Childhood in Twain and Eliot

Abstract

This lecture1 describes the way in which childhood and the river, as rendered in Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, is absorbed and reimagined by T.S. Eliot in The Dry Salvages. Oh East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat; But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!2 Though seemingly belonging to different ends of the earth, both Eliot and Twain were born on the same patch of it, in Missouri in the nineteenth century, and each had strong ties to another patch, the east coast: Eliot’s familial, Twain’s literary and personal. Each had a beloved brother named Henry—Eliot’s older, his confidante during the bad times in his marriage and all throughout his life the preserver of his legacy; Twain’s a treasured younger brother, who sailed with him in his steamship days on the Mississippi, until his 1858 death from a riverboat explosion left Twain disconsolate and haunted. Both men had strong ties to Mother, Twain’s an eccentric, prim, Presbyterian, with occultist leanings, prone to excitement, hysteria, even self-dramatization; Eliot’s an educated, Unitarian protector, with a stern regard for the past and a propensity for poetry. Both men also had a singular and lasting literary friendship: Twain with William Dean Howells, Eliot with Ezra Pound.