T. S. Eliot
An Imperfect Life
By Lyndall Gordon
W. W. Norton & Company
Copyright © 2000
Lyndall Gordon
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0393320936
Chapter One
Early Models
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on 26 September
1888 in St Louis, Missouri, the son of a New England
schoolteacher and a St Louis merchant. Thirty-eight years
later he was baptised as an Anglican in an English village.
Such facts tell little of a man for whom there was usually a
gap between his outward and his private life, the constructed,
highly articulate surface and the inward ferment. Wyndham
Lewis painted Eliot's face as if it were a mask, so that he
might distinguish Eliot's formal surface from his hooded
introspective eyes, and the severe dark lines of his suit from
the flesh of his shoulders beneath. Virginia Woolf wrote that
his hazel eyes seemed oddly lively and youthful in a pale,
sculptured, even heavy face.
Eliot's admirers played up his mask, while detractors
stripped it only to find the flaws: both overlooked a man of
extremes whose deep flaws and high virtues were interfused.
Obsessed by `this self inside us' and determined to guard it, he
was barely famous in 1925 when he decided there should be
no biography. He urged those close to him to keep silence,
and sealed many letters until the next century. Meanwhile, he
devised his own biography, enlarging in poem after poem on
the character of a man who conceives of his life as a spiritual
quest despite the anti-religious mood of his age and the
distracting claims of women, friends, and alternative careers.
He once spoke of the man who tries to explain to himself `the
sequence that culminates in faith', and in a letter, written in
1930, mentioned his long-held intention to explore a mode of
writing neglected in the twentieth century, the spiritual
autobiography.
Eliot aimed to be a `poet who, out of intense and personal
experience, is able to express a general truth'. In some sense
his own works do retain `all the particularity' of personal
experience, though to work back from the work to the life
can only be done through imaginative transformations that
intervene, the discarded fragments of
The Waste Land or the
ten layers of Eliot's most confessional play,
The Family
Reunion. The challenge is to discern the bonds between life
and work in a way that brings out the greatness of major
works which are, after all, the most important facts in the
poet's life. To do this we must imagine a man with immortal
longings, and reconstruct the strategy by which he attained
immortality. The strategy was extraordinary, so willed in its
acts of surrender, so directed in its doubts, so sure in its
single-mindedness, that we see all the way the pure line of
that trajectory — leaving broken lives in its wake.
Eliot was recognised in his lifetime as the moral spokesman
of the twentieth century, but as that century now recedes
from view the question is rising whether the huge power of
his voice to engage our souls can sustain sympathy for a man
who was stranger and more intolerant than his disarming
masks would have us believe, a man who grew progressively
harder to know during the inscrutable years of fame. Eliot's
guardians, most now dead, no longer block the crucial issue
whether his intolerance for the masses, for women and Jews
in particular, infects his greatness. The anti-Semitism is
integral to the poetry, said a lawyer, Anthony Julius, who
built up a formidable case against Eliot in 1996, thirty years
after the poet's death. Biography, though, can't reduce a man
to the adversarial categories — guilty or not guilty — of the
courtroom. Courts construct set dramas that rarely elicit the
complexity of motives in actual lives. Undoubtedly, an
infection is there in Eliot — hate — and we can't explain it
away; and yet biographers, of all people, know it is naïve to
expect the great to be good. Dickens was monstrous to his
wife and children, while his works laud the social ideal of the
family; Tolstoy was a self-willed autocrat who parades an
image of humble holy man; Carlyle was another domestic
tyrant, while Hardy estranged his wife and then wrote
touching elegies after her death. Eliot's superiority invites
scrutiny. In his case, we must walk a difficult path through a
thicket of `things ill done and done to others' harm'. Shall we
find that Eliot's great poems answer ill-doing? Is it conceivable
that they are all the greater, in fact, for their admission
of failure to match the perfect life to which Eliot aspired from
the start?
Eliot's Notebook and other manuscript poems (published
thirty years after his death) show that he began to measure his
life by the divine goal as far back as his student days, in 1910
and 1911, and that the turning-point came not when he was
baptised in 1927 but in 1914 when he first interested himself
in the motives, the ordeals, and the achievements of saints. In
later years Eliot seemed to beg off personally in favour of a
routine life of prayer and observance, but the early manuscripts
suggest that for a time in his youth he dreamed of the
saint's ambitious task, of living by his own vision beyond the
imaginative frontiers of his civilisation.
At the heart of the hidden life was a hunt for signs. One
came to him in an English garden seven years after his
conversion, a renewal of a sign he had as a student moving
through the streets of Boston in June 1910. It had cut through
the urban clamour, cut through sense perception, cut through
time itself with an intuition of timeless `reality'. Emily
Dickinson called it
Eternity's disclosure
To favorites — a few —
Of the Colossal substance
Of Immortality.
