CRITICAL COMPANION TO T.S. Eliot A Literary R eference fo Htis Life and Work LITERATURE AN MERIC ARY OF ON | og cen ms RUSSELL ELLIOTT MURPHYCrit al Companion to T, 8. Eliot Copyright © 2007 by Russell Elioet Murphy All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced! or utilized in any form ot by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recosding, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher For information contact; Facts On File, Inc. An imprint of Infobase Publishing 152 Wese 3st Street New York NY 10001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Murphy, Russell E. (Russell Elliott) ical conspanion to TS. Eliot: liteeary reference to his life and work / Russell Elliott Murphy. pet. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8160-6183-9 (acid-free paper) 1. Eliot T. S. (Thomas Stearns), 1888-1965—Encyclopedias. 2. Poets, American—20th century—Biography—Eneyelopedias. I. Title, PS3509,L4327887 2007 S821.912—le22—(B] 2006034076 Facts On File books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New York at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755. ‘You can find Facts On File on the World Wide Web at huep:/jvwwefactsonfilecom “Text design by Erika K. Aroyo Cover design by Cathy Rincon/Anastasia PIE Printed in the United States of America VB Hermitage 1098 7654321 This book is printed on acid-free paperCONTENTS Acknowledgments Introduction Part [: Biography Part I: Works A to Z Part III: Related People, Places, and Topics Part [V: Appendices 1. TS. Eliot Chronology 2. Significant Publications by T. $. Eliot 3. Selected Bibliography of Secondary Sources Index vilACKNOWLEDGMENTS Ew the age of Google, one cannot approach an exhaustive treatment of a poet as erudite and well-read as T. S. Eliot without virtually con- stant recourse to one of the several works of stellar scholatship that the poet's achievement has gener ated, In particular, [must single out Grover Smith's remarkable TS. Eliot's Poetry and Plays: A Study in Sources and Meanings, « classic of its kind. Peter Acktoyd’s T. S. Eliot: A Life is a veritable font of data and anecdote detailing the poet's day-to-day experiences and was another welcome source of bibliographical as well as biographical information, as was Christopher Rick's T. S. Eliot: Inventions of the March Hare, Poems 1909-1917, a tnuly indis- pensable reference for anyone interested in the poet’s early career, Finally, there is Jewel Spears Brooker’s recent and valuable T. §. Eliot: The Con- temporary Reviews to be noted as well. T have been reading, studying, reading about, writing about, and teaching the poetry and criti- cism of T. S. Eliot for going on four decades now. It is impossible for me, by nov, co distinguish neatly and honestly among my own most original thoughts and feelings regarding Bliot’s work and significance and those thoughts and feelings that took shape in me thanks only t© my exposure (0 the ideas of other teachers, scholars, and critics. If indeed, there is any purpose to what we in literary studies do, it isto influence and inspire each other in the same ways that we have been influenced ‘and inspired in the classroom and the library then, if at any point I seem to be echoing the thoughts or feelings of others who have “said it much better,” I can honestly say that I was in no way mindful of the borrowing either at the time of my writing or subsequently, and I must therefore be left to hope that others will be satisfied with the flattery supplied by my unconscious imitation, if not eribute. Still, let it be known that the major influences on my own understanding of Eliot, whatever that may mean, are most certainly Cleanth Brooks, Elz abeth Drew, Helen Gardner, FO. Matthiessen, and Hugh Kenner... always Hugh Kenner. T would also like to take this opportunity to thank Jerry Weist and Dana Hawkes of Eastern Point in Gloucester, Massachusetts, the present owners of the Elioss’ one-time summer home there, for graciously allowing us to photograph its exterior and interior, will close by acknowledging thae all transla- tions of Dante are mine, as is the translation af Hadeian’s “Animale” and anything else that may have tequired translating.INTRODUCTION his book is not a shortcut to an appreciae jon and understanding of the writing of T. S. Eliot for the simple reason that there can be no shorteut to the inner workings of such a complex literary achievement as his. Rather, this book is as comprehensive a guide to Bliot as has yet been published, That is no small claim, nor is this a small book. Eliot is one of the more diffieult poets of the 20¢h century, perhaps of all time. Dac Ock, a charace ter in the movie Spider-Man 2, put it well. Dur- ing a conversation with young Peter Parker, alias Spider-Man, when the good doctor has not yet morphed into a supervillain and is still only just Dr. Otto Cetavins, he relates how his future wife, a literature student when they met in college, learned science for his sake and how he in turn attempted to leam literature for hers. His future wife had been much more successful at mastering Id of study than he had bs he was studying T. S. Eliot,” he explains to Parker, “and, compared to science, Eliot is very complicated." That admission of Dr, Octavius is a fact: Eliot is very complicated, and there is no easy way to understand his work. Nonetheless, this book is designed to assist the student in doing so, While the entries in this volume on Eliot's poetry, verse drama, and literary and social criticism recognize and address the complexity of Eliot's thought and technique, they are written with an aim toward trying to defuse father than compound that com. plexity, although never at the expense of sound nat mastering, scholarship and authentic interpretation. This vale ume hopes to add to the impres quantity of scholarship and criticism that Eliot's