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Possum Emerges Young Eliot: From St Louis to The Waste Land

By Robert Crawford ( Jonathan Cape 493pp £25)

The Letters of T S Eliot: Volume 5, 1930–1931

Edited by Valerie Eliot & John Haffenden

(Faber & Faber 862pp £50)

Biographers of T S Eliot face a number of challenges, not least the marked disinclination of their subject to having his biography written at all. When, in the early 1960s, a scholar wrote an account relating the poetry to his early life, Eliot went through the typescript striking out unwarranted speculations. ‘This is just silly’, he wrote in the margin at one point, responding to the perfectly mild suggestion that an interest in Arthurian myth might have been partly prompted by the paintings in Boston Public Library. His manner with admirers’ enquiries was celebrated for its unforthcoming deadpan: he was a master of disavowal and deflection. The comparison with Joyce, always happy to expand upon the ambitions and strategies of his genius for the edification of generations to come, is very striking. ‘Possum’, Ezra Pound’s nickname for Eliot, referred to an animal that played dead to deflect predators. One manifestation of the Possum spirit was Eliot’s destruction of much of his correspondence, so as to spoil the chances of his hunters.

poem means is as much what it means to others as what it means to the author’. He was unmoved by F W Bateson’s interpretation of Wordsworth, a minor academic scandal in its day, which attributed unacknowledged incestuous feelings in the poet towards his sister. ‘Well, he may be right’, was Eliot’s response. ‘But the real question, which every reader of Wordsworth must materials that went into Eliot’s compelling and enigmatic poem. Eliot himself might be seen occasionally giving him some modest encouragement. Eliot certainly complained about ‘having my personal biography reconstructed from passages which I got out of books, or which I invented out of nothing because they sounded well’, but he also lamented an opposing indignity – ‘having my biography invariably ignored in what I did write from personal experience’, which implies that at least some of his verse had roots in a life that might usefully not go ‘ignored’.

For Crawford, as for many of Eliot’s critics and biographers, the ‘experience’ that most matters in the run-up to The Waste Land is Eliot’s catastrophic marriage to Vivienne Haigh-Wood, a vivacious and gifted person whose needy anxiety and nervous illness tessellated in a disastrous

He was an intensely private man and his greatest works revolve with a sometimes appalled fascination around the impenetrable secrecy that shrouds the innermost self, both others’ and one’s own. But his opposition to biographical speculation was down to more than the desire not to have his privacy violated. Eliot repeatedly expressed scepticism towards the view that knowing about a life brought anything important to an understanding of the poetry that emerged from it. True, an author might have insider information about the raw material of his poems, the stuff that, as he once put it, ‘has gone in and come out in an unrecognisable form’, but the meaning of the poem lies somewhere other than an informed theory of its genesis: ‘what a

The Eliots in London, 1916: unhappy couple answer for himself, is: does it matter?’

Robert Crawford’s adept and widely informed account of Eliot’s life up to the publication of The Waste Land in 1922 is committed to making such things seem to matter, and on the whole he succeeds very well. Eliot famously wrote that ‘the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates’, but Crawford is not being unreasonable in seeking to reunite those separated selves, rooting out the raw way with his own intense reticence and emotional fragility. Crawford writes about Vivienne with sympathy and tact, while making it clear that she made her husband’s life as hellish as she made her own. She is not the cruelly abused victim portrayed in Carole Seymour-Jones’s deeply tendentious Painted Shadow, in which Eliot comes across as a conniving and duplicitous monster; but Crawford evokes very well the ways in which she was surely destroyed by the marriage, the misery of which lay f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 5 | Literary Review 5