Featured Download
Speak Like a CEO
This chapter describes ten helpful actions and behaviors that will bring you...
Content provided in partnership with
T.S. Eliot and Prejudice. - book reviews
National Review, Sept 29, 1989 by Russell Kirk
The earliest letter in this collection is written (June, T1898) from Gloucester by a ten-year-old boy to his father in St. Louis. Little Thomas Stearns Eliot mentions that a microscope and "a box of butterflies and a spider" had been broken in his trunk on the journey from Missouri to Massachusetts. There comes to mind Eliot's Ariel poem Animula": "The pain of living and the drug of dreams / Curl up the small soul in the window seat / Behind the Encyclopedia Britannica."
Sources and influences quite other than the Britannica would wake the imagination of T S. Eliot. This first vol-
- More Articles of Interest
- T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form. - book reviews
- T. S. Eliot And Anti-Semitism
- Inheriting Eliot
- THE SECRET PASSIONS OF T.S. ELIOT
- 'Where are the eagles and the trumpets?': the strange case of Eliot's missing...
ume of his correspondence, ably edited by his vigorous and forthright widow, tells much about the experiences that nurtured his early poems and the associations and convictions that led to his editing of The Criterion. The volume ends on the eve of publication of The Waste Land, which soon gave him domination of the realm of letters. The twentieth century has been the Age of Eliot-and not in Britain and the United States merely.
During 1988 and the early months of 1989, the ancient city of Monza, in Lombardy, celebrated the memory of Eliot with a series of theatrical productions, readings, and lectures held amidst the crumbling splendors of the Villa Reale. This reviewer delivered the concluding "testimony" to the twentieth-century heir of Vergil and Dante. I remarked that Eliot, though melancholy from early years until his marriage, late in life, to Valerie, also was witty and even comical, as we find him in some of these letters.
Self-mockery is the most successful form of wit; we encounter it in his "Linces for Cuscuscaraway and Mirza Murad Ali Beg":
How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!
With his features of clerical cut . . . Yet in truth, as I told my Italian audience, Eliot was easy to converse with, not at all forbidding, and perfect in his manners-or so I always found him, in London or in Edinburgh. His English manners and speech took form between 1914 and 1922, the years covered by the six hundred pages of this first volume. Though Eliot is called an expatriate, and indeed was strongly attracted to English life, it was necessity that kept him in London after his marriage to Vivienne Haigh-Wood, and he remarked once that the worst form of expatriation for an American writer is residence in New York City.
Vivienne's neuroses and wretched health soon thrust him into a psychological Waste Land. Many of the letters in this collection pertain to that misfortune. Four decades later, Eliot would write privately, "To explain my sudden marriage to Vivi-
enne Haigh-Wood would require a good many words, and yet the explanation would probably remain unintelligible.... I was very immature for my age, very timid, very inexperienced.... I think that all I wanted of Vivienne was a flirtation or a mild affair: I was too shy and unpracticed to achieve either with anybody. I believe that I came to persuade myself that I was in love with her simply because I wanted to burn my boats and commit myself to staying in England. And she persuaded herself (also under the influence of Pound) that she would save the poet by keeping him in England."
Yet the terrible sorrow that came to pass through this marriage was the catalyst that brought forth Eliot's major poetry, beginning with The Waste Land and presently followed by Ash Wednesday. One thinks of the paradox of the Fortunate Fall.
These revelations about the unhappy marriage and its consequences (matters kept most private by Eliot during his lifetime) are perhaps the most significant letters in this first volume, so far as insight into the poet's spiritual experiences are concerned. But all sorts of lively and surprising matters turn up in these letters-among them Eliot's endeavor to assist Maxwell Bodenheim, the The Letters of T.S. Eliot: Volume I, 1893-1922, edited by Valerie Eliot (Harcourt, Brace, 639 pp., $29.95) T S. Eliot and Prejudice, by Christopher Ricks (University of California, 290 pp., $25).
bohemian author of Replenishing Jessica and other off-color novels. To Ezra Pound, on May 20, 1920, Eliot wrote concerning the eccentric Bodenheim, "Conrad Aiken is here; stupider than I remember him; in fact, stupid. Also Bodenheim, the American Max, who arrived in the steerage on Monday with a wife and a baby which will see the light in a few weeks ('Almost any time, in fact,' Mrs. B. says) ... He is not unintelligent, anyhow better than Aiken, and being Semites I suppose they will survive somehow."
Eliot did what he could toward that survival, but the Bodenheims soon found it necessary to return to the United States. The word "Semites" in
this letter, however, brings me to Professor Ricks's T S. Eliot and Prejudice. In the context of the preceding Eliot letter to Pound, "Semites" might be taken either as admiration or as dispraise for Jews' endurance under tribulation. Such minor ambiguities in Eliot's verse and prose brought upon him the dread charge of anti-Semitism-principally from a handful of British and American zealots, during last year's celebrations of the poet's centenary and again on the publication of the volume under review here.
