Young Eliot (66 page)

‘Xmas is awful,
awful
', wrote Vivien, but they had a small tree and, as usual, in a consolingly childlike way, they hung up their stockings.
159
Cheques – and ‘beautifully made' pyjamas – arrived from Tom's mother whom Vivien hoped might come and visit them in ‘
April
' which she regarded as ‘just in time for the most beautiful time of the year in England'.
160
After Christmas lunch at home, she and Tom went on to Christmas dinner with her parents. Perhaps enthused by the rhythms of the Southern Syncopated Orchestra, she took along a gramophone, but felt the evening was ‘not a very nice' one.
161
All Boxing Day, it poured with rain. Vivien ventured to the Schiffs for tea; but she and Tom would spend the next few days apart: he had accepted, but she had turned down, an invitation to visit his friend Sydney Waterlow, to whom he felt obligated and who was now ‘a very important official in the Foreign Office'. Tom realised Vivien was sleeping ‘very badly'.
162
She felt ‘most wretched, & fearfully tired'.
163
They had the chance to rent out the Marlow house, but she was determined they should hang on to it, associating it with a dream of happiness that seemed lost, for the moment at least. On 30 December, now that Tom was back from Waterlow's, they went together to a ‘very drunken & rowdy' dinner party at the Hutchinsons. The sexually voracious Nancy Cunard, the beautiful young poet and model Iris Tree, Osbert Sitwell, painter Duncan Grant and others were there, but Vivien, worried she looked unwell, did not enjoy it. Her father was ill; she feared he might die: another ailing old man. ‘Glad this awful year is over', reads her diary entry for 31 December. ‘Next probably worse'.
164

 

14

Professional

I
N
1920 Tom's annual salary was £500 – a good income for a professional in his early thirties. On 6 January, when he informed his mother he had just been given a pay rise,
The Times
advertised a vacancy for a fully qualified ‘clinical pathologist' of comparable age, which paid £600.
1
Including reviewing and other activities, Tom probably earned around that sum. Nevertheless, writing a cheque that day for a £14 dentist's bill, he felt, as so often, that he was not making quite enough to be able to look after Vivien, to maintain his position in society and to buy himself time sufficient for the work – not least the poetry – that he most wanted to create.

Generally he wrote ‘in the evenings and Sundays'.
2
On weekdays in his Information Department, he collated economic data from several areas of the English-speaking world and Europe. He was expected to understand economics and as many European languages as necessary. Facts and figures impressed him: ‘England and Germany use the most sulphuric acid.'
3
His limited knowledge of industrial chemistry was not great, but did make its mark on ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent'. As he won the respect of his bosses at Lloyds, in the wake of the Treaty of Versailles they put him ‘in charge of settling all the pre-War Debts between the Bank and the Germans'. This, he informed his mother, was ‘an important appointment'.
4
‘Occupied', as he recalled, ‘in a humble capacity, with the application of some of the minor financial clauses' of the Treaty of Versailles, he read Keynes's
Economic Consequences of the Peace
, which dealt with social psychology as well as economics.
5
Quoting poetry as well as statistics, Keynes (whom Tom met at Garsington) set forth his view of ‘ruin', of ‘the fearful convulsions of a dying civilization', of ‘nightmare' and the ‘morbid'. War debts were ‘a menace to financial stability everywhere'. The peace was flawed; the book's conclusion quotes Shelley's
Prometheus Unbound
: ‘In each human heart terror survives / The ruin it has gorged'.
6
For Tom, as for the polymathic Keynes (a generous supporter of artists and writers), poetry and banking were instructively and darkly aligned.

