"An Easy Commerce of the Old and New"?: Recent Eliot Scholarship

The Preface to David Chinitz's Companion to T.S. Eliot tells us the book "presents a 'new' T. S. Eliot," associated, Chinitz writes, with "innovative work in the areas of sexuality and gender; new insight on Eliot's relations with popular culture and mass media; more closely historicized readings of his political, social, and philosophical views; a more sophisticated understanding of his role in the definition an dissemination of modernism; and rekindled debate over his prejudices" (xiv). The story of a writer's career, once a credible narrative takes hold of it, though, is notoriously difficult to change. In the last part of his life Eliot had already begun to complain of phrases of his that "dogged" his reputation as Shelley said he had been followed, by thoughts that "pursued, like raging hounds, their father and their prey."¹ And Eliot's hounding continues, not only in regard, say, to what he ruefully called his "too easily quotable"² assertion in the preface to For Lancelot Andrewes that he was "classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion" (379), but concerning the kind of career that the ringing phrase called into being. Thus it is hardly surprising that the current crop of new books about Eliot, all armed with commendable aspirations to shift the questions we ask about Eliot's work or to refresh its renovating strangeness, also manage to deepen what we think we already know. The body of the Eliot Companion, for instance, refers to the preface to For Lancelot Andrewes in entries on Eliot's Life, on Ash-Wednesday, on Race in Eliot, on Eliot as a Religious Thinker, and on Eliot's Politics. And the principal achievement of all the books under review—even including, I want to suggest, the volumes of Eliot's correspondence—have as much to do with clarifying and amplifying received wisdom as with the creation of a contemporary Eliot. This, however, does not diminish the usefulness of a book like the Eliot Companion, an excellent reference that combines pithy critical summaries of particular works and significant themes (e.g. Frances Dickey on Prufrock and Other Observations) with essays in which front-rank scholars stretch their repertory (e.g. Vincent Sherry on the Imperial strain in Eliot's decadent style). It is especially to Chinitz's credit that the freshest essays in the collection are the ones that draw on his own study of Eliot and popular culture.

John Worthen's Short Biography produces a readable and elegant version—probably the best we'll get until the rest of the letters are published—of a now familiar story about the woe that was in Eliot's marriage. Highlighting Virginia Woolf's greenroom observations and expertly parsing the evidence of Eliot's life especially as it appears in the first volume of correspondence, Worthen reminds us how little evidence there is to support current "misinformation" (including "a great deal of knowing talk" about Eliot's "'sexual failure'" and "'homosexual predilections'" [1]), but achieves his principal success in a sympathetic and objective but, for all that, powerful retelling of Eliot's violent and visceral mid-life turn toward asceticism.

Barry Spurr and Nancy Duvall Hargrove, meanwhile, straightforwardly enlarge upon features of Eliot's career long viewed as significant. (In fact, they...