Eliot!’, where nonsense words ‘porpentine’ and ‘wopsical’ are fit to set beside such Learisms as ‘crumpetty’ or ‘crumbobblious’.30 In early 1899, under the guise of ‘anon’, he also attempted the literary genre most often associated with Edward Lear, but Tom’s limerick about female suffering is below par in form:

There was a young lady name of Lu

Who felt so exceedingly blue

She was heard to state

That it was her fate –

And then she began to bu-hu.31

Clearly he was absorbing contemporary events, probably from reading newspapers that lay around the house. Tom’s mention in Fireside, number 4 of a Brazilian balloonist in Paris picks up on the story of the rich young Brazilian Santos-Dumont whose ‘sailing around Paris, driving his cigar-shaped balloon’ was reported in the St Louis Globe-Democrat on 8 January 1899.32 Again, Tom’s use of comic plutocratic names including ‘Mr and Mrs Bondholder Billion’ in Fireside, number 3 and ‘Miss Stockenbonds’ in Fireside, number 11 involves close relatives of the creations of a Globe-Democrat cartoonist, Mr and Mrs Stockson Bond.33

Names such as Prufrock (which graced St Louis’s Prufrock Furniture Co., a ‘manufacturer of parlor furniture’ one of whose branches in 1899 was ‘between Locust Street & St Charles Sts’) and Stetson (Mrs Stetson, a niece of Harriet Beecher Stowe, lectured to the Wednesday Club in January 1899) stayed with Tom, absorbed apparently unconsciously, before emerging years later in his mature poetry.34 Into the Fireside he also copied the picture of ‘Dr Sweany’ which regularly featured in the Globe-Democrat. This gentleman was one of several local pedlars of remedies for male ailments who advertised routinely throughout Tom’s boyhood. Asking in anxiety-inducing capital letters, ‘ARE YOU LACKING IN ENERGY, STRENGTH AND VIGOR … MEN WHO ARE WASTING AWAY?’ and using such terms as ‘Nervous Debility’, Dr Sweany’s advertisements addressed problems including nervousness and loss of manliness. Rhetoric of this sort flourished in an era when George M. Beard’s Practical Treatise on Nervous Exhaustion (Neurasthenia) and its 1881 sequel American Nervousness were often reprinted, warning Americans that ‘the relative quantity of nervousness and of nervous diseases that spring out of nervousness, are greater here than in any other nation in history’.35 Shy, truss-wearing Tom, whose later verse would deal repeatedly with anxieties about manliness and who would develop poems featuring ‘Apeneck Sweeney’, copied from newspaper advertisements the doctor’s substantial beard. In the printed ads, this hirsute appendage completely obscured Sweany’s neckline. Tom also copied a version of the doctor’s slogan – ‘When Others Fail Come to Me’ – and highlighted Sweany’s ability to deal with insomnia.36 Ironically, in Tom’s 1920s melodrama ‘Sweeney Agonistes’, Sweeney’s nightmares render him unable to sleep.

Other Fireside figures included ‘Woodbury, The Facial Contortionist’, based on John H. Woodbury who advertised ‘painless operations for correcting featural irregularities’.37 As a child Tom was acutely embarrassed by the perceived featural irregularity of his own protruberant ears. Sitting between two girls at a children’s party he overheard one whispering to the other that she ought to look at this boy’s ears. As a result, Tom bound a rope around his ears when he went to bed at night, but his mother removed it, telling him not to worry: in time the ears would fold themselves back.38 In the childhood picture taken in the studio of ‘Holborn’s Dainties, 2320 Washington Avenue’, those ears stick out like the handles on proverbial jugs.39

Conscious, too, of orthodontic problems, in the Fireside the boy drew an advert for ‘Dr Chase, dentist’ under which there is a picture of a protuberant-eared male with dog-like fangs.40 From the age of ten, Tom was made to attend the dentist twice a week to have his teeth straightened. Over many visits, as he awaited this ordeal, he read all through an entire set of Edgar Allan Poe’s Collected Works that were in the waiting room.

Nineteenth-century tooth-straightening could be gruesome, and Poe’s narratives of horror may have seemed an appropriate preparation. The scholar Steven Matthews points out how ‘The Assignation’, one of Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination, especially impressed Tom when he read it before his regular dental appointment. This story of doomed love, attempted murder and the suicide of a beautiful young woman in Venice twice quotes lines from the seventeenth-century poet Henry King, memorialising his wife:

Stay for me there! I shall not fail

To meet thee in that hollow vale.

Tom went searching for that poem. Steven Matthews, calling attention to details in Poe’s story, such as the hair ‘in curls like those of the young hyacinth’, makes a convincing case that not only did this reading resurface at moments in Tom’s later poetry with its ‘hyacinth girl’, but it also prepared him for encounters with the often erotic and broodingly violent aspects of Elizabethan and Jacobean literature from which Poe liked to quote.41 ’The Assignation’, for instance, cites George Chapman’s ‘vigorous words’ in the Jacobean tragedy Bussy D’Ambois. Later, Tom developed a marked taste for such plays, but his boyhood experience brought together his personal pain at the dentist’s with darker aspects of literary imagination. Poe’s work, so important to Baudelaire, underlay too the French Symbolist poetry Tom would come to love in his student years. Attracted to suffering women, Poe – recounter of mysterious crimes, morbidly erotic poet of ‘For Annie’ and provocative poetic theorist – went on mattering to him.

Whether it was his teeth, his ears or his hernia, his body was at times a source of anxiety, even before this shy boy reached puberty. The body in his mature work would be a recurrent focus for worry and pain. However casually, humiliatingly or light-heartedly, such a nexus of associations grew in Tom early, and was with him even as a ten-year-old. A good number of Fireside’s advertisements, usually copied from the newspapers, relate to ill health: Wine of Cardui was a tonic for female ailments; Munyon’s Cures ministered to a plethora of ills, including common colds; Dr Franck’s Grains of Health were good for ‘C. C. and Headache’; Carter’s Little Liver Pills, Dr Pearce’s Pleasant Pellets for Pink People and Smith’s Bile Beans spoke for themselves. Whatever else Tom Eliot was aware of, he certainly knew about illness.

‘Avez vous Fireside?’ ask that magazine’s numbers 13 and 14; numbers 2 and 3 offer readers a story about ‘duelests’ (sic) set among ‘the busy streets of Paris’ complete with ‘gamins’. Like Poe’s tales, and like the St Louis Globe-Democrat, which often ran stories about life in Paris and London, Fireside aimed to be Francophile and cosmopolitan. In December 1898 translations of Edmond Rostand’s play Cyrano de Bergerac (which, as well as featuring French duellists, deals with men who find wooing an intellectual woman difficult) were selling out in Tom’s home city.42 This was because the actor Richard Mansfield and a large theatrical entourage were in town to perform at the Olympic Theatre ‘the great play … for the first time in St. Louis’.43 Rostand’s drama juxtaposes poetic eloquence with chronic male shyness exacerbated by bodily oddity: Cyrano has a huge nose. A local fancy-goods store presented a prominent picture of Cyrano in its Globe-Democrat advertisement of 8 January and Mansfield’s ‘masterly production’ got a rave review two days later. Here was ‘a strong play, a great play, a beautiful play … perfection in a play’ that featured ‘a love song, the tenderest ever told’.44 Though he would write his own, very different ‘Love Song’ eleven years later, this production also caught the attention of young Tom. He recorded in the Fireside of 28 January that it had caused ‘a great sensation’. His chronicling that ‘Mr Mansfield had a lame leg’ suggests that either he or other family members may have seen it.