Eliot would not call it anything, unwilling to wrench it to fit
words that fall short of the Word. But there is no question
that he recognised whatever it was as momentous. He said
simply there was nothing else to live for — `there is
nothing else beside'. This absolute conviction explains his
view of ordinary life as waste. In
The Waste Land, the waste
is a place, a city filled with hopeless inhabitants. Later, in
Four Quartets, the waste is time, the `waste sad time' between
signs.
Whether the waste was place or time, it meant the failure
of the human mind to grasp the sign. There followed, a bit
automatically, Eliot's disgust with the debasement of the
human condition. This was confirmed by a wretched marriage
and early struggles to make a living in what seemed, to a
newcomer, a squalid and soulless London. His London, like
the equally squalid Boston of his `Preludes', is not really an
objective scene but a correlate for the collapse of a private
vision. If this is true, Eliot's famous disgust is no common
élitism. It is a stranger, soul-sick state of his own.
Eliot is most outspoken in his poetry, guarded by his
celebrated theory of impersonality which, he once admitted,
was a bluff. As more is known of Eliot's life, the clearer it
becomes that the `impersonal' facade of his poetry — the
multiple faces and voices — masks an often quite literal
reworking of personal experience. Eliot wrote that there is a
`transfusion of the personality or, in a deeper sense, the life of
the author into the character'. This book will follow the
confessional element in Eliot's poetry by measuring the
poetry against the life. It may be called a biography, but in
Eliot's sense of the genre. Whenever he wrote about lives
Eliot was not so much concerned with formal history and
circumstance as with what he called `unattended' moments.
`The awful daring of a moment's surrender,' he wrote in
The
Waste Land. `By this, and this only, we have existed.' The
external facts of Eliot's life are here, but only to prop what
was for him the definitive inward experience that shaped the
work. By limiting biographic trivia, it is possible to trace the
continuity of Eliot's career and see poetry and life as
complementary parts of one design, a consuming search for
salvation. Throughout his life and throughout his work, Eliot
was testing the sublime plot of spiritual biography, the plot
laid down in Exodus: an exit from civilisation followed by a
long trial in a waste place, followed by entry into the
promised land. To obscure this plot with too much detail
would be to miss the point, and that is why, with Eliot, the
form of full-scale biography is simply unsuited to an
understanding of his life.
A poet, Yeats said, `is never the bundle of accident and
incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn
as an idea, something intended, complete.' It is hard to say
exactly how or when the commanding idea is born but, in
Eliot's case, an obvious source suggests itself in the figures
that surrounded his American youth. The shadowy exemplary
figure that haunts Eliot's poetry may be traced to his
grandfather, whom Emerson called `the Saint of the West', to
his mother's heroes of truth and virtue, to the hardy
fishermen of Cape Ann, Massachusetts, who all shaped
Eliot's imagination. Towards the end of his life he came to see
his poetry as more American than English: `... in its sources,
in its emotional springs, it comes from America.'
* * *
Eliot said he was brought up to believe that there were
`Eliots, non-Eliots and foreigners', and that amongst Eliots
the pinnacle was his grandfather, the Revd William Greenleaf
Eliot (1811-87): `... the most one could possibly achieve
was to be a Credit to the Family, though of course one's
Grandfather was the Great Man, so there was no hope of
reaching that eminence.' His grandson was never `whacked',
in fact as the last of seven children he was `spoilt', but he had
no sense of importance in his own right.
Eliot's parents were both forty-five when he was born, and
seemed to him remote, like `ancestors'; he felt closer to his
only brother, Henry Ware Eliot, Jr, and to his sister Marian,
nine and eleven years older. His father, Henry Ware Eliot, Sr,
was a man of refined bearing with a taste for art and music,
and an acute sense of smell. He had a habit of smelling his
food before he ate it and could identify which of his
daughters owned a stray handkerchief. He started with
wholesale groceries, then went bankrupt making acetic acid.
Although he eventually found success as a manufacturer of
bricks, he lived under the shadow of his own father, William
Greenleaf Eliot, a financial genius of whom it was said that,
had he not been called to the ministry, he might have owned
nearly everything west of the Mississippi. There is little sign
of imagination in Henry's autobiography; he presents himself
as rather a plodder, proud of his industry and filial piety. He
could be, in a studied way, playful and liked to draw faces on
his children's boiled eggs. He commended Tom as a modest
and affectionate son, not as a promising one, and this left the
boy rather `mournful', since his grades, mostly C's, gave no
indication of latent gifts.
His mother, on the other hand, may have thought more of
him than he granted, for she spoke to him as an equal. He, in
turn, was devoted to her. Later, when he was cut off from her
by a comfortless marriage, struggling through war years in a
gloomy England, he recalled lying in bed at home in St Louis,
his mother by his side, telling the tale of the `little Tailor' as
the firelight played on the ceiling. His strongest recorded
expression of emotion is on the flyleaf of a copy of
Union
Portraits which he sent to her `with infinite love'. High-minded
and plain-living, Charlotte Champe Stearns taught
her children to perfect themselves each day, `to make the best
of every faculty and control every tendency to evil'.