life and work have inspired virtually from the by ning of bis literary career with the publication of Prafrock and Other Observations in. 1917. To discuss Eliot's work requires the tecognic tion of genuine limitations. Although students all too often imagine that the way to come to grips with the “meaning” of a particular Eliot poem is to decode the meaning of every single line, such an re and extensi attempt often provides just the illusion of clarific: tion at the expense of admitting complexity. Any Hed ning in a line of Bliot’s ean aften be refuted by the next line. And then there are all the various allusions to deal with as well—to mythole ogy and to literature, to the Bible and to other reli- gious texts, to operatic pieces, to Tagtime music, and to much more. Many an academic career has beets made and unmade in the effort to explain Eliot's allusions, many of which are not even in English. The truth is, Eliot's style of poetry very much unintelligible at times, is often intentionally that way. The poet of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufeock” and The Waste Land, *Gerontion” and “The Hollow Men,” to cite but a few of the titles for which he is best known, was never one to make his readers’ lives easier. So, then, it would be both unfair to the poet readers to expect any teacher or book to make Eliot's poetry so teadily accessible that no ques- 1d unwise for his tions remain.x _ Critical Companion to T. S. Eliot The commentaries in this book recognize and respect Bliot’s complexity by secking constantly to interpret and co contextualize, but they also aim to provide readers with as much detailed backround and peripheral information as can be gathezed, all in the hopes that readers can then judge those interpretations for themselves, in good Eliot fash- ion. They may even be inspired to come up with interpretations of their own. How to Use This Book This hook is divided into four principal sections. Pare I provides a biographical essay that lays out the major influences and developments in Eliot’s life in narrative fashion, Part Il offers extensive treatment of Eliot's individual poems, plays, and major works of prose. Entries on all these works are arranged in alphabetical order. Part IIl provides detailed entries on individuals, places, and works by others that helped shape the poet's interests and writing. Pact IV contains a chronology and an extensive bibliog raphy of works by and about Eliot To indicate a cross rence, any name or term that appears as an entry in Part IIT is printed on first appearance in an entry in SMALL CAPITAL, LETTERS.PART | BiographyBiography 3 T. S. Eliot (Thomas Stearns Eliot) (1888-1965) The rule that great artists do not generally lead interesting lives certainly applies in the case of Thomas Steams Eliot, the American-born 20th- century English poet, critic, and verse dramatist. Nonetheless, his life has garnered intense eritical scrutiny, if by his life one means not just its actions and events but his tastes and interests and values as well. The man who virtually invented the idea of separating the poet from the poem and che life and times from the work has been subjected to more analysis and interpretation of the rela ship among the life and the work and the than any other literary figure of the 20th cen- tiny, perhaps of all time. The reason for this kind of scrutiny is obvious: Few other poets have left behind n body of work whose meanings continue ta he inscrutable, and yer the incerest these works hold for readers contimues to be contagious. Who the person T. S. Eliot was remains not so much a puzzle as a challenge, precisely hecause his poetry can simultaneously bedazele and befuddle readers It is not odd, then, that critics and scholars, who are themselves nathing more than glorified readers, persist €@ this day in erying ¢o untangle fom the facts af the reasonably normal life that Eliot led the nuanced minutiae of some particular biographical detail that will finally cast an unfailingly clear light on an image or an illusion or symbol whose very attraction as poetry, meanwhile, seems to lie in its adamant resistance to any sort of unerring interpre- tation, as the poet himself well knew. EARLY LIFE T. S. Eliot was born on September 23, 1888, in . LOUIS, Missouri, the seventh and last child of Henry Ware Eliot and Charlotte Champe Stearns. Although the Eliots were a reasonably prosperous family wha could trace their original New England roots back to the earliest days of the Massaehu- setts Bay Colony, the St. Louis of the time still had some of the rougheand-tumble spirit of a frontier town and river city from its own original heyday as the fabled Gateway to the West. Growing up in that vibrantly active community along the fabled Mississippi River would remain an experience that would shape Eliot's poetry and acute sense of place well into his advancing years. “The Dry Salvages,” ‘composed dating the height of World War Il in the summer of 1940, begins with its famous image of a river that is unmistakably the Mississippi, a “strong ‘brown god.” Eliot, howes close ties to the Anglo-Saxon, Protestant estab- lishment of another water eity—staid, old BOSTON and environs, a harbor city with a self-confidenely progressive culture capable of laying credible if not somewhat self-congratalatory claim at that time to ‘being the Hub of the Universe. The Massachusetts family’s founder, Andrew Eliot, emigrated from the English village of East Coker in the 17th century, settling in Beverly, Massachusetts, where he served ct, was a scion of a family with as town clerk. He is reputed as well to have served asa juror during the notorious Salem witeh trials T. S. Bliot’s paternal grandfather, WILLIAM GREENLEAR ELIOT, was a Harvard Divinity gtaduate and a disciple of William Ellery Chane ning, one of the founding forces behind