Young Eliot: From St. Louis to The Waste Land by Robert Crawford (review)

Robert Crawford writes beautifully. Exquisitely so. Indeed, he writes so well that it’s very easy for the reader to find himself going along with it all, throwing away all objectivity, and simply succumbing to the elegant sentences and graceful paragraphs. Beauty is truth, right? And, truth is beauty? From the opening sentence of each chapter, the Scotch biographer grabs one’s attention through to its end. Even the quick breaks between chapters are not enough—visually—to draw the reader out of the story. More is demanded, and the author rightfully gives and gives.

An award-winning biographer, poet, and professor at the University of St. Andrew’s, Crawford has dedicated his career to studying the arts and those who have crafted them. Best known for his work on Robert Burns and for his extensive editing of numerous anthologies, Crawford came to know and love Eliot as a young man. His experience of encountering Eliot mirrors almost all who love the Anglo-American poet. At least in the beginning of the discovery of this love.

Like most people to whom his poetry matters, I fell in love with the ineradicably insinuating music of Eliot’s verse. More than forty years after I first read it there are still things about the poetry that puzzle me, luring me on; but I knew fro the start, and writing his biography has confirmed the conviction, that Eliot’s poems work not because they are intellectual games but because they are the products of an intense emotional life fused with a preternatural mastery of the pliancy of language. Like Tennyson and a very small number of other English poets, Eliot had perfect pitch when it came to the music of words.

Whether this is true or not, one could readily praise Crawford for the very same thing. Indeed, from this reviewer’s perspective he’s describing himself as much as he is Eliot. As if to make his conviction certain, Crawford explores the very minutia of Eliot’s life—from what his “mamma” said here and there to the poet’s own insecurities about the size and shape of his ears as a boy.

While the biographer does not ignore Eliot’s intellectual beliefs, he certainly attempts to give them all a context that, more or less, makes them unimportant in the big scheme of things. This is a biography of materialistic and psychological motives, not spiritual or intellectual ones. Only five pages after his own acknowledgement of the poet, Crawford claims that since 1995, scholars have given too much credence to Eliot’s ideas while ignoring his poetry. This, Crawford claims, must be rectified.

The problem is, if Crawford’s claims are true, he simply exacerbates the extant and lingering, if not hovering, Manichean division by setting poetry against intellect. The real trick with Eliot, then, is to integrate the two. This is not entirely lost on the biographer, though, as Crawford attempts to overcome this pernicious division by simply historicizing everything. A hike becomes, therefore, as important as reading a book. Racism and anti-Semitism, then, become merely a matter of the culture in which Eliot was raised. As such, it’s very hard to know if Eliot possessed much free will at all or if his environment (cultural and physical) so overwhelmed him that he simply gave in to its ultimately inalterable forces. Yes, I am exaggerating a bit, but only a bit. Here’s an example of where Crawford allows the conditions of environment to override will—or at least suggesting so. In a discussion of young Tom’s physical limitations, his love of his mother, and his views on D. H. Lawrence and psychoanalysis, the biographer leaps to this:

Little or nothing is known about sex education or possible instances of homosexuality at Tom’s single-sex school, but traditionally Smith Academy did give its boys at the age of twelve or so some instruction in “Physiology” through...