The mistake of making a statement that can be shown to be factually incorrect is a grave one. I begin this essay with an apology for being guilty of such an error.
In my essay, “Some Books in My Library”, published in Books& Authors on September 11, 2011, I mentioned The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume I 1898-1922, edited by Valerie Eliot, as one of the books in my library and added this parenthetical remark: “(to date, there has been no second volume).” A fortnight later I discovered that I was wrong for there it was, on the bookseller’s site when I went to order a new book of Beckett’s letters: The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Vol. 2: 1923-25, published by Faber and Faber in 2009 in the UK, and by Yale University Press in 2011 in the US.
Proceeding then to purchase Eliot’s second volume, I discovered that Volume I, the first edition from 1988, published by Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, had been reissued by Yale University Press in a revised edition in 2011, and contained an additional 200 letters that had come to light since 1988. So, I purchased this, too, and have now read this volume and Volume II, which contains the letters written by Eliot and also some by his correspondents during the very difficult years of his life, 1923-25.
Both the volumes — handsome hardbound books, nearly 900 pages each — are edited with scrupulous care by Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton, with John Haffendon as the general editor of the series.
A writer’s letters offer us three levels of interest: biographical information that sometimes proves elucidatory in our estimation of his work, the development of his aesthetic ideas, and a vision of his total achievement which, for the next generation of writers, becomes the starting point for a new aesthetic. With Eliot, the ongoing portrait of the poet suggested in our minds by the letters elicits our sympathetic concern. We see the suffering person struggling to transform a deep personal discord into an expression that transcends the confining boundaries of the individual self; we appreciate how much his extensive study of the past contributes to what we perceive to be original in his work; and for those of us who want to be writers, the letters of a great writer are not only a source of inspiration (for, like us, he too was an ordinary human being and in our own struggle we can draw strength from his example) but also an education in the theory and practice of the art.
Ideally, as is proved by literary history with such examples as Homer and Shakespeare, we should need no biographical information to appreciate a literary work; however, there are important exceptions where our understanding is heightened by some knowledge of the writer’s life. For example, with Eliot, our reading of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is enriched by knowing that he wrote the poem when he was working on his doctoral dissertation on the philosophy of F. H. Bradley, and not to appreciate the epistemological sub-text suggested by the poem’s haunting phrasing of “For I have known them all already, known them all”, with the repeated emphasis on ‘known’, is to miss an essential thought in Prufrock’s mind. And our understanding of some of Eliot’s work, especially The Waste Land, will be deepened by knowledge of his and his wife Vivien’s mental and physical breakdowns during the 1920s.
Of course, in the end all great poetry rises above the personal trauma that might have occasioned it and a reader over- impressed by an ad hominem analysis will have only a narrow understanding of the work. But to have experienced the depth of the poet’s private anguish undoubtedly adds an important level to our understanding and enriches the work: there is never a precise correlation between an experience and its literary rendition but an intuitive resonance gets transmitted that enhances the reader’s appreciation.
Eliot received a travelling fellowship when he was a student at Harvard and he decided to spend a year at Oxford to continue his graduate work in philosophy. The year was 1914, he was 26 years old, and seemed headed for a career as a professor of philosophy in some provincial American university. However, within weeks of his arrival in England the First World War broke out. Eliot ended up remaining in England for the rest of his life. He married Vivien Haigh-Wood in 1915, and, her health proving unstable, realised he needed a job to support her. He became a school teacher, but finding teaching unpromising as a career, joined Lloyds Bank in 1917. There, as he wrote to his mother, working in the bank’s Colonial and Foreign Department, he was kept “busy tabulating balance-sheets of foreign banks”, and added, “Anything to do with money — especially foreign money — is fascinating, and I hope to learn a little about finance while I am [at the bank].” His wife expressed astonishment to his mother that Eliot was considering “taking up Banking as his money-making career!” She and several friends, including Ezra Pound, thought it “the most horrible catastrophe”.
But unlike the friends — Pound, Bertrand Russell, Leonard and Virginia Woolf — Eliot was poor and without private means. Some years later, he would receive financial support from his family in America but during the years that led to the publication of The Waste Land in 1922, he was constantly worried about money, and especially felt the pressure of having to look after Vivien, who needed to be treated by specialist doctors and who he feared would be destitute should he himself die before her. He remained with the bank for eight years, working daily from 9.15 to 5.30.