Ameri- can UNITARIANISM. As a young man, William Eliot had “lit out for the territories” (as another literary native son of Missouri, Mark Twain, later famously phrased America’s then-obsessive fascination with going west). William, whom his grandson Thomas would grow up to resemble, settled in St. Louis in 1834. TI call to scivie duty and with the fulfilment of social obliga- tions inherently required by the privilege accorded to his class, William devoted himself to philan- thropic endeavors among his other service to the community, He founded the Unitarian church in St. Louis, the first west of the Mississippi, and ‘helped found WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY. William's son Henry, the poet's father, would be of more worldly and practical bent. Despite an early business failure, Henry eventually ended up jpresident of the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company, ‘4 position whose success would enable the family to lead a comfortable middle-class life, That mate~ rial success nevertheless did not translate into the . in keeping with Unitarianism family's abandoning their once-fashionable Locustical Companion to T. S. Eliot Eliot’: ancestral home of East Coker, shown as itis toe address long after urban sprawl had brought the area into some decay and other equally pros- perous families had moved our into the burgeoning suburbs. So, then, just as that powerful sense of devotion to a city to whose civic and moral well- being grandfather William had devoted so: much of his life would have its own salutary effect on the future poet, father Henry's remaining eity-bound would expose Eliot the boy to: the somewhat grit- tier aspects of the American mtban experience at a time when it was undergoing rapid and uncon- trolled transformations on virtually every front from the social and political to the economic and technological. Iewas the women in the young Eliot's early life, however, who would have the most profound effect upon the developing literary genius, Eliot was not only the last child born to Henry and Charlotte, bur a late child as well, coming when his parents were already in their 405 and his six older siblings were already well out of their childhood years, Fur- thermore, five of these six elder childeen were girls, and Eliot, a precociously bright child who, while [lit frst visited East Coker in August 1937, would later be the locale for the Quartet of the same name. (Courtesy of Russell rd the town phy not frail, was not of particularly robust health and would suffer throughout his life from a congenital double hernia, was protected and doted on. There was also the early influence of his Irish nurse, Annie Dunne, who took him to Roman Catholic Mass with her in both St. Lonis and GLOUCESTER, Massachusetts, where the Eliots summered begine fing in 1893. Eliot would Inter tecall that he had conversations with her about the existence of God when he was only six. Foremost among these early influences was his mother, Charlotte schoolteacher and another transplanted New Englander, whose own family also had close ties to Harvard Divinity School and Boston society. A cultured, genteel woman, a forme upon her marriage 10 Henry she devoted herself ro raising a family and to church and civic work, She was also particularly devout in her religious prac tices, honoring the Madonna and Child Jesus and St. Francis despite or perhaps because of the human- ist bent of her Unitarian background. Her other interests included the austere Italian Renaissance moral reformer Savonarola, about whom she wroteTS. Eliot, between three and five years of age in 1892 or 1893 (Courtesy of Houghton Library; Harvard University) Biography 5 book-length poem. Indeed, young Eliot's literary and moral interests must have flourished under the especially protective eyes of his highly accomplished and loving mother, whom the poet’s brother, Henry, Jr. said Elios, among all her ehildr ‘Med both physically and in characte Later, when her son Tom beygan to show such promise as poet during his undergraduate years at Harvard, Charlotte would write t0 say that she hoped that her son would achieve the literary rec- cognition that she herself, as a young woman, had ‘hoped to achieve in her own life but that had evaded ther as a consequence of her wifely and maternal sluties, Under Charlotte's ever-watchful eye, the somewhat frail Eliot was nevertheless allowed to ‘have a normal boyhood, during which he enjoyed ‘both the comforts of a securely mislle-class life and the freedois of a city neighborhood. In 1896, Henry Sr. was prosperous enough for the family to build a substantial summer home on Eastem Point at Gloucester. Although Charlotte , most resem- Eiot with his mother in 1895, while vacationing, in Gloucester, Massachusetts. (Courtesy of Houghton Ubrary, Harvard University)Advocate staff, 1910. A young Eliot fs seated third from left in the front row. Between 1907 and 1910, Eliot published 8 total of 14 poems in the Advacate, (Courtesy of Ho prohibited him fom engaging in overly strenuous physical activities because of hemnins, Eliot became 4 very avid constal sailor, sometimes venturing as far north up the New England seaboard as Canada. He was educated at Smith Academy in St. Louis unl his 16th y ries in the Smith Academy Record inspired by visits to the native village exhibits at the St. Louis World Fair in 1904. In 1905, he left home to spend his last year of secondary education as a student at Milton Academy in Milton, Massachusetts. There he began the lase phase of his preparation for his matriculating as an undergraduate at HARVARD College beginning in 1906 1. There he published several sto- THE POET TAKES SHAPE Already visible in Eliot's roots are the seeds of the identity issues that would make Elior an American ton Library; Harvard University) poet who would become a British