T. S. Eliot spent his first sixteen years in a city distinguished
at the turn of the century for the corruption of its businessmen,
its inadequate sewers, and sulphurous fumes. Yet he
could still say: `I am very well satisfied with having been born
in St. Louis.' Whenever he recalled St Louis in later life he did
not think first of the city's blemishes but of the childhood
memories that overrode them: the moods and rhythms of the
great Mississippi (`the river is within us ...'); the steamboats
blowing in the New Year; the river in flood in 1892, 1897,
and 1903 `with its cargo of dead Negroes, cows and chicken
coops'; his Irish nurse, Annie Dunne, who discussed with
him, at the age of six, the existence of God, and took him
with her to a local Catholic church on the corner of Locust
Street and Jefferson Avenue. `... I liked it very much.' he
recalled, `the lights, the coloured statues and paper flowers,
the lived-in atmosphere, and the fact that the pews had little
gates that I could swing on.' There is a photograph of Eliot,
aged seven, with his dimpled nurse, his beret perched jauntily
on his head and his face mischievous; Annie's lips are pursed,
one hand on her hip. Years later, Eliot wrote a rhyme about
some naughty Jim Jum Bears who got up to tricks to
exasperate their Nurse (`Was ever a Nurse so put about?'). It
recalls the secure intimacy of early days with Annie, to whom
he said he was `greatly attached'.
Annie took him to Mrs Lockwood's school, what was
called in those days a dame school. When he was ten, in
1898, he moved on to Smith Academy, a school founded by
his grandfather; his mother sent him in a sailor-suit, and the
boys laughed. There was one other `terrible' humiliation as he
described it: `I sat between two little girls at a party. I was
very hot. And one of the little girls leaned across ... to the
other and whispered loudly: "Look at his ears!" So one night
I tied some rope round them when I went to bed, but my
mother came and took it off and told me they would fold
themselves back so I needn't worry.' He avoided another
children's party: `I walked round and round the streets until it
was time to go home.'
The Eliots lived in Locust Street, an unfashionable
part of St Louis, not far from the saloons and brothels of
Chestnut and Market Streets, at a time when pianists in back
rooms were joining `rags' together as jolting tunes. At the
turn of the century St Louis became the world's ragtime
capital, where Scott Joplin produced his ragtime opera in
1903. An impresario called Turpin set up a National Ragtime
Contest for the 1904 St Louis World's Fair. This music was
the first popular hit of the twentieth century, and there are
Americans who claim that Eliot's improvisation in
The Waste
Land (1922) is a kind of rag, joining snatches of tunes and
voices in a single composition. Certainly, a rag of 1902
`Under the Bamboo Tree' by Johnson, Cole, and Johnson,
was to enter Eliot's Jazz Age play,
Sweeney Agonistes (1926).
Since most of the Eliots' friends moved to quieter suburbs
further west, and since Tom's sisters and brother were a good
bit older, he had few playmates and spent most of his time
reading. One favourite was Poe. From the age of ten he had
to go to a dentist twice a week for two years: he found the
collected works of Poe in the waiting-room, and managed to
read them through. From 28 January to 19 February 1899 he
brought out fourteen numbers of a magazine called
The
Fireside, boasting `Fiction, Gossip, Theatre, Jokes and all
interesting'. At the same age he could identify some seventy
kinds of birds on Cape Ann, Massachusetts, where the family
spent the summer. He had a congenital double hernia and his
mother, afraid it would rupture, forbade football and
strenuous sports. When `the Skipper' gave him sailing lessons,
Charlotte would go along, fortified by a guard of grown-up
sisters, to ensure that he did not get too wet or too hot or too
tired. He accepted his mother's domination in good humour.
There was in Eliot's mother a moral passion and a gift of
eloquence. She had the intellectual ardour of able nineteenth-century
women — like Dorothea Brooke in
Middlemarch — a
natural scholar whose sex and circumstance debarred her
from higher education. She set out to be a poet, and when her
youngest child showed talent, hoped that he might redeem
her sense of failure. She wrote in a letter to Eliot at Harvard:
I hope in your literary work you will receive early the
recognition I strove for and failed. I should so have loved a
college course, but was obliged to teach before I was nineteen.
I graduated with high rank, `a young lady of unusual brilliancy
as a scholar' my old yellow testimonial says, but when I was
set to teaching young children, my Trigonometry and Astronomy
counted for nought, and I made a dead failure.
