In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • The Letters of T. S. Eliot ed. by Valerie Eliot, John Haffenden
  • William M. Chace (bio)
The Letters of T. S. Eliot, ed. Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden, vol. 3 (1926–27), 954pp., and vol. 4 (1928–29), 826pp. (London: Faber and Faber, 2012).

Punctilious, industrious, resolutely polite, and shrewdly diplomatic, the Eliot of these letters is the perfect editor of a small and prestigious journal and the discerning partner of a small but influential publishing firm. The Criterion (first a monthly, thereafter named The New Criterion and then, once more, The Criterion, but a quarterly) consumed that part of his every working day not consumed by his labors at Faber and Gwyer, soon to become Faber and Faber. In each case, the mission was the same. As Geoffrey Faber put it to another partner of the small house, it was “to bring grist to the mill.” That meant soliciting writers for both establishments and reviewers for the journal. It meant lunches and afternoon teas, hundreds of them, letters, thousands of them; it meant reading the submissions of “a boy named Auden” and corresponding with William Empson, I. A. Richards, Walter de la Mare, Edmund Wilson, and myriad others. It meant continued close association, through the mail, with Joyce, with Pound, and with Wyndham Lewis. It meant liking some, but not all, of D. H. Lawrence. And it meant telling [End Page 145] Edwin Muir, late in 1928, “I should be very glad indeed to see your essay on Kafka. I know the name, but that is all.”

Eliot was paid £400 a year by Faber (some $32,000 in current dollars) and from January to June in 1928 earned, in the currency of the time, $38.20 in royalties for his poems. When he was not ill, and he was ill again and again, he worked. He did so without belief that his industry would have any immediate results: “The Criterion, of course, must allow always about twenty-five years to elapse before any of its ideas can reach the general public.”

Only intermittently, and by sudden breaks in the industrious monotony, does the reader get a glimpse of another Eliot: the one who wrote The Waste Land and “Prufrock” and who, in these and other poems, created a landscape of desolation, neurasthenia, and blocked hope that served to shape one generation of poetry and poets, if not several. That Eliot is rarely seen, and even then he must be seen by ignoring his disguises: when we learn that he “has taken up dancing” or that “he is learning to drive an automobile” or that his real specializations are “detective fiction and ecclesiastical history,” we know we are being misled. The Eliot of the poems, the person with an internal existence, is to be discovered only when, abruptly, we come upon not his letters but those of his wife, Vivien. Perpetually distraught, at odds with herself, at odds with her husband (“he simply hates the sight of me”), and forever suffering from medical problems (pleurisy, headaches, influenza, restless fatigue), she was sufficiently disturbed to cause Pound, Conrad Aiken, and Virginia Woolf, as well as his brother Henry, to recognize Eliot as a man in distress. In “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” he had claimed that the poet undergoes a “continual surrender of himself.” But the troubled Eliot of these letters could no more surrender himself than he could jettison his perfectly correct manners. A decade after writing that essay, he wrote to E. M. Forster that, “as for the ‘impersonality’ doctrine, it has its personal motives of course, and is neither more true nor more false than its opposite doctrine.” By 1928, he was seeking not a surrender of himself, but a form of religious discipline that would hold that self in the tightest of bonds: “I feel that I need the most severe . . . the most Latin, kind of discipline, Ignatian or other. It is a question of compensation. I feel that nothing could be too ascetic, too violent, for my own needs.”

The religious practice that would provide that discipline had, for Eliot, its own peculiarities. It was indeed a form of ritualistic Christianity, but with...

pdf

Share