INTRODUCTION
One warm autumn evening in 1955 Mary Trevelyan met T. S. Eliot on the steps of Faber and Faber, the publishing house where Eliot worked as a director. By then the pair had been friends for seventeen years. He was the country’s most famous literary figure – one of the most eminent literary figures in the world, having won the Nobel Prize seven years before. She was an energetic, passionate woman of fifty-eight, nine years younger than Eliot. She had devoted much of her life to the care of students who came to London from all over the world; her deepest wish was for her charges to feel safe and comfortable when they were far from home and for them to return to their native countries with only the very warmest feelings about Britain and the British. She was the kind of woman who knew she could make the world a better place, and whose clear thinking and vigour could shape the lives of those around her, even Nobel Prize-winning poets.
They climbed into her car. As a red September sun sank behind the cargo ships on the Thames, Mary and Tom went for a drive through London. Mary loved to drive and they cruised through the City, to the Tower and over Tower Bridge, Eliot quoting Shelley as they prowled about in by-ways – as Mary wrote in her extraordinary recollection of her two-decade-long friendship with the poet, a manuscript she called The Pope of Russell Square. Finally, in her account, they pulled up at a fine French restaurant where they ate and drank – and the head waiter bowed to Eliot and asked him to sign a copy of Murder in the Cathedral, which had been first performed in Canterbury Cathedral exactly twenty years before. The couple – and they must have looked like a couple – chatted happily, making plans for the arrival of Eliot’s great-niece Priscilla in a few days’ time.
‘May I arrange your life for you?’ Mary asked Eliot.
‘That is exactly what I want you to do,’ Eliot said, and the two went on to plot out Priscilla’s visit. Eliot gave Mary a silver cigarette lighter. ‘He feels very superior having given up smoking,’ she recorded in recollection of that evening. It had been nearly two decades since their first meeting in 1936, when he had come to read, at her invitation, from his work at the Student Christian Movement (SCM) Conference in Swanwick, Derbyshire. That encounter was the foundation of their friendship.
Mary is one of four women who played a significant role in Eliot’s life. The others are Vivien Haigh-Wood, his first wife; Emily Hale, a friend of his American youth with whom he had an enduring relationship which might have moved towards marriage; and Valerie Fletcher, his devoted secretary at Faber and Faber, many decades his junior, whom he married in 1957 and with whom he found great happiness at the end of his life. His relationship with Mary was a warm, strong bond for many years; it is not easy to categorise. But as it grew and strengthened, she came to believe it might lead to something more. This is a portrait of a romance as much as it is an account of a friendship.
And why should she not believe their relationship would develop into romance? Though they came from different worlds, they had much in common, the strongest link being their commitment to the Anglican faith. They were both from prominent families: Eliot’s grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot, had come to St Louis, Missouri – city of Eliot’s birth – to found the Unitarian church there. Ralph Waldo Emerson called Greenleaf Eliot ‘the Saint of the West’.
In an echo of his ancestor, T. S. Eliot too blended a religious zeal with practical qualities, especially in his work at Faber and Faber. There were links in his family to Noah Webster, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne; he once told Mary: ‘I know there are Eliots, non-Eliots and foreigners.’ His father was a successful businessman, his mother Charlotte a poet herself; in 1926 her dramatic poem, Savonarola, was published with an introduction by her son. She was in some ways like Mary Trevelyan, a powerful figure whose power was often thwarted by the age in which she lived.
Mary also came from a distinguished family in which the ideals of faith and service ran strong. She had been born in 1897, the eldest of six children. (Eliot was the youngest of seven; and so they were at opposite ends of the sibling hierarchy in their respective families, a fact which may well have influenced the dynamic between them.) Her nephew, the biographer Humphrey Carpenter, wrote of the way in which his aunts – Mary and her three sisters – seemed to him to come from a different era:
In their speech, though they had been born at the turn of the century, my aunts preserved the vowels of the 1880s or earlier. They never said ‘girl’ but ‘gel’, never ‘cross’ but ‘crorse’, and in the word ‘golf’ the ‘l’ was silent, so that the game was referred to as ‘goff’. They belonged to a sublimely self-confident caste, an enclave of English society which has now entirely vanished, but which can be precisely defined – they were the daughters of a Victorian vicarage.
