The 2nd volume of Robert Crawford’s monumental biography of T S Eliot. Comprehensive, detailed and meticulously researched, this will surely remain the definitive biography for some time to come. Excellent literary scholarship accompanies a generous, balanced and non-judgmental account of Eliot’s life and work. Insightful and perceptive, this is biography at its best. It’s a long book, for sure, and with its accumulation of detail takes some dedication to plough through, but it’s well worth the effort and I very much enjoyed reading it.

Robert Crawford, in Eliot After The Waste Land, states he will let Eliot’s life “emerge in its sometimes complex, contradictory messiness”. “Contradictory” is a good description. On the one hand, the traditional perspective of Eliot is that of a dry man in a three-piece suit, whose statements give the impression of being carved into granite blocks and handed down to awe-stricken lesser intellects. On the other hand, Crawford quotes from a letter that:
poet Basil Bunting spotted Tom ‘at a party wearing an enormous cape lined with red and eyebrows painted green’. ‘”Thought the party need hotting up”,’ Tom remarked.
That is an image of TSE that not many of us will have pictured before.

Eliot may have appeared dry but this book shows his human side. He drank too much sometimes; he smoked too much all the time; he hurt people who cared for him and who thought their affection was reciprocated; he let off steam by writing obscene limericks.

It also shows the genesis of Four Quartets and how Eliot distilled personal experience and belief to write such great poems.

Crawford’s research has been phenomenal and I cannot imagine anyone ever taking that much trouble to write a further biography of TSE. Crawford has benefitted from the unsealing of Emily Hale’s archive of TSE’s letters at Princeton, fifty years after her death – and shows us that she was THE most important person in his life from 1923 – 1947 or so. However, she wasn’t as important to Tom as his religion. Eliot told Emily he cannot marry her because he will not divorce Vivien. Thus, when Vivian suddenly dies, Emily could reasonably expect that he would then marry her. However, Eliot decided that he could not face marriage again. Yet, a few years later, he married his secretary, Valerie Fletcher. That was obviously a full marriage, as we can see from some erotic writing.

The book really helps us to understand T.S. Eliot and thus to have a far greater appreciation of his poetry. If you have any interest in Eliot or his poetry, I cannot recommend it highly enough, I really can’t. As Crawford writes, “To different people he presented different selves” and we are greatly in Crawford’s debt for showing us all those different Eliots.

#EliotAfterTheWasteLand #NetGalley

THIS IS big book. In fact, taken with its first volume, Robert Crawford could be said to have produced the definitive biography of TS Eliot.
And it’s one that’s sorely needed. If there’s one literary figure of the 20th century in need of some re-evaluation then it’s surely Eliot. From the cliché of the Brylcreemed, pin-striped and bowler-hatted trying-so-very-hard-to-be-an-English-gent photographs and the humourlessly ardent Anglicism.
And then there’s the disastrous marriage to Vivien Haigh-Wood that after his death has led to Eliot being cast as hate figure of the literary patriarchy -- and immortalised in Michael Hastings’ rather one-sided play Tom and Viv, as well as the subsequent cinema adaptation.
But there’s obviously a lot more to Eliot than that and Crawford has very been very successful in redressing that balance.
Not that this is any sense a hatchet job of Vivien or a hagiography of Eliot. Crawford has been assiduously, even forensically, fair in his treatment of, I think, all the major players in this story and has been just as critical of both Eliot and Haigh-Wood as is demanded. Certainly, Vivien no longer emerges the cartoonish feminist martyr she has sometimes been portrayed and Eliot is no longer the heartless Prufrockian figure he often appears but Crawford certainly doesn’t shy away from engaging with Eliot’s anti-Semitism and his occasional sexism and nor does he try to wave it away as the ‘product of a different age’. Rather, we’re presented with two very complex, and actually pretty damaged, individuals who should really never have been married to each other in the first place.
Similarly, Crawford manages to get past Eliot’s monolithic Great Man of Letters reputation and present a vivid and often rather ordinary life that just happened to be punctuated by moments of great import for 20th century letters.
Something that was surprising was, in fact, this focus on Eliot the man rather than Eliot the poet. Given Crawford’s own career as a literary academic, not to mention a poet of some note, I would have expected, and probably liked, a little more critical analysis of Eliot’s work.
But on reflection, I think Crawford has made the right decision in focusing on the more human aspects of Eliot’s life (there is, after all, no shortage of critical study on Eliot.
What we do have is an evocative portrayal not just of a life but of a period in history and Crawford provides us with a highly readable account and analysis of a man who lived not only a rather dull, sedentary and emotionally stunted life compared to some of his contemporaries but who also produced some of the most important, and influential, poetry and criticism of the 20th century. I came away from reading this with some serious misconceptions around Eliot blown away and while I’m not sure I could say I like him as a human being any better, I’ve been given a greater sense of his life and psychology in its entirety and that is surely the mark of a great biography.