In 1862, after her graduation from the State Normal School
of Framingham, Massachusetts, she had moved from one
teaching post to another — Pennsylvania, Milwaukee, Antioch
College in Ohio, and then back to Framingham. It was when
she moved yet again to teach at the St Louis Normal School
that she met a handsome clerk who shipped goods on the
Mississippi. This was Henry Ware Eliot, and they married in
1868. She then devoted her energies to her growing family
and local reforms, particularly a separate house of detention
for juveniles. When her husband went bankrupt in the 1870s,
she supported the family for a year, teaching at an adjoining
girls' school, the Mary Institute. Her room displayed no sign
of conventional femininity except for a pincushion on the
dresser. There was a comfortable armchair next to a sunny
window even though it blocked a chest of drawers. The bed
faced a mantelpiece draped with a velvet cloth on which
rested a painting of the Madonna and child. On her wall
there hung an engraving of Theodosius and St Ambrose,
illustrating the triumph of holy over temporal power.
After her death, when Henry Ware Eliot, Jr, placed
Charlotte's poems in Harvard's Eliot Collection, he wrote to
the librarian: `Perhaps a hundred years from now the
connection with T. S. Eliot will not seem so remote. Of all the
family, my brother most resembled my mother in features
and ... if there is anything in heredity, it must have been
from that side that T. S. Eliot got his tastes.' Apart from
Charlotte herself, there were no writers on the Stearns side,
but there was that moral fervour. The statue called `The
Puritan' in Springfield, Massachusetts, shows a Stearns
ancestor striding forward with a huge Bible grasped under
one arm and, in the other, a pilgrim's staff. A reserved
uncle, the Revd Oliver Stearns, used to startle his students at
Harvard Divinity School with sudden floods of eloquence.
Whatever he saw to be true or right, that would he say and
do, `though the heavens fell'.
It is telling to read Charlotte Eliot's poetry in the context of
her son's work. She writes of `the vision of the seer' and `the
prophet's warning cry'. Her poems recount turning-points in
the lives of the chosen: the Apostles and `The Unnamed
Saints', St Barnabas and St Theodosius. Her heroes are `truth-inebriated',
`God-intoxicated' individualists modelled on nineteenth-century
New Englanders Emerson and Channing; her
Savonarola, her Giordano Bruno, her St Francis trust the
private vision. Her image of the thinker who, from unfathomed
depths, seizes on the sublime truth is almost identical
with the dominant figure in her son's vigil poems of 1911 and
1912.
Charlotte Eliot's strength is essentially that of a preacher.
All the force of her poetry lies in passionate argument and
dramatic illustration. She speaks particularly to those who
`by gift of genius' are set apart; her message is to endure with
faith periods of religious despair:
Ye who despair
Of man's redemption, know, the light is there,
Though hidden and obscured, again to shine ...
(`Saved!')
Her gift is didactic; she lacks the inventiveness and imaginative
freshness of the great poet. Her son, using the same
traditional images, rescued them from triteness — the beatific
light, the fires of lust and purgation, the pilgrimage across the
`desert waste', and the seasonal metaphor for spiritual
drought that pervades his mother's poetry. In the extremity of
`the dying year' the boughs in her garden go stiff and dry, no
flower blooms, while a new power awaits its birth. `April is
the cruellest month,' her son was to write, `breeding lilacs out
of the dead land'. Mother and son used the same traditional
images to signal grace. In `The Master's Welcome' she hears
children's voices. Bells signal recovery of faith after a period
of doubt. Water — the `celestial fountain' and `the healing
flood' — promises relief after long ordeals.
Charlotte Eliot mapped out states of being between loss
and recovery of grace, a map her son redrew in his poetry in
twentieth-century terms. The main difference was his mother's
optimism. She felt an assurance of grace her son could
not share. His faint-hearted character, J. Alfred Prufrock,
feels obliged to frame an `overwhelming' question but shirks
it. In the context of his lack of nerve, it is curious to note the
many questions Charlotte Eliot posed in her poetry: How
does one face `blank annihilation'? Is life worth living since
we know we must die? `And is this all [,] this life so
incomplete?' `What shall I do to be saved?' Eliot had a model
of the perfect life before he left his mother's side; the long-term
issue was whether he could make it his own.
He was later to lead a double life: publicly at the centre of a
sycophantic buzz; privately there was the incommunicable
life of a solitary that was all the stranger because it was
conducted in the stir of the city, in the glare of fame. There
was an inward silence and, at the same time, a speaker on
platforms across Europe and America. Eliot's face acquired a
sort of exposed reticence from the habit of looking down
from a lectern into rows upon rows of eyes. His skin had a
look of being drawn tightly across his face. His features,
though sharp, were delicate, especially the softly indented
mouth. It was his nature to have scruple within scruple and to
regulate his conduct on principles ignored by men of the
world, like Lot in Sodom or Daniel in Babylon who, Eliot
said, kept silence because they could do no good.
He often spoke of the `unspoken'. In a solitude guarded by
public masks he lived a hidden life. It would be unreachable if
he had not been a poet with a need to explore and define that
life. His poetry distils a predetermined drama from the dross
so that what emerges is the coherent form of spiritual
autobiography, direct, honest, and more penetrating than any
outsider could dare to determine — a life so closely allied to
creative works as to be a reciprocal invention. This biography
follows his own formulation, testing it against the facts of his
actual existence.