Throughout her life, Carpenter wrote, ‘she retained the supreme social self-confidence of a child who is used to being given precedence over five strong-willed vociferous individuals’. Her confidence seemed expressed in her physique: her nephew wrote that she was ‘not tall, but broadly built, with firm features dominated by the strong “Trevelyan” nose, which most members of the family possess’.
She was more than just the daughter of a Victorian vicarage: both of her grandfathers, her father and her brother-in-law were ordained in the Anglican church. Her brother Humphrey (later Baron Trevelyan) was a distinguished diplomat. She was second cousin to the historian George Macaulay Trevelyan, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge: his History of England (1926) was an important text in the interwar years. His long affiliation with both the National Trust and the Youth Hostel Association complemented the work which was to occupy Mary’s life.
The Trevelyans were an influential family with a strong sense of their moral obligation to society. The historian A. L. Rowse noted that they were marked by ‘integrity to the point of eccentricity, honesty to the point of rudeness, devoted public spirit, idiosyncrasy held in check by strong common sense; not much sense of humour. That distinguished family were apt to think there were Trevelyans – and then the rest of the human race.’ It’s a sentiment that reflects Eliot’s own characterisation of his family. Mary’s nephew Humphrey Carpenter’s sketch of his youthful visits to her Chelsea flat shows both her energy and what one might call her forceful warmth. When a guest arrived on her threshold,
The door would swing open, and there she was, generally with a cigarette in her mouth or hand, always with her opening sentence ready, so that one was immediately swept off on a tide of instructions: ‘You’re twenty minutes late, but it doesn’t matter because it’s only sausages, so I’m going to pour you a gin and tonic, and you will then play the piano to me while I go and cook the supper.’
He captured her perfectly: the feeling, her nephew wrote, was of being ‘treated simultaneously as an adult and a very small boy’. Eliot, it is clear, received the same treatment.
Mary was not in Eliot’s literary orbit – though she wrote all her life, and was an inveterate keeper of diaries. Music was her love: she was an excellent pianist and organist, and had studied conducting at the Royal College of Music under Sir Adrian Boult, the first conductor of Holst’s Planets, and founding conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra. For a while she taught music at Radley College and Marlborough School, serving as a parish organist and a choir trainer at weekends. She would call herself an ‘uneducated musician’, but it remained a passion throughout her life; there was always a piano in her flat, and music played a significant role in her relationship with Eliot.
In the early 1930s, she had begun to venture abroad – journeys that would take her, as she wrote, to ‘the ends of the earth’. She travelled to India and Ceylon – and, as so often happens, found that upon her return from these far-flung places she had a new vision of her native land. ‘In London,’ she would write,
I noticed groups of Indians on the streets looking lost in the wintry rain, snow and bitter winds. I had intended to return to the musical profession, but began to wonder if I might be able to do something to help these young men, since I had spent such a happy year in their country. One day I met a friend who offered me an appointment on the staff of Student Movement House – a centre for students of all countries. I accepted the offer for a trial period on both sides and, within a year, found myself appointed Warden. And this, though I did not know it at the time, was the beginning of the end as far as my own musical future was concerned. I have never regretted this change of direction.
Even this brief passage gives a sense of what a remarkable woman Mary Trevelyan was. Her character is wonderfully encapsulated by a story she tells of her adventures during the Second World War, published in 1946 as I’ll Walk Beside You. On the last day of September 1944, Mary set off to Europe as part of a convoy of vehicles organised by the YMCA. The conflict was drawing to a close at last. Three and a half months earlier the Allies had landed in Normandy, and victory was now within reach. And so, as Mary wrote, a parade of twenty-two vehicles drove away from Great Russell Street in London, destined for Brussels – which had only just been liberated from the Nazis. Over the next six months the organisation would provide respite for front-line troops: by May 1945 nearly 50,000 had passed through the YMCA hostel – a requisitioned luxury hotel – on forty-eight-hour leave.
