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A life of constraints
A volume of T.S. Eliot's letters tells a lot about him as an editor
- Reviewed by John Sutherland, Financial Times
- Published: 00:00 December 18, 2009
- Image Credit: Supplied
- The Letters of T.S. Eliot: Volume Two: 1923-1925 Edited by Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton, Faber, 912 pages, £35
The first volume of The Letters of T.S. Eliot appeared in 1988, 23 years after his death. The correspondence published in that volume brought the biographical record up to 1922, the year of The Waste Land.
In her 1988 preface, Valerie Eliot, the editor and the poet's widow, confided: "I intended this first volume to run to the end of 1926 ... but the physical extent of the book would, in my publisher's opinion, have been too bulky for the reader's comfort. We hope, by publishing the second part next year, to restore the balance."
Now, some 21 years later, the promised second volume has finally arrived. There are, however, still 40 years of Eliot's letter-writing life left. At this rate, the job will complete in about 400 years' time. Scholars seeking access to the Faber-Eliot archive have customarily seen their requests unanswered or turned down.
This has generated a vacuum around Britain's greatest modern poet. There are reasons for the estate to restrict access. Eliot himself was dogmatic on the point. He instructed Valerie, his second wife, not to posthumously publish his letters. He later lifted his prohibition "on condition", as she recalls in her 1988 preface, "that I [Valerie] did the selecting and editing". He was adamant, however, that no biographies should be written.
Eliot's prohibitions put his executor-wife into an excruciating dilemma. Whom does a dead author belong to? Should his literary remains be clutched forever in his cold hand? Valerie Eliot has handled the executory task conscientiously, gathering the scattered letters and employing amanuenses to put them in order.
This belated second volume will blow away some of the murk befouling the poet's reputation. The years 1923 to 1925 were torture for Eliot. He was chronically hard up. His first wife Vivienne was an invalid, often mad with pain. He held a senior position at Lloyds bank. When a patron, Lady Rothermere, helped him set up his own, "ultra-Tory" literary quarterly, The Criterion, Eliot drudged at the bank by day and slaved at the editorial task by night.
Finally, he was offered a directorship at the new publishing company of Faber and Gwyer. The majority of letters in this second volume are office correspondence. They tell us a lot about Eliot the editor — his ability to be exquisitely polite yet firm with contributors; his skill in tactfully rejecting what would not suit his magazine.
Business letters have their interest. But there is, in these hundreds of pages, a striking absence of intimate communications. What really ails her constantly ailing son, his mother asks in a letter to the poet's brother Henry. The elder Mrs Eliot's letters and those from the younger Mrs Eliot, Vivienne, blow through Eliot's guardedness like little breaths of fresh air.
Over the awful years of 1923 to 1925, Eliot's creative writing was paralysed. He was at breaking point. But in only one letter here does he snap. In early 1925, he confesses to John Middleton Murry: "I have made myself into a machine. I have done it deliberately — in order to endure, in order not to feel — but it has killed V ... must I kill her or kill myself?" This is an uncontrollable spasm in an otherwise heroically controlled existence.
This is not an enjoyable collection. Eliot is a fluent letter-writer but he reserved his genius for poetry, drama and criticism. Nonetheless, the letters, en masse, are informative and corrective. The impression one takes away from this volume is of a good man martyrised — and much literature forever lost because of it. Please, Mrs Eliot, let us have the next volumes soon.
John Sutherland is author of Curiosities of Literature.
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