Here, as one of the highlights of the school year, was work by a living writer.

Tom’s was a markedly literary education. He went to a school where it was possible to encounter a practising author, and where writing of different kinds was celebrated. Curd’s staff included outstanding English teachers such as young Percy H. Boynton, who taught at Smith from 1898 until 1902, lectured extramurally in St Louis on Tennyson, then went on to become a professor of English at the University of Chicago.97 When Tom was thirteen Boynton, who ran the school’s annual oratorical contest, launched a series of chapel exercises on the topic of ‘Boys’ Books’. There were sessions on Abbott’s Rollo books and on Kipling’s Captains Courageous.98 After Boynton left, Harvard graduate Roger Conant Hatch arrived. A sporty, broad-shouldered young man of twenty-four, Hatch was completing his master’s degree at Washington University and had written verse about striving to be ‘An honest Christian man’.99 When Tom was fifteen, Hatch took charge of ‘higher English and elocution’, but his passion was lyric poetry. He had a taste for Elizabethan verse and Robert Burns. Though his contributions to Songs of Smith Academy sang of the school’s ‘lofty halls’ and ‘feats of brawn’, he could also pen erotic verse about a woman’s ‘warm soft arms’.100 Hatch enjoyed teaching, later calling his Smith Academy pupils ‘“aygnorant young divils,” God bless ’em’.101 Tom liked him.

He did not, however, like every aspect of schooling. It no longer exists, but the earliest poem he remembered writing was about not wanting to go to school on a Monday morning. He regarded himself as having been well taught; yet, with the exception of ‘Tom Kick’ whom he knew before he went to Smith, he tended not to recall having close St Louis friends. Later he described F. Anstey’s Victorian novel Vice Versa in which an older man is sent back to school as a ‘nightmare’.102 Back in St Louis as a sixty-five-year-old, he stated, with some qualification, that his ‘memories of Smith Academy’ were ‘on the whole happy’; he wanted to ‘pay tribute to’ the institution as ‘a good school’, not least ‘because of the boys who were there with me’. Yet he named no fellow pupils, and contemporaries from his schooldays recalled him as ‘diffident and retiring’ (as Tom Kick put it). To another, less well-disposed classmate he was ‘dreary, bookish’.103

This last description suggests shy, hernia-afflicted Tom kept his mischievous side well hidden, maintaining a low profile in a school whose most celebrated pupils tended to be sports stars like August R. Krutzsch, fullback in the Smith football team.104 In 1903, about a month after Tom’s fifteenth birthday, Smith fielded burly, broad-shouldered Frederick Klipstein in centre position, though a week later he left the field when a fellow footballer, Otto H. Schwarz, was brought on as a substitute in a convincing Smith victory.105 While playing no part at all in football, Tom knew these players’ names well. He stored them up for decades only for them to re-emerge in unattractive contexts in his poetry. In the drafts of what became The Waste Land ‘Gus Krutzsch’ is one of several men out for a night on the town, while Eliot also used the name as a pseudonym when he published his ‘Song to the Opherian’ (later modified as part of ‘The Hollow Men’) in 1921.106 Klipstein would appear in ‘Sweeney Agonistes’ as part of the American duo Klipstein and Krumpacker, who at one point sing a jazzy duet accompanied by ‘Swarts’ on tambourine.107 J. Louis Swarts was at Smith along with Tom but when, years afterwards, Otto H. Schwarz (who had also captained the Smith Academy basketball team) was convinced that he recognised a version of his own name and that of Klipstein in Tom’s writings, the poet confessed, adding that, in part at least, his character of Sweeney had been based on Klipstein.108

It is hard not to think that in giving such names to less than reputable characters in his work, Tom was taking a kind of revenge on some of the sporting boys from whose circles he was excluded at Smith Academy. In a footballing school where lads were routinely weighed, measured and examined, Tom’s physique and shyness meant he did not conform to the gregarious norms of sporty masculinity.

When he did incorporate names from high school into his later work, several sound Jewish. As a little boy in his Fireside, he had advertised a book called ‘History of the Jews by Fulish Writers’, illustrating his advertisement with a drawing of a man with a bulbous nose.109 Evidently the Fireside circulated among his immediate family, so presumably it was acceptable at Locust Street to link ‘Jews’ to ‘Fulish Writers’. If so, this prejudice, very common indeed in his youth and early manhood, did not come from Tom’s religion: his early minister, the Reverend Snyder, was aware of hostility towards Jews but sympathetic to them. Yet, with some embarrassment, Tom’s mother commented much later, in 1920 when her younger son was dealing with a writer called Bodenheim:

It is very bad in me, but I have an instinctive antipathy to Jews, just as I have to certain animals. Of course there are Jews and Jews, and I must be not so much narrow-minded, as narrow in my sympathies. There must be something in them which to me is antipathetic. Father never liked to have business dealings with them …110

The way his mother articulates this implies that anti-Semitism was a prejudice substantially unspoken in the Eliots’ St Louis household, but indisputably present. Tom’s attunement to it in the Fireside suggests that he took it on board early. His deployment of names like that of the sports star Klipstein hints that it may have stayed with him during his time at Smith Academy. It continued to dog him, part of an early conditioning which he sometimes went along with, sometimes questioned.