Fame & Folly Read Online Free PDF

the manner of Henry James’s illustrious conquest of it three decades before. He was quiet, deceptively passive, always reserved, on the watch for opportunity. He met Ezra Pound almost immediately. Pound, a fellow expatriate, was three years older and had come to London five years earlier. He had already published five volumes of poetry. He was idiosyncratic, noisy, cranky, aggressive, repetitively and tediously humorous as well asperilously unpredictable, and he kept an eye out for ways to position himself at the center of whatever maelstrom was current or could be readily invented. By the time he and Eliot discovered each other, Pound had been through Imagism and was boosting Vorticism; he wanted to shepherd movements, organize souls, administer lives. He read a handful of Eliot’s Harvard poems, including “Portrait of a Lady” and “Prufrock,” and instantly anointed him as the real thing. To Harriet Monroe in Chicago, the editor of Poetry, then the most distinguished—and coveted—American journal of its kind, he trumpeted Eliot as the author of “the best poem I have yet had or seen from an American,” and insisted that she publish “Prufrock.” He swept around London introducing his new protégé and finding outlets for his poems in periodicals with names like
Others
and
BLAST
(a Vorticist effort printed on flamingo-pink paper and featuring eccentric typography).
    Eliot felt encouraged enough by these successes to abandon both Oxford and Harvard, and took a job teaching in a boy’s secondary school to support the poet he was now heartened to become. His mother, appalled by such recklessness, directed her shock not at Eliot but at his former teacher, Bertrand Russell (much as she had gone to the headmaster behind the teen-age Eliot’s back to protest the risks of the quarry pond): “I hope Tom will be able to carry out his purpose of coming on in May to take his degree. The Ph.D. is becoming in America … almost an essential condition for an Academic position and promotion therein. The male teachers in our secondary schools are as a rule inferior to the women teachers, and they have little social position or distinction. I hope Tom will not undertake such work another year—it is like putting Pegasus in harness.” Eliot’s father, storming behind the scenes, was less impressed by Pegasus. The appeal to Russell concluded, “As for ‘The
BLAST
,’ Mr. Eliot remarked when he saw a copy he did not know there were enough lunatics in the world to support such a magazine.”
    Home, in short, was seething. Within an inch of his degree, the compliant son was suddenly growing prodigal. A bombardment of cables and letters followed. Even the war conspired against the prodigal’s return; though Pound was already preparing to fillEliot’s luggage with masses of Vorticist material for a projected show in New York, the danger of German U-boats made a journey by sea unsafe. Russell cabled Eliot’s father not to urge him to sit for his exams “UNLESS IMMEDIATE DEGREE IS WORTH RISKING LIFE.” “I was not greatly pleased with the language of Prof. Russell’s telegram,” Eliot’s father complained in a letter to Harvard. “Mrs. Eliot and I will use every effort to induce my son to take his examinations later. Doubtless his decision was much influenced by Prof. Russell.” Clearly the maternal plea to Russell had backfired. Meanwhile Harvard itself, in the person of James H. Woods, Eliot’s mentor in the philosophy department, was importuning him; Woods was tireless in offering an appointment. Eliot turned him down. Three years on, the family campaign to lure him home was unabated: the biggest gun of all was brought out—Charles W. Eliot, eminent educational reformer, recently President of Harvard, architect of the “five-foot shelf” of indispensable classics, and Eliot’s grandfather’s third cousin once removed. “I conceive that you have a real claim on my attention and interest,” he assured his