T.S. Eliot: A Life

...But this loosening was mostly vicarious, confined as it was to his poetry, and it was doctrinal: The values of "order" and "discipline," which had a moral emphasis in Babbitt, received an aesthetic and political emphasis from the poet-critic and proto-Fascist Maurras...

...Ackroyd nods to all the issues raised in the voluminous criticism of Eliot and his work, but contributes little toward settling any...

...A congenital double-hernia doomed him to the society of his sisters and of a mother with literary aspirations of her own...

...Lewis and Christopher Dawson would be deeply suspicious of the ideological tendency, the sociological emphasis, of Eliot's public faith...

...Apparently, the act of composition was the therapy which restored him on this occasion, not the treatment of a "pre-Freudian" psychiatrist at Lausanne, Dr...

...The Action Francaise also provided a congenial milieu and a manner: The swaggering, dandified youths who hawked Maur-ras's 'newspaper, who received riot training on an island in the Seine, and who occasionally punched out an unpatriotic professor at the Sorbonne inspired new affectations...

...he led many to the principles of faith and order, and will continue to...

...One must do more than note Maurras as an anti-Semite...

...in general, intellectual discourse was too polluted for mere men of letters to see their way out of the crisis...

...Vittoz, who placed his hands on the patient's head to sense the electromagnetic waves...

...or Eliot would escape for a few days in the same way, alone...

...The cultural aridity of Unitarianism and upper-middle class urban life made for a drab existence that left his morbid sense of an inner "void" all the more desperate...

...Eliot refused permission to quote from her husband's published works...

...Since the second Mrs...

...Eliot, the poet's former secretary, strictly controls his papers, this study became possible only when the first Mrs...

...He had become the representative of a tradition which, without his presence, might finally disappear, and the fact that he now had very little left to say only heightened the almost ritualistic sense of occasion which that presence provided...

...For example: What did religion really mean to Eliot...

...The nineteenth-century dandy, represented by Brum-mell and his imitators, was a figure of supreme assurance...

...But, as Peter Ackroyd shows us, how much more unpleasant to be Mr...

...In this instance the remedy for a bad case of writer's block was to write whatever came...

...he therefore turned his work over to Pound for editing...

...An interesting figure in her own right, she currently receives attention not only from this book but also from Michael Hasting's new play, Tom and Viv...

...The land of Baudelaire was the place to loosen up a little after heavy doses of Irving Babbitt's "Inner Check," a doctrine that at first had seemed a remedy for the chaos of his own inner "void...

...Actually, Eliot found the discipline imposed by his job to be beneficial, and he needed the money...

...Her bad health, and life with a poet, made her tragedy...

...Ackroyd's biography covers the whole of Eliot's life but studies the first marriage in greatest detail...

...During his thirties he drank, connived at getting people to call him "the Captain," and wore green powder on his face...

...As is well known, Eliot wished that no biography be written...

...The "breakdown" from which The Waste Land emerged now seems only one episode in a continuing cycle of nervous prostration...

...As things became worse, Vivien would go to a sanitorium, the seaside, the country, or the continent, while Eliot stayed in the city, working at the bank...

...Yet this question of intellectual influences remains one of the most interesting frontiers for study...

...one should care enough to establish that Babbitt probably advised Eliot against Maurras, and that the six men mentioned would not have suffered each other's company...

...Eliot thought of adopting French nationality but instead returned to Harvard as a cosmopolitan...

...He may have conceived of England as a place for schizoid Americans to hide...

...Ackroyd suggests that Joachim's tutorials introduced to Eliot's prose the habit of over-qualification and retreat into disclaimers-"his conversation, so nicely/Restricted to What Precisely/And If and Perhaps and But...

...though he continued to support her, it was nonetheless something to regret for the rest of his life...

...Since the book suffers from an academic style anyway, the absence of supporting quotations in Ackroyd's commentary on the poetry makes the reading only duller...

...Eliot's tutor, Joachim, shut the windows in case the old boy might by chance hear the students discussing his work...

...Truly, Eliot was too fragile a vessel to hold the entire West in himself, though he struggled mightily...

...He resents rather the god of academic criticism and the mummified prophet of a palimpsest Western culture gathered from a heap of fragments...

...His icy self-control more closely resembled catalepsy than poise...

...But wasn't much of this his fault...

...Ackroyd pretentiously refers to thinkers whom Eliot cited, admired, and presumably felt the influence of: But the slight discussion he does provide exhibits little comprehension and enlightens the non-specialist reader less...

...It led him to Harvard, to Irving Babbitt's defense of Western civilization, to the study of Sanskrit, to France and Charles Maurras's rightist Action Fran-caise, to British citizenship...

...Consequently, Ackroyd misuses the term "dandy" in describing Eliot's graduate school pose...

...Vivien loved and depended on him and attempted to help him as she could...

