Robert Crawford, Young Eliot (Jonathan Cape)Robert Crawford makes clear in his introduction why he calls T.S. Eliot 'Tom' throughout this first volume of biography. It is,
a way of reminding people that T.S. Eliot was a human being, rather than a remote historic monument ,
he wants to,
circumvent assumptions about his often defensive persona
but it seems over-familiar, like addressing the headmaster as 'Jack' in what is not, after all, an official biography. It is a minor point and hardly relevant to the scholarship and work involved in such a big book but it recurs so often, won't go away and so puts one almost on the look-out for anything else incongruous. By the end of page 2, Eliot's catalogue of eminent ancestors have been listed and it is remarked that,
Few squealing infants have had quite so much to live up to.
I've got off to a bad start with Prof. Crawford, who I've seen a couple of times and know to be a highly respectable and well-mannered man, and I'm already quite unreasonably asking where is the academic evidence for the implication that the baby Eliot 'squealed'. From then on, I was fault-finding, even if only sub-consciously.
Crawford is admirably thorough in examining the detail of Eliot's early life, the St. Louis upbringing, his education, reading and associations. Eliot is not the easiest project for an easy read because if Auden, Larkin, even Ted Hughes and certainly Betjeman can be comic characters at times, there really isn't much funny about Eliot. If Crawford's objective is to save Eliot from any previously attributed reputation or assumptions, it was probably too big an ambition to aim at. The fact that the student Tom wrote ribald doggerel for Harvard magazines or private circulation among more outgoing peers, he would hardly have been the only one ever to do that.
It isn't reasonable to being the commonplace assumptions of 2015 to bear on attitudes of a hundred years ago. 'Networking' hadn't been invented then in such a term and so it's a bit unfair to say Eliot was doing it but, perhaps more significantly, if we identify various prevalent cultural attitudes as 'racist', or otherwise, in hindsight then we need to be able to plead guilty to anything that subsequent generations might make of our own current wotld view.
Neither is it unusual for a celebrated poet not to have been an outstanding student although Eliot does more in his later student career to improve his grade than, say, Auden or Betjeman ever did.
Prof. Crawford takes considerable pains over detailing Eliot's teenage reading, nearly all of which in this account seems to end up recycled into his own poetry. That might be the case but, equally, he must have read other books that made less of an impression and so this list looks a bit pre-determined by its later significance.
But it is instructive to see how the poetry of Laforgue, probably more than Baudelaire, the psycho-analytic writing of Bergson as well as his wide reading in earlier English poetry all feed in to make Eliot's poems, most memorably when edited by Ezra Pound. And this biography is in some ways a biography of the genesis of The Waste Land, which is where the book finishes and thus appears to have been leading us to all the time..
Eliot's shyness, sexual inexperience and medical conditions that make him unfit for the most masculine athletic activities are a part of a nervy, anxious, withdrawn character and his eventual marriage to Vivien, much more outgoing but equally fraught, is a bad idea. It isn't necessarily a good thing that Bertrand Russell is available to help, the dastardly advocate of free love who thus is almost duty-bound to take an undue interest in Vivien. With a friend like that, a friend like Pound is a relatively good one to have and Ezra emerges on the evidence of this story as well as anyone where John Middleton Murry is not quite as badly reviewed as Katherine Mansfield, who is described by Eliot as,
one of the most persistent and thick-skinned toadies and one of the vulgarest women Lady R(otherrmere) has ever met and is also a sentimental crank
and so nobody ever did have reason to assume that because great writers produce wonderful literature they must also be wonderful people, either on their own account or in those of each other.
The Eliots are always either individually or collectively ill or tired, but 'tired' is usually upgraded to 'exhausted' and if they're not, they are just about to be. (You imagine that the baby T.S. 'squealed' quite a lot but there's still no documentary evidence provided).
Not all of that is by any means Robert Crawford's fault but the book, 424 pages of fairly close print, amounted to that. It does little to retrieve any perception of Eliot from the image I brought of him from Peter Ackroyd's biography many years ago, that he was one who applied powder to his face to, possibly, make himself look even less healthy and that anecdote is included here in due course.
By the time of the publication of The Waste Land, Eliot is a major figure in English poetry, with his carefully managed small number of perfectly formed poems but, by that stage, Crawford isn't telling us how he rates the achievement but neither does he have to. In the introduction, he describes his devotion to the poems since his first encounter with them, and many of us have been through that. But having shown us quite what a collage of other things the poetry is (and surely all poems are in some measure made from previous material), we might like to know quite where Eliot stands now. The Waste Land is a ground-breaking assemblage of fragments, an objective correlative of both Eliot's mental condition and Europe after World War 1 but how much was he a composer and how much a curator because it was Pound that sorted it out for him into the poem we have now.
No, it was not a pleasant book. The next volume is not due for several years because, as we are told, some of the papers required for it are still under embargo. There is very little to admire in the troubled young man or the view of the emergence of Modernism that one gets seen from this perspective. If that is how it was then Robert Crawford has done a marvellous job describing it. It couldn't have been easy writing it because it wasn't very easy reading it. For that, he deserves some admiration, symapthy and respect.
