A strait-laced upbringing and a disastrous marriage taught the young TS Eliot to camouflage his emotions
When TS Eliot died, 50 years ago last month, the New York Times called him that “quiet, gray figure who gave new meaning to English-language poetry”. This June marks the centenary of the publication of “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock”, which, along with a few other early works including “Gerontion”, “Portrait of a Lady” and “Sweeney Among the Nightingales”, helped Eliot crack open modern poetry. Between 1915 and 1920, while rationing out a handful of radically innovative poems, Eliot published heaps of magisterially conservative literary criticism. Even before The Waste Land, he was famous enough to be parodied by Louis Untermeyer, who imagined “Einstein Among the Coffee Cups” in high Prufrockian style: “The night contracts. A warp in space / Has rumors of Correggio.” In late 1922 Eliot released The Waste Land into a world that seemed to be waiting, if not ready, for it. Joyce had published Ulysses that February; a few months later, Proust was finally translated into English, “so that even the French might read him”, quipped one American critic. “Modernism,” complained another, “they say, is in the air. So is the flu.” The Waste Land was heralded even before its publication as the poem that would epitomise this literary movement, the artistic source from which modernism could endlessly renew itself. Robert Crawford’s new biography, Young Eliot, takes its subject only as far as this momentous publication, ending with some sketchy gestures toward its initial reception.
Eliot has been the subject of comparatively few biographies: his will prohibited the use of quotation, forcing his first biographers to resort to paraphrase. This has helped entomb him culturally as the man in “a four-piece suit”, in Virginia Woolf’s phrase, with “his brow so grim / and his mouth so prim”, as he himself once joked. Crawford wants to rescue “the bankerly poet” from his sepulchre of priggishness, and inject some colour into the quiet grey figure. Trying to loosen Eliot up, Crawford familiarly calls him Tom, tells us (too) many times that he was mischievous and emphasises the bawdy verse he wrote as an undergraduate. He focuses primarily on the twin influences that Eliot’s upbringing as a shy (another constant word) child in a strict family, and his education, had on his imagination. Although Eliot knew that “literature is not primarily a matter of nationality, but of language”, he also understood the importance of place, insisting after 30 years as a British citizen that his poetry, “in its sources, in its emotional springs, it comes from America”. Seeking those sources, Crawford’s masterfully researched chronicle enriches the familiar story of Eliot’s early years in St Louis, education at Harvard and Oxford, travels on the continent and ultimate residence in London. The first biography permitted to quote extensively from Eliot’s language, Young Eliot finally brings the poet’s life-defining gift into the story.
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