Fame & Folly (5 page)

Meanwhile his parents required placating. A bright young man in his twenties had gone abroad to augment his studies; it was natural for him to come home within a reasonable time to get started on real life and his profession. Instead, he had made a precipitate marriage, intended to spend the rest of his days in a foreign country, and was teaching French and arithmetic in the equivalent of an American junior high school. Not surprisingly, the brick manufacturer and his piously versifying wife could not infer the sublime vocation of a poet from these evidences. Eliot hoped to persuade them. The marriage to Vivien took place on June 26, 1915; on June 28 Ezra Pound wrote a very long letter to Eliot’s father. It was one of Eliot’s mother’s own devices—that of the surrogate pleader. As his mother had asked Russell to intervene with Eliot to return him to Harvard, so now Eliot was enlisting Pound to argue for London. The letter included much information about Pound’s own situation, which could not have been reassuring, since—as Pound himself remarked—it was unlikely that the elder Eliot had ever heard of him. But he sweetened the case with respectable references to Edgar Lee Masters and Robert Browning, and was careful to add that Robert Frost, another American in London, had “done a book of New England eclogues.” To the heartbroken father who
had looked forward to a distinguished university career for his son, Pound said, “I am now much better off than if I had kept my professorship in Indiana”—empty comfort, considering it was Fair Harvard that was being mourned; what Pound had relinquished was Wabash College in a place called Crawfordsville. What could it have meant to Eliot’s father that this twenty-nine-year-old contributor to the lunatic
BLAST
boasted of having “engineered a new school of verse now known in England, France and America,” and insisted that “when I make a criticism of your son’s work it is not an amateur criticism”? “As to his coming to London,” Pound contended,

“I might add,” he concluded, “that a literary man’s income depends very much on how rigidly he insists on doing exactly what he himself wants to do. It depends on his connection, which he makes himself. It depends on the number of feuds that he takes on for the sake of his aesthetic beliefs. T.S.E. does not seem to be so pugnacious as I am and his course should be smoother and swifter.”

The prediction held. The two-year eruption that was Vorticism waned, and so did Pound’s local star; he moved on to Paris—leaving London, as it would turn out, in Eliot’s possession. Pound’s letter to the elder Eliot was not all bluster: he may have been a deft self-promoter, but he was also a promoter of literary ideas, and in Eliot’s work he saw those ideas made flesh. The exuberance that sent Pound bustling through London to place Eliot here and there was the enthusiasm of an inventor whose thingamajig is just beginning to work in the world at large, in the break-through
spirit of Alexander Graham Bell’s “Mr. Watson, come here.” In Pound’s mind Eliot was Pound’s invention. Certainly the excisions he demanded in
The Waste Land
radically “modernized” it in the direction of the objective correlative by keeping in the symbols and chopping out context and narrative, maneuvering the poem toward greater obliqueness and opacity. He also maneuvered Eliot. A determined literary man must go after his own “connection,” he had advised Eliot’s father, but the boisterous Pound served the reticent Eliot in a network of useful connections that Eliot would not have been likely to make on his own—including John Quinn, a New York literary philanthropist who became his (unpaid) agent in America and shored him up from time to time with generous money contributions.

Eliot was dependent on Pound’s approval, or for a long while behaved as if he was. It was Pound who dominated the friendship, periodically shooting out instructions, information, scalawag counsel and pontification. “I value his verse far higher than that of any other living poet,” Eliot told John Quinn in 1918. Gradually, over a span of years, there was a reversal of authority and power. Eliot rose and Pound sank. Under the pressure of his marriage (Vivien never held a job of any kind, nor could she have, even if it had been expected of her), Eliot ascended in the pragmatic world as well. He gave up teaching secondary school—it required him to supervise sports—and tried evening adult extension-course lecturing. The preparation was all-consuming and the remuneration paltry. Finally he recognized—he was, after all, his father’s son—that this was no way to earn a living. A friend of Vivien’s family recommended him to Lloyds Bank, where he turned out to be very good at the work—he had a position in the foreign department—and was regularly praised and advanced. Eventually he joined Faber & Gwyer, the London publishing house (later Faber & Faber), and remained associated with it until the end of his life. And then it was Pound who came to Eliot with his manuscripts. Eliot published them, but his responses, which had once treated Pound’s antics with answering foolery, became heavily businesslike and impatient. As founder and editor of a literary journal Vivien had named
The Criterion
, Eliot went on commissioning
pieces from Pound, though he frequently attempted to impose coherence and discipline; occasionally he would reject something outright. In 1922 Pound had asserted that “Eliot’s
Waste Land
is I think the justification of the ‘movement,’ of our modern experiment, since 1900,” but by 1930 he was taunting Eliot for having “arrived at the supreme Eminence among English critics largely through disguising himself as a corpse.” Admiration had cooled on both sides. Still, Eliot’s loyalty remained fundamentally steadfast, even when he understood that Pound may have been approaching lunacy. After the Second World War, when Pound was a patient in St. Elizabeth’s Federal Hospital for the Insane in Washington, D.C.—the United States government’s alternative to jailing him for treason—Eliot signed petitions for his release and made sure to see him on visits to America. Eliot never publicly commented on the reason for Pound’s incarceration: Pound had supported the Axis and had actively aided the enemy. On Italian radio, in Mussolini’s employ, he had broadcast twice-weekly attacks on Roosevelt, Churchill, and the Jews (whom he vilified in the style of Goebbels).

