Introduction
ON a wintry day in the late 1950s, around the time of his second marriage, T. S. Eliot came downstairs from his publishing-house office in London’s Russell Square and noticed a restless baby in a pram. The little daughter of Frank and Patricia Herrmann had been left in the office foyer, close to the receptionist, and had kicked off her blankets. When the Herrmanns returned, seeing no pram, they began to panic. ‘Where has the pram gone?’, Patricia Herrmann shouted, but the receptionist calmed her, explaining that the poet had seen little Camilla looking unsettled, and had tucked her up, then taken the pram outside to push it round Russell Square. Twenty-first-century readers may be disturbed by this momentary abduction as a gesture of appropriation and control, or touched by it as a small example of observant kindness. Whether, as the Herrmanns did later, they speculate that ‘the experience’ may have represented ‘a vicarious substitute for unfulfilled parenthood’, and whether or not readers choose to relate it to his poetry, is a matter for each individual.1 Chronicled much later by Frank Herrmann, and in our own century detailed by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue in their annotated text of The Poems of T. S. Eliot, this was a revealing action performed by the elderly poet, publisher, and internationally lauded man of letters. But it may be more appropriate to regard it as something done by the man whom his family simply called Tom.
Both in America, where he had been born in 1888, and in England, where he lived from his twenty-sixth year, many people found it hard to get to know this poet on familiar terms. Even if they did so, some were unsure what to call him. ‘Will he become “Tom”?’ Virginia Woolf had wondered in 1921, after she had known him for well over two years.2 By the time The Waste Land appeared in 1922, Thomas Stearns Eliot, the young, London-based, St Louis-born, Harvard-schooled poet who had seemed so formal and reserved, was certainly ‘Tom’ to her, and in the following year she typeset his remarkable poem for its earliest British publication as a book. Like Young Eliot (2015), this second part of a two-volume biography of Eliot offers readers access not just to the poet, public figure, banker, publisher and man of letters, but also and crucially to ‘Tom’ or, as close American friends and relatives called him, ‘Taam’.3 Eliot After ‘The Waste Land’ is the first full-scale biography to draw on his most important surviving correspondence, the letters to Emily Hale made public in 2020, and on the great scholarly editions of his poetry and his prose (completed respectively in 2015 and 2019) as well as on the vast, ongoing print and electronic edition of the poet’s general correspondence, whose ninth volume appeared in 2021. At the same time, I am also the last biographer to interview anyone who knew ‘Tom’ when The Waste Land was first published; and, over several decades, I have gained from conversations with his surviving godchildren and others who remember him in England and America from the 1930s, 40s, 50s, and 60s. No one who met Valerie Eliot, the poet’s widow (who died in 2012), will forget how she spoke of him as ‘Tom’. In biography, as in poetry and in life, naming is important. The poet of Prufrock and Macavity knew that well. Like its predecessor, this book presents a close-grained, intimate portrait of a man who can still seem to some, as he seemed to Siegfried Sassoon in 1922, intellectually aloof and a specimen of ‘cold-storaged humanity’.4 That is why, throughout, I call him ‘Tom’.
Being on first-name terms need not encourage readers to share all of the subject’s attitudes, passions, or prejudices. In a book which takes him from his time as an exhausted bank employee during the emotional turmoil of his early thirties, then through his years as a middle-aged firewatcher in bombed wartime London to the personal surprises of his eminent old age, I try to present Tom Eliot’s life and work without undue moralising, letting readers reach their own conclusions. Inevitably, in selecting details, I am making a particular individual portrait that tries to delineate how his powerfully resonant, superbly calibrated poetry is linked to the trials of his emotional, intellectual and spiritual life; other biographers will choose differently. My aim is not to neaten his life, or reduce it to one expository template, but to let it emerge in its sometimes complex, contradictory messiness. There is a temptation, to which the poet, his widow, and some biographers have been prone, to describe that life as if it followed a teleological pattern and possessed one stable meaning. This book seeks to reveal the life as it was lived, not as it may have been shaped in retrospect. While conscious that a number of readers may want a biographical ‘explanation’ – whether psychological, religious, sexual or sociopolitical – I have tried to stay true to my belief that a human life is too rich and subtle to be explained away through one neat interpretative matrix.
Rightly, the subject of Eliot After ‘The Waste Land’ matters most to the world as a poet. The following chapters concentrate particularly on the part of his life during which he wrote poetry, though they address also his work as playwright, publisher, editor, and Christian public intellectual. Not least, I try to show ways in which, however refractedly, the poetry sprang from the poet’s sometimes tormented life, from his 1915 marriage to Vivien (sometimes spelled Vivienne) Haigh-Wood, and from his surroundings. I will suggest, too, how this non-combatant produced the greatest English-language poetry of the Second World War. Telling this story requires intense selectivity, or the material would become overwhelming. In its annotated form, The Poems of T. S. Eliot runs to nearly 2,000 pages. His Complete Prose comprises about 7,000 pages. Including The Rock, his six full-length plays await a fully annotated edition. The ongoing publication of his letters in print and online already extends well beyond 10,000 pages, and is perhaps less than half complete. The daunting voluminousness of these writings and activities explains in part why the present book maintains a close focus on the man who generated them, rather than attempting a panoramic survey of the society, figures, and cultures around him. Biographers need to sieve and filter all the published writings, drawing too on further published and unpublished sources, as well as on oral and broadcast interviews. The biographer has to be an editor, a chooser of resonant details, as well as a narrator, companionable guide, critic, historian, and assembler of images. Eliot After ‘The Waste Land’ tries to suggest why this poet and his poetry compel our attention, but the book is not a work of literary criticism or history, so I have avoided puddling the text with critical or historical essays; instead, I have tried to select material that does justice to the full range of this remarkable and difficult man’s achievements, and to present him not as a literary monument but as a human being.
The French philosopher Henri Bergson, some of whose classes Tom Eliot attended at the Sorbonne in 1910–11, liked to stress that our experience of time is significantly subjective, and that some moments appear to have a duration and intensity surpassing their measurement on the clock. Before Bergson, the Romantic poets, with their focus on what Wordsworth calls ‘spots of time’, sensed this too, though intuition of the phenomenon may be as old as poetry itself.5 Certainly, such perceptions are part of Four Quartets. Most people treasure particularly revealing or revelatory instants and incidents, recalling them throughout their lives, and in selecting some moments rather than others, biographers, like poets, have to hone their material. Though, perhaps like many readers, I was first attracted to the poet of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ through reading his great, nervously tensile early poems, it is not just in The Waste Land but also in his subsequent poetry that some of his finest accomplishments lie. With its tidal acoustic and intense sense of longing, ‘Marina’, that great father–daughter poem authored by a childless man, is surely one of the most beautiful of all anglophone poems, while Four Quartets, written during times of profound personal pressure, articulates remarkably and simultaneously a sense of struggle and almost limitless endurance. This is the biography of an often astonishing poet, whose life’s course conditioned his poems.
Copyright © 2022 by Robert Crawford