Young Eliot (52 page)

He had, though, found a new job. ‘Mélange Adultère de Tout' presents its speaker as ‘A Londres, un peu banquier' because Tom, now ‘combining the activities of journalist, lecturer, and financier', had started work on 19 March 1917 in the Colonial and Foreign Department of the London headquarters of Lloyds Bank, one of Britain's biggest lending institutions.
52
Previous talk of a job at the
Manchester Guardian
had come to nothing, so a commercial career was an opportunity. Paying £120 a year, the bank position was less remunerative than schoolteaching, but provided better prospects, security of income and a regular routine, even if Tom worried about leaving Vivien (who had been complaining of laryngitis) on her own at home all day. Often on Sundays they dined with her parents in Hampstead, and Tom explained to his mother that it was a friend of Mr and Mrs Haigh-Wood, E. L. Thomas, Chief General Manager of the National Provincial Bank, who ‘gave me an introduction to Lloyds'.
53
He was eager to show his parents that in business as in literature, his decisions and commitments might pay off.

In the financial district, the City, not far from London Bridge, he shared a small office. His colleague, Mr McKnight, who liked to regale Tom with stories about his son, carefully polished his silk hat before stepping outside. Tom sat at a gleaming mahogany desk scrutinising balance sheets of foreign banks, reporting on them, then filing them. A little like his character Appleplex, he transcribed details on to large cards under headings such as ‘Cash in hand' or ‘Correspondents'.
54
Painstakingly investigative, these tasks appealed to the side of him that always enjoyed Sherlock Holmes. To Vivien's surprise he found the work ‘fascinating'; in this, as in his sense of order, authority and (occasionally) rebellion, he was his father's son.
55

The business was notably polylingual. Checking and cross-checking banks' reports, evaluating their activities and solvency in wartime, Tom absorbed texts in French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian. The way
The Waste Land
would flit among an array of different languages is indebted, surely, to his Harvard education, but also to his London bank work. During the day Mr McKnight (on whom, decades later, Tom based the character of Eggerson in
The Confidential Clerk
) told his new colleague about suburban gardening; at night Tom lectured to his students on nineteenth-century literature and received from two of them (‘Both are mad') advice about spiritualism, head colds and astrology.
56
From a metamorphosed version of horticulture (‘“That corpse you planted last year in your garden, / “Has it begun to sprout?”') to a ‘famous clairvoyante' with ‘a bad cold' and a ‘horoscope', details of Tom's Lloyds Bank days and his literary night-school teaching found their way later into
The Waste Land.
Its City workers crowd across London Bridge where the church bell of St Mary Woolnoth ‘kept the hours / With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine' – ‘A phenomenon', Tom wrote, ‘which I have often noticed'.
57
Starting at 9.15 each morning, his office day ran until 5 p.m., though he enjoyed a very English cup of tea at precisely 4 o'clock.

Most lunchtimes, sometimes with Dante's
Inferno
in his pocket, he snatched ‘half an hour in Cheapside' not far from the most famous of all Wren churches, St Paul's Cathedral; or else he wandered closer to the river – ‘la malheureuse Tamise' (the unlucky Thames) as he called it in one of his French poems. Here several pubs were located on or near Lower Thames Street beside the site of the old Billingsgate fish market.
58
Close by, overlooking the Thames and affording panoramic views of the city, stands Wren's Monument to the 1666 Great Fire of London, and another Wren Church, St Magnus Martyr, where each year the Fish Harvest Festival was celebrated. A section Tom marked in his London Baedeker explained that Miles Coverdale, first English translator of the Bible, was buried in St Magnus Martyr; Chaucer ‘the “father of English poetry”' had lived just yards away.
59
On the once adjacent Old London Bridge (eventually demolished in the mid-nineteenth century and replaced by a more modern structure) an ancient chapel had been dedicated to St Thomas à Becket; this chapel had been a staging post for pilgrims, including those in Chaucer's
Canterbury Tales
, heading to Canterbury Cathedral where Thomas was murdered.
60
Tom, a ‘solitary visitor at noon' escaping ‘the dust and tumult of Lombard Street' in an area crisscrossed by narrow alleys, had an eye for such details. He visited many of the churches in this part of London, ticking them off in his Baedeker. In 1921, when there were controversial plans to demolish City churches, he protested vehemently, praising their ‘beauty';
61
in the 1930s he would write his play about Becket,
Murder in the Cathedral.
Since it was almost as popular in nineteenth-century America as in England, probably he had known from childhood the rhyme and dance beginning ‘London Bridge is falling down'. That, too, became part of
The Waste Land
, a poem peculiarly nourished by his time in the City.