subject in 1928, At 18, Eliot was a midwesterner or southerner, depending on one’s view of St. Louis's regional identity, whose family had been from New England and who would himself move there. He was also a socially privileged individual raised in the middle of the social stew that is any American inner city to this day, as psychically at home on the hanks of a great, rolling, mythic tiver as along the rocky shores of an immense and equally fabled ocean. Is it any wonder, then, that Eliot very likely would feel at home everywhere, anywhere, and nowhere and that his earliest literary influences were neither American nor English but European? Eliat found his first and most profound literary influences not in America or even in England, but in two continental European venues, contempo- tary France and late medieval Florence, Italy. TheBiography 7 story of Eliot’s exposure to the French symbolists is almost legendary among students of the poet; his exposure to the Italian poet DANTE ALIGHIER is hardly less well known. But neither influence could have come about were it not for Bliot’s exposure to cosmopolitan undergraduate education at HAR VARD, an institution of higher learning that, despite its venerability, has always taken pride in its being a progressive force in American education. When the young Tom Eliot went to Harvatd in the fall of 1906, he had heen preceded not only by his brother Henry, Jr, but also by a number of Eliot ancestors. Indeed, a distant cousin, Charles Wik liam Eliot, was the university's then-seated pre: dent. Nevertheless, so thoroughly midwestern was the fatue poet, despite the summers in Gloucester and the year at the Milton Academy, that fellow students characterized his speech with a racial slur, calling ita “nigger drawl.” For all that people who would meet Eliot throughout his adult life would comment on his shyness, Eliot was both a successful student and, more importang, classmate. He was active in all the various social clubs that then constituted the core of the undergraduate experience, forming many lifelong friendships, most notably with the fellow future poet and critic CONRAD AIKEN, whom he joined in 1909 on the board of Harvatd's unde graduate literary magazine, the Advocate. Elior’s literary aspications, however, had already been given an incalculable boost from a source that so changed his life that he would be express- ing his “great indebtedness” to the source of that inspiration years later. In December 1908, w looking through the offerings available in the Har- vard Union library, Eliot stumbled pon ARTHUR SYMONS's critical study The Syqpouast Move MENT IN LiTERATURE, and through that work be was introduced to the French symbolist poet JULES LAFOROUE, Whatever the exact shape that Eliot's affinity for the tragic young French poet and his self-deprecatinely seriocomic verse took, there was enough of an affinity that by the following spring Bliot had acquited a three-volume set of Laforgue’ complete works, although he could barely translate the French. In an August 1917 letter to am admirer of his own first volume, Prufrock and Other Obser- vations, he would admit to feeling “more grateful” to Laforgue than any other poetic influence that he could think of at that time. What Laforgue gave Eliot, it is generally ages swaas the ability to manufacture poctic emotions by means of the mask, In Laforgue’s case, the world- swenry, elegant sophisticate who could also act the double and phy the pathetic fool to his awn pas- sions may have been in keeping with the facts of his life as a consumptive dandy. Eliot learned from that sort of selfemodeling, nevertheless, that to write poetry was as much to adopt a tone and a style as ‘it was to express oneself, By the time he completed hhis undergraduate studies and a master’s program in English literature at Harvard in 1910, he had alecady leatned to cast the “I” of the poem in what. ‘ever droll or pathetic role might serve the purposes not of biography but of art. In essence, not yet out of his 22nd year, Eliot ctively that craft is more stitical to the poet and the poem than content— indeed, that craft is content, if by craft is meant the abilicy 0 cast words into verses with such a multiplicity of frequently contradictory moods and tones and meanings that a personality totally ‘independent of the poet emerges. That abstracting ‘from experience, rather than composing out of it, changed, no doubt, as Eliot matured and began to acquire a center to his values and beliefs. For now, however, while he was still an imprese sionable young person just learning the skills that would become the basis for his trade in life, the mastering of the eraft of poetry occupied most of ‘his attention. He was learning it primarily fom the symbolise poets, whose view of the world might seem, on the surface, to be so alien to his own—a person raised in rel stable surroundings of a long-established family and the cultural and religious traditions associated with chis New England Puritan heritage—as to defy any ‘resemblances. seemed to know in: lative ease and luxury in the THE TRAVELING STUDENT Eliot spent the summer following his June 1910 graduation from Harvaed with his family in Gloucs ter, convincing them to allow him to travel to Paris thac fall, and he left for Europe in October, shortly8 Cri | Companion to T. S. Eliot after his 22nd birthday. In addition to Paris's repu- tation among the English and Anglo-Americans as ‘city where moral, religious, and intellectual stric- tures were under far less restraint, it had also long been something of a finishing school for young Brit- ish and American people of so-called breeding and prospects. There Eliot took classes in French litera- ture at the Sorbonne and honed his philosophical skills by attending lectures at the College de France conducted by the renowned French idealist