Young Eliot: From St Louis to The Waste Land by Robert Crawford (Jonathan Cape, £25)
TS Eliot didn’t want anyone to write his biography, and for a long time his widow Valerie Eliot (who died in 2012) made life difficult for anyone trying to do so. Fifty years after his death, though, Robert Crawford—himself a fine poet—has produced a biography of Eliot up to 1922 that, unlike previous attempts, can freely quote from the works and letters. Taking full advantage, Crawford packs his sentences with the author’s own words, offering a careful account of Eliot that wisely avoids one overarching explanation for his genius.
Born in St Louis in 1888 “Tom”, as Crawford calls him throughout, was a walking contradiction: a bookish child who loved dancing to jazz; a philosopher who was also drawn to the symbolist French poetry of Jules Laforgue; a respectable young man who wrote obscene verses to his Harvard pals.
Soon after moving to England in 1915, he contracted a hasty marriage that quickly turned miserable. (He wasn’t helped that his goatish friend Betrand Russell seduced his wife soon after the wedding.) But with the help of Ezra Pound, Eliot gathered images from his reading—Richard Wagner’s librettos, Renaissance poetry, the Buddha’s Fire Sermon—and spliced them alongside childhood memories and London observations to create a new form of poetry. Crawford’s book, the first of two volumes, cannot explain so fathomless a poem as The Waste Land, but it allows us to see more clearly than ever the circumstances under which this revolutionary work was created.