As Tom discovered, St Magnus Martyr in Lower Thames Street had been devastated during the Great Fire. Wren rebuilt it. Inside the church's white, columned interior can still be seen the centuries old Benefactors' Board, recording among other things that in 1640 a ‘Mrs Susanna Chambers' had left ‘Twenty-two Shillings and Sixpence', so that a special ‘Sermon' be preached there every 12 February to celebrate ‘God's merciful preservation of the said Church of Saint Magnus from Ruin' after an earlier ‘Terrible Fire on London Bridge'.
62
The church, another memorial records, had been threatened by a further ‘dreadful Fire' in 1760, and when Tom started work in the bank, London was again threatened with conflagration – this time started by German bombing.
63
Among the details of the section of
The Waste Land
called ‘The Fire Sermon' is an account of calmer details familiar to Tom:

Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street,

The pleasant whining of a mandoline

And a clatter and a chatter from within

Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls

Of Magnus Martyr hold

Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.
64

For a poet who had read the Buddha's Fire Sermon in Sanskrit, and who recalled fishmen working at the fishsheds of Gorton and Pew and other businesses in Gloucester, Massachusetts, these London sites had oddly unEnglish resonances. Yet Tom was impressed, too, by their historic associations, even if the modern Thames, with its ‘Oil and tar' was hardly unpolluted.
65
Those sounds in the ‘public bar' and that glimpse of ‘Inexplicable splendour' in St Magnus Martyr are perhaps the most positive moments in
The Waste Land
– remarkable products of Tom's snatched half-hour lunches, and of Mrs Chambers's bequest.

Away from the bank, Tom continued to humour Harvard's Professor Woods, promising him further notes on Aristotle. Occasionally on Thursday nights he attended meetings of the Omega Club, an offshoot of Roger Fry's Omega Workshops design studio at 33 Fitzroy Square. There he sat on a mat ‘(as is the custom in such circles)' exchanging a few words with W. B. Yeats or listening to the novelist Arnold Bennett. Yeats, in whose poetry he continued to show little interest, struck him at this time as willing to talk only about ‘psychical research' and ‘Dublin gossip' – neither of which Tom cared for much. The poet of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' and the poet who was then writing ‘The Wild Swans at Coole' seem to have avoided conversing about poetry. Tom thought Bennett like ‘a successful wholesale grocer' whose accent, very different from the tones of Anglophile Boston and the upper-class ‘Bloomsberries', struck him as unpleasantly ‘Cockney'.
66

Most Saturday afternoons and a good part of Sundays were spent preparing for the coming week's evening lecture. More practised now, he did not script his lectures in full, delivering them instead from notes. Keeping ahead of the class was challenging, but he came to relish his contact with the working-class students, one of whom, a thoughtful grocer, was an astute enthusiast for Ruskin. If some of his listeners amused him, Tom liked to entertain them too. In April he made his predominantly female English audience laugh by reading aloud a passage from Ruskin's
Time and Tide
:

