When his father signed to certify that he had ‘examined’ Tom’s report card for the second term of session 1899–1900, Hal was pleased to see that whether for coursework or final examinations every grade – for Arithmetic, English Literature, English Grammar, English Composition, US History, Spelling, Drawing, Writing and Deportment – was an A.82 Tom’s performance in the first-year class of the main school was a marginal improvement on his report card for the comparable term in his previous year. Then he had dropped to a B for one element of Arithmetic coursework, and had scored consistent Bs for Writing – probably meaning handwriting, not the separate subject of ‘English Comp’. For composition, as in everything else, he had been awarded straight As for ‘exceptional work’.83

Tom drew on his schoolwork for his writing at home, and sometimes anticipated it. He wrote in pencil the tiny booklet, George Washington, A Life, presenting the author on the title page as ‘Thos. S. Eliot, S.A., Former Editor of the “Fireside”’. He then crossed out the word ‘Former’, so probably this briefest of works (which compresses Washington’s life into just twelve lines of prose) was contemporary with the early 1899 Fireside productions. Tom’s Washington ‘wanted to go to sea but his mamma didn’t want him to’.84 Tom repeated this detail in a tiny piece on Washington in the Fireside.85 Mammas were commanding figures.

In St Louis around 1900 there were local newspaper features on London life and on Charles Dickens – an author whose work Tom grew to love. One could attend a Literary Symposium lecture on St Paul’s Cathedral and the area of London known as ‘the City’ centred round ‘old London Bridge’ near which had been the ‘shrine’ of ‘Thomas à Becket’.86 At schools like Smith Academy private education for boys was relatively Anglophile. Tom worked through a history of England during session 1900–1901, but read American literature too – not just Hiawatha but also Longfellow’s ‘The Courtship of Miles Standish’, which, blending amorous pursuit with a rather plain name, anticipates ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. Another text the boy read in 1900 was Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield; as he later acknowledged, words from a song contained there (‘When lovely woman stoops to folly’) entered The Waste Land.87 When he was thirteen the third page of John Williams White’s First Greek Book introduced him to the term logos.88 The meanings of that word came to fascinate him.

His schooling sculpted his imagination, as, indeed, it was designed to do. Overseen by Washington University whose junior ‘Academic Department’ it had been from 1856, then financed by local philanthropists James and Persis Smith, Tom’s all-male school was a private, non-residential establishment with about three hundred pupils and twenty teachers. Its substantial multi-storey brick building stood on land owned by Washington University at the corner of Washington Avenue and Nineteenth Street. Next door, but quite separate in gender and ethos, was the Women’s Christian Home, a fifty-bedroom hostel for young women of good character but relatively low income: nurses, teachers and shop assistants.89 A ‘preparatory school for colleges, schools of engineering and business’, Smith Academy attracted the sons of prosperous St Louis folk, just as the similarly constituted Mary Institute admitted their daughters.90

Entrance to Smith Academy was by examination. Pupils had to buy their own textbooks. Fees were about $70.00 for each of the year’s two twenty-week terms. Facilities were good. There were chemistry and physics laboratories on the second floor equipped for practical experimental work as well as lectures, and a first-floor gymnasium ‘handsomely furnished with the most serviceable pieces of apparatus of modern pattern’. Tom took part in daily gymnastic exercises to which each class was sent around the middle of the school day. The object was ‘to give a systematic physical training, not only to those who enjoy athletic sports and would practice them of their own accord, but also to the large number who neglect bodily exercise, unless opportunity is furnished them’.91

Many Smith boys in their white shirts, neatly knotted ties and formal jackets went on to become students at Washington University, but the school also sent students regularly to Ivy League colleges including Harvard, Yale and Princeton. For all its ties to Missouri education, Smith in the 1890s boasted that ‘The methods of instruction are such as prevail in the oldest and most popular preparatory schools of New England.’92 Pupils intending to pursue a university arts degree followed a six-year ‘Classical Course’: Tom took this traditional option including Greek. Cautioning its students ‘lest self-love should rule the mind’, Smith Academy had a Ciceronian motto: ‘Non nobis solum sed patriae et amicis’; as one of the school’s songs (written by Tom’s favourite English teacher, Roger Conant Hatch) translated it, ‘Not for ourselves alone but for / Our friends and native land’.93 This ethic of subordinating self to community accorded both with Tom’s grandfather’s teaching, and with his own mature thought.

Smith’s lean, experienced headmaster Charles P. Curd from Louisville, Kentucky, set the tone. Curd had arrived in 1879 at the age of twenty-eight and risen through the pedagogical ranks. Given at times to platitudes, he believed, as he put it when Tom was fifteen, that ‘Energy, enthusiasm, honesty and an unbounded determination are among the chief requisites of success.’94 His ‘pupils’ were ‘expected to prepare at home a part of the lessons assigned for each day, and their hours of study should be regular and free from interruption’.95 A Latinist, a Germanist and an English teacher who had studied arts at the University of Nashville, then law at Vanderbilt University, Principal Curd held forth at school-chapel morning assemblies. Enthusiastic about public speaking (the school had regular oratory contests), he was known in the press as ‘an idolater of athletics’.96 Neither of these passions Tom shared. However, Curd was keen to inspire his boys in other ways too. He invited the school’s best-known former pupil, American author Winston Churchill (not to be confused with the British politician) to address the school on Citizenship when Tom was twelve. Shortly before, an extract from Churchill’s recently successful novel, Carvel Hall, had been read at the school’s Christmas chapel exercise.