Exemplary literary scholarship.
An authoritative life of a towering poet.
After completing a two-volume biography (Young Eliot, 2015), Crawford continues his meticulous, perceptive examination of the life and work of T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) beginning with the 1922 publication of The Waste Land. Drawing on voluminous letters and archival sources, he constructs a finely detailed chronicle of the poet’s last four decades, focusing on how Eliot’s work—poetry, plays, essays—arose from his “sometimes tormented life.” Much of that torment was caused by his marriage to the volatile Vivien Haigh-Wood, whose physical and mental deterioration—recounted in sometimes tedious detail—vexed both of them. Although overwhelmed with Vivien’s problems, Eliot found sustenance in his relationship with Emily Hale, whom he had met in 1912 and professed to be in love with. Their correspondence, made public in 2020, reveals an intimate friendship. Hale was Eliot’s confidante, and she longed to marry him if only he would divorce Vivien. For Eliot, though, a convert to the Anglican Church, divorce was forbidden. When Vivien died in 1947, Emily’s hope revived, but “it was as if Vivien’s death pointed him all the more definitely towards renunciation.” Suddenly, he realized that “his love for Emily now was so different from what he had felt in his youth.” Marriage, he explained to her, was impossible. Crawford examines Eliot’s “bleak private life,” which became exacerbated by the deaths of family and friends—and even by winning the Nobel Prize, which he feared would quash his creativity. “The Nobel is a ticket to one’s funeral,” he complained. Despite travels, teaching, honors, and lectures; despite his work as an editor at Faber & Faber; despite an active social life, Eliot appeared deeply solitary and withdrawn. “In public,” Crawford writes, “his carapace remained impermeable.” Marriage to his young secretary Valerie Fletcher, in 1957, which surprised everyone who knew him, seemed to rejuvenate him. Eight years later, he was dead.
Exemplary literary scholarship.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-374-27946-2
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A marvelous exploration by an author steeped in the craft of his subject’s elastic, elusive work.
The mystery of the iconic novelist’s divided self as beautifully parsed by accomplished English biographer and novelist Wilson.
In this utterly satisfying investigative narrative, the author moves from Dickens’ death in 1870 back through his career and childhood trauma being sent to work in a blacking factory at age 12. It’s clear that Wilson fully comprehends the many complexities of the wily novelist, public performer, and secret lover. Beginning with the mystery of his death, the author re-creates the last day of the famous novelist’s life as he made the habitual hour’s journey from his home at Gad’s Hill, Kent, to his mistress’s house in Peckham (places have major significance in Dickens’ work). There, he suffered a seizure and was returned to his home to die a respectable death, surrounded by his estranged wife—tortured, as Wilson calls her—and some of his many adult children. Wilson gradually, engagingly unravels the circumstances surrounding his death. “Dickens was good at dying,” he writes. “If you want a good death, go to the novels of Dickens.” The novelist had been consumed by his love affair with the former actress Nelly Ternan for the previous 13 years and had bought the house where she lived with her mother and sisters. Just that morning, Dickens had been working toward the conclusion of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, a book that was destined to be left incomplete, and was saturated with a sense of raging passion for a young, unobtainable girl. (Wilson ably dispels the myth that Dickens did not write about sex.) Wilson writes with precision, intuition, and enormous compassion for Dickens’ senses of social justice and outrage, especially regarding children in the mercilessly materialist Victorian era. The author also charmingly conveys his own early enchantment with Dickens’ books.
A marvelous exploration by an author steeped in the craft of his subject’s elastic, elusive work.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-295494-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
Unsentimental nature writing that sheds as much light on humans as on eels.
An account of the mysterious life of eels that also serves as a meditation on consciousness, faith, time, light and darkness, and life and death.
In addition to an intriguing natural history, Swedish journalist Svensson includes a highly personal account of his relationship with his father. The author alternates eel-focused chapters with those about his father, a man obsessed with fishing for this elusive creature. “I can’t recall us ever talking about anything other than eels and how to best catch them, down there by the stream,” he writes. “I can’t remember us speaking at all….Because we were in…a place whose nature was best enjoyed in silence.” Throughout, Svensson, whose beat is not biology but art and culture, fills his account with people: Aristotle, who thought eels emerged live from mud, “like a slithering, enigmatic miracle”; Freud, who as a teenage biologist spent months in Trieste, Italy, peering through a microscope searching vainly for eel testes; Johannes Schmidt, who for two decades tracked thousands of eels, looking for their breeding grounds. After recounting the details of the eel life cycle, the author turns to the eel in literature—e.g., in the Bible, Rachel Carson’s Under the Sea Wind, and Günter Grass’ The Tin Drum—and history. He notes that the Puritans would likely not have survived without eels, and he explores Sweden’s “eel coast” (what it once was and how it has changed), how eel fishing became embroiled in the Northern Irish conflict, and the importance of eel fishing to the Basque separatist movement. The apparent return to life of a dead eel leads Svensson to a consideration of faith and the inherent message of miracles. He warns that if we are to save this fascinating creature from extinction, we must continue to study it. His book is a highly readable place to begin learning.
Unsentimental nature writing that sheds as much light on humans as on eels.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-296881-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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