“Quis hic locus”: Spatial Critical Theory in Modernist London

On September 8, 1914, Tom Eliot wrote two almost identical letters to his brother Henry and his friend Eleanor Hinkley about recently arriving in Bloomsbury: “Here I am in Shady Bloomsbury, the noisiest place in the world, a neighbourhood at present given over to artists, musicians, hackwriters, Americans, Russians, French, Belgians, Italians, Spaniards, and Japanese; formerly Germans also.… A delightfully seedy part of town, with some interesting people in it.” Bloomsbury felt to him like a global microcosm, and Eliot’s description in both letters is different from the artsy middle-class English Bloomsbury of Virginia Woolf’s circle, just a few blocks away from his Russell Square digs. Eliot barely knew anyone in London yet, and this is a picture of the 25-year-old poet at his most socially disconnected, with all his ambitions and an unfinished dissertation hanging over him. Yet he sounds jubilant in the letters to his brother and Eleanor, repeating jokes he had made to a neighbor, telling them he was learning French and “acquiring a war vocabulary.” He had secured room and board after returning in a hurry from Germany (where he had hoped to take summer courses) when England joined the war on August 4, 1914, which at this moment he understood mainly as an inconvenience and disappointment. The realities of war would sink in slowly over the next few years; in 1914, Eliot’s Bloomsbury jangles and throbs. “The noise hereabouts is like hell turned upside down. Hot weather, all windows open, many babies, pianos, street piano accordions, singers, hummers, whistlers.” He hears gongs for dinner at seven o’clock, paper boys with the late editions at ten and eleven p.m., women singing popular songs for pennies, maids chatting—these impressions go through him like the summer breeze that everyone hopes will float in the open windows. “I find it quite possible to work in this atmosphere,” he reassures his brother. “The noises of a city so large as London don’t distract one much; they become attached to the city and depersonalise themselves” Eliot uses “depersonalization” to great effect in his essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), suggesting that art approaches “the condition of science” when the poet is able to turn private experiences into something bigger that draws on existing literary tradition and adds to it. His casual use of the term in 1914, saying to his brother that the noises coming through the window become a kind of hum of the city in his ear, indicates it to be a word he used frequently to describe the affective link between a poet, place, and other people—a triangular relationship that informs every argument in this book.