As was the Harvard custom, so in Milton the graduating class had, Tom’s brother recalled, a ‘class president’ – in Tom’s case a boy called John Robinson, who came from Salem and was interested in sailing.102 Tom and Robinson had at least that pastime in common, and would keep in touch at university. Others in Tom’s circle at Milton included Harrison Bird Child, who became an Episcopal priest after studying at Harvard; and Roger Amory, who became the Treasurer for Tom’s Harvard classmates.

At Milton he found himself part of a group of privileged boys with New England backgrounds, but since he had arrived only in 1905 he was regarded as among the ‘immigrants’ to his class.103 Jayme Stayer points out that one fellow pupil (assistant business manager of the school magazine) was called Ronald A. MacAvity; his surname would become as notorious as that of Prufrock.104 Learning to fit in, Tom wrote home to St Louis regularly from the time he ‘first went to Milton’, and his mother preserved his letters all her life.105 He alarmed her in May 1906 by wanting to ‘swim in a quarry pond near the Academy’.106 Since Papa’s sister had drowned in a pond, Tom’s parents were none too keen on that.

When Tom came to graduate with twenty-one classmates from Milton Academy on 21 June 1906, Roger Amory wrote the ‘Class History 1906’ in one of the school publications, The Milton Orange and Blue, published on the fourth of July. Stayer has noted that Tom’s was the very last name to be saluted by the class historian at the 1906 graduation. No mention of any misdemeanour by Tom appears in the school’s surviving disciplinary minutes, but he was hailed at graduation as ‘Big Slam Eliot, boisterous haranguer of Forbes House’.107 Perhaps this indicates that at Milton he had reinvented himself. However, given the shyness that had characterised his boyhood, and which continued to be part of his demeanour at Harvard, the act of keeping his name to the very end of the list and then describing him as a ‘boisterous haranguer’ may have been designed to give his classmates one last laugh before leaving school.

 

4

A Full-Fledged Harvard Man

BY today’s standards, it is surprising that Thomas Stearns Eliot was admitted to Harvard. In a university run by the ageing, distinguished President Eliot, his surname and background probably did him no harm. Writing to Headmaster Cobb at Milton Academy in spring 1905, Lottie Eliot had glossed over Tom’s precise grades, preferring to emphasise his Latin prize and extensive reading. Tom stated simply that he had ‘passed’ subjects at Harvard’s ‘Elementary’ level, and was about to sit Greek, Latin, French and English at ‘Advanced’. When Mr Cobb asked about the precise level of the passes, Tom’s mother confessed they were mostly Cs.1 John Soldo, who unearthed in the 1970s the full run of entrance examination grades, lists the Elementary passes as ‘B+ in History; B in French; C in English, Greek, Latin and Algebra; D in Plane Geometry and E in Physics’. This last disaster, Mrs Eliot explained, was precipitated by a teacher who had succumbed to ‘nervous prostration’.2 In his four Advanced subjects Tom achieved a consistent row of Cs.3 He was working, but not very hard.

That style, honed at Milton, shaped his time as a Harvard freshman in session 1906–7. Dominating small-town Cambridge, Massachusetts, just across the Charles River from Boston, ‘Unitarian Harvard’ (as Tom later styled it) was not just about education.4 It was also, he knew, about privileged panache. His brother, who had edited the Harvard Lampoon, is credited as the author of ‘The Freshman’s Meditation’, penned a few years before Tom arrived: ‘Whoop! Hurrah! I’ve come to Harvard!’ it begins, ‘I’m a full-fledged Harvard man.’ To his ‘dandy room’ (furnished by his mother), the freshman in this poem adds Harvard flags and crimson cushions matching the university colours, not to mention ‘an ice-chest out of sight’. With ‘So many things to do’ on the sporting front, Henry’s new arrival relishes his sense of freedom, convinced he ‘Needn’t trouble ’bout my studies’.5 No doubt alert to social cachet and guided by Henry who had graduated in 1902 before proceeding to Harvard Law School, Tom’s parents had secured him accommodation at 52 Mount Auburn Street, right at the heart of Harvard’s ‘Gold Coast’. Just minutes from Harvard Yard in the direction of the Charles, this area of privately developed halls and upscale student boarding houses was home to the most cosseted undergraduates; the ‘Silver Coast’, classy but less exclusive, was down the road. Other boys from Tom’s year at Milton, including Howard Morris, George ‘Dago’ Parker and Charles ‘Chicken’ Gilbert, were moving to the Gold Coast. It seemed right for Tom ‘Big Slam’ Eliot to be there too.

Earlier generations of freshmen had tended to live at the heart of the Harvard campus in the Yard’s dormitories, most iconic of which was the early-eighteenth-century dark-red-brick Massachusetts Hall. However, 1906 freshmen from moneyed backgrounds enjoyed more opulent facilities if they lived outside the gated Yard with its expansive, well-kept lawns and lofty elms. Freshmen in Tom’s cohort (the ‘Class of 1910’ – named after the year in which they would graduate) strolled to Massachusetts Hall to elect class officers – a president, a secretary, a social committee – and attended receptions as well as lectures and classes in the other buildings of the Yard; then the most affluent ambled back to Mount Auburn Street.

On that thoroughfare and nearby some of the best endowed student societies had their clubhouses with private dining rooms. As the 1907 Official Guide to Harvard University puts it, this area ‘between the Yard and the Charles River … has come to be the centre of those activities in which the social spirit, the college loyalty, and the literary, musical, and other interests of the student body express themselves … Along Massachusetts Avenue, facing the Yard, and in Harvard Square, southwest of the Yard, are the shops, restaurants, billiard rooms, etc., most frequented by the students.’6 Long afterwards, reminiscing to a Harvard pal with whom he had made undergraduate mischief, Tom mentioned billiard cues; it was easy on the Gold Coast to avoid one’s studies.7 From 52 Mount Auburn a short stroll took him to a café such as the Dunster at Harvard Square which offered music every evening as well as food. One could buy stationery or have one’s visiting card engraved at Aimee Brothers, fine purveyors of ‘Student Supplies’; or, just off the Square at 5 Brattle Street, could eye fashionable clothing in the emporium of Alfred R. Brown & Co., Tailors and Outfitters, ‘Sole Agents for Carlton & Co.’s English Hats’; next door, the Harvard Tailoring Co. prided itself as ‘Importers of Woolen Novelties’, offering a ‘special Discount to Harvard Men’.8

Men they all were. Female students studied at nearby Radcliffe College, but none yet graduated from Harvard. Almost all Harvard men in Tom’s day were white, many from the crème de la crème of exclusive New England private high schools. As well as Tom, three other freshmen are listed as lodging at 52 Mount Auburn for 1906–7: Robert Haydock, a well-behaved New Englander with a self-deprecating sense of humour, later pursued a Boston business career; C. C. Perkins, though listed as a freshman, was probably Charles C. Perkins, a sophomore of the Class of 1909 who went on to become a salesman; Constant Wendell, kinsman of Harvard literary professor Barrett Wendell, left the following year and eventually experienced a nervous breakdown.9 Several further students lodged next door at number 54, none of them academic stars; whether or not one was as ‘green’ and inexperienced as the conventional ‘verdant freshman’, it was easy to be distracted on the Gold Coast.10

Hints of well-off student life in this vicinity come from some of the creative writing in the Harvard Advocate, confirming Gold Coasters’ reputation for idleness. In a 1906 Advocate parody of an ancient Greek play the character ‘Goldkoastides’ determines ‘to elect no courses but from ten o’clock to twelve’; any course whose class hour is 9 a.m.