Eliot After "The Waste Land" by Robert Crawford

Eliot after The Waste Land
By Robert Crawford
Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2022

Robert Crawford’s excellent, definitive two-volume life of the great poet T. S. Eliot started with a big, generous book called Young Eliot, which chronicled Eilot’s life until roughly what Crawford convincingly portrays as its dividing-line, the publication of “The Waste Land” in 1922. The concluding volume, a hefty thing out now from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is called Eliot after The Waste Land and fills in the story down to the poet’s death in 1965. 

It’s easy to imagine Crawford considering the natural title to a volume following Young Eliot — that is, Old Eliot — and then stubbornly discarding it, worried about casting such a somber shroud over a 600-page book. But it won’t take even the gloomiest reader more than a dozen pages to realize that a shroud by any other name still fills the End Notes with sources for every stomach ache, every rotted tooth, every petty Saturday afternoon betrayal. Even though Eliot is well shy of middle age at the start of this book, it’s still very much Old Eliot from first page to last. 

Crawford faithfully notes Eliot’s one and only meeting with F. Scott Fitzgerald, telling readers that the two men enjoyed each other’s company — and showing us that they demonstrated this in the way writers always do, by scorning each other the minute they were out of the room. “Tom thought Fitzgerald, whose marriage to the mentally troubled Zelda was tempestuous and whose alcoholism was becoming chronic, “a very sick man,” while Fitzgerald thought Tom “Very broken and sad + shrunk inside.” 

Leaving aside the undoubtable truth of Eliot’s assessment (and leaving aside Crawford’s commentary; Fitzgerald had at least as many mental troubles as his “tempestuous” wife, and his own alcoholism was yards and yards more chronic), readers are confronted likewise with the truth of Fitzgerald’s: sad + shrunk inside. The Waste Land, Crawford writes with his customary insight, “speaks of ruin, broken-ness, pain and waste, but, substantially thanks to [Ezra] Pound’s editorial guidance, it possesses form and order, repeatedly and tellingly aligning past and present.” Pound crops up often in these chapters, predictably since Eliot often championed him, but all that ruin, broken-ness, pain and waste crops up much more often. The lives of poets often make for grim reading, and in this as in so much else, Eliot often outdoes his peers and progenitors.

These are the years of celebrity, in which the grand old man of letters becomes steadily grander and older. They’re the years of Eliot’s association with the Criterion, the “elite periodical whose subscribers numbered only ‘about 200’, even if a few hundred more copies were sold in shops” (“he did not always feel sufficiently compensated,” Crawford somewhat unnecessarily adds). And throughout, thanks to the biographer’s immense research, readers get a seamless combination of sweep and creep, broader narrative stapled at regular intervals with Tom’s incessant griping:

His new poem’s desperate bleakness was answered by his latent religious commitment. Intensified by recent meetings with Emily, the poem’s frustrated longings would spur his willed, disconcerting transformation of her into a symbol invested with spiritual yearning. While he considered himself bound to his disastrous marriage, separation from Vivien brought temporary relief, encouraging his search for fresh purpose. In France his accommodation had ‘damp patches in the walls’. ‘The Cote d’Azur is DAMNED COLD’, he complained that December. Yet his enlivening visit to Rapallo, and the chance to ponder his forthcoming Clark Lectures initiated a period of intense composition.

But this is mainly a story of decline, reaching its purest distillation naturally once actual decline is the order of the day. When Eliot has a dinner with the great Stravinsky in 1963, late in the book, Stravinsky remembers that the poet slouched over his food for most of the meal, only perking up long enough to offer a toast: that he and Stravinsky manage to hold on living for another decade. (“But Tom was worried,” Crawford somewhat unnecessarily adds; this time he’s worrying about what kind of estate he’ll be leaving to his young wife, but by this point it really could have been anything).

“In a book which takes him from his time as an exhausted bank employee during the emotional turmoil of his early thirties, then through his years as a middle-aged firewatcher in bombed wartime London to the personal surprises of his eminent old age, I try to present Tom Eliot’s life and work without undue moralising, letting readers reach their own conclusions,” Crawford writes. “My aim is not to neaten his life, or reduce it to one expository template, but to let it emerge in its sometimes complex, contradictory messiness. ”  In this and in much else, Crawford completely succeeds. His two volumes combine to form the best life of TS Eliot by such a wide margin that it’s difficult to imagine any future biography equaling, let alone surpassing it. It’s not a happy story, but it’s complex, contradictory messiness is almost hypnotizing. 

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. He’s a books columnist for the Bedford Times Press and the Books editor of Big Canoe News in Georgia, and his website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.