Young Eliot

Starred review from January 26, 2015
Drawing extensively on new interviews, original research, and previously undisclosed memoirs, biographer Crawford (Scotland’s Books) offers the first book devoted to T.S. Eliot’s youth, painting a vividly colorful portrait of the artist as a young man. In exhaustive, and often exhausting, detail, Crawford chronicles, year-by-year, the young Eliot: his childhood, divided between St. Louis and Massachusetts; his painful shyness and love of dancing; his years at Harvard, his post-Harvard experiences in Europe and first, though unrequited, love ; his marriage to Vivienne Haigh-Wood; and his early publications of poetry, leading up to The Waste Land’s release in 1922. Eliot’s affinity for the sacred is traced to his upbringing in an “idealistic, bookish household,” to his keen ear for St. Louis’s rich confluence of music—both opera and jazz—and to his love of birdsong. Readers also learn about Eliot’s difficult marriage to Haigh-Wood, which brought neither of them happiness, though Eliot wrote to Ezra Pound that “it brought the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land.” Crawford’s masterly biography, with its great depth, attention to detail, and close reading of the youthful Eliot’s writings, is likely to become the definitive account of the great poet’s early years. Agent: David Godwin, David Godwin Associates.

Starred review from January 1, 2015
A masterful biography of the canonical modernist.In this first of a proposed two-volume life of T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), Crawford (Modern Scottish Literature/Univ. of St. Andrews; On Glasgow and Edinburgh, 2013, etc.) examines the poet's youth and early career, ending with the publication of The Waste Land in 1922. Drawing on sources not available to previous biographers, the author fashions an authoritative, nuanced portrait. Eliot was the seventh child of a wealthy St. Louis family whose provincialism he was determined to escape. Drawn to poetry even as a teenager, he fell into "an intense engagement" with the 19th-century Romantics. At Harvard, where he was a mediocre student, he discovered the French symbolists, especially Jules Laforgue, whose poems possessed "a compulsively insinuating music" that Eliot began to imitate. Not surprisingly, he yearned to go to Paris, a plan his doting, overprotective mother sternly discouraged. Nevertheless, in 1910, Eliot sailed for Europe, enrolling in classes with the groundbreaking sociologist Emile Durkheim, psychologist Pierre Janet and philosopher Henri Bergson, thinkers who stimulated Eliot's ideas "about the intersection between religious mysticism, asceticism, and hysteria in 'primitive' and modern life." In 1914, he again left America, this time for a year at Oxford that proved life-changing: He met Ezra Pound, who responded to "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" with exuberant praise. Pound opened doors, and by 1920, married, living in London, editing and reviewing while working full-time at a bank, Eliot had become "one of the best networked younger figures in London literary publishing." Crawford illuminates Eliot's tormented first marriage to the volatile Vivienne Haigh-Wood; his complicated relationships with Bertrand Russell and Virginia Woolf; and his struggle to find an American publisher. Most crucially, he explores the swirling aesthetic and philosophical forces that shaped Eliot's startling poetry. Although Crawford modestly claims that his biography is neither "official" nor definitive, it is unlikely to be surpassed.

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February 15, 2015

This work is much more complete than other well-received T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) biographies (e.g., Peter Ackroyd's from 1984 and Lyndall Gordon's from 1998) because Crawford (modern Scottish literature, Univ. of St. Andrews; Scotland's Books), writing after Eliot's widow's death in 2012, has had access to primary sources that were off-limits to earlier researchers. Nonetheless, the author notes, this work, for which a second volume is planned, is not an official biography. Crawford demonstrates how Eliot's American upbringing and his later experiences in France and England helped make him "the most influential and resounding poetic voice of the 20th century." Published just after the 50th anniversary of Eliot's death (January 4), the book covers his privileged Unitarian childhood following his birth in St. Louis through his relocation to England and the 1922 publication of The Waste Land, considered the most important 20th-century poem in English. Key elements explored here include Eliot's precipitous and disastrous first marriage and its effects on his health and work, collaboration with Ezra Pound to modernize English literature, and involvement with the Bloomsbury and Garsington cultural establishments. Intermingled with material about his life are detailed accounts of Eliot's poetry, prose, and criticism produced during this period. VERDICT Wonderful for serious Eliot scholars. [See Prepub Alert, 9/29/14.]--Denise J. Stankovics, Vernon, CT

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Starred review from February 15, 2015
The man whose The Bard (2009) dispelled the myths and mists about Robert Burns now publishes the first volume of a biography every bit as magisterial on the most consequential anglophone poet of the twentieth century. Indeed, revelation and enlightenment begin with the title, for the predominant conception of T. S. Eliot is that he was never young. Yet the milestone toward which this book proceeds, the epoch-making long (but hardly plethoric) modernist poem, The Waste Land (1922), was the work of a still-young manmoreover, tissue of allusions that it is, a work of memories amassed during an intense, busy youth. To keep the fact of Eliot's early life constantly before us, Crawford always calls him Tom, as his family and friends did. Drawing on, besides the poet-critic's published writing, an immense body of letters and other documents, Crawford maintains focus on the gestation of the poetry while Tom the boy, teenager, collegian, doctoral student at Oxford, and young banker dealt with handicaps (a hernia), learned sailing and tennis, enjoyed friendships, traveled, and fatefully married the chronic invalid, Vivien Haigh-Wood. All the while, he studied world literature and forged an understanding of tradition that remains among his greatest gifts to world culture. It's hard to imagine a literary biography of greater merit being published this year.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)