T. S. Eliot Undefined
BELL, PEARL K.
Writers & Writing T.S. ELIOT UNDEFINED BY PEARL K. BELL George Orwell and T. S. Eliot-—in the spirit of Oscar Wilde's dictum that every great man has his disciples, and it is usually Judas who...
...One task of Eliot's biographer is to connect these blandly imperturbable impersonations with the violently charged private emotion of the poetry—the jagged edge of despair, the anguish of desiccation, the revulsion and horror and awe before the mysteries of religion and sex, the fear of being found out and the longing to give in...
...so far as I know, she is still looking...
...Rather than confront the evidence to be found in a critical reading of the works (he contemptuously dismisses the scholars who "continue to peck away at Eliot's poems like sparrows picking at horse shit"), Matthews prefers to rely on anecdotes and wisecracks...
...both men were born and brought up in the American Middle West...
...After that volcanic year the remainder of Eliot's life—almost half a century—was from a biographer's point of view externally uneventful, but for the awful, guilt-ridden decision in 1932 to leave Vivienne for good...
...Though Eliot was born in St...
...Through this exercise Edel was amazingly successful in showing "that by the very act of criticism the 'invulnerable granite' can yield that part of the writer which is most important to literary biography"—the wholly personal inner experience that is eventually transformed into the work of art...
...In 1917, Eliot's in-laws came to the rescue with a job at Lloyds Bank that saw him through the next nine years...
...Then, at 68, with the mildest of thunderclaps, he wed his much younger secretary—it was a marriage as happy as his first had been pure hell...
...Matthews shrewdly adds a seventh, from Eliot's early days—that of the old man...
...like the poet, Matthews was educated in the East, moved to Great Britain, became an Anglo-Catholic, and married an Englishwoman...
...Eliot's refusal, and he gives us an ill-assorted congeries of reasons for pursuing his task...
...Johnson, the genteel Bostonian, the Christian, the oracle, the Anglican clergyman...
...In 1921, the strain of living and working at this pitch became intolerable, forcing Eliot to take a leave of absence to consult a "nerve specialist" in Switzerland...
...The many letters Eliot wrote to her may not, by the terms of her will, be seen by anyone until the year 2020...
...He rejected that mainstay of present-day poets, a university post, "like a wary animal sniffing a trap," and tried secondary-school teaching and book-reviewing...
...he must also try to elucidate the vast discrepancy between the man, shuffling his several masks of propriety, and the work...
...remains unanswered...
...j^n the beginning of Great Tom, T. S. Matthews asks the deceptively simple question, "Who was T. S. Eliot...
...ELIOT UNDEFINED BY PEARL K. BELL George Orwell and T. S. Eliot-—in the spirit of Oscar Wilde's dictum that every great man has his disciples, and it is usually Judas who writes his biography—each left a strict injunction to his widow against any authorized life...
...Eliot shifted from banking to publishing, was received into the Anglican Church, became a British citizen, won the Nobel Prize, traveled, and lectured—a sobersides monument addicted to work and routine...
...Eliot's father was a businessman...
...Like every poet without independent means, Eliot hunted about in England for a living that would also leave him time to write...
...a rethinking of the traditional heritage of English letters...
...Was he a great poet—or a monstrous clever fellow...
...He peppers his Foreword with many puzzles, some commendably bold, some merely silly and some patently unanswerable by either man or God: "Why did he want to keep his private life a secret...
...Young Tom went to Harvard as inevitably as a river flows into the sea, read philosophy at the Sorbonne and at Marburg, and continued his studies, after the outbreak of World War I, at Oxford...
...Edmund Wilson detected and named six favorite roles the poet variously assumed: the formidable professor, Dr...
...In the spring of 1915 he married an Englishwoman, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, and his first paid poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," was published in Harriet Monroe's magazine, Poetry, after Ezra Pound twisted her arm...
...Despite the abundance of facts served up in Great Tom, the question "Who was T. S. Eliot...
...Miss Hale's great stock-in-trade was her long association with the legendary poet—when he married "beneath him" for the second time, she went to pieces —and though Matthews speculates at length about her secret dream of marrying Eliot, none of this conjecture tells us much about his subject...
