‘Eliot After “The Waste Land”’ Review: As Prufrock Grew Old - WSJ

‘Eliot After “The Waste Land”’ Review: As Prufrock Grew Old - WSJ ‘Eliot After “The Waste Land”’ Review: As Prufrock Grew Old wsj.com/articles/eliot-after-the-waste-land-book-review-biography-as-prufrock-grew-old-11659711184 August 5, 2022 By William H. Pritchard Aug. 5, 2022 10:56 am ET 1 With “Eliot After ‘The Waste Land,’ ” Robert Crawford completes his monumental life of T.S. Eliot. The first volume, “Young Eliot,” was published in 2015. All told, we now have more than 1,000 pages of scholarly and critical commentary, as well as a deeply informed biographical narrative that offers fresh insights into one of the 20th century’s premier poets. Grab a Copy Eliot After 'The Waste Land' By Robert Crawford Farrar, Straus and Giroux 624 pages We may earn a commission when you buy products through the links on our site. Mr. Crawford is the first Eliot biographer, though surely not the last, to benefit from the trove of letters that Eliot wrote to Emily Hale over the course of a passionate but ultimately unhappy relationship. Hale, a friend of friends, gifted in music and the theater, met Eliot in 1912 in Cambridge, Mass., when he was a graduate student in philosophy at Harvard and soon to take up a year’s fellowship at Oxford. Their correspondence grew intense after Eliot separated from his first wife, Vivien, in 1933. Emily looked forward to a marriage that was not to be. In Mr. Crawford’s words, their lovemaking remained “excitedly epistolary” until, over the years, it died down, and Eliot, at age 68—Vivien had died a decade before—did the surprising thing of marrying his 30-year-old secretary, Valerie Fletcher. The letters to Emily, long archived at Princeton’s library, were finally made available in 2020. (Eliot burned her letters to him.) Although a further account of Emily’s life will be found in Lyndall Gordon’s forthcoming book “The Hyacinth Girl,” it’s safe to say that even the most committed student of Eliot will feel that, in Mr. Crawford’s telling, both he and Emily have received sympathetic and sufficient biographical treatment. 13 Books We Read This Week A sweeping new history of the underground war against Hitler, the philosopher who shaped a young America, a Hollywood romance and more. After Vivien’s death, Eliot had written to Emily that he was shocked “to discover that I recoiled violently from the prospect of marriage.” Wrestling with the issue he declares: “I cannot, cannot, start life again, and adapt myself . . . to any other person. I do not think that I could survive it, as a person; I cannot bear the company of any one person for very long without extreme irritation and suppression.” As if that were not conclusive enough to put paid to any hope Emily might hold out for marriage, he sums it up: “This is what we have to face. I am afraid, my dear, that the cataclysm is a much greater upheaval than your kind and patient and sympathetic words show any realization of. Physical intimacy without entire spiritual intimacy would be a nightmare.” Poignant and unsettling is the way “my dear” nestles among these bleak declarations. Perhaps one may be forgiven for remembering the first line of the Edward Lear-like light verse that Eliot classified as one of his “minor poems”: “How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot! / With his features of clerical cut, / And his brow so grim / And his mouth so prim.” Newsletter Sign-up Books Be the first to find out what's new and what's good. Get the weekend book reviews before the weekend. SUBSCRIBE As Mr. Crawford surveys Eliot’s life after the publication of “The Waste Land” (1922), he wisely doesn’t aim at new “readings” of Eliot’s poems, although he is careful not to neglect any one of them. Often his method is to put together life and work. Thus when the aging Eliot decides to pass along to his godson, Tom Faber, an old pocket watch that he was given years before, the biographer makes use of the poet’s recently composed lines from “The Dry Salvages,” one of the poems in “Four Quartets.” Mr. Crawford writes (if a little awkwardly): “Aware in his new poem of ‘a time / Older than the time of chronometers’, Tom had a keen, quickened sense both of the solemn balance between ‘Time the destroyer’ and ‘time the preserver’, and he wanted to preserve what he could.” Eliot finished “Four Quartets” in the early 1940s. Mr. Crawford notes that, though Eliot continued to write verse dramas and “measured, thoughtful prose,” as a poet “his work was done.” When “Eliot After ‘The Waste Land’ ” was published in England two months ago, Philip Hensher took the occasion in the Spectator to discern “cracks” in Eliot’s once “unassailable reputation.” He devoted the bulk of his review to an account of Eliot’s “anti-Semitism”—one example, a small but telling one, being Eliot’s remark, after a friend had adopted a refugee child, that the child was “not at all objectionably Jewish to look at.” The reviewer ends by wondering whether his reputation will survive “the undeniable bad smell of remarks made in passing.” A more useful and not often considered question arises when the survival of Eliot’s poems is measured against those of his contemporaries, the British and American poets who overlapped him in the first half of the 20th century: Hardy, Yeats, Frost, Wallace Stevens, to name four outstanding ones whose oeuvre is capacious. By contrast, Eliot’s poems—as published in 1963 (he would die two years later)—take up a fairly slender volume. The most enduring are, arguably, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “The Waste Land” and “Four Quartets.” Yet after rereading and thoroughly assimilating them, we find that there is not that much more to discover, at least when compared with the fat volumes of the other poets, which continue to yield discoveries in the form of poems previously overlooked. The upshot is that, rather than reading, say, “The Waste Land” once more, we may turn increasingly to Eliot’s essays, criticism and letters (now in their ninth volume!) with enlarged apprehension and pleasure. Frequently these prose items are also full of the humorousness, the sly turnings of a speaking voice, that is absent from most of the poems. Mr. Crawford’s biographical net is a wide one, and I was more than once surprised and touched by something new that enriches the “unpleasant” Mr. Eliot into something other—richer and more strange. This is felt nowhere more strongly than in two references to him by Virginia Woolf. In one, she describes him as “a religious soul: an unhappy man, a lonely very sensitive man, all wrapt up in fibres of self torture, doubt, conceit, desire for warmth & intimacy. And I’m very fond of him—like him in some of my reserves & subterfuges.” Even more revealingly, she wrote to her sister about “Tom Eliot, whom I love, or could have loved, had we both been in the prime and not in the sere; how necessary do you think copulation is to friendship?” But Mr. Crawford is also more than respectful to Eliot when the fibers of “self torture” relax a bit, as they did during the bombing of London in 1940, when Eliot, a new and scrupulous air-raid warden, vouchsafed some valuable advice to his friend John Hayward: “The first thing to do, when you hear the Syrens, or the gun fire preliminary, is to have a good Piss: after that you are ready for the Jerry.” For all his self-refashioning as a model Englishman, Eliot’s advice here seems to me very much in the American grain and strikes a note quite distinct from that of his august contemporaries. We should keep reading him with that note in mind. Advertisement - Scroll to Continue Mr. Pritchard, the author of “Randall Jarrell: A Literary Life” and many other books, is a professor of English emeritus at Amherst College. Appeared in the August 6, 2022, print edition as 'As Prufrock Grew Old'. Sponsored Offers Best Buy: Save 15% or more on the Best Buy deal of the Day Walmart: Walmart coupon: $20 off your $50+ order Nike: Up to 60% off just-dropped styles with Nike promo code Wayfair: Up to 15% off + free shipping at Wayfair Journeys: Summer Sale: 50% off select styles + free shipping Dick's Sporting Goods: 10% off sitewide - Dick's Sporting Goods coupons