The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.T. S. Eliot
to T.S .Eliot
By Cavan Wood
Where do you start with T.S Eliot? You could start if you were a graffiti writer of the 1970s by pointing out a funny fact. His name is an anagram of toilets. It was not intentional – but if you abbreviate Thomas Sterns Eliot to initials and a surname, that is what you get. His parents never realised, bless them! Then you can discuss his complicated relationship with his first wife. Why did an American end up in England and join the Anglican Church at a time when many writers were giving up on religion?
Though born in America, Eliot’s roots were in England and he always had an regard for all things English. His family’s ancestors had originally come from East Coker in Somerset. The Eliot family were rich and well educated, who believed that Europe and especially the “the old country” were ideal places for Americans to gain more class and education.
Tom (as his friends called him) moved to England in 1914 to study at Merton College in Oxford for a PhD in Philosophy. He had read the subject at Harvard as well as Indian language. The young Eliot was a man searching for some answers to the big questions of life. His family’s Unitarian faith (a Christian church that taught that there was only one God and that Jesus was a God- inspired man not a person of the Trinity) did not seem to give him the truth he wanted.
He never completed his doctorate; probably due to his marriage to Vivian in 1915 and his belief that as a young husband, he should support his wife financially. It was to be a deeply unhappy relationship. There were rumours that the young philosopher Bertrand Russell had had an affair with Vivian – a painful fact for Eliot, as he had been a major influence on his thinking at one point.
Tom had a few years trying to find a direction for his life. He tried his hand at teaching, including schooling the then young John Betjeman. (Betjeman disliked his old teacher’s poetry later in life.) He worked for Lloyd’s Bank for eight years. These are safe, steady jobs which brought in the money whilst Eliot wrote his poetry at night. There was no way that he was going to starve for his art! His masterpiece, “The Waste Land” was published in 1924, yet he never became a full time writer.
The Waste Land
By TS Eliot FOR EZRA POUND - IL MIGLIOR FABBRO
I. The Burial of the Dead
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
He was approached to work at the publishers Faber and Faber and became a senior member of the company. During his time there, Eliot wrote to one author that his story about animals would never sell. He had rejected George Orwell’s “Animal Farm.”!
Influences of Ezra
Tom was influenced by the poet Ezra Pound. They had met a few months after Eliot arrived in England. Pound had a wide social circle which included other important writers like James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway. He was a good friend, who according to one estimate spent a fifth of his life helping others, rather than working on his poetry. Both they were Americans abroad; seekers after truth but their roads began to separate as Tom found religion helpful which Ezra rejected. Undeniably, his endorsement and his help in editing “The Waste Land” helped to make that poem and poet more widely read. The masterpiece is dedicated to Pound as a consequence. Poetry was describing and changing the world in verse, they believed.
Pound had a major Achilles heel – his anti-Semitism which would lead him to support the fascists all across Europe. (In Eliot’s poetry, there are some worrying stereotypes of Jews as grasping and materialistic. Some have suggested that Eliot merely reflected the time he lived in or perhaps this was the legacy of having spent time with Ezra.) The relationship between Pound and Eliot cooled, and largely carried on by letters, but it was Tom who helped his friend be released from a mental hospital.
Here we have an irony. The man who helped his friend leave an institution did little to help his wife when she went into one. When Vivian went into a mental hospital in 1938, Eliot never visited or saw her again. She died eight years later.
Eliot converted to the Church of England and described himself as having “a Catholic cast of mind, a Calvinist heritage and a Puritanical temperament. His writing reflected his faith in poems like “Choruses from the Rock”, “Four Quartets” and plays like “Murder in the cathedral”, which was about the murder of Archbishop Thomas a Beckett by the assassins sent by Henry the Second.
There is a great deal of humour in Eliot’s work too, even in some of his seemingly serious poems. This was best shown in perhaps the most surprising book he produced. Although he did not have children himself, he wrote “Old Possum’s book of Practical Cats” for younger readers to enjoy, the book which would inspire the musical “Cats.”
THE OLD GUMBIE CAT by TS Eliot
I have a Gumbie Cat in mind, her name is Jennyanydots;
Her coat is of the tabby kind, with tiger stripes and leopard spots.
All day she sits upon the stair or on the steps or on the mat:
She sits and sits and sits and sits—and that's what makes a Gumbie Cat!
But when the day's hustle and bustle is done,
Then the Gumbie Cat's work is but hardly begun.
And when all the family's in bed and asleep,
She tucks up her skirts to the basement to creep.
She is deeply concerned with the ways of the mice—
Their behaviour's not good and their manners not nice;
So when she has got them lined up on the matting,
She teaches them music, crocheting and tatting.
Eliot died in January 1965. His best poetry is about the barrenness of the 20th century , set against the possibility of faith transforming it. He continues to influence and inspire the generations of poets that have followed him.
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things. T. S. Eliot
Meet this week's writer Cavan Wood
Published author by Bloomsbury.
Cavan is a well sought after writer, teacher and speaker based in Sussex of over thirty years experience. He has written about religious, moral, cultural and political themes , having written or contributed chapters to over twenty books published by Bloomsbury, Oxford University Press, The Bible Reading Fellowship and Hodder amongst others. He is interested in politics, literature, cinema and is a leader in his local church and past Head of Religious Education .
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BOOK OF THE WEEK
Into full Sunlight by Tom Rubens
A romantic novel about a young teenager’s transformation into an adult. It captures his first sexual encounter with a student at university. But the novel offers a deeper insight into human nature.
Tom, like so many writers has had a burning desire to write and become an author for mainly philosophical works.
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