...In their turn, mere literary scholars of today such as Ackroyd are helpless to analyze . the situation Eliot faced...

...He parted his hair in back and carried a cane- alas, it was not lead-filled, and he swung it rather awkwardly...

...The poetry remains great, but the poet, all too prone to affectation and role-playing, suffered from institutionalization at the hands of the Nobel committee and departments of English literature...

...this "automatic writing" resulted in a meandering series of fragments whose relative worth Eliot could not judge...

...the bourgeois respect for Arnoldian "Culture" provided no strategy for relief...

...Some months after Eliot's recovery, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell noticed that he wore face powder-'pale but distinctly green, the colour of forced lily-of-the-valley...

...Louis...

...What would they have contributed to his ideal system...

...Later stretches seem only a chronology of Eliot's frequent respiratory complaints and dental work...

...She copied over parts of the Waste Land manuscript by hand, advising her husband on the portrayal of the hysterical woman, and even contributed short stories to the Criterion...

...to some satisfaction in the Christian faith-though C.S...

...Bradley was a non-teaching fellow and was rarely seen even crossing the courtyard...

...Perhaps his survival as a writer demanded that he abandon his wife, who would eventually be committed to an asylum...

...The Sitwells rationalized: Fearing bourgeois respectability as a mere bank employee, Eliot was desperate to assert his poetic character...

...his extraordinary authority was based on that sense of a cultural order which he had once sought and which, by the strange alchemy of his career, he now embodied...

...The most marvelous and fondly remembered year of Eliot's life was 1910: Having graduated from Harvard, he went to Paris to study at the Sor-bonne...

...This is the year of Vivien...

...Then came the marriage, a disaster from the start, with its constant movement, illness, and panic...

...To express her entire disapproval of Ackroyd's project, the second Mrs...

...The ideological climate between the wars, with its profound corruption, did not leave Eliot untainted...

...Perhaps Eliot took the suggestion from Rousseau and Romanticism, where Babbitt quotes Theophile Gautier: The fashion of the romantic school was to look "pale, livid, greenish, a little cadaverous if possible . . . giving the air of the fatal, the Byronic, the giaour, devoured by passion and remorse...

...Bertrand Russell said that marriage would make a man of him- and then took Vivien Eliot to the seashore...

...Instead it created an inexorable sense of rootlessness: For Eliot, being a provincial was a state of mind...

...Eliot's brother, Maurice, began recently to talk-apparently feeling remorse over the part he played in helping Eliot evade his wife problem...

...What did Eliot like about them...

...There can be no doubt that Eliot's waste land was a personal one...

...True, he could not foresee the conT. John Jamieson's essay on Eliot, Babbitt, and Maurras will appear in the forthcoming festschrift, Irving Babbitt in Our Time (Catholic University of America...

...he, in turn, tried to involve her in his work...

...One is obliged at least to speculate upon them...

...Sarcastic as he is, I do not think that Ackroyd detests Eliot personally...

...Eliot acquired wisdom...

...But the theatrical streak common to both partners determined that public hostilities would break out anew...

...this Eliot decidedly lacked...

...to the founding of the Criterion and the advocacy of an artificial cultural concept ("the mind of Europe"), and to writing a new kind of poetry...

...Ackroyd only takes a skeptical attitude, citing what he calls Bradleyian "relativism" and Eliot's apparent fear of an abyss of uncertainty within the self...

...Relentless ambition propelled him into a life of affectation and a milieu of dangerous acquaintances-the perverse and petty monstrosities of Bloomsbury, certainly no school of normal behavior...

...Yet Ackroyd's caricature-the Eliot who became The West in order to save it single-handedly-is not unfair to the illusions of the poet and his admirers...

...later on, Virginia Woolf thought of him as "the corpse...

...Eliot-wracked by the insecurity of his literary reputation, his finances, and his mental and physical health, married to a hopeless neurotic who sought his attention by psychological torture, unsure whether tomorrow his poetic inspiration might fail him permanently...

...At Oxford he studied the idealist philosophy of F.H...

...Commenting on the tour of American campuses in the 1950s which attracted thousands, Ackroyd says that Eliot had become a kind of totem...

...sequences of marrying badly and on bad advice...

...ELIOT: A LIFE Peter Ackroyd/Simon and Schuster/$24.95 T. John Jamieson How unpleasant to meet Mr...

...The abject humility and grievous look of the later Eliot came with a profound sense of time wasted in folly and ignorance...

...Bradley (in Brad-ley's own college, Merton), analyzing the experience of the isolated self in a universe of isolated selves...

...Unable to articulate a political philosophy for himself, Eliot in 1926 assembled a list of authorities for a modern conservative outlook: Sorel (an ex-leftist with a cult of violence and "political myth"), Maurras (the "Catholic atheist"), Benda (author of The TYeason of the Intellectuals), Hulme ("classicist"), Maritain, Babbitt...

...The abnormality of Eliot's life begins in St...