Lacking formal commercial or legal qualifications, though aided by assistants, Tom had to weigh up complex economic issues. He produced financial reviews; he made digests; generating substantial correspondence, he got used to having a secretary. Office personnel changed repeatedly. One of his early clerical assistants, a military officer's wife called Mrs Lord, ‘had no knowledge of shorthand and had some difficulty in reading her own handwriting' with the result that she ‘occasionally pied the correspondence'. Another secretary, Miss Holt, was the sister of twin boys whom Tom had taught at Highgate School: ‘She came to me to weep', he recalled of this typist. Before long, in
The Waste Land
, he would present a figure who has become the most famous typist in English literature. He liked to observe his professional colleagues – whether Mr Saunders, who enjoyed a ‘matitudinal visit to Short's Wine Rooms in Pope's Head Alley', or Mr Crewdon, ‘a real swell who had been to Uppingham and King's College Cambridge' – but the customers interested him too.
7
Meeting former millhand Sir James Roberts, whose clothing business at Saltaire outside Bradford in Yorkshire had been damaged by the financial consequences of the Russian Revolution, Tom was impressed. Sir James, who had known the Brontës in Haworth, was then in his seventies and so hardly the model for the young ‘carbuncular' clerk who forces himself on
The Waste Land
's typist, but he did provide the impetus for those unsettling lines: ‘One of the low on whom assurance sits / As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire'.
8
Every inch the businessman's son, in white shirt, dark tie and three-piece suit, Tom acted the banker with aplomb, and was respected for it. Yet, eyeing some of his richer friends who enjoyed freer lifestyles, he confided to Lady Ottoline that ‘So very few of one's acquaintance realise what it means to have sold the whole of all of one's days, – except at most a month a year – and old age – to a huge impersonal thing like a Bank.'
9

Bankerly professionalism carried over into his literary dealings too, and sometimes into domestic life. He contained elements of calculating ruthlessness that young poets – not least male ones – often possess. His work for the
Athenaeum
and his
Egoist
editorial activities overlay his earlier experience at the
Harvard Advocate.
Thoroughly familiar with how journals operated, he knew about reviewing from the reviewer's side as well as from the perspectives of author and publisher. He could boost his income by critiquing the same book for two paying periodicals. Professionally he became one of the best networked younger figures in London literary publishing. J. C. Squire had tried to court him to write for the new
London Mercury
. Politely Tom declined; he thought its editorial standards too low. Squire might be ‘the cleverest journalist in London', but ‘he knows nothing about poetry'.
10
As far as possible, Tom wanted to associate only with people whose professional judgement he trusted. He was more favourably disposed when during January 1920 publisher John Rodker sounded him out about becoming a ‘Director' for a ‘scheme' he was hatching; at around the same time he was visited by Lincoln McVeagh, a former Harvard student now working with Scofield Thayer at the New York
Dial
, to see if Tom would help secure work from English writers.

Though he introduced McVeagh to Murry, Tom was wary; he didn't want to solicit work from friends, only to find they were not treated with professional courtesy by the
Dial
. So, mixing helpfulness with a certain bossiness and signing himself ‘Yours ever, Tom', he wrote direct to Thayer, advising him to come and hire ‘a person of discrimination and intimate knowledge of London letters' to commission material ‘on the spot'. Thayer might have thought Tom just such a person. However, matters were finessed by John Quinn and others so that Ezra Pound was made ‘agent' at a salary of $750 (then worth about £200) per annum. Slyly, Thayer, who had met Pound and knew his name might disconcert people, kept it off the
Dial
's notepaper.
11

In March, Tom, who had already used his ‘influence to get [Wyndham] Lewis into the
Athenaeum
', seems to have wangled Pound's appointment by Murry as that journal's theatre critic; fed up with England, Pound was spending much of his time in France, so this arrangement was short-lived and not entirely friction-free.
12
Conscious that ‘Pound's lack of tact has done him great harm', Tom made sure to deploy manners, tenacity and skill to avoid antagonising influential people, whatever he thought of them. Socialising with minor poets including Osbert Sitwell, four years his junior, he was well aware Sitwell produced ‘rather clever imitations of myself'.
13
Observing English society with a foreigner's amusement, he explained to his mother that on 24 February he had dined at the Woolfs' home with Sydney Waterlow, ‘Lord Robert Cecil's right hand man' – ‘very pompous and smokes cigars'. On Saturday he responded to Sir Algernon Methuen's invitation to have a volume considered for publication.
14
Though the Egoist Press had already announced that they would be publishing Tom's essays, this was a better offer, and he accepted it.
15

