Eliot After the Waste Land

 Robert Crawford, Eliot After The Waste Land (Jonathan Cape)

Seven years after Robert Crawford's first volume of his life of T.S. Eliot, the story is completed with 'After The Waste Land'. That's how long it takes. I remember it being seven years between Jonathan Bate thinking 'he might write about Ted Hughes' in Oxford and the appearance of his equally weighty Unauthorised Life. It represents a monumental effort. Prof. Crawford's first chapter alone has 190 footnotes to 31 pages.

Such an undertaking can't be done without some regard to one's subject but in Eliot's case, it can't be easy. We are very soon back into the horrors and misery of 'being Eliot' that led him to his waste land. While Eliot's standing as the vast, imposing icon of C20th poetry in English, might have undergone some reconsideration, few will deny him the significance he remains credited with and the high priest status he once occupied.

Robert Crawford's narrative is judicious and objective in its dealings with Eliot's right-wing sympathies and friends. While Eliot's life could be almost as grim to read as it must have been to live, it's engagingly and astutely written-up here once one becomes inured to the trauma, hopelessness, genuine sickness and hypochondria.

Sometimes such high art and intellectualism can be reduced to a disarmingly simple equation. Eliot's personal distress, the racism that seems to come with him from Missouri and his 'aridity' make him neither the first or last person in a crisis to adopt the dogma of religion as a way of imposing a sense of order onto the chaos he can't deal with. Otherwise, in his own words, he is 'a shell with no machinery in it'.

His marriage to Vivien is a disaster. He is for much of his life 'in love with' Emily Hale with who he maintains a close, if mostly long distance, friendship until later in life, when she was keener on marriage, it fails, or he fails it.

As his career and standing as a poet, critic, dramatist and editor establish him as such a major figure, the litany of impressions of him accumulates- Virginia Woolf describing him as 'a corpse', his own inversion of Sartre in finding 'Hell is oneself' and one commentator finding his dependance on all things Anglo-Catholic 'medieval'. Which, of course, to many of us, it is. Modernism might have looked like a revolutionary, new thing across all the arts circa 1911 and subsequently but in the hands of Ezra Pound, Eliot, Yeats and even in some ways, Joyce, it was backward-looking. One can appreciate how Pound's simplistic analysis of economics and the effect of usury led him to outright anti-semitism and fascism. Eliot treads a fine line in remaining friends with him, adopting almost equally as absurd points of view, while never perhaps quite tipping over into fascism. Crawford performs an equally fine balancing act in presenting such troubling issues.

With Vivien in a much less stable condition than Eliot, Crawford is particularly good on the genesis of the Four Quartets. Whether or not Eliot had been editor at Faber & Faber, the likes of Auden, MacNeice, Larkin and Hughes would most likely have had poetic careers that prospered either way but he showed good judgement in signing them up, his error coming when he rejected Animal Farm.

Meanwhile, only 96 pages before the end of the story, Valerie Fletcher, is a schoolgirl in 1940 whose 'inspirational' English teacher plays her class the recording of Gielgud reading The Journey of the Magi and she asks,

'Who wrote that poem?'....'I shall marry that man'.

And 17 years later, and 38 years his junior, making her way towards the position of most opportunity, his secretary, via working for Dylan Thomas, that's exactly what she did. And, in a miraculous turnabout, she engineers some happy years of devoted marriage for both of them in a brilliantly executed plan that succeeds beyond all expectations, and she continued to look after his legacy after his death in 1965 until hers in 2012. There are few examples of devotion and the 'power of poetry' than that.

It is a happy ending that nobody could have seen coming.

Much is made of Marina as Eliot at his finest. Nobody will ever talk me out of regarding Prufrock as a sensational, essential poem and there is an austerity, economy and authority about Eliot's poems that will ensure their reputation, rather than his, will be in little doubt. His essays also come with great gravitas and are persuasive about 'tradition' were it not for his increasing reliance on church doctrine as an 'a priori' last resort on which to depend. But there is a question asked of celebrity guests in The Times on Saturdays about 'the play they walked out of' and I left Murder in the Cathedral at half-time. I'd almost rather have been accidentally caught in a symphony by Bruckner.

Robert Crawford's magnum opus on Eliot is unlikely to find Eliot any more admirers and, as can be the case, knowing too much of the inside story risks reducing what we once thought of the poems but it is an excellent job done on a difficult subject, the two volumes adding up to 894 pages. It never quite stops being disconcerting that Crawford, with his reasons given in the introductions, refers to his subject as 'Tom' as if he were a friend. It's not easy to regard him as that but in private he wrote Cats, which paid for Faber's poetry list and he would do a Chaplin walk, twirling his umbrella, and was a big fan of Groucho Marx except that, when they eventually met, they didn't get on particularly well.

Nothing's ever easy. The debt he owes to Valerie is immense.