Eliot – I Gotta Use Words When I Talk to You

Virginia Woolf to T. S. Eliot: ‘We’re not as good as Keats.’ T. S. Eliot to Virginia Woolf: ‘Oh yes, we are. We’re trying something harder.’ Checkmate! It’s a delightful vignette, one of many, in Peter Ackroyd’s brilliant biography. T. S. Eliot was indeed trying something harder and he succeeded. With the publication of The Waste Land, Eliot broke the mold in poetry, in the same way that Joyce’s Ulysses – published the same year, 1922 – broke the mold in the novel. In the history of poetry there is before and after Thomas Stearns Eliot.

Who was he, this man who created a new movement in literature, virtually a new poetic language that has ‘the capacity to cut into our consciousness with the sharpness of a diamond’ (Anders Österling, Permanent Secretary to The Swedish Academy 1948)? What was he like, this man about whom Ted Hughes said, ‘There is a direct line which can be traced from Virgil to Dante, from Dante to Milton and from Milton to Eliot, the greatest poet for over three hundred years’? Well, the greatest poet for over three hundred years was described by John Betjeman as ‘a quiet, remote figure’. At Lloyd’s Bank, where he worked as a clerk, he cut a figure of great elegance but he was in fact very good at his job. After the bank years, he became editor, and then director, at publishers Faber and Gwyer (later Faber and Faber), where he was known as ‘the Pope of Russell Square’. Even after he’d begun to make a name for himself as a poet, Ackroyd notes that Eliot did not exactly dazzle those who met him. The society hostess Lady Ottoline Morrell found him ‘dull, dull, dull’. Aldous Huxley said Eliot was ‘just another Europeanised American talking about French literature in the most uninspiring fashion’. ‘The dull, dull man’, ‘the boring Europeanised American’, who even described himself, in less than thrilling terms, as ‘Classical in literature, Royalist in politics and Anglo-Catholic in religion’, was born in St Louis, Missouri, in September 1888, a late son to older parents who already had four daughters and a son. They were, Ackroyd writes, successful, practical Unitarians, part of the intellectual aristocracy of America. ‘They never did less than was expected of them and Eliot too did what was expected of him.’ He went to the right schools, the right clubs and the right university, Harvard, where, in the library one day, he came across Arthur Symons’ The Symbolist Movement in Literature. Its main practitioners were French – Mallarmé, Verlaine, Rimbaud and Laforgue. The discovery of this book was, Eliot himself said, life-changing. The importance he attached from then on to the symbol of reality, and its associations and affinities, is key to ‘experiencing’ Eliot. Mood, subtle connections, strange conjunctions, in language and image – rather than realism of time and place and incident – all work together in an Eliot poem with almost hypnotic power. This Eliot effect I noted again and again at readings, even during his most demanding work. The hour-long Four Quartets, for example, is listened to in a concentrated silence even during long, often daunting passages.

After Harvard his path was deemed to be clear: academe. He rebelled and left for Paris in the autumn of 1910. It would not be his last determined departure and from Harvard to Paris is not only a question of geography. Through his friendship with a fellow lodger, Jean Verdenal, Eliot quickly became part of the heady literary life of Paris. By 1911, Eliot was scribbling in a notebook the poem that Ezra Pound would call the first American masterpiece of the twentieth century, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (later dedicated to Verdenal, who was killed in the war). He was also writing ‘Portrait of a Lady’. He was just twenty-two and it is one of literature’s more unnerving facts that he had already taken possession of his gift. The writer Conrad Aiken, Eliot’s Harvard friend, is quoted by Ackroyd as having been astonished at ‘how sharp and complete and sui generis the whole thing was from the outset . . . The wholeness is there, from the beginning.’ One journey, from Harvard to Paris, had resulted in great intellectual and artistic riches. Another journey, from Paris to Oxford’s Merton College, led him to a darker, personal destiny: marriage to Vivien Haigh-Wood. She it was who would shape his life and influence his work for decades to come. The artistic riches in future would be dearly bought.

Eliot was twenty-seven in 1915 when he met Vivien and, he said later, ‘very young for his age, very timid, very inexperienced’. They married quickly, Eliot seemingly wholly unaware that Vivien suffered from a severe hormonal disorder. The morphine-based drugs that were used to treat her exacerbated her often hysterical, sometimes dangerous, behaviour. Over the years the huge financial burden of doctors and sanatoria meant that he rarely worked fewer than fifteen hours a day. The stress almost broke his health. If it was hard for Eliot, it destroyed Vivien. It is a terrible tale and biographers – Ackroyd, Lyndall Gordon and others – approach it with compassion. The American critic Cynthia Ozick is rather harsher in her judgement of Eliot’s emotional and psychological journey, which she describes as one from compassion to horror. In 1933, after eighteen years of marriage, he left Vivien, ostensibly to give a series of lectures in Harvard. He had no intention of returning to her. She refused to accept the inevitable. Her illness and her distress led to behaviour that was regarded, in those more constrained times, as bordering on insanity. She was confined for the last years of her life to a mental institution, where she died in 1947. Eliot never visited during that time. Four Quartets, which he started in 1936, three years after their separation and published in its entirety in 1943, is his mature masterpiece and it led to his being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1948. ‘The more perfect the artist,’ he once wrote, ‘the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates.’ Maybe. However, only a man who had suffered deeply could write that one of ‘the gifts reserved for age’ is ‘the awareness of things ill done and done to others’ harm/Which once you took for exercise of virtue’. Late in life, he made a kind of dash for the adult happiness that had eluded him. He married Valerie Fletcher, his young assistant at Faber. It was a marriage that transformed him. This most private of poets wrote of his deep joy in ‘A dedication to my Wife’, a love poem of ‘private words addressed to you in public’. He was now an iconic figure, fêted everywhere he went. ‘Viva, Viva, Eliot,’ they called to him in Rome and Ackroyd tells us he once gave a lecture to 14,000 people in a football stadium in Minnesota on ‘The Frontiers of Criticism’. Those were the days! However, although there were plays and essays, there was to be no more poetry. Larkin’s ‘rare bird’ had flown away.

Eliot died in 1965, aged seventy-seven, with his second wife Valerie at his side. After his death she said he felt he had paid too high a price for poetry. ‘The dead writers are that which we know,’ he once said. The Nobel academy agreed: ‘Tradition is not a dead load which we drag along with us . . . it is the soil in which the seeds of coming harvests are to be sown, and from which future harvests will be garnered.’

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