Young Eliot (18 page)

‘C' was pretty much Tom's average grade throughout session 1907–8. Though he managed Bs in Fine Art and the more literary of the Greek courses, he got a C for Greek Prose Composition. Having chosen also two Philosophy courses, in one he got a ‘C', in the other a B. Yet, set against his D in German, this run of marks made him an undistinguished student. His loafing contributed, but there was also a sense he was not yet finding quite what he needed. For an undergraduate so grounded in literature, the philosophy courses in Emerson Hall were a new departure. Taken together, Philosophy A (History of Ancient Philosophy) and the matching introductory course B (History of Modern Philosophy) were surveys providing a general overview to which students might add depth later. Tom was selecting courses that let him read around freely, indulging a taste for roaming across cultures: from ancient Greece and Rome through the Middle Ages to modern English, French and German. No one who has embarked on Goodwin's
Moods and Tenses of the Greek Verb
could argue that he chose only the easiest options; but he was hardly an academic star.

He had left Mount Auburn Street in his second year, but had moved no further than around the corner to a purpose-built Gold Coast residential hall. There he shared a suite of rooms with his former Milton school friends Howard Morris and John Robinson. While a freshman, nineteen-year-old Morris had lived nearby in sumptuously appointed Westmorly Court, sharing a suite with another friend from Milton days, twenty-year-old Californian Welshman Evan Cyfeilwig Evans, Jr, and his younger brother Harry Llewellyn Evans. Morris lost his two room-mates when their mother died and the Evans boys left Harvard after just a year, returning to San Rafael, California. Big, heavily built, Morris had comparatively little interest in literature, but was easy-going, enjoyed music and liked to eat and drink. Also, he was used to fraternising with people he had known from Milton. He spoke with Tom and John Robinson about sharing a suite of rooms in another of the Gold Coast's swanky privately-run residences, Russell Hall, very close to Westmorly.

Tom knew he could get on with Morris and Robinson so they signed up for accommodation during 1907–8 at 22 Russell Hall. This substantial five-storey building stood at the corner of Plympton Street and Bow Street. Now demolished, it was replaced in 1930 by another Russell Hall, today part of Adams House. A surviving photograph shows that the earlier building's design featured bow-windowed towers at its street-front corners. Each student in suite 22 had a separate bedroom, but they shared a large sitting room in one of these tower-like extensions, with three windows looking out over the street and a semicircular, cushioned window seat beneath them. In the fashion of the day, the windows were equipped both with blinds and lace curtains. Occasionally, in true student fashion, Tom and his flatmates drew their blinds half down in daytime. Hardwood-floored, their sitting room had dark woodwork, but its atmosphere was softened by an elaborately patterned carpet in the centre of the room. Furniture was à la mode: ‘the general tendency is towards “mission” morris chairs', a 1907
Harvard Advocate
article ‘On the Decoration of College Rooms' had remarked, noting that as well as such recliner chairs with their wooden arms and cushioned leather seats, ‘some steins' (ornamental beer mugs) and ‘plaster casts' were desirable.
46
If you could afford the substantial rent, 22 Russell Hall was not a bad place to loaf.

A photograph of Tom and Howard Morris in their sitting room was perceptively if a little speculatively described in the 1970s by the journalist T. S. Matthews.

It was well lighted: in the middle of the ceiling hung a chandelier, fitted for both gas and electricity; two wall brackets, each with gas and electric fixtures; on a small table by the fireplace a ‘student lamp,' with a green glass
art nouveau
shade. On the table, cluttered with tobacco tins and a small pile of books, was a copy of the
Saturday Evening Post
(that would be Morris's); on the other side of the fireplace a small bookcase, shaped like a truncated pyramid, filled with an encyclopedia and a set of ‘the classics' (that would be Eliot's). A sizable oriental rug covered most of the floor. A chafing dish stood on top of the bookcase; a tea set was on another small table. The space under two of the three bay windows was filled by a divan, spread with pillows and rugs. There were two Morris chairs, with flat wooden arms and frame and leather-covered cushions; a third chair, uncompromisingly hard.

