T. S. Eliot in Context (review)

In an opening statement similar to one to be found in David Chinitz’s recent Companion to T. S. Eliot, Jason Harding’s T. S. Eliot in Context proposes to situate itself in a “new era in Eliot scholarship” by riding the wave triggered by the release of “a large amount of important archival material” (2, 3) and aspiring to “reinflect” our “received knowledge” of Eliot (4).¹ But for Harding, this effort, rather than re-contextualizing Eliot’s life and work in the light of recent developments in literary studies, has to do with stripping away generations of accumulated academic commonplaces. Thus Harding’s introduction identifies the volume’s aims in part by noting that “‘Modernism’ is not a term that appears in the chapter titles,” because a great deal of Eliot’s writing (his work “as a BBC broadcaster in particular”) “unsettles misleading accounts of Eliot as an aloof ‘Modernist’ (a term he never embraced)” (3). Similarly, Harding argues that although “Eliot’s values and beliefs are not ones that are commonly held in high regard today,” once we examine them freshly we discover that “they were sophisticated responses to specific socio-cultural conditions, as well as to extreme political and economic crises” (4). Harding, then, affiliates the collection’s work with that of an art restorer in the sense that as editor he wishes to remove the overlay of the ages through a study of Eliot’s contemporary “contexts” and return Eliot’s work to the unvarnished freshness of the time in which it first appeared. With this in mind, he eschews some of the categories that have lately driven Eliot studies (interest in Eliot and cultural decadence, for example, or Eliot and popular culture) and divides his volume into five sections as follows: “Life” (“St. Louis,” “New England,” “Paris,” “London,” “Englishness,” “The Idea of Europe”); “Forms” (“The role of intellectual [sic],” “Publishing,” “Censorship,” “Literary journalism,” “Visual art,” “Dance,” “Drama,” “Music,” “Radio”); “Literary Cross-Currents” (“Allusion: the case of Shakespeare,” “Classics,” “Dante,” “Seventeenth-century literature,” “Romantic and Victorian poetry,” “French poetry,” “Georgian poetry,” “Bloomsbury,” “Ezra Pound,” “The avant-garde”); “Politics, Society and Culture” (“Politics,” “Economics,” “Anti-Semitism,” “Gender,” “Religion,” “Philosophy,” “Social science,” “Natural science”); and “Reception” (“Contemporary reviews,” “Contemporary and post-war poetry,” “Eliot studies,” “Legacies”).

It is worth keeping in mind, of course, that “context” can mean a number of things, and that the ideal of restoration proves slippery when applied to complex intellectual matters—or even to apparently simple ones. Take for example the setting of Eliot’s early life, which is treated in the collection’s opening essay on “St. Louis” by Earl K. Holt III, the author of a 1985 biography of Eliot’s grandfather William Greenleaf Eliot and an accomplished expert on the Eliot family. Holt’s piece offers valuable new details about the Eliots and Unitarianism, and (although constrained like all the collection’s essays by considerations of space) points to selected elements of Eliot’s St. Louis that affected his poetry. (He notes, for example, “the ailanthus tree” planted behind the house that re-appears in Four Quartets [12–13]). What the essay does not address, however, are some facets of the St. Louis “context” that have become particularly interesting to the politically and ideologically sensitive readers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The circumstance, for example, that Eliot’s father and grandfather grew up in a place that was split between Northern and Southern culture during the period of the American Civil War (Eliot’s grandfather was very much anti-slavery, and the family suffered from the city’s Southern resistance to this and became sensitized to issues of race). Or the fact that Eliot’s father, Henry Ware Eliot, who as Holt tells us “built a successful career” as a businessman making bricks, also failed in his early efforts and saw an earlier grocery business go bankrupt. Or the more commonly disseminated circumstance that Eliot was partly brought up by a Catholic nursemaid...