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. Eliot’s St. Louis and “The Head of the Family” “In my end is my beginning,” the poet writes in “East Coker.” The story of T. S. Eliot’s life is to some extent an account of his retracing Andrew Eliot’s steps, further and further back to East Coker, and finally his interment there, in , in St. Michael’s, the village church. His first American ancestor, Andrew Eliot, had migrated in  from the village of East Coker, Somerset County, England, to colonial Massachusetts. The original American Eliot became prominent enough to be appointed one of the judges who tried and sentenced to death by hanging some nineteen witches in the infamous Salem witchcraft trials in Massachusetts in . In those same trials, an ancestor of Nathaniel Hawthorne (–) had also voted to execute the witches, an act for which the novelist apologized in his introductory essay (“The Custom House”) to his novel set in Puritan Salem, The Scarlet Letter (). Eric Sigg, in his “Eliot as a Product of America,” has provided a remarkable genealogical tree, listing Eliot’s “far-flung” “Literary Relatives,” including James Russell Lowell, John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Adams, Herman Melville, and Hawthorne (Sigg, –). One of the few American authors T. S. Eliot never read was Melville, and one of the few American authors he read and referred to repeatedly in his critical essays was Hawthorne. Eliot would later call Hawthorne the “greatest” of New England writers, saying [1] –  () Eliot’s St. Louis and “The Head of the Family,” ; () Sons and Lovers: Sex and Satan, ; () A Frail Youth, a Bookish Boy, ; () Early Landscapes, Later Poems,  that “there is something in Hawthorne that can best be appreciated by the reader with Calvinism in his bones and witch-hanging (not witch-hunting) on his conscience” (ALAL, –). Eliot would share this Puritan heritage with Hawthorne and partake of a Midwestern version in the city of his birth, St. Louis. St. Louis was settled in  as a trading post on the banks of the Mississippi River.When Eliot’s grandfather, the Reverend William Greenleaf Eliot, was inspired by the missionary spirit to leave Boston, Massachusetts, for St. Louis, Missouri, in , he settled in what was essentially a frontier town, more Southern than Northern, with a population heavily Irish Catholic and constantly outgrowing its civilized needs. The “river trade” of the Mississippi attracted not only easterners but also foreign immigrants, especially from Germany. By , the railroad would extend from Cincinnati to St. Louis, which would become for a time—until overtaken by Chicago—the hub of the country’s rapidly developing railroads. It became known as America’s “gateway” to the West. It was the river, however, that brought Ralph Waldo Emerson to St. Louis on Christmas day in , as part of his extensive lecture tour of the West. He had read his “Fate,” to become a chapter in his Conduct of Life, on December  in Cincinnati, and Gay Wilson Allen speculates on its effect: “His emphasis on the power of will to overcome obstacles and get things done must have appealed to men who were conquering nature by determination and effort,men who believed that Fate was on their side”(Allen,). For the seven lectures Emerson gave in St. Louis, he was paid $. There is no record of his visit in the biography of William Greenleaf Eliot later written by Eliot’s mother, but in a letter to his wife Lidian, Emerson provides us with a characterization of the man and the town:“This town interests me & I see kind adventurous people; Mr. Eliot, the Unitarian minister, is the Saint of the West, & has a sumptuous church, & crowds to hear his really good sermons. But I believe no thinking or even reading man is here in the  souls. An abstractionist cannot live near the Mississippi River & the Iron Mountain.” The Pacific Rail Road, he noted, was under construction as well as was one to New Orleans.“Such projects cannot consist with much literature, so we must excuse them if they cannot spell as well as Edith” (Emerson, L, :–). Ronald Bush, in his essay “Nathaniel Hawthorne and T. S. Eliot’s American Connection,” has suggested that from the beginning Eliot would be “haunted” by two Emersons. The first was “a man who by identifying his own imagination with the Holy Spirit had become a monster of egotism.” The second, closer to what Eliot would become: “Having rebelled in the T. S. Eliot: The Making of an American Poet [10] [3.145.178.240] Project MUSE (2024...

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