T.S. Eliot: a life.

ELIOT--like Kafka, Orwell, and Auden--specified that he did not want to have a biography written about him. But he paradoxically stated, in "The Frontiers of Criticism" (1956): "There is no reason why biographies of poets should not be written. . . . Any critic seriously concerned with a man's work should be expected to know something about the man's life." Several inadequate biographical studies have been published, and an edition of Eliot's letters have been promised for many years (I have heard, on good authority, that this project has long since been completed and is being deliberately withheld), so this study fills a major gap.

Since Ackroyd's interesting and well-written book has been so highly praised in England, it might be useful to mention some of its limitations. The archival research has been exhaustive, but the book seems to be based on interviews with only 17 people. Its scope is too small and its contents too thin. It covers the first 18 years of Eliot's life in 15 pages and describes the last seven years in only nine pages. It arouses but does not slake our curiosity. We want to know a great deal more than we are told about the St. Louis background and the five siblings of this late child of thwarted artists, who was born with a congenial double hernia; of his shadowy roommates at Harvard; of his friendship with Jean Verdenal, killed in the Dardanelles, to whom he dedicated Prufrock; of the crippled man of letters, John Hayward, with whom he lived for 11 years; of Emily Hale, whom he was very fond of but did not marry; of his good friend Mary Trevelyan, who twice proposed to him and was twice refused; and of the attractions of his bovine secretary, Valerie Fletcher, which led to their marriage when she was thirty and he was 68. (His mother-in-law's comment on his "virinal" quality suggests the nature of their sexual life). More needs to be said about the young Eliot's financial difficulties (what was the inheritance from his father?), and an entire book could (and will) be written on the publishing career and influence on modern poetry of "the Pope of Russell Square."

Fortunately, however, Ackroyd gets well away from what Cyril Connolly called "the cat addict and cheese taster, the writer of pawky blurbs, the church warden, the polite deflater," and shows, contrary to received opinion, that Eliot was neither cold nor learned. Ackroyd shows how Eliot's adult traits developed from his childhood. The New England repression, the business tradition, the comfort derived from the society of women, the imitative skills, the peculiar combination of Yankee toughness and shuddering sensitivity, of self-awareness and self-doubt, the intelligence, reserve, and detachment were all elements in his early character.

Ackroyd is too severe on the "sterility" of Harvard. Charles Copeland, Irving Babbitt, and George Santayana gave Eliot a first-rate education; and the university was patient about his unfinished dissertation on the philosophy of F.H. Bradley and generous with fellowships. At Harvard, Eliot first discovered some of the seminal influences on his work: Dante, the Jacobean dramatists, the Metaphysical poets, Laforgue and Baudelaire, the English aesthetes of the 1890s. Ackroyd perceptively points out that Eliot expressed his deepest feelings in response to other poetry, that he did not develop as a thinker but merely elaborated his previous convictions, that "the act of creation was for him the act of synthesis," and that it was his talent for concentration and elimination that led to the brilliant obliquities of his poetry.

The central drama of Eliot's life was his marriage to Vivien Haigh-Wood, which began a lifetime of torment that seemed like a Dostoyevsky novel badly rewritten by John Middleton Murry. Lady Ottoline Morrell noted that the young Eliot had already "lost all spontaneity and can only break through his conventionality by stimulants or violent emotion." Vivien, who first revealed to him the possibilities of emotional life and was sexually experienced when he was innocent, said she had married Eliot to stimulate him but found she could not do so. She had better success with Bertrand Russell, who predicted that Vivien would soon tire of Eliot and proceeded to cuckold his former student.

Like Leonard Woolf, Scott Fitzgerald, and Heinrich Mann, Eliot had a mad wife who sometimes became a public spectacle. The surprising thing about their marriage is not that Eliot left Vivien, but that he remained with her for 17 years. Though Ackroyd argues that "A Game of Chess" in The Waste Land does not chronicle the death of their relationship, it seems clear that their maladie a deux drove him to a breakdown. Mad Vivien hurt him into poetry.

Perhaps the weakest aspect of the book is the discussion of Eliot's apparently quack treatment by Dr. Roger Vittoz--there is no reference to Harry Trosman's article on this subject in the Archives of General Psychiatry (May 1974)--who required his patients to repeat simple tasks and believed in physical contact to "draw off the weight of nervousness." Eliot could just as well have taken cold baths and done calisthenics. The main reason for his "cure" (he soon had a second breakdown) was his temporary separation from the vampiric Vivien. Common sense also suggests that Eliot, scarred by Vivien, could not bring himself to marry coevals like Emily Hale and Mary Trevelyan; that marriage to Valerie became possible when he reached an age where he could accept her adoration without emotional and sexual reciprocation.

In The Waste Land, written when Eliot was recovering from his breakdown in Lausanne, he transformed his personal disgust and guilt about sexual relations (partly inspired by Vivien's "purulent offensive discharge") into a public expression of the malaise of our time. In so doing, he inadvertently made fashionable the expression of authentic mania in confessional poetry, such as that of Roethke, Berryman, Lowell, Sexton, and Plath.

In contrast to his great contemporaries, Conrad, Ford, Lewis, Lawrence, Pound, and Joyce, Eliot established the context for the evaluation of his own work and came to embody in his lifetime the cultural order he once had sought. Yet fame, literary achievement, even religious belief did not bring him contentment. Ackroyd never quite explains what drove the aged eagle to give endless lectures abroad when he could scarcely drag himself to the platform and had nothing more to say. Like most great men, he seemed to be gnawed by self-doubt and needed continual adulation--from his audience as well as from his wife.

Ackroyd, who quotes Edmund Wilson's remark that Eliot was a perfect "self-invented character" and mentions that Eliot's commitment to English life and history was artificial, an act of will, does not develop the full implications of these statements. Despite Eliot's long years in England, he was essentially American--he actually wore American underwear beneath his English apparel--and retained his puritan conscience under his bowler hat.