* * *
In a talk, `The Influence of Landscape upon the Poet', Eliot
called himself a New England poet because he had been so
deeply affected when he came east as a child. He was always
happy near the sea and would remember with joy his
boyhood summers at Gloucester, Cape Ann.
Until he was eight, the family stayed at the Hawthorne Inn;
then, in 1896, his father built a large, solid house at Eastern
Point, beyond the town, on land bought in 1890, an
uncultivated rough coast, surrounded by wild bush and slabs
of rock going down to the sea's edge. The upper windows
looked out on the granite shore, the white sails on the sea
and, looking the other way, the harbour. Eliot remembered
Gloucester harbour as one of the most beautiful on the New
England coast. A photograph by his brother, Henry, shows it
at the turn of the century, the tall masts of what was then an
all-sail fishing fleet dominating the village in the background
with its clapboard houses and sloping roofs. From the
beginning, fishing was the main occupation in Gloucester.
When a divine came among the first settlers in the seventeenth
century and said: `Remember, brethren, that you journeyed
here to save your souls,' one of the brethren added, `And to
ketch fish.' In Eliot's day fishermen lounging at the corner of
Main Street and Duncan Street told yarns of storms and
shipwrecks on the half-hidden rocks offshore from Cape Ann.
Working in hard winter gales, the deep-sea fisherman put out
from the schooner in a tiny dory which often capsized or
went astray in fog or snow. And when a man lived through
such an experience, he told the kind of yarn Eliot listened to
as a boy, of risk and tenacity beyond belief.
Glory in the fisherman's casual acts of heroism and hardy
self-reliance is reflected in Eliot's schoolboy compositions and
sustained through his writings. In `A Tale of a Whale',
published in the
Smith Academy Record in April 1905, and in
`The Man Who Was King', published the following June,
Eliot made proud use of sailing jargon. Later, in
Marina
(1930), the dross of civilisation is blown away by the sea
wind, and an awakening to redemptive love, its mystery and
promise, is aligned with the perilous crossing of the Atlantic
and slow approach to the New World, the dim New England
shore with its woods and grey rocks. Eliot imagined forebears
in the mould of the Cape Ann sea captains he admired. In an
article called `Gentlemen and Seamen' (1909) he extols as
`plebeian aristocrats' men like the old Eliots — small-town
patriarchs, seamen, small printers, and tradesmen, who
established themselves in villages along the New England
coast. His great-grandfather William Greenleaf Eliot, Sr, had
been a New Bedford ship-owner, and acquired a dinner
service of Chinese `willow-ware' porcelain which survives in
the family. Eliot calls up old sombre faces, old compressed
lips, old Eliot natures difficult and unyielding as a consequence
of religious principle and endless struggle with the
narrow resources of New England.
As a child Eliot explored the Cape Ann beaches for what
the sea tossed up — starfish, a whale bone, a broken oar, a
horseshoe crab. The pools offered, for his curiosity, `the
more delicate algae and the sea anemone'. He collected, dried,
and classified algae. When he was ten, peering through water
in a rockpool, he saw the sea anemone for the first time, an
experience, he remembered, `not so simple, for an exceptional
child, as it looks'.
Eliot was to return again and again to the Cape Ann shore
and sea for scenes of crisis and revelation in his poetry. To the
Cape Ann summers of his youth he owed his model, drawn
from the Gloucester fisherman, of a sailor `faring forward' on
the thin edge of mortality. His imagination fastened, too, on
the still pool and the light-filled water that recurred in his
poetry as a tantalising memory of unspeakable bliss.
* * *
When Eliot was sixteen his mother published a biography of
her father-in-law, William Greenleaf Eliot, and dedicated it to
her children `Lest They Forget'. `I was brought up to be very
much aware of him,' Eliot said. `The standard of conduct was
that which my grandfather had set: our moral judgements,
our decisions between duty and self-indulgence, were taken as
if, like Moses, he had brought down the tables of the Law,
any deviation from which would be sinful ...'
William had a narrow frail body and large, calm, benign
eyes. His son, Henry, recalled those magnificent eyes in his
autobiography, and said that they seemed to read one's
innermost thoughts. William's expression was sensitive and
serene, the face of a man who looks on suffering from a
citadel of moral assurance. He was not stern, but it would
have been unthinkable, said his son, to argue with him or to
attempt undue familiarity. `How can one be familiar with the
Day of Judgement?' said James Freeman Clark, a classmate at
Divinity School. `One feels rebuked in his presence.... Yet
he is playful, fond of fun, and there is a sweet smile appearing
on the corner of his mouth. But there is no
abandon.'
