Young Eliot (73 page)

Tom also set in motion arrangements for his relations to be received at Garsington. He had told his mother all about Lady Ottoline. Lottie Eliot was ‘very excited' at the thought of meeting her.
67
It seems unlikely that Tom's mother had read D. H. Lawrence's
Women in Love
, published in London that June, whose Hermione with her ‘horse-face' suggesting ‘unenlightened self-esteem' was in part a version of Ottoline Morrell (‘to the life' thought Virginia Woolf) and had caused Ottoline, as she made clear to Tom, considerable hurt.
68
This was Mrs Eliot's first trip to England, a country she had read about all her life – the home of classic English literature, and now of her gifted literary son. She was eager to encounter his titled, unusual literary friend in her country manor. Henry, tagging along, was more sceptical.

It was six years since Tom had last met his family. Vivien had been advised by her doctor to remain outside London. Against her specialist's ‘express command', she had come to be with her husband. For her, for him and for the visitors, matters were tense. ‘These new and yet old relationships involve immense tact and innumerable adjustments', he explained to Aldington. ‘One sees lots of things that one never saw before.'
69
The main person Mrs Eliot Senior had never seen before was Vivien. Tom's father had made up his mind without meeting her; Lottie, used to reading between the lines of Vivien's letters, had come to judge for herself. Vivien spent considerable time with her mother-in-law, and one day invited her and Marion Eliot to tea with Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell. Osbert thought Vivien ‘bitterly resented' the visiting matriarch. Vivien gave him the impression that Mrs Eliot had withheld money from Tom because she felt her late husband would not have approved of attempts to ‘ease' Tom's financial ‘burden'. Yet, Osbert recalled decades later, when eventually he ‘met old Mrs. Eliot it was difficult to think any ill of her. She appeared to be a strait-laced, straightforward, conventional, but kindly lady.'
70
Lottie tried. Vivien tried. But by 21 June Tom saw his wife was ‘very tired again'. Two days later he was ‘very tired' too.
71

At the end of the month Tom went to see the Ballets Russes perform Stravinsky's daringly dissonant and provocatively danced ballet
Le Sacre du printemps
at the Princes Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue
.
He may also have attended the work's Queen's Hall concert performance by an augmented orchestra conducted by Eugene Goossens some days before – an ‘extraordinary concatenation of sound'.
72
Certainly he noted that ‘on the first night' the music ‘was received with wild applause'. Stravinsky was in London. Hailed as ‘the greatest success since Picasso', he attended both concert and ballet performances, impressing Tom as he ‘took the call many times, small and correctly neat in pince-nez'. ‘To me', Tom wrote, ‘the music seemed very remarkable'. It had a ‘modernity' the accompanying ballet seemed to lack.
73
Premiered in Paris eight years earlier, famously
The Rite of Spring
had caused a riot. Though the London
Times
critic in 1921 could find ‘no drama, no story' but only a ‘passionless ritual' as the ‘Chosen Virgin' (ballerina Lydia Sokolova) danced herself to death, initially surrounded by a ‘spasmodic quiver' of other dancers, nonetheless the audience ‘roared itself hoarse' in saluting Stravinsky.
74
Attending a ‘“family house”' performance of the ballet, Tom the City gent used ‘the point of an umbrella' to restrain the ‘mirth' of people inclined to mock what they saw.
75
This scandalous modern ballet patterned on an ancient pagan fertility ritual reminded him of
Ulysses
as well as of
The Golden Bough.
It confirmed his conviction that a powerful new work of art could draw on an ancient structure – such as that fertility rite which Jessie Weston discerned undergirding Arthurian myths.

His American visitors had different tastes. Soon his strong-spirited mother was keen to make an excursion to the historic, castled English city of Warwick; to behold Shakespeare's Stratford; to visit the Kenilworth made famous by Sir Walter Scott. Tom, who had never been to Warwick, readied himself to accompany her there on 9 July. ‘She is terrifyingly energetic for seventy-seven.' Vivien, having had enough, had headed back to Bosham; Lottie Eliot's journal shows she toured this area, too, staying near Itchenor with the Hutchinsons whose cottage had no electricity and very primitive sanitation, but found it ‘a nightmare'.
76
Tom's phrasing to Aldington – ‘I was just getting my wife away to a place in the country' – suggests Vivien had to be evacuated from London. He hoped she might stay there until the end of July.
77
That was just before his mother was due to leave.

