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(while himself wearing a broad-brimmed straw hat and a frilly dress, unremarkable garb for upper-class nineteenth-century male tots). His mother wrote to the headmaster of his prep school to ensure that he would not be allowed to participate in sports. She wrote again to warn against the dangers of swimming in quarry ponds. She praised Eliot’s schoolboy verse as better than her own, and guaranteed his unease. “I knew what her verses meant to her. We did not discuss the matter further,” he admitted long afterward. At his Harvard commencement in 1910, the same year as the composition of “Portrait of a Lady” and a year before “Prufrock,” he delivered the farewell ode in a style that may have been a secret parody of his mother’s: “For the hour that is left us Fair Harvard, with thee, / Ere we face the importunate years …” His mother was sympathetic to his ambitions as a poet—too sympathetic: it was almost as if his ambitions were hers, or vice versa. His father took a brisk view of Eliot’s graduate studies in philosophy: they were the ticket to a Harvard professorship, a recognizably respectable career.
    But Eliot would not stay put. To the bewilderment of his parents—the thought of it gave his mother a “chill”—he ran off to Paris, partly to catch the atmosphere of Jules Laforgue, a French poet who had begun to influence him, and partly to sink into Europe. In Paris he was briefly attracted to Henri Bergson, whose lectures on philosophy he attended at the Collège de France, but then he came upon Charles Maurras; Maurras’s ideas—“
classique, catholique, monarchique
”—stuck to him for life, and were transmuted in 1928 into his own “classicist, royalist, Anglo-Catholic.” In 1910 the word “fascist” was not yet in fashion, but that is exactly what Maurras was: later on he joined the pro-Nazi Vichy regime, and went to jail for it after World War II. None of this dented Eliot’s enduring admiration;
Hommage à Charles Maurras
was written as late as 1948. When Eliot first encountered him, Maurras wasthe founder of an anti-democratic organization called Action Française, which specialized in student riots and open assaults on free-thinkers and Jews. Eliot, an onlooker on one of these occasions, did not shrink from the violence. (Ackroyd notes that he “liked boxing matches also.”)
    After Paris he obediently returned to Harvard for three diligent years, doing some undergraduate teaching and working on his doctoral degree. One of his courses was with Bertrand Russell, visiting from England. Russell saw Eliot at twenty-five as a silent young dandy, impeccably turned out, but a stick without “vigour or life—or enthusiasm.” (Only a year later, in England, the diffident dandy—by then a new husband—would move with his bride right into Russell’s tiny flat.) During the remainder of the Harvard period, Eliot embarked on Sanskrit, read Hindu and Buddhist sacred texts, and tunneled into the investigations that would culminate in his dissertation,
Experience and the Objects of Knowledge in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley
. Screened by this busy academic program, he was also writing poetry. When Harvard offered him a traveling scholarship, he set off for Europe, and never again came back to live in the country of his birth. It was the beginning of the impersonations that were to become transformations.
    He had intended an extensive tour of the Continent, but, in August of 1914, when war broke out, he retreated to England and enrolled at Oxford, ostensibly to continue his studies in philosophy. Oxford seemed an obvious way station for a young man headed for a professorial career, and his parents, shuttling between St. Louis and their comfortable New England summer house, ineradicably American in their habits and point of view, could not have judged otherwise, or suspected a permanent transatlantic removal. But what Eliot was really after was London: the literary life of London, in