Essay-writing consumed a good deal of his time. Occasionally he contributed to Sydney Schiff's favoured
Art and Letters
; he sent a much revised ‘Brief Treatise on the Criticism of Poetry' to Monro's
Chapbook
; he went on writing, provocatively, for the
Athenaeum
, suggesting William Blake with his ‘peculiarly terrifying' honesty was no mere ‘wild pet for the supercultivated', and examining why, in the age of ‘Mr. James Joyce or Mr. Joseph Conrad', Swinburne's verse was ‘no longer' enjoyed. Provocatively, he mocked the ‘Civilized Class' for their failure to support performances of plays by Dryden, Webster and other classic English dramatists revived by London's Phoenix Society – a group whose work he championed.
16
All this writing was insightful, and often commandingly professional. For the critic, Tom stated later that year, ‘there is no method except to be very intelligent'.
17
Such crisp judgements indicate an authoritative confidence accompanying his sense of being grounded in the art he professed: ‘all the best criticism of poetry is the criticism of poets'.
18
His earnest professionalism, his literary socialising and his telling his mother how very busy he was established a pattern which became second nature: using professional obligations to cover up deeper troubles.

There were hints of sadness in verses he quoted. He recalled for their ‘beauty' in January 1920 lines of Shelley he had known since boyhood, and that came to haunt him with their melancholy:

Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,

Are heaped for the beloved's bed;

And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,

Love itself shall slumber on.
19

It was now over five years since he had asked Aiken to buy roses for Emily Hale, but considerably later when Tom was well into his forties and had visited an English garden with her, those lines came back to him; they help explain why it is not roses but ‘rose-leaves' which lie under dust as he ruminates in ‘Burnt Norton' on lost possibilities.
20
In early 1920 as an example of Blake's ‘naked vision', he quoted a stanza about an unhappy love match:

Love seeketh only self to please,

To bind another to its delight,

Joys in another's loss of ease,

And builds a Hell in Heaven's despite.
21

Yet there were also moments of affection and respite. Early in the year, one Sunday morning he joined Vivien and one of her women friends for a ‘dancing practice'.
22
Both Eliots still enjoyed dancing. He knew they appeared an odd couple, if not to casual observers then certainly to the folks of Bloomsbury and Garsington whose sex lives made their own seem tame. ‘I live', Tom explained to Henry in March, ‘among a set of people some of whom would probably shock your friends (all of them) terribly by varieties of “immorality” with no pretense; but these people are capable of being shocked in the way that I am. (They may consider myself and Vivien exceptionally moral, but they do not think any the worse of us for that – it merely seems to them interesting).'
23

Seeking to bring his American family and his London life into balance, Tom used his professional judgement to advise his mother about finances, and pressured her relentlessly to travel to England. Writing to her, his brother Henry found this almost obsessive: ‘Tom seems to be worrying himself sick over the prospect of your not going; it seems to be on his mind all the time.'
24
Tom urged her to ‘seize the opportunity' and arrive ‘next spring'. Otherwise, he would cross the ocean to America, ‘because I should regret it every hour of my life if I did not'.
25
Well into her seventies, bereaved, suffering from ‘renal troubles' and still having to face moving house to Massachusetts, Lottie Eliot prevaricated.
26
Ostensibly, Tom's reluctance to travel to the States was because even if the bank granted him extra leave, his visit would be painfully short; he wanted his mother to see London and their life there, and maintained he could not afford to pay transatlantic fares for himself and Vivien. Yet, with Woods still trying to recruit him to Harvard that spring, and with Vivien remaining fearful about voyaging to the land of the Eliots or about being ill if Tom went there, other psychological factors were involved. Tom's mother was a clever, sometimes domineering woman. His arguing with her was a battle of love as well as a trial of wills that he needed to win.