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T.S. Eliot Biography And Visits

London Bridge

When I was at school T.S. Eliot was a bewildering modern poet, all up to the minute angst and doubt. I never really got him. But the fact is T.S. Eliot was not a modern writer in the sense that Thomas Hardy and D.H. Lawrence were, reading Darwin and writing from a new perspective on the world. To Eliot traditional religion was very important. His view of the world was not as a place to discover new things, but as a place that constantly reveals the same unchanging truth. In many ways this is an artistic vision of the world, a vision that allows the work of artists to remain admired as sources of wisdom long after their time has passed. This contrasts with the vision of science where one generation tends to move on from the wisdom of the past. Both visions have their value, even in seeming so different. It is the tension between the old and the new that I came to feel really makes the poetry of T.S. Eliot.

Thomas Stearnes Eliot was born on the 26th of September 1888 in St Louis, Missouri, son of a New England school teacher and a businessman. Young Thomas was brought up to value self denial. His family was descended from some of the original Puritan settlers of New England, and although Eliot's religious beliefs were too undefined to be called Puritan, and his family was Unitarian, Eliot certainly had what you might call a severe, self denying Puritanical streak about him. Eliot lived in an unfashionable part of St Louis, not far from the saloons and brothels of Chestnut and Market streets. Turn of the century St Louis was the ragtime capital of the United States. Scott Joplin produced his ragtime opera here in 1903. This music was the first popular hit of the twentieth century, an early "pop" music. The elitist Eliot wouldn't have liked the idea, but some American readers claim that his famous poem The Wasteland written in 1922 was a kind of rag, the joining together of snatches of tunes and voices in a single piece.

In 1906 Eliot moved east to Boston, to attend Harvard University. Here the arts were not really considered worthwhile or manly compared to the sciences of the new century. Nevertheless Eliot came through an early period where he generally was given a grade known as "the gentleman's C", and started to become a better known figure. He was already writing poetry. The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock dates from this time. He would wander about the poor areas of Boston hoping the experience would help his poetry.

In 1910 Eliot lived in Paris for a while, which he thought would be a good idea, because he liked French poets. Then in April 1911 he made a brief visit to London, the city that was to be so important to him in the future. He ignored the usual tourist places, went to Burlington Arcade and bought the most expensive suit he could find, and visited the north London suburb of Cricklewood, simply because it wasn't a well known place. "Why Cricklewood?" he was asked. "There is no reason" was the reply. Eliot's journey wasn't going to take him to the usual places. He wanted to go somewhere unusual, and seemed to realise that the most ordinary and ignored of places can actually be the most unusual destinations. Eliot was an unashamed elitist, but there was something else in him, a wider view that came out much more in his poetry than in his daily life. D.H. Lawrence's advice that we trust the work and not the author is very relevant with Eliot, who by the way, detested D.H. Lawrence

Merton College Oxford

Eliot then returned to Harvard, read Dante, fell in love with a young woman called Emily Hale, who he kept at a distance being the highly strung uptight young poet that he was. In 1914 he travelled back to England where he was to spend the final year of his studies at Merton College, Oxford. He was now something of an academic star and was being groomed for an academic career back at Harvard. But at Oxford Ezra Pound persuaded Tom that he could be T.S. Eliot the poet. Pound was a strange, flawed, highly energetic character who felt that poets had the job of directing the great unwashed masses. He believed in Eliot as a poet, but to an extent he also seemed to bring out the worst in the young man, who started ranting on about the presence of women lowering the tone of artistic gatherings. His anti-Semitism also became more apparent.

