Hollis brilliantly sifts through the tendrils of TS Eliot’s unhappiness and shows how, with help from friends, he broke through his tortured silence to create an era-defining poem
Even if you flinch at the idea of a poem demanding a biography, an exception has to be made for The Waste Land. No other work of literature of the past century, or perhaps any century, feels quite so much a vivid breathing thing – ironically, since it is so consumed with death. Partly, crucially, that is the result of the extraordinary find in 1968 of all the drafts of Eliot’s poem in the Berg Collection of papers at the New York Public Library. Three years after the poet’s death, here were the living pages that made his reputation – mixing memory and desire – in the notes and annotations of the poet, his friend Ezra Pound and his first wife, Vivien. The publication of the facsimile of those drafts, the holy grail for a generation of English literature students, painstakingly edited and collated by Eliot’s second wife, Valerie, gave the poem a second coming in time for the 50th anniversary of its genesis.
Another 50 years on that rebirth shows no sign of flagging. This year’s centenary has been marked with a series of readings and events in the UK, the US and across the world. It has seen the second volume of Robert Crawford’s beautifully weighted biography of the poet (Eliot After the Waste Land) and also, this month, the publication of Lyndall Gordon’s The Hyacinth Girl. This is based on the new trove of 1,131 letters that Eliot sent to Emily Hale, the drama teacher he fell in love with while at Harvard in 1912, who became his confidante and lover again in the 1930s. Those letters cast some retrospective light on Eliot’s own sense of the creation of his era-defining poem. “I was never quite a whole man,” Eliot wrote to Hale. “The agony forced some genuine poetry out of me, certainly, which I would never have written if I had been happy: in that respect, perhaps, I may be said to have had the life I needed.”
Continue reading...