Old Possum in his Letters

“Talent is an adornment; an adornment is also a concealment.”
—Nietzsche

“I think one’s letters ought to be X about oneself (I live up to this theory!)—what else is there to talk about? Letters should be indiscretions—otherwise they are simply official bulletins.” So T.S. Eliot remarked to his Harvard classmate, the poet Conrad Aiken, in 1914. Most readers of Eliot’s work have expected official bulletins, but others have long awaited the letters as proof of his indiscretions. The publication of Eliot’s correspondence by his widow Valerie, an edition so long awaited by the poet’s friends and detractors, is therefore a literary event of the greatest biographical importance. The first of several such volumes to follow, this book takes the poet from his boyhood up to 1922, the year of the publication of The Waste Land. Hence, it is now possible to begin to answer whether Eliot indeed lived up to his theory. In these 618 pages of early correspondence—including some letters to or about Eliot by friends and family—we have a rich compendium of materials, indiscreet and official, touching the poet’s life and work.

Surprises of a sort do pepper these pages, as when young Eliot tells Aiken that “I should find it very stimulating to have several women fall in love with me,” and “I should be very sorry for them, too.” “Come,” he adjures Aiken (though neither was married), “let us desert our wives and fly to a land where there are no Medici prints, nothing but concubinage and conversation.” He confesses to recurrent “nervous sexual attacks which I suffer from when alone in a city” and opines that he would have been better off “if I had disposed of my virginity and shyness several years ago.” Ford Madox Ford he dismisses as “an unpleasant parasite of letters.” But was this young Eliot cocky or prescient when he remarked of Bertrand Russell, his philosophy tutor at Harvard, that “he has a sensitive, but hardly a cultivated mind, and I begin to realise how unbalanced he is,” or when he called Ezra Pound’s early verse “well-meaning but touchingly incompetent”? However one may answer, it is worth remarking that he often revised his judgment of himself and others.

But on the whole these early letters are models of circumspection befitting a young man of a proper New England sensibility. With his mother we find young Tom exceptionally tender; with his father he is respectfully defensive about his vocation; with his Harvard philosophy professors he is exacting and serious; while with classmates and Cambridge women friends he is jaunty and comedic. Eliot before 1914 seems a confident and happy young man. But with the onset of the war, with his disastrous marriage to the chronically ill Vivienne Haigh-Wood in 1915, and with his desperate effort to make ends meet, Eliot’s spirits manifestly decline, year by year, toward the nervous breakdown that felled him in 1922.

It is during this period that Eliot mounted what can only be called, after Henry James, the conquest of London. Eliot intended nothing less than to make himself the preeminent authority, in England, on literature, philosophy, and culture. The process by which he mastered Anglo-American literary politics is fascinating. It involved his immersion in the literary tradition and modern cultural developments. He undertook a calculated program of reading, he gave lectures in a university extension program, he cultivated British and American writers and journal editors, and he composed an intentionally small body of influential poems and stunning works of contemporary criticism like The Sacred Wood. These, together with his management of issues for the Egoist and his taking on the editorship of Criterion, disclose a young man astutely at work in the creation of an extraordinary literary career. As he told his mother in 1919:

There is a small and select public which regards me as the best living critic, as well as the best living poet, in England. I shall of course write for the Ath[eneum]., and keep my finger on it. I am much in sympathy with the editor, who is one of my most cordial admirers. With that and the Egoist and a young quarterly review which I am interested in, and which is glad to take anything I will give, I can have more than enough power to satisfy me. I really think that I have far more influence on English letters than any other American has ever had, unless it be Henry James. I know a great many people, but there are many more who would like to know me, and I can remain isolated and detached.

Yet Eliot’s conquest of London could not have been accomplished without the help of a good many people. And what seems evident from these letters is that Eliot, pampered as a boy, projected the persona of one who very much needed to be taken care of.

One may infer an image of Eliot’s dependency in the letter of his mother, dated 1905, to the headmaster of the Milton Academy: “I thought perhaps I had better explain to you just why Tom could not participate in football and other such strenuous sports, involving risk of strain. He has had a case of congenital rupture which, our physician thinks, is superficially healed, but as the abdominal muscles there are weak. . . . ” Later, he persuaded the family to support him, even after he had become a married man. During his catastrophic marriage to Vivienne, although he unarguably worked like a slave to support them (and the physicians who treated her), he induced Vivienne to correspond with many of their acquaintances, explaining why Tom was physically or emotionally unable to do this or that. Meanwhile, he was enormously productive in the life of letters.

Convinced as he was of what he called the “barbarism” of American life, Eliot apparently induced Ezra Pound to write to Henry Ware Eliot, the poet’s father, to explain why his son’s decision to remain in London as a writer was the only rational choice. Pound’s quotation is from George Moore’s Confessions of a Young Man:

As to his coming to London, anything else is a waste of time and energy. No one in London cares a hang what is written in America. After getting an American audience a man has to begin all over again here if he plans an international hearing. . . . The situation has been very well summed up in the sentence; “Henry James stayed in Paris and read Turgenev and Flaubert, Mr. Howells returned to America and read Henry James.”

