Eliot After ‘The Waste Land’ by Robert Crawford, review by Michael Dirda

In “Eliot After ‘The Waste Land’” Crawford particulars, with outstanding scholarly evenhandedness, a lifetime of virtually soap-operatically “complicated, contradictory messiness.” It follows “Young Eliot” (2015), which tracked the poet’s upper-middle-class childhood in St. Louis, schooling at Harvard and European travels as a philosophy pupil, and closes with the publication of “The Waste Land” in 1922.

T.S. Eliot may have been flawed, but a new book reminds of his greatness on the page

This second half of Crawford’s biography begins with a quick account of Eliot’s short-lived, unsatisfactory affair with the wealthy, notoriously promiscuous Nancy Cunard. Quickly, although, this sad husband discovered his ideas returning to the lady he had left behind in America, Emily Hale. Sooner or later, Eliot and Hale launched into an intense correspondence that might proceed for greater than 20 years. Any guise of mere friendship was quickly deserted: “I’d actually give my eyesight to have the ability to marry you. … If I ever am free I shall ask you to marry me.” A lot of Crawford’s narrative depends on this correspondence, which had been under seal until 2020.

Concurrent with epistolary dalliance, Eliot was discovering himself to be “a classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in faith.” He yearned for what he referred to as, in his nice essay on Dante, “a world of dignity, purpose and order.” His eventual dedication to an exceptionally austere Anglicanism revolutionized Eliot’s later life however ruined Hale’s. The bonds of matrimony, he repeatedly informed her, have been sacrosanct. There may very well be no divorce. Nonetheless, the 2 would meet sometimes through the interwar years — each in America and in England — for what appear to have been afternoons of decorous craving. Hale would lengthy cherish the remembrance of their few kisses whereas Eliot memorialized, in “Burnt Norton,” their walks collectively and, prophetically, “the passage which we didn’t take/ In the direction of the door we by no means opened/ Into the rose-garden.”

Not even nice poets can reside off their poetry — “The Waste Land” bought solely about 330 copies in its first six months — so Eliot, from the mid-Twenties on, labored as a director of a brand new publishing agency referred to as Faber & Faber. From its workplaces he would purchase manuscripts, oversee the staid cultural journal the New Criterion, and correspond with main poets and conservative intellectuals. For the amusement of his godson, Tom Faber, he commonly despatched the little boy Edward Learish nonsense verses, later repurposed for 1939’s “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats” and, later nonetheless, the premise for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical “Cats.”

Each Vivien and Eliot virtually regularly suffered from an array of sicknesses. Hers included intestinal irritation, shortness of breath, influenza, shingles, emotional and psychological instability, and drastic weight reduction — at one level she was right down to 80 kilos — whereas Eliot ran his spouse a good second with recurrent colds, bronchial bother, severely decayed enamel (5 have been extracted on one dental go to), a hernia that required a truss, surgical procedure on his finger and frequent intervals of nervous exhaustion. He additionally drank impressively, as many as 5 gin drinks throughout dinner.

Crawford estimates that in 1925 alone the couple spent a 3rd of their revenue on medical doctors, medicines, and stays in hospitals or sanatoria. In the course of the ’30s, Eliot organized for the more and more troubled Vivien — at one level he puzzled if she is perhaps affected by “demonic possession” — to be cared for in varied relaxation properties, and in 1938 he signed papers committing her to an asylum. With typical Prufrockian cowardice, he did this by letter whereas in a foreign country. He by no means noticed her once more.

T.S. Eliot’s American childhood

Eliot’s poetry typically displays these emotional and religious upheavals, beginning with the desolation of 1925’s “The Hollow Men” (“That is the way in which the world ends/ Not with a bang however a whimper”), progressing to 1935’s sacred verse-drama concerning the dying of Thomas a Becket, “Murder in the Cathedral” (which its mystery-loving creator initially referred to as “The Archbishop Homicide Case”) and culminating within the somber, religio-philosophical masterpiece “Four Quartets.” Composed between 1936 and 1942, “Burnt Norton,” “East Coker” (my favourite), “The Dry Salvages” and “Little Gidding” draw closely, if obliquely, on Eliot’s love for Hale, his household’s previous and the poet’s experiences as an air warden through the London Blitz.

After which in 1947, Vivien died. At this level the now-free Eliot all of the sudden recoiled on the prospect of really marrying Hale, to whom he wrote, “I can’t, can’t, begin life once more, and adapt myself (which suggests not merely one second, however a perpetual adaptation for the remainder of life) to another individual.” Hale was crushed however hoped he’d change his thoughts. In 1948, Eliot obtained the Nobel Prize for literature, privately calling the respect “a ticket to 1’s funeral. Nobody has ever executed something after he bought it.” He’s, basically, fairly proper. From then on, Eliot could be primarily a smiling public man, giving addresses on Christian humanism and selecting up honorary levels.

By way of the late Forties and mid-50s, this world-famous poet shared a collection of rooms with the witty, wheelchair-bound bibliophile John Hayward. (I extremely suggest John Sensible’s anecdote-rich biography of Hayward, “Tarantula’s Web.”) Eliot’s bed room was flamboyantly ascetic: a single mattress, an ebony crucifix, a naked lightbulb hanging from a series. Very early one morning in 1957, although, Hayward’s “lodger” introduced — with out warning, by a letter — that he wouldn’t be again the following day or, certainly, ever. The 68-year-old Eliot had proposed — through letter! — to his adoring 30-year-old secretary, Valerie Fletcher, and been accepted. Sooner or later, Hale obtained her personal letter, disclosing this final betrayal. For the ultimate years of his life Eliot was soppily besotted along with his new younger bride, and the 2 grew inseparable. He died in 1965 at age 76.

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Earlier than then, nevertheless, Eliot burned Hale’s letters and, studying that she was depositing his personal with Princeton, typed a sniveling, churlish word declaring that he’d by no means cherished her, that she was actually only a philistine and that marrying her would have killed him as a poet. Possibly that final bit is true, however this word definitely kills one’s respect for Eliot the person.

“After such information, what forgiveness?” Maybe none, but keep in mind that Crawford’s focus on Eliot’s personal life leads to a partial image, one which shifts the poet’s mental and inventive accomplishments to the background. So whereas these typically harrowing revelations do grant us deeper perception into Eliot and consequently into his work, it’s finally the poetry itself — and the criticism and drama — that we care about. After ending “Eliot After ‘The Waste Land,’” I took a drive and placed on a CD of Jeremy Irons studying “4 Quartets.” As moved and exhilarated as ever, I stored on driving till that closing Dantescan line when “the fireplace and the rose are one.”

Michael Dirda is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for Guide World, and the creator of the memoir “An Open Book,” the Edgar Award-winning “On Conan Doyle” and 5 collections of essays: “Readings,” “Bound to Please,” “Book by Book,” “Classics for Pleasure” and “Browsings.”

Eliot After ‘The Waste Land’

Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 624 pp. $40