To rob him of that is to distort and caricature him. To treat his life as if it was the history of a monument is wrong. In presenting a full and detailed portrait of this poet, I want to circumvent assumptions about his often defensive persona, and so, in the chapters that follow, I shall call him neither by his surname nor by his famous initials but by the name used by most of the people whom he allowed to get close to him, and by those who knew him best from the start.

 

1

Tom

BEFORE he was T. S. he was Tom. That was what his prosperous parents and his four elder sisters called him. In the summer of 1890 his only brother, Henry, wrote from Boston, Massachusetts, to hard-working Papa Eliot at home in industrial St Louis, Missouri. Henry’s holiday news was that baby ‘Tom’ (then aged two) had just been weighed: 30 pounds.1 Henry, almost a teenager, seems not to have resented the arrival of another male Eliot. He looks happy photographed beside his alert little brother. Indeed, before long Henry, a bookish boy who liked to go to the Boston Athenaeum to look at the magazines, was taking his own photographs of Tom.

All the baby’s surviving siblings were considerably older. When Tom was born, Ada was nineteen, Margaret was seventeen, Charlotte fourteen, Marion eleven and Henry nine. Ada could easily have been mistaken for his mother; she would sit beside him on the stairs at the well-appointed family home, 2635 Locust Street, St Louis, responding to him in a kind of shared vocal game. Later, she told Tom how ‘When you were a tiny boy, learning to talk, you used to sound the rhythm of sentences without shaping words – the ups and downs of the thing you were trying to say. I used to answer you in kind, saying nothing yet conversing with you.’2

Ada left home while Tom was still little, but he always felt attuned to her. From his early years a mixture of separation and closeness characterised his sense of family. He was loved and happy. He and his mother Lottie treasured memories of his earliest infancy; in adulthood he assured her he still cherished her singing him a song, ‘The Little Tailor’, while the firelight made patterns on the ceiling of his childhood home.3 Yet, years later, Tom suggested to Henry that their parents ‘in spite of the strength of their affection’ had been ‘lonely people’.4 A sense of familial, shared fondness, tradition and values was unusually strong among the Eliots: Tom inherited it; but he also inherited, and worked hard to counter, a sense of isolation in himself.

When he was born in St Louis in 1888, both his parents were forty-five. Lottie – Charlotte Champe Eliot – gave birth around 7.45 a.m. on Wednesday 26 September. Anxiety mingled with jubilation. Three years earlier Lottie’s daughter Theodora had been born severely deformed. Her frail physique had failed to develop. Relatives outside the immediate family worried about how Theodora had so ‘wound herself’ round her parents’ hearts during the sixteen months of her short, stricken life, that they transferred to baby Tom a morbid sense of trepidation that later conditioned his boyhood.5

Few mothers in their mid-forties who had recently watched a baby die would not have worried at a subsequent birth, even if they were, like Lottie, of ‘unusual character’.6 The new baby’s father Hal – Henry Ware Eliot – sent a telegram immediately to relatives in Oregon: ‘Lottie and Little Thomas are well.’7 Thomas Stearns Eliot’s name was chosen with care. Stearns had been Lottie’s maiden name. Having called their first son Henry Ware Eliot Junior, after his father, the couple gave their new son the first name of Hal’s elder brother, the Oregon-based Reverend Thomas Lamb Eliot, a minister in the Unitarian Church that meant so much to all these Eliots.

A year or so before Tom’s birth, Hal, with his customary taste for kith and kin, had subscribed to A Sketch of the Eliot Family (1887). He has a short entry in it as Eliot ‘No. 163’, and close family members feature in its ‘Index of Eliots’.8 Familiar to him and to Lottie, surnames such as Adams, Cranch, Greenleaf, Peabody, Stearns, Stetson and Thayer populate its ‘Index of Other Names’. Tom, who later spotted this book in his ‘father’s library’, grew up with a strong, sometimes constricting sense that the world, like this book’s indexes, could be divided into Eliots and non-Eliots.9 Certainly his family tree, was formidable. A distant ancestor, Andrew Eliot, had emigrated from East Coker in Somerset, England, to Beverly in Massachusetts around 1670. Through him the St Louis Eliots could claim kinship with a substantially Unitarian New England elite.