Image courtesy of The Daily Postcard
Historic Bellefontaine Cemetery holds over 87,000 bodies and counting, and is one of St. Louis’ most-populated cemeteries. It boasts most of the grand names in St. Louis history, names like Busch and Brookings and Burroughs. On my visit, my guide repeatedly used the phrase “movers and shakers,” though many of the occupants have neither moved nor shaken in more than two centuries. But there is one name that has faded into the ether of history, a St. Louis literary name that dictated the course of modern poetry once-upon-a-time.
I’m not referring to T.S. Eliot, but rather to the Prufrock family name that Eliot immortalized 100 years ago with the publication of his first manuscript, Prufrock and Other Observations. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” the collection’s headlining poem, established Eliot as an innovative voice in modern poetry. The poem follows the eponymous narrator’s stream-of-consciousness as he suffers through the alienation of 20th century urban life. The Prufrock of the poem drinks a lot of coffee, tries and fails to make himself understood, most notably to his lover, and then dies an anguished death amid singing mermaids (although all this may have only happened in his head.)
It is a poem that could easily be about the Prufrocks themselves, a family about whom not much is known. William Prufrock immigrated from Germany in 1868, married, established William Prufrock Furniture Company, and had three children. He lived in a middle-class house just east of Tower Grove Park, on Tennessee Avenue. His gravestone at Bellefontaine Cemetery, which he shares with his wife, is a modest slate-gray stone slightly faded with age. A pretty vase adorns its top, bringing it to about the height of an average man.
By the time T.S. Eliot was coming across the name in the 1910s, Harry Prufrock had taken over the family business and was spreading the company name through full-page newspaper ads. These ads appeared regularly in local periodicals like the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and featured idyllic scenes of middle-class families around a Prufrock table eating a holiday meal, or working diligently in trousers and shirtsleeves at a Prufrock desk. Harry Prufrock is mentioned in the enormous Grand Rapids Furniture Record for the remarkable editorials he included in these ads. “Little editorials by Harry Prufrock,” the Record reads, “add the human interest—personal touch—that gives them value.” He was, apparently, a gifted ad-man.
That Eliot encountered the name in such a way is remarkable, given the character of his narrator. In the St. Louis of the 1910s, “Prufrock” would have been synonymous with the average, middle-class life, the same as the Macy name today. It appears that much of this has made its way, if only subconsciously, into the poem. Eliot wrote “The Love Song” as a young man, just five years after he moved from the St. Louis family home on Locust Street. Even if the poet wasn’t acquainted with the Prufrock family, the name itself, the “pru” bringing to mind the prudish, overly-mannered gentleman of the city, the “frock” of the bureaucratic coats of the day, added onto that childhood memory of ads of serious men at work on their new Prufrock desks, would make great fodder for a poem about alienation in the modern city. It is easy to imagine Harry Prufrock as one of the “lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows," as the traffic moves slowly, “following like a tedious argument” in the streets below his 4th street office downtown. The Prufrock name, long synonymous in literary history with the modern experience, gives the poem a very particular St. Louis shape.
The book, published to critical consternation in London in 1917, took five years to sell its initial printing of 500 copies. The general reading public weren’t quite ready for it. One critic complained of the stream-of-consciousness style, writing “the fact that these things occurred to the mind of Mr. Eliot is surely of the very smallest importance to anyone, even to himself. They certainly have no relation to poetry.” Renown would have to wait until later, when Eliot’s The Waste Land was published the same year as Joyce’s Ulysses, and the world slowly started to notice the literary revolution that was underway.
As for the Prufrocks? The name seems to fade from history after Harry, who had two daughters, and was the only son of William Prufrock. T. S. Eliot himself couldn’t remember if he had based “The Love Song” on actual people, but figured that he must have, “and that the memory has been obliterated.” Now the name lives on only in two places: in the world of fiction, and in Bellefontaine Cemetery.
