T. S. Eliot and the Criterion

After T. S. Eliot’s death in 1965 Valerie Eliot prevented the publication of her husband’s letters and kept his prospective biographers at bay for a long time. It was only in 1988 that she herself published the first volume of The Letters of T. S. Eliot, 1898–1922, and then there was a lapse of twenty-one years before the second volume appeared in 2009. The third and fourth volumes soon followed in 2012 and 2013. These letters reveal authentic details of Eliot’s early life that had never been known. We now have, for the first time, fuller details about the illnesses, both physical and mental, from which his first wife suffered throughout her unhappy life. We know too that Eliot was profoundly affected by what he called “the catastrophic state” of her health, so much so that at one time he told Middleton Murray that he had contemplated suicide—or murder. More important, these letters illuminate a combination of circumstances that resulted in his fortunate entry into literary journalism—a change of career that shaped his whole life.

Eliot’s literary career started in London, where he arrived in 1914 on a Harvard scholarship to attend Merton College, Oxford. It was wartime and most British students had enlisted in the army. The university was sparsely populated, mostly by American and foreign students, and Eliot found the atmosphere congenial. His tutor was Harold Joachim, who was a disciple of the philosopher F. H. Bradley, on whom Eliot had started work at Harvard as a graduate student of philosophy. He had published poems in the Harvard Advocate and had given some of his unpublished poems to his Harvard friend Conrad Aiken. Aiken had arrived in London a year earlier than Eliot and had shown Eliot’s poems to English poets and editors for their opinion. Harold Monro dismissed “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” as “absolutely insane.” But Ezra Pound, who had been living in London for five years and was promoting his unconventional poems about contemporary life, was greatly impressed by it. He sent it to Harriet Monroe, the editor of Poetry magazine, telling her that he was sending her “the best poem I have had or seen from an American. He has actually trained himself and modernized himself on his own.”

Though Eliot was thus generally pleased with his new situation, he began to feel sexually frustrated. He complained to Aiken that “one walks about the street with one’s desires, and one’s refinement rises up like a wall whenever opportunity approaches. I should be better off, I sometimes think, if I had disposed of my virginity and shyness several years ago: and indeed I still think sometimes that it would be well to do so before marriage.” He was soon to remedy the situation. He met several English girls, and was drawn to them for their different looks, manners, and accents. One such girl was Vivienne (later called Vivien) Haigh-Wood, with whom he seems to have started a relationship. No details are known about this period of their lives, but they suddenly got married on 26 June 1915, without informing their respective parents. This event had a major influence on Eliot’s life without his being fully conscious of all its implications.

He decided to stay on in England, and soon thereafter gave up his philosophy studies and his hopes of a teaching career in America. He told his professor at Harvard that he would like to “remain in London and engage in literary work.” But he soon realized that writing could not provide him a reliable source of income. His marriage certificate says, next to Eliot’s name, “of no fixed occupation.” To earn a living he started to teach at schools in London and to give extension lectures to mature students in different parts of the country. And, to supplement this inadequate income, he began to review books for journals to which he was initially introduced by Bertrand Russell and Sidney Waterlow. His first professional review of A. J. Balfour’s “Theism and Humanism” appeared in the International...