When Vivienne broke down, it was Bertie Russell whom Eliot pressed into service, to take her down to his place in the country for rest and recuperation. We have long known that Pound put together the Catholic Anthology for the simple purpose of getting 15 pages of Eliot into print at once, and that he organized a public subscription to get Eliot out of the Lloyd’s bank, where he had taken a job, so that the poet could devote himself wholly to letters. As Vivienne put it in a letter to the poet’s brother, “Tom is wonderful. I have never met a man who gets so much pushing and helping and who impresses people so much with the feeling that he is worth helping.” Charles W. Eliot, the retired president of Harvard and a cousin of Eliot’s grandfather, wasn’t convinced by Eliot’s expatriation. As he told Tom in a letter of 1919: “My last word is that if you wish to speak through’ your own work to people of the ‘finest New England spirit’ you had better not live much longer in the English atmosphere. The New England spirit has been nurtured in the American atmosphere.” Nevertheless, as these letters make plain, the craft and cunning of Eliot’s siege of London manifestly involved an appearance on his part of helplessness and an appeal to the goodwill of others. I do not mean to suggest that Eliot was ungrateful: these letters are replete with expressions of sincere gratitude. It is simply that the affairs of genius were, in his case, as in many others, managed by an apparent affectation of helplessness, one of Old Possum’s many masks.

In the meantime, as Eliot becomes more and more immersed in his banking and literary duties, the letters become less indiscreet and revelatory, and more impersonal, more concerned with literary business. If, in 1917, he confided to Eleanor Hinkley that he sometimes thought “it is better to write brief letters—unless one had one particular thing to say at some length; one sits down to write a ‘good long letter’ and becomes consciously dull,” by 1922 he was confessing to his brother that “I have not had the leisure to write a satisfactory and personal letter for years, and it is a recreation at which I am painfully out of practice.” There is in all of this, however, something calculated, an element of self-protection, based on Eliot’s recognition of his growing eminence and his aversion to biographical disclosures, evident in his notorious claims for the necessary impersonality of poetry.

Even so, a good many of the letters are richly interesting compendia of literary observations, amounting to obiter dicta. To Eleanor Hinkley, he remarks that “Every novelist has a knack for doing some one stunt”:

Thackeray could do the Yellowplush Papers and the Steyne part of Vanity Fair, but he had a picture of himself as a kindly satirist. Not at all, he hadn’t brains enough, nor courage enough to find out really what he could do well, which was high society sordidness, and do it. Standards of good writing in English are deplorably low. Meredith knew what he was doing, but unfortunately it wasn’t worth doing, don’t read him. The Way of All Flesh was written by a man who was not an artist and had no sense of style.

On the other hand, Henry James “has about the keenest sense of Situation of any novelist, and his always alert intelligence is a perpetual delight,” while, George Eliot “had a great talent, and wrote one great story, Amos Barton, and went steadily down hill afterwards.” Joyce and Marianne Moore Eliot read with pleasure, but of H.D.’s verse he observed that it is “fatiguingly monotonous and lacking in the element of surprise.” In addition, he found in H.D. “a neurotic carnality which I dislike.” (“I imagine you dislike equally the Prudentialism of myself and Mr. Joyce,” he told Richard Aldington unexpectedly, “and expect you to abhor the poem [The Waste Land] on which I have been working.”) His editorial dealings with women writers, or women generally, were problematic. As he told his father, “I struggle to keep the writing as much as possible in Male hands, as I distrust the Feminine in literature, and also, once a woman has had anything printed in your paper, it is very difficult to make her see why you should not print everything she sends in.”

The Feminine in marriage was an even greater ordeal. “You said once that marriage is the greatest test in the world,” he wrote Mrs. Jack Gardner in 1915, the year of his marriage. “I know now that you were right, but now I welcome the test instead of dreading it. It is much more than a test of sweetness of temper, as people sometimes think; it is a test of the whole character and affects every action.” After a year of marriage Eliot confided to Aiken that “I have lived through material for a score of long poems, in the last six months.” These letters intimate the most exciting test of Eliot’s character as the couple struggled with poverty and illness of every conceivable kind, most conspicuously Vivienne’s gradual descent into madness. The Waste Land portrait of the neurotic wife whose “nerves are bad tonight,” who hallucinates wildly, and who implores her silent husband to speak to her, speak, speak about anything, opens up a vision of what the Eliots were going through in the years between 1915 and 1922. However, in that latter year it was he who completely broke down and required psychiatric treatment in a Swiss sanitarium, in what the poem called that “decayed hole among the mountains.” There the poetic voice expresses the deepest sense of personal and spiritual exile.

Peter Ackroyd, Eliot’s biographer, Michael Hastings, author of the play Tom and Viv, and the critic Donald Davie have charged that Eliot letters, unflattering to the poet, have been excluded from this collection prepared by the second Mrs. Eliot, and that it is “a whitewash job.” Such charges require greater substantiation than I have so far seen. Until there is more evidence that these letters are merely “official bulletins,” I am inclined to think the claim exaggerated. From 1917 onward. Old Possum was not much inclined to commit himself, in indiscreet ways, on letter paper. Meanwhile, we await succeeding volumes.

[The Letters of T.S. Eliot: Volume I, 1898-1922, edited by Valerie Eliot (San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich) 639 pp., $29.95]