phi- losopher HENRI BEROSON. During the 11 months that Eliot spene in Paris, however, equally significant events were occurring on other fronts in his life and interests. For one thing, he turned his hand to perfecting the poems in the symbolise style that he had penned during his undergraduate days, most notably “Rhapsody on a ‘Windy Night” and the “Preludes.” Far mote signifie cant by any standard of measurement, he composed “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and worked ‘on “Portrait of a Lady,” a poem that he had begun in carly 1910 but would not complete until after his return to America in November 1911, He also struck up a friendship with a young Frenchman, Jean Verdenal, who shared bis interest in contem- porary French poetry. Verdenal’s subsequent death in World War J, im which he served as a medical officer, caused Eliot enough grief that he would later dedicate his firs published volume of poetry, 1917's Prufrock and Orher Observations, to this friend of his youth and fellow poetry enthusiast Beyond his academic studies, Eliot also had a private tutor in French, In addition, he took up smoking strong French cigatettes, a vie that he continued for many years afterward and that no doubt contributed to the emphysema that he developed Inter in life. He also: toyed with the idea of remaining in Paris, where he would become a poet writing verse in French, not English. Youth- ful binges of wish-fulfllment aside, the Paris of the time offered him cultural delights, from opera and ballet to the high-kicking dancers at the Moulin Rouge and the decadent nightlife of the so aptly named Montparnasse, the student and artist quat- ter that, little more than a decade later, would achieve enduring fame in American letters as the lengendary Left Bank that the equally legendary expatriates, among them Eenest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, would soon frequent. Despite bouts of loneliness and homesickness brought on by his characteristic shyness, it was wonderful year for Eliot, just the sort of release and relief from the humdrum of the familiar and the routine that a young person of Eliot's deceptively restless nature needed at this critical juncture in his passage from youth into adulthood. He used Paris as a home base from which he might visit other European locales. In April, he traveled for the first time to the city that would become his future home, London, where he wrote the poem “Interlude in London.” In July, he traveled to Munich and then south into northern Italy. His lovely lyric “La figlia he pinnge” would be the fruit of that excursion. By the time his close friend from Harvard, Con- rad Aiken, visited him in Paris in the summer of 1911, however, Eliot was expressing a determina- tion to return to Harvard to enroll in the graduate program there in philosophy. By September, he hd sailed hack to America, where he again joined his family on Eastern Point in Gloucester. When the fall semester began at Harvard, he was enralled in the university’s graduate school to study for his doctorate in philosophy. GRADUATE YEARS. For the next three years, Eliot studied philosophy at Harvard. He took classes in Hindu philosophy, Sanskrit, and Indian philology. In 1912, he also met and fell in love with Emily Hale, with whom he would resume a subdued romantic relationship several decades later when his first magriage began to fall apart. Eliat was very successful as a doctoral eandie date and flourished amid the rigors of academic life. In June 1913, he purchased « copy of Fe H BRADLEY’s Appearance and Reality, the work that would become the subject of his doctoral disserta- tion, That fall semester, he took a course in various types of scientific methods under JOSIAH ROYCE, The paper he produced for that course, on asses ing primitive rituals, would conclude that any sci- entific validity is awed by virtue of the fact that the observer's observations are distorted by his own experiences. Tenets such as these, questioning theBiography 9 human ability to access any experience that might be said co approximate an objective reality, would ultimately form the foundation for much of Eliot's modernist thinking, which relied on tradition as a hedge against the moral and intellectual piefalls awaiting any sort of personal myopia By October 1913, Eliot had proved to be both adept enough at and devoted enough to his gradue ate studies in philosophy to be appointed presi- dent of the University. Philosophical Chub. By March 1914, impressed by a visiting professor from England, BERTRAND RUSSELL, Eliot obtained a prestigious appointment by Harvard to a Shel- don Travelling Fellowship in Philosophy, which he planned to spend at Merton College, Oxford, for the 1914-15 academic year. There he would study Aristotle under the tutelage of Harold Joachim, one of Bradley's disciples. Although Eliot could hardly have known it at the time, once he set sal for England that summer of 1914, except for a brief visit the following summer, he would not return to America again for another 17 years. THE OXFORD YEAR Two events conspired to make Eliot become the English rather than the American poet that he would eventually enter literary history as. The first, and far more significant, was the outhteak of hos tilities in Europe that would eventually he known as the Great War, or World War 1. Eliot had no sooner arrived in England in July 1914 to take up his Oxford studies that fall chan he departed for a summer class in Marburg, Germany, where he was when war between Russia and Germany broke out on August 1. The summer seminar was cancelled, although ic was another two weeks before Eliot was permitted to leave Germany where he began his course of study at Oxford on October 6. He would return to America the follow- ing July to summer with his fami Otherwise, Elior essentially maintained