But his working day did not end at 5.30. He spent his evenings writing and giving lectures, writing book reviews, working as the assistant editor of The Egoist in the earlier years and later as the editor of The Criterion. Determined that The Criterion should be the finest literary magazine in the western world, he carried on a correspondence with the leading European writers — often in their own language! — soliciting contributions from them and then, sometimes when he could not find a translator, doing the translation himself. He was barely 30 years old and already knew who his important European contemporaries were and read them in the original. What is even more impressive is that his judgment was invariably correct: looking back nearly a century later, one observes how the writers of whom he writes approvingly in his letters (example James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence) are firmly situated in the canonical tradition while those he dismissed (Conrad Aiken, Hilda Doolittle) are clearly of no consequence. He was correct, too, in praising Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, in significantly remaining silent about Hemingway, admiring Marianne Moore and maintaining a low opinion of Robert Frost whom he found not “modern enough”. Furthermore, the European writers he championed, and especially the French Paul Valéry and St-John Perse, whom he translated, proved to be central to the modernist sensibility that shaped much of 20th century literature.
Both at the bank and at home he was often without any assistance. He wrote to his mother in 1920, about “receiving hundreds of reports from branches of the bank, classifying them, picking out the points that needed immediate attention, interviewing other banks and Government Departments”, working by himself “through chaos” and then spending the evening at home, “working on a longish essay on Contemporary Criticism of Poetry which is to go to the printer this week.” When editing The Criterion, he was without a secretary or office at the beginning, and worked in his own small flat (with Vivien either sick or away convalescing in a country cottage), attending to the voluminous correspondence with the contributing writers as well as the business aspects of running the magazine.
The relentless labour took its toll. He wrote to Sydney Schiff on March 12, 1923: “I have refused always to recognise that there are any limitations to my capacity for work and now I am faced with the consequences.” On the same day, he wrote to John Quinn: “I have sunk the whole of my strength in this confounded paper, when I ought to have been minding my business and doing my own writing.” A year later, the bank promoted him, making him the head of the department, which, though he now had a staff of clerks to help him, burdened him “to read a dozen foreign papers a day… and be an authority on foreign bonds”; at the same time, the growing international prominence of The Criterion made his work on the magazine more demanding while at home Vivien’s condition worsened.
All that time there was a part deep within his mind that pondered the aesthetic question of what the poet, who had already written The Waste Land, must write next. He said in a letter to Herbert Read (October 18, 1924), “When I write, I must write to the limit of my own convictions and aspirations: but I don’t want to impose these on others, any more than I should be willing to reduce myself to the common denominator of my colleagues.” What would come next would be the next great phase of his work: Ash Wednesday, Murder in the Cathedral and Four Quartets. His promotion at the bank offered him the financial security for which he was desperate but left him little time for literature. Geoffrey Faber rescued him from the bank by offering him a directorship in the publishing house that became Faber & Faber — an astonishing event in the history of publishing, that a publisher should be so eager to have the leading poet of the age as an editor that he offers him a directorship.
Some of Geoffrey Faber’s letters are included in Volume II, as are many from Eliot’s mother and brother in America and from Vivien when she was away from him. The editorial decision to include them was a wise one, for they broaden the context in which we understand the life and work of the poet. Vivien’s letters are especially fine; she writes in a chatty, informal prose replete with italicised phrases and unexpected initial capitals that convey the voice of a person who is emotionally excited, whose phrases have a musical ring to them and echo her mood which is now jubilant, now sad: she seems to write as she thinks.
The second volume concludes soon after Eliot joined Faber at the end of 1925, marking a momentous change in his life. No doubt there will be more volumes of his correspondence from the next 40 years of his life; in the meanwhile, the first two volumes already contain much that will enlarge a scholar’s understanding and inspire younger poets. Of the many universal truths to be discovered in Eliot’s letters, the one he expressed to Ford Madox Ford (October 11, 1923) is particularly inspiring: writing about what he called “the age of mistaken nationalism”, he remarked, “But the more contact, the more free exchange, there can be between the small number of intelligent people of every race or nation, the more likelihood of general contribution to what we call literature.”
The writer is a novelist and teaches English at The University of Texas at Austin
The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Vol. 2: 1923-25 (LETTERS) Edited by Valerie Eliot & Hugh Haughton Faber and Faber, UK, ISBN 9780571140817 912pp. £35