Hearing the poem that June, Virginia Woolf had an impulse to rescue so great a poet from toiling as a bank clerk. In league with Lady Ottoline Morrell, she initiated an Eliot Fellowship Fund. Pound too had a rescue scheme called Bel Esprit, to which a New York lawyer, John Quinn, promised a big contribution. Eliot himself ws wary; they would have to collect £3,000 to yield and income of £300 a year (less than his steady rises at the bank to £500 a year by the mid-twenties) and the interest would be subject to fluctuation. No security then for his wife.
His father had not left money outright to his younger son, unlike the bequests to his five other children. The sum was in trust, for us during his lifetime; after that, the capital would revert to the Eliot family. Henry Sr had not liked Vivienne, who’d gone on cadging funds beyond the rent he’d been compelled to pay. As a responsible parent, there had been no alternative, and it had been easier to deplore his son’s wife than ‘my Tom’.
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