Eliot After The Waste Land by Robert Crawford,

JONATHAN CAPE, £25. REVIEW BY STUART KELLY

Near the beginning of the second volume of Robert Crawford’s magisterial biography of TS Eliot, the problem for the biographer becomes clear. Eliot wrote, ironically in a letter: “If I could destroy every letter I have ever written in my life I would do so before I die. I should like to leave as little biography as possible”.

Eliot did vacillate from this position, but there was a perpetual reticence to his life. Crawford is the first biographer to have access to Eliot’s correspondence with Emily Hale, which was sealed for 50 years, and there is therefore a tranche of new detail, speculation and inference possible. This volume sees Eliot’s separation from his first wife, Vivien, who was eventually sectioned.

All the while Eliot was romancing, in an epistolary form, an old acquaintance Emily Hale. The letters are revealing: Eliot can seem off-puttingly priggish as he castigates her for taking Anglican communion although she was a Unitarian. Theology also inflects the more emotionally turbulent side of their relationship, as Eliot made it clear that his marriage to Vivien was indissoluble. He refused to divorce her, and even after her death would not re-marry Hale.

All of this is interesting and Crawford handles it judiciously. Eliot, however, is remembered as one of the greatest poets of the 20th century, not for his haphazard romantic life. Crawford places the Four Quartets in the context of war and depression, as much a work of ruination as The Waste Land but with a searing and redemptive quality. The problem for any biographer is after the Four Quartets, the poetry ceases.

I remember speaking with a former girlfriend’s grandmother who remembered reading Eliot for the first time. What she recollected was the sense of shock. “I grow old… I grow old.. / I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled,” she recited from memory, adding: “Well, we thought, that’s just not poetry”. Eliot, in some ways, created a whole new key of poetry.