...Yet Matthews resolves almost none of these issues satisfactorily...
...Louis, his family roots were deeply embedded in New England...
...Putting all the chronological facts together is the least of the biographer's problems...
...Was he a homosexual...
...The answer is by no means clear, for the contrast between the inner man of the poetry and his different cunning personae shows him to be a grand artificer, a master of disguise...
...By 1972, in the wake of some printed memoirs rank with scandalous gossip, she decided to overrule her late husband's veto, and announced that she was looking for a biographer...
...And for a man who takes such caustic pleasure in exposing other men's errors and lapses of taste, he can be astoundingly neglectful of his own vulgarity: "The famous Hippopotamus [is] a favorite weapon of those who delighted in taking the mickey out of the church...
...His grandfather, a Unitarian minister, had migrated from Boston to Missouri in 1834 to civilize the frontier, but he remained, in his lofty view, "a silver shilling among copper pennies...
...his Bos-tonian mother was an ambitious if pedestrian poet who took inordinate pride in her youngest child's intellectual and literary precocity...
...By now you might have been the Manager of the Bank of England...
...Is there less, or more, in his poetry than meets the eye...
...Virginia Woolf, who called Eliot "Great Tom" in whimsical echo of a 17th-century round about the bells of Christ Church, once maliciously lamented "that you started being a poet instead of remaining in a bank...
...Yet neither of them provided both the money and the freedom he desperately required...
...There, during a three-month respite from Vivienne and London, he completed the long poem which, ruthlessly pruned and edited by Ezra Pound, appeared in 1922 as The Waste Land...
...finally, in the biographer's words, "we both stopped smoking when we were 68 . . . and belonged to two of the same London clubs...
...Eliot's time with the bank coincided, remarkably, with the decade of his greatest creative energy: the period of the extraordinary poems between "Prufrock" and "Ash Wednesday," and the enormously influential literary essays that, as G. S. Fraser has written, "carried out the most arduous, concentrated critical labor of which detailed record exists...
...Matthews, a former editor of Time who has lived in England for many years, was undeterred by Mrs...
...Thus, when T. S. Matthews several years ago began work on Great Tom: Notes Towards the Definition of T. S. Eliot (Harper & Row, 219 pp., $8.95), Valerie Eliot flatly turned down his request to consult the unpublished papers...
...It is a wickedly clever set piece, to be sure, but an irrelevant digression nonetheless...
...Unfortunately, Matthews largely evades this chore in his "biography of sorts...
...Not at all, it would seem, if one thinks of the outstanding literary biographies of our time: Richard Ellmann's Joyce, Leon Edel's James, Enid Starkie's Rimbaud, George Painter's Proust...
...How deep did Eliot's affectations go...
...In the case of T. S. Eliot, however, a researcher needs all the help he can get...
...He devotes an entire chapter to Eliot's old friend Emily Hale, an icy monster of high-born Boston gentility who taught speech and drama at Smith, where she could exercise her formidable powers of condescension on ill-bred undergraduates...
...Some years ago Leon Edel, in his little book Literary Biography, set himself the fascinating experiment of sketching a portrait of Eliot entirely from his work, as if nothing were known of the external facts...
...In this era, too, Eliot began editing his literary journal, The Criterion, and in the small part of each day that remained, tried to cope with the growing hysteria and derangement of a wife who was sinking into madness...
...Are such external resemblances important...
...The superficiality and glibness of Great Tom cannot be blamed on insufficient material but on Matthews' curious unwillingness to discuss the poetry of T. S. Eliot —which is, after all, the reason for writing his biography in the first place...
...Over and again, Matthews expends his considerable talent on the brightly textured surface festooned with "vivid" detail—aiming for the quick laugh and the easy dazzle—and scorns the less obvious, less conveniently gathered, often less palatable fruit of hard critical thought...
...Whereas many great poets?Dylan Thomas and Hart Crane, for example—left a pathetic trail of broken glass and shattered promise that can be followed with ease, Eliot's 76 years, except for his wretchedly painful first marriage, were singularly lacking in public drama and vicissitude, in the clangorous, disruptive excitement of eccentricity, misfortune and upheaval...
...He shares Eliot's initials and first name...
Vol. 57 • March 1974 • No. 6
