How to Meet Mr Eliot

The Oxford Lives and Legacies series, of which Craig Raine's T. S. Eliot is a part, promises volumes that are 'brief, erudite, and inviting', offering 'a fresh look at some of the greatest minds in politics, the arts, and science'. The series is 'written by prominent writers', and its 'engaging volumes' promise to 'shed light on the life and work of our leading intellectual, artistic and historical figures'. Varieties of quick but apparently thorough illumination are to be seen throughout bookshops now – sometimes the more elegantly turned out, slim volumes suggest that they might double as fashion accessories – while other pocket sized books are presented in discounted stacks, promising a short introduction to everything, with that most efficient of marketing tools, guilt, worked into their very short nature: 'I should really know just a little about that'.

It is difficult to know whether Raine's T. S. Eliot is intended to be an introduction to Eliot's work for a reader encountering it for the first time, and so to take its place among other such companions, prefaces, and guides, or whether it is conceived as a personal response. Turns of phrase frequently suggest the latter, particularly as they privilege a writer's insight into another writer, while the way the book is structured – covering early to late poems, a chapter on the criticism and one on the plays – suggests that it will also try to perform the dutiful role of a companion or helpful introduction. The book is characterised by this conflict of aims. We are specially reminded at the outset that, 'We writers frequently inherit our themes from our most admired predecessors. It is they who set the agenda. It is we who continue it, who develop it. It is important to realize that, for writers, the fully lived life also means the interior life, the mental life' (pp. xiv–xv). Such evidently privileged understanding is not, however, able to show what advantages it may possess within this book's structure. One predicament of the volume is that Raine's evident admiration for Eliot and knowledge of his work should appear in this form, which insists on the presence of an overarching plot, 'the failure to live fully', 'the theme of the "buried life "', to such an extent that the curious, inconsistent terrain of a writer's life and his work fades from view, and in its place is a neatly packaged theme (pp. xix–xx).

Taking as his directive Eliot's own remarks in the essay on Ford that 'the whole of Shakespeare's work is one poem', Raine insists that 'Eliot's lifelong themes, despite the manifest and exemplary variety of the poems, are consistent' (p. xix). He writes:

Almost a motif in this book, the idea of the buried life is one that underlies much of Eliot's work in many different ways – it is inherited, then explored and mined by Eliot in ways that expand Arnold's original analysis. To the rationed heart and to self-ignorance, Eliot adds other occluded selves – our hidden motives; our previous incarnations; our non rational, unconscious mystical experiences, the previous lives of literature and of words themselves; the continuing life within us of dead ancestors; and the power of the irrational. The buried life in Eliot has a headstone with many names.

(pp. xx–xxi)

Unfortunately such lists can have a numbing effect on readers, who, like writers, are not always looking for a so-called underlying idea, as Eliot imagined of Shakespeare: 'Montaigne is just the sort of writer to provide a stimulant to a poet; for what the poet looks for in his reading is not a philosophy – not a body of doctrine or even a consistent point of view which he endeavours to understand – but a point of departure.' Strangely, as we are reminded that this book is by a writer, what is missing is some consideration of statements of Eliot's which contemplate just such a point of view: 'The attitude...