REFLECTIONS: Mr. Eliot

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In his junior year Eliot decided that he was too puny, took boxing lessons, once proudly sported a luminous shiner. He also delighted his classmates* by writing risque doggerel about a mythical King Bolo and his Queen ("that airy fairy hairy-'un, / Who led the dance on Golder's Green / With Cardinal Bessarion"). In addition to chronicling the doings of King Bolo, he contributed romantic verse to the Harvard Advocate. After Harvard, Eliot went to study in Paris for a year ("on the old man's money"), and in a Left Bank flat wrote his first significant poem. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, the portrait of an aging man reviewing a life frittered away between timid hopes and lost opportunities:

For I have known them all already, known them all,

Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons.

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons . . .

Shall I part my hair behind?

Do I dare to eat a peach?

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each . . .

Did 23-year-old Tom Eliot feel his own life slipping away? He returned to Harvard for three more years' graduate work. In 1914, of all years, he won a traveling fellowship and went to Germany. He barely managed to avoid being caught by the war, and went on to Britain.

It turned out to be a long stay.

Sweeney & the Nightingales. After a year at Oxford, Eliot taught history, Latin, French, German, arithmetic, drawing and swimming in English schools, where he was known as "the American master." He also tried to teach the boys baseball while they tried to teach him Rugby and cricket. In 1915, he married a pretty ballet dancer, Vivienne Haigh, daughter of a British artist. He volunteered for duty with the U.S. Navy, but his ensign's commission did not come through until after the Armistice. He gave up teaching and went to work for Lloyds Bank in London. Friends think that, had he stayed in the City, he might have risen to be a director of the Bank of England. (Later, he gave up his bank job to join the publishing firm of Faber & Gwyer, now Faber & Faber).

But Eliot the banker, in his bowler hat, black coat and sponge-bag (checked) trousers, was only one of several simultaneous incarnations. There was also the dreamily peripatetic Mr. Eliot who walked on the beach wearing, like Prufrock, white flannel trousers and reading Virgil or Dante. Above all, dogging the steps of the other Messrs. Eliot, was the increasingly cynical young man who wrote verse as polished and as sharp as a Guardsman's sword. He created a gallery of unforgettable characters: Mr. Apollinax, the faun-like, fragile embodiment of the dry intellect (whose "laughter tinkled among the teacups"); Apeneck Sweeney, the dumb incarnation of a brutal age; Grishkin, the musky, eternally feline feminine:

Grishkin is nice: her Russian ey

Is underlined for emphasis.

Uncorseted, her friendly bust

Gives promise of pneumatic bliss.