St. Louis Blues. Thomas Stearns Eliot began his journey through the waste land in the heart of a land of plenty. The youngest, most coddled of seven children, he was born (1888) in St. Louis, a city filled with the disorder of growth and a booming faith in the nation, in business, in machine-driven progress.
The Eliots were New Englanders: they had come to Massachusetts around 1670 from East Coker, Somerset. T. S. Eliot's grandfather moved from Boston to St. Louis, founded the city's first Unitarian Church, as well as Washington University. The Rev. William Greenleaf Eliot could be a stern shepherd; one of his more memorable sermons was entitled: "Suffering Considered as Discipline." But young Tom Eliot's Irish Catholic nurse considered Unitarianism too thin a spiritual cloak against the cold winds of the world; she liked to take him along to her own church, a block away from the Eliots' red brick house on Locust Street.
Tom's father was a wholesale grocer who became president of the St. Louis Hydraulic-Press Brick Co. There was neither smoking nor drinking in the Eliot household. The Eliots were a literary-minded family: evenings, Tom, his brother and his five sisters would cluster around father as he read Dickens to them. Tom's mother wrote a dramatic poem on the life of Savonarola. Tom Eliot was a frail and quiet child. Often, when friends wanted him to come out and play, they found him curled up in a big leather armchair, reading.
He went to Smith Academy in St. Louis, later moved on to Milton Academy near Boston. Wherever he was, he felt out of place. He wrote later: "I had always been a New Englander in the Southwest and a Southwesterner in New England. In New England I missed the long dark river, the ailantbus trees, the flaming cardinal birds . . . of Missouri; in Missouri I missed the fir trees, the, hay and goldenrod, the songsparrows, the red granite and the blue sea of Massachusetts."
At 18 Eliot went on to Harvard.
Babbitt & King Bolo. Professor George Santayana taught him philosophy and Professor Irving Babbitt, the ardent revivalist of the classic past, taught him French literature, got him interested in Sanskrit and Oriental religions (Eliot later devoted two years to their study). Bertrand Russell taught him logic and later introduced him to the London literary world as his "best pupil." Eliot breezed through his course in three years, spent the fourth year working for his M.A. But he was no bookworm. Although he was shy, he made a point of going to dances and parties: Poet Conrad Aiken, a fellow student, recalls seeing tall, dapper Tom Eliot for the first time reeling out of the office of the Harvard Lampoon, where a punch party was in roaring progress.
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 eye
Is underlined for emphasis.
Uncorseted, her friendly bust
Gives promise of pneumatic bliss.
More & more clearly, Eliot saw and recorded the crumbling of European civilization; more & more sharply, his verse photographed the human ruins--an old man waiting for death in a rented house; a tuberculous courtesan calling for lights in decaying Venice; Apeneck Sweeney at an all-night party where, in a soaring descant above the all-erasing vulgarity, "The nightingales are singing near/The Convent of the Sacred Heart . . ."
Few people were listening to nightingales, in the dawn after World War I,
when Eliot began to work on The Waste Land. Their song came only faintly to Eliot himself, whose sense of general calamity was intensified by private troubles. By 1920, partly because of overwork in his dual career as banker and poet, Eliot was on the verge of a breakdown. While resting under the care of a specialist at Lausanne, he finished The Waste Land. He sent it for criticism to his friend, brilliant, erratic Poet Ezra Pound, who blue-penciled it down to half its size. The poem first appeared in 1922, in the first issue of The Criterion, the small literary magazine which T. S. Eliot was editing with Lady Rothermere's backing. The Waste Land turned out to be the most influential poem of the 20th Century.
The Patched Mirror. The Waste Land is easier on the ear than on the mind. It is like a kaleidoscopic mirror held up to the age--a patched mirror which at first seems to reflect only a heap of broken images, but which, to a longer view, blends them into a single bizarre picture, at once as strange and as familiar as one's own face (or one's own city) seen in a recurring nightmare. The broken bits of mirror reflect bittersweet scenes of past summers, and brown, foggy glimpses of London; a hysterical woman in an ornate boudoir like a candlelit tomb; women in a pub talking of postwar problems ("Now Albert's coming back, make yourself a bit smart. / He'll want to know what you done with that money he gave you / To get yourself some teeth . . .").
Some of the splinters mirror images from other poems, from legend, or from history. These references invite the reader to measure the squalor of his day against past splendors--Elizabeth and Leicester in a red & gold barge on the Thames contrasted with an anonymous London girl of today, in a canoe on the same Thames, being seduced without pleasure, without protest ("My people humble people who expect / Nothing . . .").
Dominating the tableau of aimlessness, decay and sterile joy is the image that gives the poem its name: the parched desert through which a wanderer struggles in search of an oasis. When he comes upon a chapel in the and mountains, he significantly finds this symbol of faith broken and deserted--"There is the empty chapel, only the wind's home." But at the deepest point of despair, the rumble of thunder brings promise of rain to the waste land. The poem ends with the Hindu incantation, like the first shower of long-looked for rain, shantih, shantih, shantih, meaning: "The Peace which passeth understanding."
The Lost Generation. Some of the critics reviewing The Waste Land sniffed that it was indeed a piece that passed all understanding. But it brought Eliot a literary notoriety that passed into fame. The "lost generation" embraced his sharp, unsentimental lyricism; they voted Eliot their most representative poet (a distinction which Eliot himself coldly rejected). The age recognized itself in the patched mirror; Eliot had touched a hidden spring in the century's frightened, shut soul--and that soul began to open to him a little. One English girl sums up Eliot's impact on her youth: "Somehow Eliot put the situation into words for us, and it was never so bad again. Each in his own prison, but Eliot in the next cell, tapping out his message, if not of hope, at least of defiance. We would not measure out our lives with coffee spoons."
T. S. Eliot, no more than his age, has emerged from the waste land, but be has managed to rebuild, for himself, the broken chapel in its midst. For a time, Eliot delighted the Greenwich Village atheists by seeming to take the road of easy cynicism; in The Hippopotamus (1926) he squirted heavy sarcasm at the church ("The hippo's feeble steps may err / In compassing material ends, / While the True Church need never stir / To gather in its dividends ...") Yet it was to the church that Eliot turned.