his resi- dence in England from that moment on. The other event that effectively sealed Eliot's fate occured on April 24, 191 Vivien Haigh-Wood, the attractive and certainly eccentric daughter of the landscape and. portrait painter Charles Haigh-Wood. On June 26, they ‘and return to England, at Gloucester. when he met married. Thus began a mattiage that was not 60 much troubled or stormy or passionate as odd. By alll accounts, as a domestic pair, they both seemed to be selfindulgent hypochondriacs, who were, nevertheless, often genuinely ill with one malady ‘or another. They both seemed, too, to be fairly ignorant with regard to maintaining healthy sexual relations, though not necessarily virginal. Vivien is said to have suffered from neurasthenia, or what would today be called a nervous disorder, that made her very high strung and her behavior erratic Furthermore, she had a persistent problem with ‘extremely irregular menstrual cycles, creating prob- lems both with her personal hygiene and with the couple's capacity to have a normal sex life, if any at all. Despite this, there are reasons to bel that doring the first years of her marriage to Eliot, ‘Vivien carried on an affair with Bertrand Russell, = = Vivien Haigh-Wood Eliot in 1921, about six years into her marriage with Eliot (Courtesy of Houghton Library Harvard University)10. Critical Companion to. S. Eliot Eliot inv 1933, in formal wear before presenting a visiting lecture in New York (Caurtesy of Houghton Library Harvard University) the mentor whose charm and brilliance had drawn Eliot to study in England in the first place. The marriage was one of a virtually steady though never dramatic decline, more painful for their friends, perhaps, than for themselves, although it would not effectively dissolve until the fall of 1932 when Eliot left for America to take up n year: long visiting professorship at Harvard, From that point on, although Vivien would refuse to admit it, they were estranged. Shortly after his return to England, in September 1953, Eliot filed for a formal separation, although Vivien continued t harrass him and their manual acquaintances as if they were still husband and wife. By the summer of 1938, she would he committed by her family to a private men- tal hospital, where she died of a heare attack at the comparatively youthful age of 38 in 1947. While no one, not even future biographers, would hold Eliot personally responsible for che dissolution of the mattiage and Vivier’s slow but inevitable decline into what can only be described as madness, nei- ther can there be any doubt that Eliot continued to suffer a grent deal from feelings of personal guilt and anguish over the tragic travesty their marriage turned ont to be almost from the first. DENIZEN OF LITERARY LONDON The summer of 1914 through spring of 1915 wite nessed another significant development for Eliot, one that would also have enduring effects, although in this case reasonably salutary ones, on the blos- soming poet's life and work. Through the kind offices of his Harvard undergraduate friend, Conrad Aiken, Eliot would meet another visiting American poet, EZRA POUND, in London on September 22, thus beginning one of American and English let- ters’ most celebrated and productive literary and personal friendships. Their relationship extended well into the 1950s, by which time Pound, tried by U.S. authorities for his activities on behalf of Fas- cist Italy, an enemy power, during World War I, had heen declared incurably insane and was com- mitted 10 St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C. Bur thelr relationship had in fact culminated in the earlier collaborative effore that would pro- duce, in 1922, the final version of Eliot’s early mod- ernist masterpiece The Waste Leal Eliot had already by work by another Harvard undergraduate back in 1909 when Eliot was first experimenting in his own new kind of poetry based on bis exposure to the French symbolists. Pound, at that time, was still translating the works of the Uth-century French Provengal poets known collectively as the Troubadours, whose love lyrics were apparently not Eliot's cup of tea. Whatever his reasons may have been, Eliot did not agree with the assessment, made then, that he would find Pound’s work to be “up your street.” sn introduced to Pound's By the time of their meeting five or more years later, however, Pound, by then under the influence of a recent acquaintanceship with the Chinese ideogram, had become a self-styled imagist poet far more in keeping with his own time and with the stylistic and thematic revolution then taking place in poetry writing. Employing concrete imagesBiography 11 along with the freer poetic style categorized under the general heading VERS LIBRE, or free verse, the elder poet, Pound, was also making a name for himself as an editor and promoter of this new kind of poetry emerging on both sides of the Atlantic. It was in this later tole that he took Eliot under his literary wing. Pound used his considerable influ. ence to do everything that he could to ensure chat the work of the younger man, whom he famously described to Harrict Monroe, then the editor of Poetry magazine, as a poet who had “made himself modern all of his own,” was published and was afforded the recognition that it deserved. By early October, Pound had sent Bliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” to Montoe at Poetry, for which Pound was the European editor. The poem, Eliot's first major success, would appear in that review the next June. Under the auspices of such literary acquain- tances as Aiken and Pound, along with the social citcles that Eliot shared as a result of his marriage to Vivien and of the mentorship of Russell, who had since returned to England, Eliot found bim- self being quickly ushered into the sorts of liter ary, academic, and journalistic