If Mrs Eliot's visit was wearing out Vivien, Tom too felt ‘the strain of accommodating myself to people who in many ways are now strangers to me'.
78
And, in the midst of all this, another long-running situation developed. For some time, after the demise of
Art and Letters
, there had been a proposal either to revive it or to start a new quarterly literary journal. Negotiations were now at a particularly delicate stage. Thanks to his expertise, Tom was being lined up as the potential editor. Everything depended on money. The financial backer would be Lady Rothermere, wealthy estranged wife of the publisher of the
Daily Mail.
Lady Rothermere spoke to Thayer in New York. Lady Rothermere spoke to Tom in London. Lady Rothermere contacted other people too. Would the new magazine be linked to the
Dial
? Might it be a reborn
Art and Letters
?

Her Ladyship could be demanding to deal with, and Tom, whose links to Thayer and other editors mattered to him, knew it. ‘Exceptional tact' was called for. ‘I am sorry to say', he confessed to Ottoline Morrell, ‘[I] was obliged to call Vivien back from the country to help me out.' Vivien was ‘
invaluable
'. Still, however, Lady Rothermere held back from placing matters on a definite basis. Vivien, whose own opinion of her Ladyship's plans was that there was ‘nothing in the whole business', left London once again, ‘worn out', as soon as she could.
79
It had been difficult for her, Tom and Henry to share the Wigmore Street top-floor flat. As the hot July sun beat down through a large skylight, Vivien joked, or half joked, she was ‘becoming gradually insane'. She reminded Thayer in a letter that he had once invited her to drown herself with him. ‘I am ready at any moment.'
80
Still, once the in-laws had gone, she expected she and Tom might be off to Paris in October.

He was attempting too much: to make his mother, brother and sister happy; to ensure things worked somehow with Vivien; to perform his bank duties; to negotiate about a magazine; to write his ‘London Letter' for the
Dial
; and to keep the long poem with which he was struggling still alive in his mind. So far he was just about coping, though it was hard to juggle his family and friends as Lottie Eliot traversed England. If Garsington and Lady Ottoline impressed his mother, who kept a detailed diary of her trip, Henry saw things differently. An intelligent man of finance from Chicago, his tolerance for English rural quaintness was limited; he listed picturesque villages whose names sounded like ‘Rotton Eating – Moping Sulky – Ham-on-Rye'. Writing up a mocking account of his visit to aristocratic Garsington with its ‘polygamous buttery', and interiors of cobalt ‘blue, coral pink, peacock green, dull gold', Henry cast a sceptical eye on the milieu that appeared to enthral his brother. At ‘Rotting Wold' he wrote,

There is a fine gallery of paintings by Picasso, Izzasso, Djingerpop Pfyz, Funiculi-Funicula, and the rest of our little group of intelligentzsia; also a discriminating collection of triptychs, prie-dieu, and moth eaten obscure Florentine Primitives, for Lady Ottoline will tolerate nothing in her collection that is not either hot off the griddle, or petrified with age. Her penchant for Neo-lithic rock drawings and early Senigambiah rattles and teething rings shows how unsullied is her aesh aesthetic [
sic
] taste. The visitor should not pass up the swimming pool, surrounded by what appears to be, at first glance, stone hitching posts in an advance stage of decay, but which prove on close inspection to be art treasures from Hallicarnassus, or Philippopolis, or somewhere. To appreciate the versatility of our charming hostess, however, one should see her clotting cream, or making cheeses in the buttery, or slaughtering a sheep, in the fold.
81

Tom loved Henry, and shared aspects of his sense of humour. Yet, working on his own avant-garde poem which juxtaposed the supposedly primitive with the very contemporary, he was now at least as close to Lady Ottoline's milieu as to 2635 Locust Street, St Louis. At times he felt awkward with the people to whom his kinship was strongest. The pull between his mother and his wife was even more difficult. Mrs Eliot, Sr, so loath to let him go, came to feel, she told Henry, that Tom longed for what his family could offer: ‘I think the poor boy misses the affection that makes no demands from him, but longs to help him. Vivien loves Tom, and he her, although I think he is afraid of her.'
82
Lottie Eliot had seen a good deal of Vivien, as Tom had hoped; but she remained sceptical. Henry, after living at close quarters with Vivien for several days at Wigmore Street and having corresponded with her for years, was even more so. Discussing Tom's wife after returning to Chicago, Henry wrote to his mother that October,