Over the fireplace and above the mantelpiece a large rectangular crimson banner, bearing the legend HARVARD 1910, was tacked to the wall; the 1910 was partly obscured by two photographs of football teams. Between the photographs stood a beer stein; on the second mantel shelf were four more, flanked by two silverplated trophy cups (Morris's). In the center of the shelf were a dozen books (common property). Just over the fireplace hung a pipe rack, a line of trolls' heads in plaster; at the side, a German peasant's pipe depended from a hook. The andirons in the fireplace were piled with short birch logs. The framed pictures that covered the walls were mostly photographs: family groups, classical buildings and statues, a framed diploma.
47

When the photograph was taken both young men were in their characteristic dark suits. Tom, hair neatly combed, sat in one of the leather-seated chairs, legs crossed and hands folded in his lap. His dark leather shoes are typically gleaming. Beyond him, Howard Morris has adopted a characteristic student attitude of the day ‘as he lounges on the proverbial window seat', one hand behind his head, smoking relaxedly.
48
Their body language is very different. Morris looks the more at ease.

Later Morris described himself as belonging ‘to more clubs than I need'.
49
He and Tom shared jokes and got on fine, but Tom's intellectual life was separate. Rather than cooking much for themselves, it was customary for well-off students to belong to private Gold Coast dining clubs, but Morris and Tom tended to move in different circles. As an undergraduate Tom belonged to several societies. Probably the first he joined was the Southern Club whose other members drawn from his year included Texan Jack Harrold; at a time when, unlike Boston, Cambridge was a dry town, belonging to a private club brought access to alcohol. Tom remembered the Southern Club as a hell of drinking and poker-playing, perhaps indicating that he went there most during his ‘unsatisfactory' period, or maybe that he did not frequent it much at all. Southern Club membership was appropriate, given his Missouri roots, but he seems to have avoided significant contact with other Smith Academy alumni at Harvard such as his fellow member of the Class of 1910, James Taussig, Jr. Tom's one-time childhood neighbour and foe, Atreus Hargadine von Schrader, Jr, was a year ahead, playing tennis – without notable success – in the Class of 1909.

A better tennis player was Tom's ‘really closest friend' at Harvard, Harold Peters.
50
This New Englander had grown up on family land on South Street in the Forest Hills district of Boston, today part of Harvard's lush, green Arnold Arboretum with its Peters Hill.
51
In the spring of 1907 while von Schrader was being knocked out in the early rounds of the interclass tennis tournament, Peters was powering his way to the final of the Freshman Championship.
52
He continued to play, but not quite so well, in the following two years. As did Tom, Harold Peters came from a prosperous family that could trace their roots to seventeenth-century New England; if Tom's father had a house at Eastern Point, Harold's held property on Maine's North Haven Island.
53
Again, like Tom, Peters had a family background to live up to: his elder brother had enjoyed a successful Harvard undergraduate career before studying at the Law School. The age gap between these two brothers was even greater than that between Tom and Henry. By the time Harold Peters was winning at tennis, his sibling Andrew James Peters (Class of 1895) was a Democratic Congressman for eastern Massachusetts; later he became Mayor of Boston.

Like Howard Morris, Harold Peters was a good companion to Tom, but no intellectual star or civic leader. He was, however, passionate about sailing. He and Tom spent several energetic holidays cruising in small boats from Gloucester and other New England ports. While Tom was rooming with his ex-Milton pals Howard Morris and yachting enthusiast John Robinson, Peters at 106 Westmorly was sharing with his old school-friend Leon Little, who had grown up in Newburyport, Massachusetts, and was, like Tom's brother, another keen sailor. Little and Tom were members of the Digamma Club, founded about a decade earlier: a private Harvard society. Tom's sophomore room-mate Robinson knew Peters too, and was another member of the Digamma. So were other old school friends of Tom's such as Chicken Gilbert from Milton.
54

With its substantial, white-doored clubhouse at 44 Boylston Street, the Digamma was an exclusive, all-male space where well-off young men could socialise, dine, drink and make merry in very fine surroundings.
55
Boasting three storeys and a substantial basement, the detached building was ornamented with imitation classical columns at its corners, though the Digamma was not among the very richest of Harvard's clubs.
56
Founded by six students in 1898, its name comes from the sixth letter of the archaic Greek alphabet; however, ‘F', the archaic Greek letter digamma, just happens to look like the English initial associated with academic failure – and may hint at other F-words too. The Digamma's title made it sound like one of the elite intellectual ‘Greek letter clubs' of the Ivy League colleges, best known of which in Tom's Harvard was the Phi Beta Kappa; but its coded moniker was partly parodic. Though it had numbered literary men, such as journalist Maxwell Perkins and poet Van Wyck Brooks, among its members (Brooks had been club librarian), bibulous sociability and even scandalous exclusivity, rather than remarkable brainpower, were its hallmarks; its signature ‘F' led to its being renamed the Fox Club, its emblem a rampant fox slyly holding a letter ‘F'.

