fourth Caprice in Montparnasse', he had begun (he recalled) to work together some earlier fragments into a poem involving the name ‘Prufrock'. Featuring a walk through run-down urban streets of the sort familiar to him from America, ‘Prufrock's Pervigilium' may feature American-sounding ‘drugstores', but its sense of ‘narrow streets', ‘evil houses' and ‘Women, spilling out of corsets' who ‘stood in entries / Where the draughty gas-jet flickered/ And the oil cloth curled up stairs' owes debts also to Bubu's Paris.
58
Tom's French ‘romantic year' (as he later termed it) was not ‘romantic' in the usual sense.
59
It left us no poetic descriptions of the Eiffel Tower or kisses in the Champs Élysées. Instead, it helped him incorporate into poetry vignettes of a kind of life he had seen in the alleys of America as well as on the lanes of Montparnasse. It helped him, too, to draw less on the ‘romantic' itself than on intense anxieties about it.

Ultimately, Tom became a great poet through learning how to access and articulate unforgettably the wide spectrum of his inner life, his experience and his voracious reading. He learned to face up to and make poetry out of his own hurts, but gave his material a wider resonance through blending it with what he read. Apparently completed in Paris in 1910, the third of his ‘Preludes' carries an epigraph from
Bubu
, and steals Philippe's ‘sordid images', including ‘the yellow soles of feet'.
Bubu
, along with Philippe's
Marie Donadieu
, which Tom read in 1911, also haunts ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night'.
60
That poem features a ‘street-lamp' that ‘sputtered' and ‘muttered', calling attention to an inviting yet intimidating woman of the night, ‘the corner of her eye' twisting ‘like a crooked pin'.
61
Tom missed female company acutely in Paris; though he conversed with women there, he knew none well, and certainly, as he made clear three years later to Aiken, he did not sleep with any of them. Instead, feeling intensely self-conscious, in ‘Paris' he suffered from ‘nervous sexual attacks'.
62
He attempted to ward these off at times with over-compensatory imaginative bravado. Some fragments, later excised from his notebook but apparently penned in late 1910 begin:

There was a jolly tinker came across the sea

With his four and twenty inches hanging to his knee

Chorus
With his long-pronged hongpronged

Underhanded babyfetcher

Hanging to his knee.

Tom might delight in such an imagined sexual epic, but in his less rowdy poems he investigated more anxious aspects of sexuality, psychology and modern life.
63
Completed in March 1911, his ‘Rhapsody', in which ‘the floors of the memory' are made to ‘Dissolve', fuses Bergsonian flux with precise, sometimes sexualised images of nocturnal streets. Its crazy synaesthesia, perhaps drawing on Janet's psychology, ranges far beyond the street lamp that stood outside the Pension Casaubon:

Every street lamp that I pass

Beats like a fatalistic drum

And through the spaces of the dark

The midnight shakes my memory

As a madman shakes a dead geranium.
64

No one had written like that in English before. The geranium was Laforgue's. A sworl of exciting ideas and images surrounded Tom, and he was able to synthesise many of them in startling combinations. Undergirded by all his American reading and experiences, this was the making of him, the making of his style.

Alain-Fournier urged him to read recent French poetry by the Catholic poet Paul Claudel. Also verse by Charles Péguy, as well as prose by André Gide and Dostoevsky. ‘Under his [Alain-Fournier's] instigation', he read
Crime and Punishment
,
The Idiot
and
The Brothers Karamazov
‘in the French translation during the course of that winter'. They ‘profoundly impressed' him, and he ‘had read them all before
Prufrock
was completed'.
65
Sometimes it can seem that all he did in Paris was read. Yet the city showed him how literature and cultural values were intermixed. Such fusion impressed him: ‘in 1910 I remember the camelots cheering the cuirassiers who were sent to disperse them, because they represented the Army, all the time that they were trying to stampede their horses'.
66
This is a reference to a near riot at the Théâtre de l'Odéon, not far from Tom's lodgings, on 3 November 1910 when the young dramatist René Fauchois criticised Racine in a public lecture, and there were street demonstrations by the Camelots du Roi who championed the traditionalist nationalist beliefs of the faction known as L'Action Française. Tom, receiving some informal ‘leçons de philosophie' from Alain-Fournier, read a good deal of the writings of Charles Maurras, anti-Semitic intellectual leader of L'Action Française. Maurras's
L'Avenir de l'Intelligence
was on Tom's 1911 bookshelf.
67