Finishing at Oxford in 1915 Eliot abandoned any thoughts of an academic career, and decided to become a poet, basing his decision on the shaky foundations of the publication of Prufrock in June 1915. That same month he rushed into marrying a woman by the unusual name of Vivienne Haigh Haigh Wood. The couple were basically incompatible; what should have been a fling became marriage, because Eliot's sense of rectitude meant that if you slept with a woman then you had to marry her. Pound was also involved, encouraging Vivienne to marry Eliot because he needed looking after for the sake of his poetry and the world. It wasn't Eliot who ended up being looked after, however. Vivienne wasn't the strong nurturing type. She was fragile, nervous, creative, needy, and her fragility had been compounded over the years by the intervention of doctors using powerful drugs which did more harm than good. She nevertheless had healthy sexual appetites, that the repressed Eliot could not help her with. As Vivienne was not the woman that Eliot needed, the self absorbed Eliot was not the person that Vivienne needed. The marriage turned into a long nightmare. They lived at first in a flat owned by Bertrand Russell. Eliot taught in a school. Vivienne had an affair with Russell.

46 Gordon Square

In a lonely marriage, with the First World War raging in Europe, Eliot was a stranger in wartime London. He met the Bloomsbury Group after Bertrand Russell asked Clive Bell to befriend him. He was invited to 46 Gordon Square, one of the centres of Bloomsbury, and also to Garsington Manor, home of Lady Ottoline Morrell, mistress of Bertrand Russell. Ottoline was a famous hostess who regularly entertained the leading lights of the English intellectual scene. Garsington Manor today hosts the famous Garsington Opera.

Eliot's first volume of poetry, Prufrock And Other Observations, was published in 1917 by Egoist Press. The following year Leonard Woolf wrote to Eliot and invited him to submit a book of poems to Hogarth Press, the small publishing company he ran with Virginia Woolf. Eliot went to the Woolf's home, Hogarth House in Richmond, and seven poems were published in 1919. Publication in England was helping to turn Eliot much more towards the country he was later to adopt. He had been rejected in his application to work for U.S. Intelligence, but was happy working for Lloyds Bank in the City of London, where he was valued and steadily promoted. By 1919 Eliot already had a lot of material which was eventually to become The Wasteland , set vaguely in postwar London. This was to turn out to be a great poem, probably his greatest, and brings out the best and most humane side of the man. In this poem he achieves a balance between the progress of the world, and the unchanging truths that poets set out to find again and again in whatever era they might live in. He finds a balance between the traditional unchanging religious world view, and the new vistas opened up by the modern world.

St Mary Woolnoth

I recall The Wasteland from school as a kind of impenetrable code, which required me to read the whole of Greek and English Literature, to speak Latin, French, German, and to know stuff about eastern mysticism. The thing I now realise is that you don't have to know about all that. The poem's references to other writers, which many clever people cleverly identify, are merely signposts pointing on a journey that stays the same. In the second section of the poem A Game Of Chess, a publican calls "hurry up please it's time." The people leave the pub saying goodbye to each other: "Goodnight Bill. Goodnight Lou. Goodnight Mary. Goodnight. Ta ta. Goodnight. Goodnight." This leads in to the quotation of Ophelia's last words to Hamlet, words which are much the same as the drinkers goodbyes. In Shakespeare's play Ophelia says: "Good night, ladies. Goodnight, sweet ladies, good night, good night." Saying goodbye in one age is the same as saying goodbye in another. Ophelia's words, which are her last words, are the same as words said at the end of an evening, which will be followed by many other evenings out. In spite of the apparent finality of Ophelia's farewell the world will continue to run on through countless evenings out, and no doubt the grumpy Eliot would have found this prospect like the end of the world. The end of the world is combined with the endless hope of it. It is like a mirror, a flat surface in which you see the depth of life. Here I feel that the cold, elitist Eliot found a humane balance between the general run of life and the desire to explore it profoundest depths.

A walk around the City of London will take you glancing over the surface of things, the crowds of people walking over London Bridge, doing today what they did yesterday, or as Eliot put it people: "Flowed up the hill and down King William Street to where St Mary Woolnoth kept the hours with a dead sound on the final stroke of nine." And like a world seen in the surface of a mirror the depth will also be there, the kind of still, profound echo of ages in places like St Mary Woolnoth, or St Magnus thre Martyr which Eliot would visit in his lunch hour. In The Fire Sermon a bored typist takes little notice of her lover who has just left: "She turns and looks a moment in the glass, hardly aware of her departed lover." In the glass you see superficiality, and depth, held together.