Charlotte revered her father-in-law and brought up her
children to observe two of his laws in particular, those of self-denial
and public service. T. S. Eliot acknowledged that his
early training in self-denial left him with an inability to enjoy
even harmless pleasures. He learnt, for instance, that it was
self-indulgent to buy candy, and it was not until he was
forced to stop smoking in his sixties that he could bring
himself to eat it as a substitute. This kind of upbringing was,
of course, not peculiar to the Eliot home. Henry Adams, also
constrained by the virtue of New England ancestors, recalled
that he would eat only the less perfect peaches in his
grandfather's garden.
Eliot's grandfather had died in 1887, the year before his
birth, but a vice-regent in the shape of his grandmother lived
on next door all through his youth. Abigail Adams Eliot
(1817-1908), who had spent her childhood in Washington,
could recall her great-uncle, the second President, for whose
wife she was named, and she knew his son, John Quincy
Adams, the sixth President, grandfather of the writer Henry
Adams (1838-1918) with whom Eliot felt much in common.
As Eliot grew up he had to face the most important of his
grandfather's laws, the subordination of selfish interests to
the good of Community and Church. William Greenleaf Eliot
exemplified the family ideal of manhood, combining piety
and public enterprise. In 1834 he moved from Harvard
Divinity School to found the Unitarian Church on what was
then the American frontier. A brilliant fund-raiser, he helped
found both the Academy of Science in St. Louis and
Washington University, where he served as unpaid professor
of metaphysics. He was an early advocate of women's
suffrage and of prohibition. During the terrible typhoid
epidemic of the 1840s he visited sickbeds indefatigably, and
during the Civil War organised the Western Sanitary Commission
in Missouri which looked after the medical services
of the Northern army and its fleet on the Mississippi. For
three decades, he opposed slavery in his border state, appalled
by whippings, mob violence, and the `vile traffic' of chained
gangs led through the streets to the steamboats going South;
he was known as St Louis' `only open abolitionist'. A portrait
of Lincoln hung in the front hall when Eliot was a child — his
grandfather had known him slightly. In 1852, when Emerson
visited St Louis, he reported that the Unitarian minister had `a
sumptuous church and crowds to hear his really good
sermons'.
William Greenleaf Eliot fulfilled Emerson's ideal of an
individual with the power to remake his world. `All history
resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few stout
and earnest persons,' Emerson said. `The man must be so
much that he must make all circumstances indifferent. Every
true man is a cause, a country, and an age.' The gambling and
drinking habits of the French Catholics and American
pioneers from Kentucky and Virginia (who settled St Louis)
had called, said Eliot, for his grandfather's strong missionary
hand. Brought up to applaud William's reforming zeal, it is
not surprising that his grandson should confront, a century
later, the moral wilderness of post-war London. Even as a
boy, said one cousin, `Tom had a great sense of mission.'
Generations of Eliots before him had responded to the call
to family and communal duties. Those Eliots who lived in
Somerset, Wiltshire, and Gloucestershire in early Tudor times
made wills which did not forget the poor, and sent their sons
to institutions of higher learning, and tended to marry rich
widows of the landed gentry.
Little is known of the Andrew Eliott (1627-1703) who
emigrated from Somerset to Salem, Massachusetts, except
that he was a man of property and education, that he was
accompanied by his second wife, Mary Vivion, and four
children, and that he became a member of the First Church of
Beverly in 1670 and in 1690 Beverly's first Town Clerk. He
was drawn into the frenzy of the Salem witch trials, where he
condemned innocents to death, along with the notorious
`hanging' Judge Blood, a forebear on the Stearns side (Eliot's
grandmother Charlotte Blood was a descendant). In 1692
Andrew Eliott confessed that he had acted on insufficient
evidence. He and eleven others signed a declaration that they
had been `sadly deluded and mistaken', unable `to withstand
the mysterious delusions of the powers of darkness', which
now left them `much disquieted and distressed in our minds'.
Andrew Eliott asked forgiveness of God and of the sufferers.
For he and others, he owned, `fear we have been instrumental
... to bring upon ourselves and this people of the Lord the
guilt of innocent blood —'.
In the tight network of cousinage in New England,
reaching down from the colonial period, the Eliots were
interrelated with all the leading New England families:
William Greenleaf Eliot was distantly related to John Greenleaf
Whittier, Noah Webster (the lexicographer), and Herman
Melville, and there were also links on both sides of the
family to Louisa May Alcott. There was a political tie
between William's brother, Thomas Dawes Eliot, and
Edward Dickinson (father of Emily Dickinson) who shared
rooms in Washington as representatives to Congress in the
1850s, where they set up meetings that led to the formation
of the anti-slavery Republican Party. The Eliot network
included, besides the eminent Adamses, the Lowells, and,
most closely, Nathaniel Hawthorne, another direct descendant
of the first Andrew Eliott, whose ancestor (on the
Hathorn side — Colonel John Hathorn) was another of the
jurors at the witchcraft trials — not one of the repenters. By
the next century the Eliots were flourishing as city people,
conspicuous in the affairs of Boston. The first to distinguish
himself was the Revd Andrew Eliot (1718-78). Chubby-faced,
with neat features and a double chin, he seldom gave
controversial sermons from his pulpit in the New North
Church. His Calvinism was moderate in temper but he
practised it most earnestly. When Boston was blockaded
during the Revolution, he was the only Congregational
minister, apart from Samuel Mather, to open his church every
Lord's Day. When he was proposed as successor to President
Holyoke at Harvard, and again after the resignation of
Locke, he declined because of religious duties. One acquaintance
used to call him `Andrew Sly' because of his political
prudence and circumspection. When he felt his temper rising
he used to retire until he had controlled it.