Though in the long run the friendship altered and attenuated—especially as Eliot grew more implicated in his Christian commitment and Pound in his self-proclaimed paganism—Eliot learned much from Pound. He had already learned from Laforgue the technique of the ironically illuminated persona. The tone of youthful ennui, and the ageless though precocious recoil from the world of phenomena, were Eliot’s own. To these qualities of negation Pound added others: indirection, fragmentation, suggestibility, the force of piebald and zigzag juxtaposition—what we have long recognized as the signs of modernism, that famous alchemy of less becoming more. But even as he was tearing down the conventional frame of art, Pound was instructing Eliot in how to frame a career: not that Eliot really needed Pound in either sphere. Poets and critics may fabricate “movements,” but no one can invent the Zeitgeist, and it was the Zeitgeist that was promulgating modernism. Eliot may well have been headed there with or without Pound at the helm. That Pound considered Eliot a creature of his own manufacture—that he did in fact tinker with the
design—hardly signifies, given that Eliot’s art was anyhow likely to fall into the rumbling imperatives of its own time. As for Eliot’s advancement into greater and greater reputation, even pushy Pound could not push a miracle into being. Still, it was evident early on that Pound’s dictates were in full operation. “Now I am going to ask you to do something for me,” Eliot informs his brother Henry in 1915,

and he goes on to propose that Isabella Stewart Gardner, an influential blueblood connection of his, be dragooned into sending a note to the editor of the
Atlantic
on Eliot’s behalf. A few days later he is writing to Mrs. Gardner herself, announcing the imminent arrival of his brother, “in order that he may get your advice.” To Henry he admits he has only a handful of poems to show, including “some rather second rate things,” but anyhow he asks him to try for an opening at
Harper’s, Century, Bookman
, and the
New Republic
. “Nothing needs to be done in Chicago, I believe.”

Thus, Pound’s training in chutzpah. Yet much of it was native to Eliot, picked up at the parental knee. Not for nothing was he the offspring of a mother who was a model of the epistolary maneuver, or of a father who demanded instant success. He had been reared, in any event, as one of the lords of creation in a conscious American aristocracy that believed in its superior birthright—a Midwestern enclave of what Cousin Charles Eliot had called “the finest New England spirit.” In the alien precincts of London, where his credentials were unknown or immaterial, the top could not be so easily guaranteed; it would have to be cajoled, manipulated, seduced, dared, commanded, now and then dodged; it would have to be pressed hard, and cunningly. All this Eliot saw for himself, and rapidly. Reserve shored up cunning. It scarcely required
Pound to teach him how to calculate the main chance, or how to scheme to impose his importance. He was actually better at it than Pound, because infinitely silkier. Whereas Pound had one voice to assault the barricades with—a cantankerous blast in nutty frontiersman spelling (“You jess set and hev a quiet draw at youh cawn-kob”) that was likely to annoy, and was intended to shake you up—Eliot had dozens of voices. His early letters—where he is sedulously on the make—are a ventriloquist’s handbook. To Mrs. Gardner he purrs as one should to a prominent patroness of the arts, with friendly dignity, in a courteously appreciative tone, avoiding the appearance of pursuit. Addressing the irascibly playful Pound, he is irascibly playful, and falls into identical orthographical jokiness. To his benefactor John Quinn he is punctiliously—though never humbly—grateful, recording the state of his literary barometer with a precision owed to the chairman of the board; nor does he ever fail to ask after Quinn’s health. To his father he writes about money, to his mother about underwear and overcoats. Before both of them, anxiety and dutifulness prevail; he is eager to justify himself and to tot up his triumphs. He means to show them how right he was in choosing a London life; he is not a disappointment after all. “I am staying in the bank,” he reports (he had been offered an editorship on a literary journal)—this alone will please his father, but there is much more:

This was surely the voice of a small boy making his case to his skeptical parents:
it will give you pleasure if you believe it
. He was thirty years old. The self-assurance—or call it, as others did, the arrogance—was genuine, and before his father and mother he was unashamed of speaking of the necessity of power. Such an aspiration was axiomatic among Eliots. What he had set himself to attain was the absolute pinnacle—a place inhabited by no one else, where he could “remain isolated and detached.” Fate would give him his wish exactly and with a vengeance, though not quite yet. If he was puffing London to St. Louis, and representing himself there as “the best living critic, as well as the best living poet, in England,” two months later he was telling Lytton Strachey that he regarded “London with disdain,” and divided “mankind into supermen, termites, and wireworms. I am sojourning among the termites.”

In all this there is a wonder and an enigma: the prodigy of Eliot’s rocketlike climb from termite to superman. London (and New York and Boston) was swarming with young men on a course no different from Eliot’s. He was not the only one with a hotly ambitious pen and an appetite for cultivating highly-placed people who might be useful to him. John Middleton Murry and Wyndham Lewis, for example, both of whom were in Eliot’s immediate circle, were equally striving and polished, and though we still know their names, we know them more in the nature of footnotes than as the main text. All three were engaged in the same sort of essayistic empire-building in the little magazines, and at the same time. Lewis published Eliot in
BLAST
, Murry published him
in the
Athenaeum
, and later Eliot, when he was editing the
Criterion
, published Lewis. Yet Eliot very quickly overshadowed the others. The disparity, it can be argued, was that Eliot was primarily a poet; or that Eliot’s talent was more robust. But even if we believe, as most of us do, that genius of its own force will sooner or later leap commandingly out (Melville’s and Dickinson’s redemption from obscurity being our sacred paradigms), the riddle stands: why, for Eliot, so soon? His termite days were a brevity, a breath; he was superman in an instant. What was it that singled Eliot out to put him in the lead so astoundingly early? That he ferociously
willed
it means nothing. Nearly all beginning writers have a will for extreme fame; will, no matter how resilient, is usually no more efficacious in the marketplace than daydream.