In many ways following 1922 Eliot had to try and simply repeat what he had said in The Wasteland. If truth does not fundamentally change, how do you progress? Eliot did not in a sense progress. He said that during a period of recovery from a breakdown in Margate he joined "nothing to nothing." In a way The Wasteland is not deep and meaningful. It skims over life, a Shakespeare quote here, a description of London there, a bit of German or Greek thrown in for good measure. No discovery is made, and nothing changes. As those American readers suggested, it is like Scott Joplin's rag music, linking snatches of tunes together. And yet in not getting anywhere, and in not getting below the surface of life, he sees the depth of the world in the shiny surface of the mirror. In The Fire Sermon there is a vision of the end of the world, when the Thames no longer carries the debris of summer nights, and the loitering heirs of City directors have "departed and left no address." But in a world with no progress there can be no true end, simply a continuation. Perhaps the grumpy, snobbish Eliot thought that endlessly repeated idle goodbyes after a night out at the pub were the end of the world. But they were also the beginning of it, the appearance of great depth in the apparent flatness of life, like a vision of depth in a mirror. Life goes nowhere, and as a result it's journey is limitless. In a strange kind of way this is similar to the new view of the moderns like Hardy and Lawrence. There was no destined journey to a promised end. Life continued.

As for the rest of T.S. Eliot's life, you could go into lots of deep detail: how he started working for Faber in 1925, embraced the Church of England in 1927, how his marriage eventually fell apart, and his wife was confined in an institution. You could investigate his later love affairs, life in London during the Second World War when he worked as an air raid warden and wrote the Four Quartets, his post war celebrity, being awarded the Nobel Prize in 1948, how in 1956 he spoke in a Minneapolis basket ball stadium to 13 700 people like a kind of pop star. Or you could just skim over it.

 

St Magnus The Martyr seen as a reflection on the stone work of a neighbouring office building

The whole of Eliot's effort in life was contained in The Wasteland. "All time is eternally present" he was to write in The Four Quartets in 1940. What he found in The Wasteland he found again. In every ordinary moment that did not leave him high and dry in the culmination of his efforts, there was the promise of finding that special quality again. Nevertheless during the time in London after the First World War Eliot found a peculiarly perfect balance between not achieving anything, and finally getting it right. In the 1950s, his friend Mary Trevalyn would take him on nostalgic drives to the Wasteland area of London, You can follow Eliot's typical route by starting at the the magnificent junction at the Mansion House, walking down King William Street past St Mary Woolnoth, to the wide open space of the approach to London Bridge. From London Bridge descend to the Thames path, and just to the east of the City side of the bridge in Lower Thames Street you will see St Magnus the Martyr which Eliot would visit in his lunch hours away from the bank. He also watched the fishermen at Billingsgate Fish Market here, but the market has now moved. From here Eliot and Mary drove to the Tower and Tower Bridge. You can do the same by simply continuing east along the Thames Path.

Other drives took Eliot past Crawford Mansions in Paddington where he had lived with Vivienne, and to Victoria Grove, the home of cats Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer, who had appeared in his 1939 book of poetry for children, Old Possum's Book Of Practical Cats. Eliot's favourite drive was down the length of Portobello Road. All time might be eternally present, but Eliot's eternal present is most associated with the 1920s London he explored once again on these nostalgic drives.

 

At school I thought of Eliot as very modern, which meant he was very confusing. But in being so avant garde he was looking back. Eliot was actually nostalgic for the unchanging Catholic mysteries of the Middle Ages, and the certainties of the American Puritans of the Seventeenth Century. Why not go to Oxford, where Eliot studied at Merton College, or to Cambridge, where he lectured at Trinity College in 1926, and look at the ancient buildings which contain our institutions most concerned with advancing knowledge. The colleges now devoted to the advancement of learning derived from the homes of religious orders where advance was not the aim. In a place where knowledge advances, we also see the vision of something that does not change, and never will.