My American friends, of whom one, Charles Eliot Norton, of Cambridge, is the dearest I have in the world, tell me I know nothing about America. It may be so, and they must do me the justice to observe that I, therefore, usually
say
nothing about America. But this much I have said, because the Americans, as a nation, set their trust in liberty and in equality, of which I detest the one, and deny the possibility of the other; and because, also, as a nation they are wholly undesirous of Rest, and incapable of it: irreverent of themselves, both in the present and in the future; discontented with what they are, yet having no ideal of anything which they desire to become.
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Tom suspected Harvard's Charles Eliot Norton was just as ‘crusty' as Ruskin.
68
His evening-class students made him think more about differences between America and England. While ‘not so petrified in snobbism and prejudice as the middle classes', working-class English people had, he decided, a ‘fundamental conservatism'; their American equivalents were often ‘aggressive and insolent'.
69
Politically he regarded himself at this time as ‘Labourite in England, though a conservative at home'.
70
Even taking into account that he made this remark to a fellow American, his use of ‘at home' is revealing. He saw it as sheer ‘snobism' [
sic
] that drove England's middle classes to buy their children private education at what are called in Britain ‘public schools', and felt they lacked respect for true learning. ‘Some day I shall write a book on the English; it is my impression that no one in America knows anything about them. They are in fact very different from ourselves.'
71
In the spring of 1917 reviewing books on American politics quickened his consideration of such differences.

Hoping the war would end, eager to keep in touch with America and finding the world sometimes ‘a complete nightmare', Tom felt he was living through an ‘unreal' era.
72
Though the bombing of London was far less destructive than that of the 1940s Blitz, aerial bombardment was a new, terrifying phenomenon. Geopolitics brought minor as well as major reverberations. No sooner had it been confirmed in March 1917 that Tom's first book would be published in London than the political landscape changed. On 2 April in Washington DC, President Woodrow Wilson addressed Congress, proposing to resist Germany. America declared war four days later. As the horrors of conflict increasingly consumed public attention, it became more and more likely that
Prufrock and Other Observations
might not appear; yet, thanks to Pound's help, Tom had found one of the twentieth century's most remarkable publishers.

Her name was Harriet Shaw Weaver – ‘the Weaver', Tom called her. Determined and distinguished, she was then at the start of her forties. Having grown up, like Vivien, in Hampstead, she came, as Tom did, from a wealthy family with a streak of religiously inflected tenacity. After subscribing to the
Freewoman
, a feminist journal edited by Dora Marsden, Weaver had stepped in as financial backer when newsagents refused to stock it. By 1913, at the suggestion of Pound, who acted as talent scout, the magazine had been retitled the
Egoist
; James Joyce's
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
soon appeared there. When no other publisher would take the risk in 1917 Weaver not only bankrolled Joyce but also set up the Egoist Press at Oakley House in Bloomsbury Street specially to publish his novel. Now, encouraged by Pound and hoping it would not cost more than £15 to produce, she took on
Prufrock and Other Observations
. Shortly afterwards, once the magazine's handsome young assistant editor the poet Richard Aldington had gone off to war, Weaver and Marsden (whom Tom, with the arrogance of a young man, regarded as ‘old maids') hired Prufrock's author to replace Aldington's wife Hilda Doolittle as assistant editor from June.
73
Tom continued full-time at the bank.

Miss Weaver (to whom in 1932 a grateful Tom would dedicate his
Selected Essays
)
was supportive, but it was Pound who encouraged her to take on his friend's book and Tom himself. Pound was sick of attempting to place
Prufrock
with the more traditional Elkin Matthews, based near London's Piccadilly Circus. Matthews fussed about the wartime cost of paper, and the risk; wanted a subvention; prevaricated. Fed up, as Pound explained in a letter to John Quinn in New York, he told Matthews that if his firm would not publish Tom's volume ‘without fuss, someone else would.
The Egoist
is doing it. That is
officially
The Egoist. As a matter of fact I have borrowed the cost of the printing bill (very little) and am being The Egoist. But Eliot don't know it, nor does anyone else save my wife, and Miss Weaver of the Egoist & it is not for public knowledge.'
74
Helped by the Haigh-Woods, then by his outstandingly generous fellow American poet (who had borrowed the money from his wife, Dorothy, and from Harriet Weaver), in the space of a few months Tom had an additional new job, a publisher for his debut collection, and his first editorial position. Vivien, tired and feeling their life was ‘a long scramble', felt he was less irritable and prone to ‘black silent moods' than he had been; but she feared lest now, as an American, he would have to fight. ‘I think he would almost like to', she wrote to his mother, worrying that his ‘highly strung' temperament would take it badly.
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