Convincingly damns Eliot not for his sexual orientation, whatever it may have been, but for his inhumanity and hypocrisy.
English biographer Seymour-Jones (Beatrice Webb, 1992) clinically dissects at agonizing length what surely must be one of the unhappiest marriages in literary history.
T.S. Eliot was one of the great modernist poets and a shining star of Anglican orthodoxy, but he certainly wasn’t a nice man, especially insofar as his first wife was concerned. The author stirringly defends Vivienne Eliot, remembered by literary history as a harridan who made her husband miserable primarily because the gossipy Virginia Woolf disliked the lowborn Mrs. Eliot. (“This bag of ferrets is what Tom wears around his neck,” Woolf famously wrote.) Eliot was largely responsible, Seymour-Jones argues, for driving the already unhinged Vivienne into full-tilt madness. While relying on her as a muse and borrowing her Cockney voice for The Waste Land, he kept his distance, treated her cruelly, and fairly pushed her into the arms of father-figure Bertrand Russell in exchange for cash and academic favors. Why all this nastiness? Eliot was gay, Seymour-Jones charges, though he could never really bring himself to admit it and threatened suit against critics and journalists who suggested as much; “at the core of the revulsion Eliot felt for Vivienne,” she writes, “was her very femininity, which reminded him of the shameful, feared feminine part of himself.” Though she relies on indirect evidence and more than a little speculation, and though she goes on much too long, Seymour-Jones makes her case. In doing so, she rescues poor Vivienne Eliot from the dustbin of history, even though literary scholars may be loath to incorporate her findings into their accounts of the revered poet who gave the world “Ash Wednesday”—but also, let it be remembered, Cats.
Convincingly damns Eliot not for his sexual orientation, whatever it may have been, but for his inhumanity and hypocrisy.Pub Date: April 16, 2002
ISBN: 0-385-49992-2
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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