Vivien always recites some account of her migraines and malaises in her letters. But I suppose that is natural; it is a relief to talk about one's pains. I do not think she takes proper care of herself, though. I have seen her drink coffee at midnight. I have a feeling that sub-consciously (or unconsciously) she likes the role of invalid; and that, liking as she does to be petted, ‘made a fuss over', condoled and consoled, she unconsciously encourages her breakdowns instead of throwing them off by a sort of nervous resistance. It is hard to tell how much is physical and how much mental and uncontrollable by will power; but I think that if she had more of ‘the Will to Be Well' she would have less suffering. To acquire this sort of willpower unaided is something like pulling oneself up by one's boot-straps; but I think some strong impulse from outside, some change in her circumstances, might call forth the necessary willpower to be well. She needs something to take her mind off herself; something to absorb her entire attention.
83

Doing his best with his family, Tom continued wheeling and dealing over the possible new magazine. Having taken time off to entertain his guests, he had to immerse himself in bank business. Where once as head of the new Information Department, he had enjoyed a fine office overlooking the streets of London, now he was underneath them. He called this new workplace ‘my cave'.
84
I. A. Richards, who visited him in a Lloyds basement office, described him ‘stooping, very like a dark bird in a feeder, over a big table covered with all sorts and sizes of foreign correspondence'. About a foot above Tom's head was a window made of panes of reinforced ‘thick, green glass squares' set into the pavement ‘on which hammered all but incessantly the heels of the passers-by'. It was a relentlessly oppressive, claustrophobic atmosphere: ‘There was just room for two perches beside the table.' Richards thought that the concentrated work required in sorting out the ‘highly tangled story' of the materials on that table must have been ‘a big, long headache'.
85

The headache continued. Tom's family left for America on Saturday 20 August. He and Vivien saw them off. ‘Stunned', Vivien became very emotional. She fretted afterwards lest her mother-in-law and sister-in-law might have thought she ‘behaved like “no lady”, and just like a wild animal'. These Americans struck her as oddly ‘emotionless'; she felt she had made ‘a fearful mess' of getting to know Henry.
86
Her natural vivacity was the opposite of old-school, Boston-trained reserve. It had attracted Tom, but she worried it horrified his family. She saw in them the constricting reserve that so many people detected in Tom. ‘
Be personal
, you must be personal', she soon urged Henry, ‘or else it's no good. Nothing's any good.'
87
‘Polite, formal, even stiff, black-clothed New Englanders' was how Osbert Sitwell remembered Lottie and Marion Eliot.
88
Henry, deeply sympathetic towards his younger brother and knowing what mattered to him, had taken away Tom's old typewriter and replaced it with a brand new one. ‘A bloody angel', Vivien called him.
89
He had left her a bunch of roses too.

‘Vivien is not well at all', Tom confided to Sydney Schiff, confessing that the ‘strain' surrounding his family's departure had left him with a ‘reaction' that was ‘paralysing'.
90
He wrote to his mother to say how they missed her, how they felt their Clarence Gate Gardens flat had become
her
flat – scarcely a feeling Vivien was likely to welcome. It took them some time to move back in, along with their small cat, ‘a very good mouser'.
91
Tom was ‘completely exhausted', but while all this was going on, the plan for Lady Rothermere to back the new magazine gathered pace.
92
He committed himself to becoming ‘sole responsible editor'. His solicitor drew up a letter of agreement which Her Ladyship signed: she was to provide £600 annually for three years to cover running costs and payment to Tom of at least £100 per annum. He would have ‘entire control of the literary contents'.
93
This, at least, was a major success; but in his vulnerable state the responsibility, while exciting, made him ‘more worried than anything'.
94
Sceptical about Lady Rothermere's ‘inadequate' largesse, Vivien had her own worries as she underwent further consultations with specialist doctors.
95