“The Waste Land” by T. S. Eliot is one of my favourite poems, although anyone who has read it will know that the epithet “poem” barely does it justice. Eliot stands virtually alone in the pantheon of British poetry, creating verse that challenged the conformity and traditions of the time.
I am a devotee of T. S. Eliot and I prepared for this book by reading Robert Crawford’s equally excellent first volume, 2015’s “Young Eliot: From St. Louis to The Waste Land”, in which he charted Eliot’s childhood and education, examining the eclectic (and often esoteric) influences on his burgeoning poetry that led to his epic poem. This second volume, entitled “Eliot After the Wasteland”, takes up Eliot’s life after the publication of that tumultuous, iconoclastic work; a period when he would write some of his most celebrated works, including “Four Quartets” and “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats” and several successful plays.
As author Robert Crawford states in the introduction to this second volume of his biography, he proffers a deep dive into the life of T. S. Eliot; not only of the celebrated poet but also to the secret life of “Tom” as his friends and family knew him. Throughout, Crawford refers to Eliot as Tom. With unprecedented access to surviving letters and interviews with people who knew Eliot at the time (indeed, Crawford is the last biographer to interview anyone who knew Eliot when “The Waste Land” was first published). This is very much a book about T. S. Eliot the man. Crawford paints an unvarnished portrait of Eliot, brilliant but human. He does not ignore Eliot’s failings in favour of a hagiography; Tom’s bawdy racist poetry and almost casual anti-Semitism will no doubt shock the modern reader.
It is easy to dive back into Crawford’s work and continue Eliot’s life story, who now feels almost like an old friend thanks to the detail with which the first book brought him to life. The distinguished gentleman gracing the cover is T. S. Eliot as we know him; a world away from the nervous-looking youth from the first volume.
This volume picks up the Eliot’s story from the end of the previous volume with little preamble, so while there is no absolutely pressing need to read that book first, some readers may feel like they should. This is merely an observation, not a criticism: having read the first volume, I can put myself in the shoes of someone picking up this book fresh. And as the second volume of this work, it is to be expected. Crawford offers intelligent analysis of Eliot’s poetry throughout but confesses that this isn’t the main thrust of his biography.
There are many developments in Tom’s life in this book - his continued yet hidden feelings for another woman, Emily Hale; the protracted breakdown of his marriage; the subsequent death of his wife, Vivien; his life-changing involvement with the fledgling publishing company Faber & Gwyer (soon to become Faber & Faber, which publishes his first book of poems), his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism and full British citizenship. Indeed, religion is one of the main driving forces of Eliot’s life; so too is his surprisingly complicated love-life. But above all, the main constant and unwelcome companion of Eliot’s life was Vivien’s and his own ill-health. Sadly, in the latter part of his life this would continue, especially for Vivien. There are unflinching passages about her suffering, and also of Tom’s - one doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry at how often Tom gets struck down by influenza or some such ailment. He agonises over guilt that he may have in some way caused Vivien’s illness, even metaphorically “killing” her.
Obviously, the Second World War looms large in this period of Eliot’s life, and we feel the national tension grow as conflict and even invasion becomes ever more likely. There is a lot of interesting detail about Eliot’s experiences as an ARP warden and it is fascinating to read how the war developed on an almost weekly basis through the prism of his life. By the end of the book, Eliot has become a major celebrity, warranting front page splashes in the Daily Mail when he married his much younger secretary, Valerie Fletcher, and finally finding happiness (and not a little eroticism).
“Eliot After the Wasteland” is a remarkable achievement and I enjoyed it immensely, and will return to both it and its predecessor. However, there are a couple of factors that make this book an often difficult read. Firstly, Crawford frequently mentions that various organisations, collections of writing, even the recipients of books from Tom, contained few or no women. This may warrant a single mention, but continually drawing attention to it as some kind of grievous sin almost a century later is egregious, and can only be due to the author wishing to score a few Brownie points with a progressive modern readership.
Secondly, like its predecessor, this book is a weighty tome that includes a lot of painstaking detail on every aspect of Eliot’s life, both literary and personal, (in the case of Vivien’s illnesses, rather embarrassingly so) and as such the text can be a little longwinded at times: expect to read about every illness, night out and holiday the poet ever had.
Criticisms aside, T. S. Eliot was a very intelligent and complex person, often self-absorbed, and his life-story requires a book of this calibre. Despite many highbrow passages, the book is very readable and there are moments of great poignancy - this is biography done right. “Eliot After the Wasteland” is a superb continuation of a groundbreaking biography of T. S. Eliot that is as close to definitive as we are ever likely to get.