Andy HoffmanBeginning in 2022, both Deb and I have taken writing retreats at the T.S. Eliot House in Gloucester, Massachusetts; we go separately, because of the rules of the house. The celebrated author of The Wasteland and The Love Sang of J. Alfred Prufrock spent several childhood summers in this house. Though poets, even famous ones, make notoriously little money, this house has come into the possession of the T.S. Eliot Foundation. The foundation had a very small endowment until Andrew Lloyd Webber generously cut it into a deal for his musical Cats, which was loosely based on Eliot’s little book of children’s verse called Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. At some point in his youth, Thomas Stearns Eliot acquired the nickname ‘Old Possum’, and close friends and lovers called him that. From what I know about him, the nickname fit him well. The Foundation – and Cats! – covers all our expenses, for which we are grateful.
The house, built around the turn of the twentieth century by Eliot’s family, hosted the Eliots as a summer oceanside haven from the stifling St. Louis summer. Though reconciling Eliot’s hidebound demeanor of his adopted England with his boyhood summers baffles most Eliot enthusiasts, he was a regular American boy when he sailed, splashed around at Niles Beach, and pretended to go native in the rocky woods abutting the family’s land. I don’t really know what he had for breakfast in Gloucester, though I assume hired help prepared it for him. A couple hundred yards from the Eliot House stands a rustic church built by the wealthy residents of East Gloucester for the domestic servants hired a few months of each year. Breakfast probably consisted of some fish taken from the nearby waters and locally baked bread.
Resident writers at the Eliot House today pay nothing for their accommodations, which includes a prepared dinner – taken all together, enlivened by conversation about writing – and whatever other food the writers request for breakfast and lunch. For lunch we usually eat leftovers from the night before, and breakfast is a more random affair. I don’t think I have ever seen a writer in residence prepare a hot breakfast. Of course, the house only accepts writers from April to November, the winter being too savagely cold to try heating the rambling space. A cold breakfast, followed by several hours of writing, a quick lunch, and then a trip to the beach, tend to fill most residents’ days. In the evenings, the writers sometimes get together to read aloud, drink wine, and talk.
This morning, I decided I deserved a treat. After my coffee, made in a moka pot on the Viking range, and served with almond milk, chocolate and sugar, I made a cold breakfast combining ingredients I found in the refrigerator with my special-order smoked salmon. I toasted whole wheat sourdough bread and then melted a ripe imported brie onto it. I slathered some tzatziki over the brie and topped that with slices of smoked salmon. I sprinkled fresh chopped chives over it. I rounded out the meal with a bowl of blueberries. I would have preferred cherries, but there were none in the house.
Possibly young Tom had something similar back in the summer of 1908. The bread would have been made in Gloucester. I don’t think brie had made it into a New England fishing towns by then, but they had an abundance of cheddar and yoghurt, which they might have flavored with savory pickles and herbs, like tzatziki. They definitely had smoked salmon, herbs, and blueberries, which in this part of the world ripen at the end of summer into fall, when I made this meal. I can eat like he did, but I will never write something as world changing as The Wasteland. Nonetheless, I am proud to have earned permission to spend a few weeks each year in his house.