environments that would serve him well as he began to cultivare a burgeoning career in London as a poet and critic of some modest note. In time, and particularly by virtue of his attendance at such venues as Lady OTTOLINE MORRELL's literary salon for uppercrast young British bohemians at her estate at Garsing: ton, he would come to know the sister-and-brother Eliot in 1947, shontly after receiving his honorary doctorate from Harvard (Courtesy of Houghton tbrary, ‘Harvard University) poets, Dame Edith, Sit Oshert, and Sir Sacherverell Srmveit and VikcIsta WoouF and her husband Leonard Woolf. These were the peaple at the cen- ter of the famous Bloomsbury Group, whose Hog- arth Press would publish the early work of many of the new young writers, including Eliot and other future literary luminaries such as Aldous Huxley and Wyndham Lewis. In the meantime, Eliot continued to publish in outlets such as Poetry and Others. By the end ‘of 1915, he would see the “Preludes” and “Rhap- sody on a Windy Night” published in Lewis's Blast “Portrait of a Lady” in Others; and “The Boston Evening Transcript,” “Aunt Helen,” and “Cousin Nancy” published in Poetry. At the end of that year, Pound included him in his Catholie Anthology sealing Eliot's reputation as a rising star among the new voices then emerging in English and American ‘poetry. In the meantime, too, he finally completed his Harvard doctoral dissertation, "Knowledge and the Objects of Experience in the Philosophy of FH. Bradley.” Bliot booked passage for teavel to America in ently April 1916 so chat he might defend his dissertation and thus complete his grad niate program with a vind, or oral defense. When the departure date was delayed as a result of the swar, however, he had to cancel these plans. Although Harvard accepted his thesis without any defense, it would not be uneil 1947 thar Blior actually received his doctoral degree in a special ceremony at Harvard in Cambridge. He would eventually publish the dissertation under the short ened and less academic-sounding title Knowledge cand Experience in the Philosophy of FH. Bradley in 1964, LEADING TWO LIVES For their living, the young married couple relied ‘on the income that Eliot earned teaching Latin at Highgate Junior School. Throughout 1916, Eliot -was also publishing articles and reviews in the New Statesman and the Monist and was offering courses, and | ture. In nares on modern Freneh and English litera- eptember, he told his brother, Henry, that “Prufrock” might very well have been his “swan song,” and by the end of the year, he suggested that he was ready to give up on teaching as well. It is12. Critical Companion toT. S. Eliot no surprise, then, that by mid-March of 1917, he began to work for Lloyds Bank, taking » position in the colonial and foreign department that would maintain him financially for the next seven years By the end of the succeeding year, brother Henry would report that young Tom had become finan- cially independent and no longer required support from his family. For all its apparent stops accomplishments to date we snd starts, Eliot's ippreciable. After a mere three yents in England, and in view of how much he, like everyone else, had had to make do because of the circumstances created on alll sides by the war, he had become a figure of note in the small but influential circles in which he moved. For better of worse, he had heen widely published, net- worked, and accepted by the literary establishment of a foreign capital that also happened co be one of the world's mast dynamic cities. He was about to issue a complete volume of poetry that, to this day, is regarded as a remarkable poetic achievement, and he had landed himself « job that most others would regard as a career, all che while marrying and fulfilling as well the rigorous requirements of a ‘graduate degree in philosophy. Iescemed, however, that Eliot was marking him- self out for a literary career rather than the aci- demic one for which he had bees preparing himself since entering Harvard as a freshman in 1906, At the very least, it was clear that he could no longer maintain a private life asa man of letters of increas- ing influence and respect while trying co serve the demands of a career as a teacher of high school lan- guage and literatute. He did not abandon teaching entirely just yer, presenting a three-year program in modern English literature and then, in September 1917, taking on the additional teaching burden of a sixomonth series of weekly lectures on Vietorian literature, His employment at Lloyds and his liter- aty endeavors, hawever, began to occupy more and more of his time and attention. Despite his failing confidence in his poetic gifts, doubts that would assail him periodically through- ‘out his life, Eliot achieved further literary success and recognition once his first volume of poetry, Prufiock and Other Observations, was brought aut by the Egoist Limited Press in June 1917. Only a month earlier, Eliot had begun to review for the prestigious Lite Review, and with the publication of the first volume of his poetry, Eliot found his influence further expanded when he was appointed assistant poetry editor for the equally significant periodical the Eaorst, Pound was never far from the scene, simultane- ously promoting Bliot’s interests and keeping him engaged in poetry writing, especially ac a time when Bliot felt that his talents and sources of inspira tion had become so diminished and unlikely to recover that he was willing to try writing poetry in French, The poems he wrote during this time inchide “Dans le restaurant,” from which a criti- cal portion of The Waste Land would eventually emerge. Pound had already sought, back in Sep- tember 1916, to secure lawyer JOHN QUINN in New York as a patron for Eliot, whom Pound wished to characterize as a struggling, young poet. Through- out 1917 