It was 9 a.m. when the convoy began to rumble through London’s streets, still strewn with the rubble of the Blitz. There were, Mary wrote, ‘mobile canteen trucks, stores vans, and one private car, a Ford V8, which I had the good fortune to drive. This car was the only vehicle able to put up a reasonable speed, and I was placed at the tail-end of the party so that, should accidents occur, I could immediately pass the convoy and inform the leader.’ There were, in fact, three accidents as the train of vehicles lumbered through southern England – which, Mary confessed, she rather welcomed, ‘as I found it rather tedious driving a high-powered car at fourteen miles an hour for a long distance and thoroughly enjoyed any opportunity of passing our convoy at forty miles an hour to catch up to the leader’.
She was herself a powerful engine: her greatest energies were directed towards her work with students from all over the world. She was able to make the connection between what she had seen in distant lands and what help she could bring to those closer to home. She worked hard to make that connection manifest. It was in 1932 that she became Warden of the SCM’s Student Movement House, a hostel serving London University and based in Russell Square – yards from T. S. Eliot’s office at Faber and Faber.
The SCM had its origins in missionary organisations founded at the end of the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, SCM became a strong proponent of ecumenism, the belief in the global unity of all Christians, no matter what their denomination, nationality or race – an open-mindedness that was evident in Mary’s work and her travels around the world on the organisation’s behalf. Mary did cultivate the bonds of her own family, remaining devoted to her mother: Eliot was always punctilious in sending along his regards to her when he and Mary corresponded. She was not married. When she took on the role with SCM, she found surrogate children through her work, and her care for them became a passion; it was a truly global family. As Humphrey Carpenter wrote, ‘It became evident that her “family” was going to be this collection of rather lost young men and women, many of them from Africa, India and the Far East.’
She threw herself into the work, and she was willing to go to great lengths to understand the young people who landed on her doorstep. From the Ends of the Earth, published in 1942, is her remarkable account of a six-month journey undertaken in 1937 to the furthest reaches of the globe: Ceylon (as it was then), India, Burma, Hong Kong, Singapore, China and Japan, as well as the United States and Canada. The slim volume reveals a woman both passionately curious and absolutely fearless: she flew to Beijing – only the second flight she had ever made – on a tiny plane which ‘appeared to be tied together with string’.
Her invitation to Eliot was part of her mission to make foreign students feel part of English cultural life. The students with whom she interacted truly came from all over the world: from the Gold Coast and from Nigeria; there were Germans, Scandinavians, Tamils from the south of India, men from Punjab and the North-West Frontier; there were Persians and Lithuanians. In her early days as Warden, Student Movement House was located at 32 Russell Square, one of the last remaining grand houses on the square. (The offices of Faber and Faber were at number 24, where the company would remain until 1971.) Although it was clear the house had seen better days, there were still white marble Adam fireplaces, a grand staircase, floor-to-ceiling mirrors. Characteristically Mary wrote that she liked to think that the house
was glad to give the last twenty years of its life to young people from all over the world … tramping up and down the beautiful staircase, crowding into the stately and spacious rooms, talking and smoking incessantly, making friends, laughing, playing, happy and unhappy, leaving at last for their homes in far-off countries with many memories and friendships which would last a lifetime.
A student membership cost twenty-six shillings a year – but many students, and especially refugees, would only pay what they could afford. That was one mark of Mary’s care for her charges; by the standards of her day she had no regard for race or creed. Students of colour ‘knew that here they need have no fear of the doors being closed to them, here they would be treated as ordinary members of society and would be accepted on exactly the same terms as anyone else’. Mary would write of her disgust at the racism often shown in England, noting when people got up on buses or trains so as not to sit by people of colour; she was aware that hotels, dance halls and restaurants, time and again, would not admit a man – or woman – of colour. ‘Why? Just because he has been born under a tropical sun? What is there that is disgraceful in having a coloured skin?’