The Eliots were a prudent lot but the best of them had
moral courage. T. S. Eliot was proud of Sir Thomas Elyot,
who risked reproving Henry VIII to his face on account of
Anne Boleyn, and in
The Boke Named the Governour (1531)
attacked kings for their luxury and frivolity, urging them to
rule for the common good. Two centuries later, in 1765, the
Revd Andrew Eliot preached a censorious election-day
sermon before the colonial governor of Massachusetts. Both
Eliots escaped charges of treason because their tones were
sober. They felt strongly about morals, conduct, and the
public good, but they did not resort to flaming rhetoric.
There was much in the model Eliot man to admire.
Throughout his life, T. S. Eliot was to feel the disjunction
between his poetic impulse and his compulsion to conform to
the Eliot ideal. `The primary channel of culture is the family,'
he wrote: `no man wholly escapes from the kind, or wholly
surpasses the degree, of culture which he acquired from his
early environment.' At a prestigious New England boarding-school,
Milton Academy, which Eliot attended in 1905-6,
and as a student at Harvard, Eliot prepared for the professional
career his family would applaud, but came to feel
that the claims of his poetic gift had priority over the claims
of his family: `The Arts insist that a man shall dispose of all
he has, even of his family tree, and follow art alone. For they
demand that a man be not a member of a family or a caste or
of a party or of a coterie, but simply and solely himself.' Eliot
puzzled and alarmed his parents by staying in London in
1915 instead of finishing his doctorate at Harvard, and by
spending years writing poetry that was published only
sporadically and in little-known magazines. His father died in
1919 under the impression that his youngest child had made
a mess of his life. Yet although Eliot resisted the family
pattern he also followed it, first as a poor clerk like his father
in the early Mississippi days, and later, when he became a
publisher, as a successful man of business. To the end of his
life he faithfully performed the kind of responsible daily
labour that had been, for generations, the self-affirming
activity of the Eliot family.
* * *
Bred in a family which belongs at the very heart of Boston
Unitarianism, Eliot's fervent nature found no nourishment
there, and by the time he enrolled at Harvard he had become
indifferent to the Church. The religion taught by William
Greenleaf Eliot was strict rather than spiritual. He was not
concerned with perfection, or doctrine, or theology, but with
a code that would better the human lot. With Unitarian scorn
for evangelical enthusiasm, he said that educated, practical
people reject `sudden miraculous conversion, wrought by
divine power, independently of the human will ... by which
the sinner of yesterday is the saint of today.' True salvation
comes from human effort. `It is at once arrogant and
dangerous to claim direct and extraordinary guidance. It is
virtually to claim inspiration, and that which begins in
humility ends in pride.' He passed on to his children and
grandchildren a religion which retained Puritan uprightness,
social conscience, and self-restraint, but which had been
transformed by the Enlightenment. T. S. Eliot was taught to
be dutiful, benevolent, and cheerful. He was always acutely
sensitive to the power of evil, but was taught a practical
common-sense code of conduct. He once mentioned that his
parents did not talk of good and evil but of what was `done'
and `not done'. In abandoning Unitarianism, Eliot rebelled
against those tepid, unemotional distinctions. `So far as we
are human,' he wrote, `what we do must be either evil or
good.' Like Jonathan Edwards, who had rebelled in the first
half of the eighteenth century against religion tamed as a
respectable code and re-evoked the fervent religion of the
previous century, so Eliot in the first half of the twentieth
century sought an older, stricter discipline, unsoftened by
nineteenth-century liberalism. Edwards and Eliot each
seemed, to his own time, an isolated reactionary.
Unitarianism arose in America in the mid-eighteenth
century, during the Great Awakening, in opposition to the
Puritan conviction of man's innate sinfulness. The Unitarians
were confident of man's innate nobility (Eliot's grandfather
was a protégé of the leading Unitarian of the early nineteenth
century, William Ellery Channing, who spoke of man's
`likeness to God'). They rejected the Puritans' doctrine of
damnation, their tests of orthodoxy and heresy, and undemocratic
distinctions between church members. Their God was
benevolent not wrathful. The year before Eliot was born, his
mother praised a benign, rational universe in her poem,
`Force and God':
While worlds harmonious move in breathless awe
We whisper `God is here, and God is Law.'
In view of the sincere piety of Eliot's mother and
grandfather and his father's lifelong support of the Unitarian
Church, it may seem odd that he should have come to think
of himself as one brought up `outside the Christian Fold'. He
had in mind the Unitarians' denial of the Trinity as against
his own definition of Christianity as a belief in the Incarnation.
