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Review
This new biography makes TS Eliot’s life seem unthinkably grim
Robert Crawford’s Eliot After The Waste Land paints the poet as an emotionally twisted anti-Semite. Does it diminish his verse?
The excellent second volume of Robert Crawford’s biography of TS Eliot moves seamlessly on from the first, 2015’s Young Eliot. Here is the publisher, clubman, committee man, adoptive Englishman, international literary operator and Nobel laureate. Here too is the reaffirmation of religious faith in bespoke Anglo-Catholic form, and the composition of major poems from “The Hollow Men” (1925) to Four Quartets (1943), alongside his now unread verse plays. Full of voices, friendships and conflicts, Crawford’s book is rich and dense as Christmas cake.
But as Eliot intoned, “Life is very long,” with no time off for good behaviour. He was, as ever, working too hard – by day as an analyst at Lloyds bank, in the evenings as the editor of The Criterion, bankrolled by Lady Rothermere. After The Waste Land, the poems didn’t come. And his marriage was torture. He and Vivien Haigh-Wood imprisoned themselves in a nightmare. He still loved Emily Hale, whom he met in 1912; after Vivien’s affair with the predatory Bertrand Russell, Eliot tangled with Nancy Cunard. Nobody, least of all Eliot, seems to have had any fun: for him the revulsion seems to have been the payoff. No wonder he viewed art as “an escape from personality”.
It took many years to escape from Vivien, who became insane. The letters to Emily Hale, meanwhile, unsealed in 2020, suggest a depth of feeling that he was latterly inclined to treat as a nostalgic illusion. As time went on, and their direct encounters became fewer, his tenderness was displaced by legalistic exactitude, a setting of limits which must have been heartbreaking for Hale.
There is also the shadow of a demeaning prejudice. His friend Leonard Woolf said that Eliot would have sincerely denied that he was anti-Semitic, but it’s clear that, like his family, he was marinaded in the infection. In his unctuous dealings with Lord Rothermere, a prospective employer, he praised his newspapers’ enthusiastic articles about “Fascismo”. In time Eliot saw Hitler clearly, but as news of the extermination of European Jews emerged, he argued: “To suggest that the Jewish problem may be simplified because so many will have been killed off is trifling: a few generations of security and they will be as numerous as ever.”
It might be objected that Eliot was of his time, and not alone, and that it is unhistorical to subject him to the moral orthodoxies of the present. But just as we should not deform history by imposing on it a template of our own devising, so too we are bound as human beings to respond to the feelings of our fellow creatures. As Crawford reads him, Eliot was in many ways an unappetising figure. Yet he suffered, and sought to repent.
That he was also a great poet is not an exoneration; his sins derive no beneficial colouring from the poems’ existence. But, as Douglas Dunn once wrote, “The man is a liar/ Who says he has not found my grey dirt in his heart.” Eliot knew himself to be a sinner, of a high-minded sort. Because the church forbade it, he would not divorce Vivien to marry the long-suffering Hale (which may seem perversely convenient).
Meanwhile, in public life he was not only an unrivalled poet-critic, but also an advocate for Christian renewal, drawn to the wishful village-based agrarianism so appealing to the Right. If Eliot and his clergyman friends could still believe that they had a claim to the nation’s attention on matters of faith, social conscience and education, their time was almost at an end. He gave far too much time – and what remained of his health – to the duties of greatness.
The poems abide. “Little Gidding”, last of the Four Quartets, evokes the Blitz (Eliot was an air raid warden), closing with a vision where “the fire and the rose are one”, the earthly and the divine inseparably infolded. We are invited to share this mystery. But when Crawford reads “Burnt Norton”, the first part of Four Quartets, and identifies Hale as the addressee of certain lines, there is a slight temptation to forget that the poem is a work of imagination that dramatises a similar abiding mystery. Sources cannot be the thing itself, or its explanation: as Eliot himself argued intensely, a poem is something irreducible.
He did find happiness later in life with marriage in 1957 to his much younger secretary at Faber, Valerie Fletcher. When she read “The Journey of the Magi” in her teens, she knew that she must somehow find a way to Eliot: perhaps, for once, Eliot let someone else know best. As his widow, she became the fierce protector of his estate. Crawford himself prepared the ground for this outstanding biography by gaining her approval – not lightly given. The life depicted is almost unthinkably grim at times, but then there are the poems, always fascinating and at best inexhaustible.
Eliot After The Waste Land by Robert Crawford is published by Jonathan Cape at £25. To order your copy for £19.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books