The Sandy Springs library at times places recent acquisitions directly in the regular shelves, without a stay on the new book racks. The other day, browsing in the British literature section, I came upon Volume 3 of T.S. Eliot's letters, released only this year. Unless I missed it, the collection was never displayed in the all too skimpy new books section at the front of the library. This seems to especially occur with books on poetry and literature, so I have gotten used to hunting among the shelves of older books for new treasures such as the Eliot letters.
The letters cover 1926-27, when Eliot's first wife, Vivien, was sinking further into madness. "The Wasteland" was already a sensation, and most of Eliot's energies are devoted to editing The Criterion, a literary journal that never received wide readership. In these years, Eliot is also acquiring British citizenship and joining the Anglican church.
Many of the letters concern his editorial duties at the literary journal, which shifts from quarterly to monthly publication. In the early part of the book, he's concerned with Vivien's illness; later, after she's committed to an institution, she virtually disappears. He writes to a dizzying variety of the era's literary figures, many of them forgotten. Of interest is his friendship with the flamboyantly gay Jean Cocteau, who makes a brief early appearance, and his flirty tone with Virginia Woolf.
Vivien's letters are heartbreaking; Eliot's often dry and rigid. He himself is in poor mental health; an anecdote from Aldous Huxley mentions a pale and haunted Eliot downing six gins at lunch. Like a bad odor in the drawing room, many of the letters, especially those to close male chums, display a dismaying anti-Semitism and racism expressed with crude jests about black people.
The letters reveal a witty, cosmopolitan man who despite his problems enjoys the swirl of lunches and teas, literary gossip and frequent trips to the continent. Although the letters rarely reveal his poetic and critical principles in depth, they through his mind give a reading of the era's literary culture, with its anxieties, preoccupations and appalling prejudices.
In his role as Criterion editor, his rejection notices are direct, pungent and barbed with constructive criticism. Here's a jab from one to Allen Tate refusing some poems, "you are a little tied up in your own tail at present, but I am sure it will get straightened out in time."
Eliot's second wife, Valerie, with whom he found great happiness, was the editor of the first three volumes of the letters, along with John Haffenden. Valerie Eliot died earlier this year, with many decades of letters to come. Haffenden will likely carry on for the rest of Eliot's life through World War II, his winning the Noble Prize and his progression as a critic and playwright.
One stylistic note; the British edition of Volume 3 of Eliot's letters has a full length photo of him in a classic double-breasted suit, wearing a bowler and leaning jauntingly on an umbrella. The American edition has a sober portrait of him, perhaps taken at his office. The two photos together present two sides of the writer, one free-spirited and engaged with life's pleasures; the other brittlely serious and crippingly earnest. Both are well-represented here.
The collection shows a man journeying from the despair that brought forth "The Wasteland" to the religious serenity shown later in "The Four Quartets." That Vivien was left behind on that journey raises our sympathy, along with the realization that his self-preservation resulted from her abandonment.
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