Jeremy Noel-Tod reads the letters of TS Eliot and discovers the inner turmoil of the author of The Waste Land
By Jeremy Noel-Tod
Published: 6:30AM GMT 06 Nov 2009
"Practically, one crucifies oneself and entertains drawing rooms and lounges.” This sentence by T S Eliot on the reception of his extraordinary, agonised poem, The Waste Land (1922), is a thrilling moment in the long-awaited second volume of his letters. It rings like a line from one of his earlier poems, in which suffering figures suddenly see themselves in the absurd light of polite society. “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons,” rued Eliot’s alter ego J Alfred Prufrock in 1917. Eight years later, he might have added: “and headed notepaper”.
The first volume of Eliot’s letters, which covered the period from early youth up to both “Prufrock” and The Waste Land, appeared 21 years ago. It was edited, as he requested, by his second wife, Valerie Eliot, formerly his secretary at Faber & Faber. The sequel only covers another three years, up to Eliot’s professional move from Lloyd’s Bank to the publishing house. But it was evidently proving an overwhelming task, and she has now been joined by the scholar Hugh Haughton, who has also revised and expanded the first volume by about 200 pages.
Eliot’s original wish to leave his letters unpublished was unrealistic. The world’s most eminent man of letters could hardly expect his correspondence to be buried with him, not least because this would have required the excavation of a small churchyard. By asking his young widow to oversee their appearance, however, Eliot presumably hoped for some discretion, such as he had already exercised by burning his early letters to his parents. The problem this created was a widespread suspicion that the most revealing material – especially in relation to his unhappy first marriage, and his debated anti-Semitism – was being suppressed.
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