This forthrightness marked the very beginning of her friendship with Eliot (whose name, incidentally, she misspelled the very first time she wrote to him: ‘Dear Mr Elliott’). Who would dare to mock T. S. Eliot upon first making his acquaintance? Mary would – as the opening of her manuscript shows with delightful plainness. The Pope of Russell Square is an account of an alliance that offers extraordinary and unusual insight into one of the greatest figures of the twentieth century. It is an account which, although it has been seen by scholars and biographers, has never been fully revealed until now. It is an astonishing document.
Her account of their friendship was assembled from their correspondence and from her diary. She put it together in the months after they ceased to meet, and the manuscript which forms the basis of this book is divided into halves. The first half, from 1938 to 1948, is composed of ‘mainly letters’, as she herself writes: exchanges back and forth between Mary and her new friend, the famous poet, as they grow closer. The second half, from 1949 onwards, is a diary account of their comings and goings over the next seven years, with Tom’s experiences – always – in the foreground. It is a kind of mythologising of her relationship with Eliot: for any written account, any construction, must fictionalise a relationship. The reader gets Mary’s version, not Tom’s. I make an argument for her as a reliable witness, certainly as far as taking down her friend’s opinions of his friends, enemies and world events is concerned. But hiding within her seeming objectivity is a story she kept secret, perhaps even from herself.
As for its somewhat awkward title, she doesn’t claim credit. ‘The Pope of Russell Square’ was, she wrote, ‘simply a phrase that, at one time, caught on in the literary world – indicating a certain restlessness among lesser lights. I think it was particularly prevalent about the time of the publication of Notes Towards the Definition of Culture.’ Eliot’s Notes appeared in book form in 1948, just the midpoint of their friendship: and around the time too when Mary’s manuscript shifts from letter to journal form.
She preserved 170 of Eliot’s letters, most of them written between 1944 and 1954. In the later years of their friendship they met so frequently, she noted, and telephoned so often, that letter writing was not necessary. Her wish to record their later meetings as a journal, she tells her imagined reader, had a two-fold purpose:
I decided to write a diary of our many meetings; of his talk on many topics, of our church-going, concerts and theatres, of our many dinners and many evenings in my flat. I set myself this task because I have an unreliable memory and it seemed a waste to have so close a friendship with (as many would say) our greatest living poet and not to record some of his conversation.
Yet there is more to it than that. Mary directs all the powerful force of her vigour and attention towards Eliot. He is never not ‘the Poet’ – she is given to capitalising that word – but he is too, as she perceives it, her intimate friend, and one in need of her protection and care. Just as her charges at Student Movement House were like lost sheep to be brought into a comforting fold, so was Tom Eliot. She was the practical partner in their relationship, the fixer, the arranger. He complained unceasingly about his health; she was – even when she was actually ill – almost startlingly robust. But the force of her gaze has in it also the intensity of the lover. As time goes on, no detail – of his dress, his bearing, his behaviour – is too small for her to notice. They had been drawn together by their shared interests: their churchgoing, their love of music, their taste for good food and a good glass of something strong. Mary imagined something more than friendship in their future. The manuscript she left behind is, in a very real sense, a romance.
She guarded the manuscript closely. It now resides in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, and leafing through its pages one gets a powerful sense of Mary’s presence, for it is much more than a typescript. It is a scrapbook as much as a collection of letters and a journal, with postcards and photographs pasted in. Here is a windblown Eliot in a soft windcheater, caught in a candid picture taken in front of the Tennyson Memorial on the Isle of Wight. On 6 March 1950, Eliot appeared on the cover of Time magazine (‘T. S. Eliot: No middle way out of the waste land?’): she carefully pasted the cover and its accompanying article into her book.
The Pope of Russell Square and additional material copyright © 2022 by The Estate of Mary Trevelyan
Introduction, Editorial Commentary, Notes, and Compilation copyright © 2022 by Erica Wagner
