NOT LONG AGO I STUMBLED upon what I would guess to be an undiscovered piece of T.S. Eliot ephemera–an obscure bone from the corpus, as it were–and have spent the past few years contemplating its announcement. It is obviously too unimportant to be included in any sort of biographical work or critical study, or stuffed between the pages of professional journals. And yet it is not altogether insignificant, either: a trivial incident, a peek behind the curtains, a throwaway line that reminds us of something we already know.
Perhaps it is best to explain the origins of its discovery. We begin some 35 years ago. I was an undergraduate at the time, majoring in English, and one afternoon two cherished fixations of mine crossed paths. I was in a second-hand bookstore (that’s the first one) and came across a trove of discarded Social Registers (that’s the other one). I should say, in my defense, that this interest in Social Registers, slightly diminished since then, was primarily sociological. Like the late Prof. E. Digby Baltzell of the University of Pennsylvania, I have a certain fascination with the folkways of the American upper-middle and upper classes. And, from my vantage point as a student on Philadelphia’s Main Line, I had the occasion to observe the natives, from time to time, in their natural habitat.
One such place was the bookstore in question, called The Owl–now, sadly, gone. Located in a Victorian carriage house at the edge of the Bryn Mawr College campus, it was run by the alumnae and was, as such things go, a pretty good shop. Its stock was an instructive combination of academic titles and the sort of middlebrow fare that Bryn Mawr graduates, and their husbands, cherished in that era: Books-of-the-Month, Literary Guild selections, the novels of Erich Maria Remarque and Dorothy Canfield Fisher, the popular histories of Claude Bowers and Catherine Drinker Bowen (a local resident). The stock was spread through two floors and assorted rooms of eccentric design, thick with dust, and it had just enough turnover to justify regular visits. I was not exactly flush with cash in those days; but then again, the antiquarian book dollar went further in 1971.
A portion of the pleasure, I confess, was the clerks. All Bryn Mawr women, I judged from their appearance that they had probably graduated during the Twenties–perhaps were classmates of Katharine Hepburn ’28–and I happily eavesdropped on their conversations. Sensibly dressed, devoid of makeup or traces of vulgarity, their square-jawed voices and nasal intonation were pure entertainment to a visiting Marylander. To which was added a favorite ritual.
When I had ceased browsing, and presented my selection of treasures for purchase, they would carefully record each title in a log. This was a more complicated process than it sounds and, combined with the business of adding up prices and calculating the Pennsylvania sales tax, the speed of commerce was drastically slowed down.
Then, too, there was the polite, if slightly discomfiting, process of commenting on titles. I remember, once, when I bought an edition of George Moore’s Memoirs of My Dead Life, the inscription recorded that a previous owner had acquired it “on leave, London, 1944.” While the woman behind the desk was admiring the book, I mentioned this interesting tidbit–which she managed to misunderstand, as I should have guessed, to the effect that I had been on leave in London during the war.
In any event, the final ritual was invariable. Once the mathematical problems had been solved, the confusions straightened out, and the books had been enclosed in a wrinkled shopping bag, the woman would look up from her desk, smile benevolently, and ask if I were a student at Haverford College. I would smile in return, and respond: “Oh no, I go to Villanova.”
Alas, this was not what they expected, or wanted, to hear. Some of them, to their credit, kept on smiling; but more frequently than not they would literally rear back–like a horse stung by a bee–and grope for words that wouldn’t come. At that instant, of course, a lifetime’s breeding kicked in, and our transaction would end on a cordial note. But their nerves had manifestly been shattered.
The Social Registers, as I say, were acquired during those years and, for the most part, still adorn my library (reference section). When I am asked what fascination they exert, I am quick to answer: In each volume are a hundred minor novels. In the course of three or four generations you can track the decline and fall of certain clans, trace the multiple marriages of yachtsmen and bond traders, revive café society, find historic names, learn the favored clubs, traditional schools, telephone numbers, and “dilatory domiciles” of ladies and juniors and assorted “married maidens.”
One volume of particular interest is the 1928 Summer Social Register, published by the Social Register Association (381 Fourth Avenue, New York City), which “contains the Summer Address where it differs from the Winter Address of . . . residents.” Most Registers are confined to a single city, but my 1928 Summer edition lists the mountain lodges, shore homes, boat houses, and lakefront cottages of the assorted aristocracies of New York, Washington, Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Cincinnati & Dayton, San Francisco, Baltimore, and Buffalo. (No Southern cities, the reader will note.)
A few years ago, as Igazed at this comprehensive list, it occurred to me that the St. Louis section might reveal some interesting detail about the family of T.S. Eliot, who was born there in 1888, and whose mother was still alive at the time of publication. The ancestral Eliots had been New Englanders, and the midwestern branch spent their summers at Gloucester, Massachusetts; but St. Louis hovers in Eliot’s poetry, as does the neighboring Mississippi River (“a strong brown god–sullen, untamed and intractable”). So I was not entirely surprised to find T.S. Eliot himself, more than a dozen years after he had left America for England, listed among the Register‘s dilatory denizens.
I was surprised, and delighted, however, to see what was printed (see below). Eliot had, in fact, been married to Vivien Haigh-Wood (not Haight-Wood) for a dozen years. But they had no children, much less three daughters named Betty, Verona, and Aurelian. And there was certainly no Castle Eliot in East Coker, Somerset, to which the poet and his wife repaired. I had, by inadvertence, found an Eliot joke, a mildly elaborate piece of satire at the expense of the Social Register Association of New York City and, I suppose, the burghers of St. Louis.
The daughters’ names, I assume, are of no particular significance, except the humor of their ascending distinction–from proletarian Betty through Verona to classical Aurelian–and the comic-sonorous sound they make together. There was an Emperor Aurelian in the latter stages of the Roman Empire, and Verona, of course, is where Romeo met Juliet. But the poet, not the historian, is at work here.
Similarly, while it is true that Andrew, the first Eliot in America, migrated from East Coker in the West Country to colonial Massachusetts in the late seventeenth century, he was a Dissenter, and town clerk, and certainly not the lord of any manor (“Castle Eliot”). No doubt, T.S. Eliot was mindful of his forebears, and conscious of East Coker–where his ashes would be buried in the parish church 40 years later. But, to my knowledge, he never visited the place until 1937, and “East Coker” in Four Quartets was published in 1940.
All in all, a mildly amusing, but not hilarious or particularly original, fragment of historic sarcasm. It is not especially difficult to lampoon a 1928 Summer Social Register, and Castle Eliot has the mock-grandiose tone of Phlebas the Phoenician and J. Alfred Prufrock.
What intrigues me is the chronology. The middle 1920s was a complicated period for T.S. Eliot. In 1927, the year before the Register was published–the year, presumably, when he filled out the form–he had renounced his American citizenship to become a British subject, and been baptized and confirmed in the Church of England. His marriage was a source of constant tension and anxiety, and friends were disturbed by his breakdowns and torment. Yet just as he embraced British nationality, and the English national church, his status as a literary colossus kept growing, and he settled comfortably into a lifetime’s work as publisher (at Faber & Faber) and arbiter of letters as editor of the Criterion.
So Eliot’s state of mind remains a mystery, cloaked by reticence and deliberate obscurity. But Old Possum appears to have lurked near the surface, the squire of Castle Eliot and his three adoring daughters.
Philip Terzian is Books & Arts editor of The Weekly Standard.