and 1918, Pound also kept Eliot's flagging creative juices flowing by encouraging him to work in a mutual experimentation with the so-called quatrains originally developed by the 19th-century French poet Théophile Gautier. Eliot’s efforts with these four-line stanzas with their four-beat lines would result in sch curiously opaque poems as “The Hippopotamus” and “Sweeney among the Nightingales,” among others, while Pound ended up using the quatrain form to great effect in the first few parts of Hugh Sehuyn Mauberley, published in 1919. Theits was a mutually beneficial relationship. In January 1918, Knopf in New York published Exva Pound: His Metric and Poetry, Eliot's introduetion to Pound’s latest work. Pound was careful to inform Quinn that he did not want Eliot's name to be too much associated with his own as a critical voice since it might impede Eliot's progress and promise as a poet in his own right, so the pamphlet-length book was published anonymously. The United States had entered the war against Germany on April 6, 1917, and by late 1918, Bliot was beginning to chafe at being a reasonably able-bodied young man while both his native and adopted counties were at war. Several efforts to find an opportunity for service, first with the U.S. Navy and then with the US. Army, met with all sores ofBiography 13 bureaucratic entanglements, however. These efforts all came to an end, more or less, when an armistice was declared on November 11, 1918, but not before Eliot had taken a leave of absence from Lloyds in order to report for duty. Pound, working bebind the scenes as usual, informed Quinn that he had, with characteristic cheek, visited the U.S. embassy in London to ask that they not allow Eliot, whom he ‘as one of the few living Americans pable of ad ny to sk his life it a conflict meant prestimably to preserve it. In the meantime, Pound had also prepared for publication by Knopf a volume containing Eliot's work to date, It would appear in February 1920 as Poems 1920, and it included bis first genuinely original work since *Pruftock,” the poem "Geton- tion.” The Wools’ Hogarth Press would release a similar volume, Poems, in May 1919. At the same time, Eliot's own editing and reviewing responsibilities were keeping him busy even as they followed their own vagaries. He was offered the assistant editorship of the Athenaewm in March but declined it, a certain sign. that these literary successes were beginning to become a dif- ferent kind of burden, but a burden no less. By September 1919, however, he accepted a welcome invitation to write lead articles for the extremely influential Times Literary Supplement. Then the Ego- ist, of which he had been assistant editor and which had been publishing excerpts from JAMES JOYCE's modernist triumph, the novel Ubsses, ceased pub- lication in December of that same year, but not before publishing one of Eliot’s most influential li erary essays, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in installments in its two final issues. With so much activity on so many fronts, 1920 proved to be a particularly busy and pivotal year, as might be expected. In addition to the Knopf vol ume, the Ovid Press published yet another collec- tion of his poetry, Ava Vos Pree, in February, and the Methuen Press would release his first collection of critical prose, The Sacred Wood, that November. It would inchide, among other noteworthy early work, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” "Hamlet and His Problems," and “The Metaphysical Poets.” Eliot was keeping busy with both work and lei- sure activities as well, maintaining a busy social life racing civil: while continuing this increasingly productive life ‘of his asa poet and critic. In 1919, for example, although he was sent on excursions into outlying ateas by Lloyds for weeks at a time, he still found time to take a walking tour of southern France with Exta Pound in August, The following August, he would finally meet Joyce, in Paris, before embark: ing on a bicycle cour of northern France in the sompany of Wyndham Lewis. Although Vivien traveled in his social circles, she was conspicuously absent from many of these extended vacations. Eliot's father had died in January 1919. In June 1921, he and Vivien would be visited for several months by his mother, Henry, and an elder sister, ‘Marian, He would complain to his mother in la December 1920 that his successes at finding more and mote publishing outlets for his essays were preventing him from achieving other, more ere- ative aims. Nonetheless, he and Harvard classmati HELD THavER, in July of 1921, decided to approach Lady ROTHERMERE, the estranged wife of a newspa- ‘per magnate and one of England's wealthiest men, to incerest her in a new international review that -would combine Thayer's the Diat in New York wich, another journal that Eliot would edit from London. Lady Rothermere ultimately would accede to theit plans but decided to limie her financial support co a review located in London. The result, the CE TERION, edited by Eliot, would, for the next decade and a half or more, be one of the most significant European outlets in English for new young writers sand thinkers. Indeed, its frst number, published in Oetober 1922, would introduce the world eo Elior’s ‘own modernist masterwork, The Waste Land. THE POET OF THE WASTE LAND Sinve as early as September 1920, Eliot had been sharing with various intimates, his mother among them, his hopes to find the time to work on a long poem, “something which I thought better or more important.” The Waste Land, the poem that resulted, has not only been universally acclaimed as sgteat poetry but is likely to be one of the enduring ‘cultural documents of the 20th century Contrary to a story that has come to gain neat legendary status among literature students, the poet of The Waste Land was not confined to an