Of the seventeen men in Tom's class who mentioned membership of the Digamma in their later class reports, five, like Harold Peters, had attended the Noble and Greenough School in Boston, and another three, including Tom, its traditional rival, Milton Academy. Peters's sporty old school friends, C. C. Little as well as Leon Magaw Little (in 1908 a member of the Digamma's House Committee), became friends of Tom's too. So did Dick Hall, who liked tennis and theatricals; Hall was yet another Digamma member schooled at the Noble and Greenough. Almost all Digamma men lived on the Gold Coast and had attended expensive private schools – Milton, Noble and Greenough, Boston's Volkmann School (soon amalgamated with Noble and Greenough) – which acted as feeders for Harvard.
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Members were initiated into the Digamma in a secret ritual: Van Wyck Brooks's had involved ‘harassing … with oarsmen and football players', but Brooks had been known to pass out after downing a straight whisky.
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Bookish Tom Eliot, though less sporty than most other Digamma members, hoped he was made of sterner stuff.

Elected while a sophomore, Tom survived his initiation and, in the year when Leon Little was Digamma Secretary, went on to become the club's Treasurer for 1908–9; Leon thought the treasurer's job ‘very distasteful' to Tom, though he reckoned that it stood his friend in good stead when, like so many Fox classmates, Tom later became a banker.
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Attracting former members as well as current ones, Fox Club dinners were boozy affairs. Treasurer Tom was also the club's librarian and balladist. In its formal dining room on 15 May 1909, during his Junior Year, he recited his ‘Ballade of The Fox Dinner':

Muse of the rye and ginger ale,

Muse of the Cocktail and the Bar,

Open a bottle ere you hail

The members met from near and far.

Tom's dinner ballad mentions no foodstuffs. However, as well as rye and ginger ale, it takes in top-of-the-range champagne (‘When Cordon Rouge like water flows'), ‘demon Rum', a ‘cocktail chorus' and ‘booze' generally. The song imagines futures for several fellow members: recently graduated Charles Wilkins Short, Jr, of the Class of 1908, who had been club president when Tom was elected, is glimpsed advertising liquor, while former Gold Coast room-mates at 44 Dunster Hall, Dudley Richards Leland (by that time living on Park Avenue, Manhattan) and Harold Franklin McNeil (graduated but residing nearby, in Brookline, Massachusetts), were also featured: the latter for his ongoing ‘partnership with Venus' and the former for rowdiness; Tom imagines Leland crashing through a Fox Club window, summersaulting on his chair.
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Laughing about sexual antics and uproar were clearly de rigueur. Tom's role as club bard was to encourage this. He did a good job.

Another Foxy friend, Winthrop Sprague Brooks, known to companions as ‘Nick', also comes into Tom's poem. Clearly Nick, who came from Milton, had a reputation for running a ‘gambling game'. Though there is no evidence that he experienced financial problems, between poker at the Southern Club and gambling at the Fox, Tom did not have to look far to be led astray. Much later, ‘Nick' Brooks recalled ‘Tom Eliot' as his ‘old frat mate'. For Nick, a year ahead of Tom, the Fox meant having ‘a stein of whiskey at my elbow'; he relished memories of how every club dinner grew ‘pretty damned informal before its termination'.
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As well as remembering the Fox's liquor, Nick Brooks recalled his ‘frat mate' not so much as 1909 balladist or future poet of
The Waste Land
(like Howard Morris, Nick looked on Tom's later published poetry as ‘cryptic tripe'), but as the ‘swell guy' with whom he spent ‘many happy hours … going over the little known and, as far as I am aware, unpublished highlights of the career of the indefatigable Columbo'.
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Tom's readiness to share this scandalous ‘Columbo' material with his trusted circle helps explain why he got on so well with these much less literary frat pals. Within a close group that first of all included fellow diners Harold Peters, Leon Little and Nick Brooks, he delighted in coming up with bawdy ‘Columbo' verses that might have made his mother pass out. Sexually explicit, overtly racist, outrageously carnivalesque and taboo-breaking, these, like the club initiation rites, functioned as part of a male-bonding routine. Though most people saw him as shy, carefully dressed and well mannered, there was a determinedly Aristophanic side of Tom that strove to rebel against the proprieties of an upbringing soused in genteel Unitarianism.