In 1931 Eliot wrote to the critic Middleton Murry that
the perfection of a Lord who was merely human did not seem
to him perfection at all. His antagonism to England's greatest
religious poet may be traced to his grandfather's view of
Milton as a Unitarian. Similarly, Eliot's wish to exclude free
thinking Jews has to do with the easy association of such Jews
and Unitarians in his youth. `The Jewish religion is unfortunately
not a very portable one,' Eliot said in 1940, `and shorn
of its traditional practices, observances and Messianism, it
tends to become a mild and colourless form of Unitarianism.'
So, Eliot disliked `the intellectual and puritanical rationalism'
of his early environment. In his revival of ideas of depravity
and damnation, and in his craving for orthodoxy, he opposed
his Unitarian background. Probably the most important
difference was his sense of man's unlikeness, his distance
from an unknowable deity.
Eliot said that to understand a modern writer it is necessary
to classify him according to the type of decayed Protestantism
which surrounded his childhood. Already in the 1830s
Emerson resigned his pulpit in protest against `corpse-cold
Unitarianism'. The Transcendentalists of the 1840s liberated
themselves from formal Christianity and trusted, like Emerson,
in the private light, but the next generation found
themselves, as one historian puts it, `in a chilling void ... The
heir of Emerson was Henry Adams who turned away from
the barren chaos of American life to the certitudes of Dante
and St Thomas; and after Henry Adams came Eliot who not
only admired the lost traditions of Catholicism from a
distance, but made a heroic attempt to recapture them.'
For sensitive Unitarian children growing up in America in
the nineteenth century, the bland surface presented by their
religion must have seemed to resist too much of life. Eliot
himself made only passing critical comments, but Henry
Adams's analysis of the insufficiencies of Unitarianism suggests
what Eliot reacted against:
Nothing quieted doubt so completely as the mental calm of the
Unitarian clergy ... They proclaimed as their merit that they
insisted on no doctrine, but taught ... the means of leading a
virtuous, useful, unselfish life, which they held to be sufficient
for salvation. For them, difficulties might be ignored; doubts
were a waste of thought ... Boston had solved the universe
... The religious instinct had vanished, and could not be
revived, although one made in later life many efforts to
recover it ... That the most intelligent society, led by the most
intelligent clergy, in the most moral conditions he ever knew,
should have ... quite ceased making itself anxious about past
and future ... seemed to him the most curious social
phenomenon he had to account for in a long life.
The Unitarian code, with its optimistic notion of progress
(`onward and upward forever', Eliot said as a student),
glossed over unpleasant changes in American life, particularly
after the Civil War. Walt Whitman, commenting on a
widespread `hollowness at heart', wrote: `The great cities reek
with respectable as much as non-respectable robbery and
scoundrelism ... A sort of dry and flat Sahara appears, these
cities, crowded with petty grotesques, malformations, phantoms ...'
with manners `probably the meanest to be seen in
the world'. The authority of the class to which Adams and
Eliot belonged, genteel responsible descendants of the Puritans,
was superseded by the business power of the Gilded
Age. In St Louis the moral law of William Greenleaf Eliot was
ousted by the motive of profit, and in 1902 the city's
corruption was scandalously exposed. Eliot was sensitive to
the monotony that resulted from immense industrial expansion
at the end of the nineteenth century and to the loss of
native (New England) culture to a new America in which, as
he put it, Theodore Roosevelt was a patron of the arts.
The muscular Virginian was the popular hero during Eliot's
adolescence, not Lambert Strether. Eliot belonged to an
older America, before 1828 he said, when the country seemed
like `a family extension'. What that date meant to Eliot must
be a guess. It was soon after that Eliot's grandfather left
Boston for the frontier. It was also then that the civilised élite
of the eastern seaboard lost their power in the bitter election
of 1828, when John Quincy Adams fell before the rude,
uncultivated Andrew Jackson. Was Eliot still resisting the
impact of Jacksonian democracy — more Western, more
individualistic — a hundred years on? Or was it some more
subtle change: the fading of the last traces of Calvinist piety
before the cheery optimism of a new age of self-reliance? For
Emerson, the very advocate of self-reliance, that old demanding
piety remained a lingering force through his memory of
his Calvinist aunt, Mary Moody Emerson: `What a debt is
ours to that old religion which, in the childhood of most of
us, still dwelt like a Sabbath morning in the country of New
England, teaching privation, self-denial and sorrow'.
During Eliot's youth his mother guarded him from the
jarring aspects of the new America. It is necessary to look
rather to the more trying years that followed in Boston to
explain why Eliot came to feel oppressed by the American
scene and had to escape it.
Continues...
Excerpted from T. S. Eliot
by Lyndall Gordon
Copyright © 2000 by Lyndall Gordon.
Excerpted by permission.
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