ELIOT AFTER THE WASTE LAND

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despite his work as an editor at Faber & Faber; despite an active social life, Eliot appeared deeply solitary and withdrawn.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.