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
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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