In later years he would sometimes say that he came from St Louis, sometimes that he hailed from New England.

Being a little boy in Gloucester was not all ancestor-worship. Sometimes Tom’s father took him riding in a pony and trap, played chess with him or accompanied him on the golf course. A surviving photograph shows the father playing golf, the son looking on from a safe distance. In Gloucester his parents rarely went to church, and some prohibitions were relaxed. Tom liked the 4th of July celebrations in this New England port, associating them with fireworks, a yacht race (there was a substantial yacht club at East Gloucester) and strawberry ice cream.89 For all the hard life of those local captains courageous, Gloucester was fun. Later, the sort of experiences he had there re-emerged, transmuted into poetry: ‘There might be the experience of a child of ten, a small boy peering through sea-water in a rock-pool, and finding a sea-anemone for the first time: the simple experience (not so simple, for an exceptional child, as it looks) might lie dormant in his mind for twenty years, and re-appear transformed in some verse context charged with great imaginative pressure.’90

Tom’s father had some interest in natural science and in 1902 was elected President of the Academy of Science of St Louis which had received a splendid collection of butterflies. A 1901 photograph of one of the rooms in the Locust Street house shows a framed butterfly on the wall. In Tom’s Missouri there were ‘high limestone bluffs where we searched for fossil shell-fish’.91 In Massachusetts he enjoyed gathering algae on the shore, drying them out and classifying them.92 He had a microscope at Gloucester, watched crabs and possessed a child’s interest in small creatures, such as the field mice that got inside the Downs. Aged nine, he wrote in late June from Gloucester to his father who was still in St Louis, concerned that a box of butterflies had got broken, and saying that he was hunting for birds with his sister Charlotte.93

These interests stayed with him. In Missouri he loved ‘the flaming red cardinal birds’, but, in New England, Eastern Point, a staging post for many migratory birds, was and is an ornithologist’s paradise.94 For his fourteenth birthday his mother gave him ‘a much coveted birthday present’, the new sixth edition of Frank M. Chapman’s black-leather-bound volume whose gilded lettering read Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America. Lottie wrote her son’s name on the flyleaf, and the date of his birthday: no ‘with love’, but it was a loving gift.95 The volume included descriptions of plumage, nest and eggs, as well as accounts of ‘haunts and habits’. Specialist articles, such as that on page 400, ‘Turdus aonalaschkae pallasii’ (more familiarly, the hermit thrush), detailed many different aspects of bird behaviour, not least birdsong: ‘The Hermit thrush bears high distinction among our song birds. Its notes are not remarkable for variety or volume, but in purity and sweetness of tone and exquisite modulation they are unequalled.’96 Remembered and longed for, years later that bird’s song would become part of the concluding section of The Waste Land, heard at that moment in ‘What the Thunder Said’:

Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees

Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop …97

This was a cherished sound that belonged to the poet’s boyhood – to the deep part of him that was always Tom.

 

2

Hi, Kid, Let’s Dance

FOR Tom, returning from Gloucester to St Louis in late summer involved a very long rail journey in the inevitable direction of the classroom. Papa headed back to the routines of his Brick Company office. Mamma committed herself again to her social causes and cultural interests, including her poetry. From early childhood Tom was aware of his mother’s verse. On 17 September 1896, for instance, not long after the family returned from Gloucester, she took pride in a public reading of one of her hymn-like poems. It proclaims her characteristic high-mindedness, invoking the ‘God of our fathers’ and George Washington, while surveying the ‘savage’ past of America and a ‘happy’ seaside present-day where ‘ships pass ceaseless by’.1

After a summer watching ships pass Eastern Point, the Eliots recommitted themselves to the city that was, for most of the year, their happy home. The St Louis they returned to, from that first summer in their newly completed Gloucester house, was still rebuilding after the devastation of the cyclone. Nonetheless, it was thriving. Tom stepped off the train into his hometown’s monumental Union Station whose frontage extended for over six hundred feet. Opened two years earlier, this statement of municipal pride provided another opportunity for good works: a local women’s philanthropic group which his mother belonged to had arranged for it to contain boxes into which travellers could post unwanted reading matter suitable for distribution to the poor.

More railroads converged on St Louis than on any other American city. Traversing Union Station’s Grand Hall, travellers saw an impressive pictorial window depicting three white female figures sitting on a bench: those at either end represented New York and San Francisco; between them sat St Louis. That was how the city regarded itself, a midpoint in the mighty United States. With a population of around 600,000, by 1900 St Louis was its nation’s fourth largest urban settlement: ‘too far north to be a Southern city, and too southern in its social characteristics to be a Northern city; with all the polish and finish of an Eastern center, and yet toned by all the warmth and spirited verve of a Western metropolis’.2 Its French past was still discernible in local street names such as Lafayette, Chouteau and Soulard; but by the late nineteenth century German and Irish influences mixed with African American and Jewish culture. Home to the world’s largest brewery, and producing everything from bricks to newspapers, St Louis saw itself as an industrial and mercantile powerhouse. It was dominated by a rich, sometimes progressive, white elite to which the Eliots belonged.

Though the 1896 cyclone destroyed some businesses, and others suffered during a serious economic depression between 1893 and 1897, rebuilding and local population growth were good for Tom’s father’s Hydraulic-Press Brick Company. Large urban parklands and tree-lined streets in the better-off areas might be loud with cicadas, but towards the river were rows of poorer brick houses, while tall, imposing shops and office blocks thronged the downtown area. Smokestacks belching out fumes from soft Illinois coal dominated the horizon, dirtying the pale stone of the grand domed State House building.