This pessimistic, anti-Romantic work saw literary intellectuals as increasingly enslaved by a sterile capitalist society. To Tom, in flight from America's version of such a society, it spoke compellingly. Its influence (‘l'importante influence') has been traced on
The Waste Land
and elsewhere.
68
During 1913 Maurras would be defined in the
Nouvelle Revue Française
(which had published criticism of his views) as ‘classique, catholique, monarchique'; fifteen years later, Tom used those terms of himself.
69
His interest in Maurras was one of many traits he shared with Jean Verdenal who, a fellow medical student recalled, ‘took a small interest, literary and political in Charles Maurras and his Action Française. He may have been inclined to be monarchist theor[et]ically, but not to take part in this extremist movement.'
70
Verdenal's interest in Maurras was at once thoroughly French, yet also in some ways consonant with Tom's familial conservatism.

Maurras's vision of a great tradition of European culture impressed this young American. He paid tribute to Maurras for much of his life, addressing him later (as his supporters did) as ‘Cher Maître'.
71
He knew Maurras had precious little liking for foreigners (of whom Tom was one) and virulently detested Jews.
72
Deeply attached to what he told Tom were ‘les qualités les plus françaises de subtilité, de grâce et d'héroisme', yet also with a background as an ‘internationaliste', Alain-Fournier borrowed Tom's English-language books. He spoke with him about the novel he was writing,
Le Grand Meaulnes
, a lyrical account of lost youth, a paradisal French milieu and an unattainable woman. Tom, ‘tres jeune et gauche' (very young and gauche), and a person for whom all women were as yet sexually unattainable, was profoundly impressed. He was also conscious that Alain-Fournier had in him an increasing resentment towards Germany.
73
Aided by Alain-Fournier's tuition, Tom's French was improving rapidly. He could read almost non-stop.

By the end of his year in Paris he was being addressed by Alain-Fournier in customary French style as ‘Mon cher ami'.
74
Jean Verdenal used the identical form of address and became an even closer friend. Twenty-year-old Verdenal was a doctor's son from the small, historic medieval city of Pau in the Pyrenees, about thirty miles from the Spanish border. Birthplace of France's King Henry IV, whose fourteenth-century chateau dominated the town, Pau throughout Jean Verdenal's boyhood had been a favourite resort for British, American and other tourists. Thanks to the late-twentieth-century detective work of George Watson and Claudio Perinot, we know Verdenal excelled at school there. Sporty, clever, he had been considered delicate and introverted as a boy. Well read in English and German, he had read Dante in French, learning passages by heart. He loved poetry and, like Tom, had ‘a remarkable knowledge of things cultural'. Surviving books from his library include volumes by Laforgue, Mallarmé, Gide and Claudel, as well as Charles-Louis Philippe's
La mère et l'enfant
, a work Tom read too after Verdenal recommended it. When Verdenal, who had travelled little, came to the French capital as a provincial in his late teens to study medicine at the Sorbonne, he lodged with old family friends, the Casaubons. Gradually he began to love Paris. He attended art exhibitions, plays and concerts; Wagner was an especial favourite. He liked discussing philosophy with fellow lodgers and, like Tom, went to Bergson's lectures. Brought up to be patriotic, he was interested in Maurras, but ‘didn't think of him as a model leader'. Psychology, philosophy and poetry fascinated him; he read William James. Long afterwards, his nephew recalled him as ‘a kind of mystic, not the Saint Catherine type of course, but he did have a strong inner life, a personal spiritual life. He was a profound believer and rather shunned the exterior rites of religion.'
75

This was the man who became Tom's closest friend. Each was haunted by passages in Laforgue, by Bergson, by Wagner, by Maurras. Each combined a serious intellectualism and formality with a wryly amused take on life. Inked in his clear, never florid hand, this young Frenchman's surviving letters to Tom are always signed ‘Jean Verdenal'. Occasionally they contain tiny changes (such as replacing ‘habitude' (custom) with ‘études' (studies)) which suggest a fine sense of verbal nuance; only once, on a scribbled postcard, does he sign himself simply ‘Jean'.
76
If Laforgue, amalgamating improbable materials, was ‘fascinated' (as Tom later remarked) not just by the alluring English governess he married but also ‘by the Kantian pseudo-Buddhism of Schopenhauer', then the student Verdenal could tell Tom about whores' supple busts and a glimpse of shapely leg through the slit of a fashionable split skirt; yet he might also shoot the breeze in a letter mixing almost mystical rhetoric with amusing trivia: