Creators (28 page)

Returning to Harvard, Eliot drifted toward philosophy, by way of F. H. Bradley’s
Appearance and Reality
, an attractive cul-de-sac much visited by clever young men at the time. He took a course with a visiting professor, Bertrand Russell, who described him accurately as “altogether impeccable in his tastes but has no vigour or life, or enthusiasm.”
⁴
Harvard offered him a traveling fellowship, to complete his Bradley studies, in the form of a doctoral thesis in Europe. He traveled to England via Germany, barely getting out before he would have been trapped by the outbreak of World War I in August 1914. He settled in Bloomsbury, already a center of upper-middle-class writers and intellectuals with a touch of bohemianism (and sexual deviation)—the kind of English people with whom Eliot was to feel most at home, insofar as he felt at home with anyone.

For some time he had been writing poetry or, as he always called it, “verse.” This early work, commencing in 1909 and eventually published as
Prufrock
(1917) and
Poems
(1919), consists all together of twenty-four items, of which only “Gerontion,” in the second collection, adumbrates the power of his maturity. Some are clever, sophisticated, even witty in a dull way; the kind of things a well-educated but shy and diffident Harvard man might
be expected to produce in private but would not venture to publish or even perhaps show to his friends. That there was a deft, humorous side to Eliot’s verse is clear. Friends of his youth testify to his capacity to make sly, ironic jokes, often surprisingly funny. This talent, under the warming nourishment of fame, eventually blossomed into his remarkable collection
Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats
, published in 1939; it eventually formed the libretto to an astoundingly successful musical,
Cats
. However, it is fair to say that if Eliot had never written and published
The Waste Land
and
Four Quartets
, this early work would by now have been forgotten; as it is, “Gerontion” and “Mr. Appolinax,” for instance, are studied and anthologized entirely because of their supposed relationship to Eliot’s two masterpieces, and are parasitical on them. His instinct not to publish was in a sense sound. In fact many verses he wrote remained unpublished, not least of them a comic epic, “King Bolo and His Great Black Queen,” on which he worked, spasmodically, for some years. This work has been described by Peter Ackroyd in his biography of Eliot as “consistently pornographic in content, with allusions to buggery, penises, sphincters and other less delicate matters.”
⁵
It is likely that Eliot wrote pornography on and off all his life, as a form of sexual satisfaction, to compensate for his virginal existence (and his horror of masturbation, which he believed might make him insane), and later destroyed most of it. Then and later, Eliot was obsessed by the futility and pointlessness of human affairs, especially his own. Life was empty of significance. How was it to be filled? Religion was one way, but Eliot was not yet ready for that. Philosophy, in particular Bradley’s so-called idealism, was another; but Eliot quickly discovered this to be a stony path leading nowhere, as others have found since. A third way was sexual excess, but Eliot was much too puritanical and fastidious—and nervous—to travel that road; creating pornographic verses was a substitute, albeit a dispiriting one.

Then, in September 1914, Eliot’s rather feeble and purposeless existence was transformed, forever, by a meeting. Such meetings, the human equivalent of the transformation effected by blending chemicals, are of tremendous importance in the history of creation. An outstanding example is the meeting of Coleridge
and Wordsworth at Bristol in August 1795, an encounter which inflamed both and led directly to their collaboration in 1797 in the creation of
Lyrical Ballads
, its publication the following year, and the birth of romantic poetry. The meeting of Eliot and Ezra Pound was of comparable importance, since, again, it led eventually to a poetic revolution, the birth of modern poetry, with the publication of Eliot’s
The Waste Land
in 1922.
⁶

Pound was three years older than Eliot and a much more positive character, a man of enthusiasms, sometimes violent ones, and huge ambitions. He also had, in some ways, a grand generosity of spirit. Whereas Eliot was diffident about poetry, Pound was a crusader, a fierce pioneer and propagandist, to the point of bombast. Like Eliot, he had an academic side and considerable scholarship. He had taught at Wabash College, from which, characteristically, he was dismissed for his impatience and exasperation with academic methods. He then roamed Europe, living in London from 1908 to 1920. Between 1908 and 1912 he published several volumes of poetry including translations from Chinese, Provençal, and Italian, and made subtle and sometimes esoteric experiments in meter and language. Pound came from Idaho, so, like Eliot, he was technically a midwesterner, and their scholarly leanings also gave them common ground. In temperament, however, they were opposites—Eliot bloodless, Pound ebullient and bursting with ferocious energy.
⁷

When, at Pound’s request, Eliot showed him “Prufrock” and “Portrait of a Lady,” there was an explosion of enthusiasm: “This is as good as anything I have ever seen.” Pound at once wrote to Harriet Monroe, editor of the magazine
Poetry
in Chicago, and told her that he had found a new master. He also introduced Eliot to Wyndham Lewis, a writer and painter who soon produced by far the best portrait of Eliot (now in the National Gallery of South Africa, Durban) and who described him at the time as a “sleek, tall, attractive, transatlantic apparition, with a sort of Gioconda smile, moqueur to the marrow [with] a ponderous, exactly articulated drawl.” Pound introduced Eliot to many other literary figures, American and English, and Eliot soon found himself treated not as an academic philosopher but as a “young poet,” a member of the avant-garde. This brought about
a faint stirring of the blood. He found himself being bullied into publication, both in magazines and in books. Pound brought pressure on him to make up his mind about other things as well: to settle in Europe, preferably England (Pound argued strongly that this was the place most congenial to a literary life); to give up sterile academic philosophy in favor of literature; to empower this process of settling down and concentration by marrying. The decisions were connected, since they involved cutting himself off from his family. Indeed, from this point on Eliot saw very little of his parents (though his mother visited him) and received little financial support from them, despite his father’s wealth. He also began to assimilate to Europe—not, like Henry James (who became British in 1915), for social reasons but because Pound persuaded him that America was culturally conservative, and that Europe was the place where the future of art and literature was being shaped.

“Prufrock” appeared in
Poetry
in June 1915, and the same month Eliot married Vivien Haigh Haigh-Wood, an English gentlewoman, slightly older, who aspired to write and paint. The marriage was, in one sense, a personal disaster; in another sense, it was a cultural spur to produce and a tone-setting event. It was contracted in haste and without the consent of Eliot’s parents; in fact they were not even informed until afterward. Whether it was ever consummated is doubtful. Vivien was not uncomely but of fragile health, both physical and mental. She was always about to be ill, actually ill, or recovering from an illness. Some of her complaints were real, others imaginary. Her impact on Eliot was considerable in one respect. He had never been robust, as we have already noted, and his truss was an impediment not only to sex but to any kind of normal life. Vivien sharply increased his awareness of his physical disabilities, and his proneness to minor ailments such as colds and migraines. From the early days of their marriage they engaged in competitive hypochondria. Both became valetudinarians and were always dosing themselves, complaining of drafts, and comparing symptoms. (It is a curious fact that Eliot’s only successful appearance on the amateur stage was as Mr. Woodhouse, the outstanding valetudinarian in English literature, in a production of
Emma.
) When Vivien recovered
from a bout of neurasthenia, Eliot was sure to sicken, and a kind of medical ping-pong persisted throughout their marriage. Their bathroom medicine chest overflowed into the dining-room sideboard. All this first occurred during the war, but afterward, as travel became possible and the impact of Freudianism first powerfully asserted itself, both became addicts of psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis. All this can be studied in the first volume of Eliot’s
Collected Letters
, where his anxieties about his own mental state, and hers, were emphatically canvassed, and his efforts to find expert help described in detail.

There is no need to go into the marriage here, or for that matter to apportion blame for its unhappiness and eventual failure. It has been much commented upon: about as much as the tragic union of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, and to equally little effect. As Tom Stoppard has truly noted, “No one, no matter how well informed, can possibly know what goes on inside a marriage except the two principals themselves.” What we do know is that Eliot was unhappy. But then he had not been notably happy before his marriage. (He later said he had never been happy in his life except as a child, embosomed by his mother and sisters; and in his second marriage, a similar experience.) However, the study of the creative process, especially in the arts, suggests that unhappiness is rarely if ever an obstacle to production and may, indeed, be a positive incentive. The case of Thackeray, whose wife went mad and left him lonely and desperately miserable, indicates that his plight was directly related to the writing of his masterpiece,
Vanity Fair
, one of the greatest of all novels.

In Eliot’s case, the transformation of a diffident versifier into a great creative artist was impelled by a ferocious counterpoint of personal and public misery. On the one hand there was the daily sadness of his marriage, punctuated by bitter disputes and medical crises; on the other there was the truly appalling destruction and agony of World War I, with its daily casualty lists of daunting length—a conflict that seemed to prolong itself indefinitely and to become more hopeless and seemingly interminable with every dreadful week that passed. It was a war without hope or heroic adventure—just a dull misery of loss and pain—which induced in the participants, serving in the trenches or suffering
vicariously at home, an overwhelming sense of heartache. The times seemed to have no redeeming feature; mankind appeared to be undergoing the agony of the war with no compensating gain in virtue but merely the additional degradation that the infliction of death and cruelty brings. It was unmitigated waste. So, equally, was Eliot’s marriage, both parties to it enduring suffering without a mitigating sense of redemption, just two wasted lives joined in sorrow. This public and private mortification was the genesis of both the substance and the title of
The Waste Land
.

There was a third factor of some weight. Eliot had always worked hard. There was no element of idleness in his mind or his body. He was self-disciplined. But he lacked the external discipline of regular work. His father’s meanness in refusing to finance his son’s dilettante existence (as he saw it) in Europe obliged Eliot, now a married man, to earn a living. He tried being a schoolmaster, as did so many literary men in those days: first at High Wycombe Grammar School, then at Highgate Junior. Like some of his contemporaries, notably Aldous Huxley and Evelyn Waugh, he found the experience exhausting, numbing, and deleterious to his creative instincts.

Then, in March 1917, at the lowest point of the war, a happy chance pushed Eliot into a position in the City, in the colonial and foreign department of Lloyd’s Bank. He was there eight years, till November 1925, and his job became a position of some responsibility: from the end of the war onward he was put in sole charge of debts to and from the bank arising out of the war with Germany. This was a very complex matter, and Eliot later claimed that he never properly understood it. But that is belied by the confidence he evidently inspired in his superiors. In 1923 a member of the bank’s board asked a literary person at a reception: “You may know of one of our employees who is, I understand, a poet. Mr. Eliot.” “Indeed I do. He is a very remarkable poet.” “I am glad to hear it. He is also most proficient in banking. Indeed, I don’t mind telling you that, if he goes on in his present way, he will one day be a
senior bank manager
!” Eliot had never looked or dressed like a bohemian. On the contrary he had always looked and dressed like a banker, and he continued to do so for the rest of his life. In 1946 he was invited to Buckingham
Palace to read poetry for the king, the queen, and the two princesses. Unlike many poets, he did not read his own verses well, and the occasion was not inspiring. Many years later, the queen mother recalled the event: “He did not seem like a poet to us. The girls laughed at him afterwards, and I said: ‘Well, he gives the impression that he is some kind of dignified official, rather buttoned up. Or that he works in a bank—of course, we didn’t know then that he
did
!’”

Eliot took to the initially difficult but increasingly satisfying routine of foreign-exchange banking, and worked at his poetry in the evenings. The contrast between his ledger work and his versification was sharp and salutary. There is an illuminating parallel here with Charles Lamb’s work in the accounts department of the East India House. The distaste that Lamb felt for his account books made his essay writing in his scant leisure hours doubly welcome and delightful. So, too, Eliot found an immense benefit in the relief from figures and double-entry bookkeeping which his evening poetry brought: for the first time in his life he discovered the power and depth of creative pleasure. This discovery in turn led him to think about, and plunge into, the business of writing poetry in a way he had never before experienced, so that his work broadened and deepened but also became more sharp and merciless, more ruthless in expression and effect.