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T. S. Eliot: A Short Biography
Biographical writing about Eliot is in a more confused and contested state than is the case with any other major twentieth-century writer. No major biography has been released since the publication of his early poems, Inventions of the March Hare, in 1996, which radically altered the reading public's perception of Eliot. There have been attempts to turn the American woman Emily Hale into the beloved woman of Eliot's middle years; and Eliot has also been blamed for the instability of his first wife and declared a closet homosexual. This biography frees Eliot from such distortions, as well as from his cold and unemotional image. It offers a sympathetic study of his first marriage which does not attempt to blame, but to understand; it shows how Eliot's poetry can be read for its revelations about his inner world. Eliot once wrote that every poem was an epitaph, meaning that it was the inscription on the tombstone of the experience which it commemorated. His poetry shows, however, that the deepest experiences of his life would not lie down and die, and that he felt condemned to write about them.John Worthen is the acclaimed author of D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider.
320 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2009
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
September 5, 2012
The publication date (2009) is significant. Worthen is writing after other biographers of Eliot, after ‘Painted Shadow’ and after the publication of “Inventions of the March Hare”.
All new biographies are to an extent revisions of previous ones, but Worthen takes this one stage further and this is not so much a biography as a critique of Eliot biography, a stripping back of assumptions to what he perceives to be the evidence. There’s a sense that he is lining up the various versions of T.S. Eliot and knocking them down one by one to leave his preferred version last man standing.
He makes extensive use of Virginia Woolf’s diaries and the poetry, and his central thesis is summed up in his final paragraph:
‘I have attempted in this biography to reveals the disturbing and at tiems terrifying openness to moral, verbal, emotional and sexual ‘actuality’ which had for so long, made him such a terribly unhappy and vulnerable individual, but which also helped him be such a very great poet (p234).’
Which leaves out the argument running through the book that Worthen wants Eliot’s first marriage to be central to his poetry. He argues that Vivienne was crucial to both it and Eliot, allowing for/or causing the fracture between the prim young man he was trained to be and the poet who could write the Waste Land.
Without Pound and Viv, no Great Tom the Poet.
‘Painted Shadow’ gets the critical handling it needs, the claim for the ménage a trois with Russell is dismissed and the ‘evidence’ for Eliot’s homosexuality paraded in other biographies is raised, discussed and then dismissed. The conclusion:
‘In spite of Seymour-Jones’ relentless assertions that these relationships and alliances were taking place –there is not actually a scrap of hard evidence for any such alliances…”
and
‘At the heart of all the arguments I have seen for Eliot’s homosexuality lies a series of fabrications , half truths and suppositions…But evidence for his homosexuality does not exist, whereas evidence for his being a troubled hetero-sexual exists in quantity.’
At the end of the day, what remains is the poems. Who or what TSE was, whether he was anti Semitic, misogynist (until his second marriage), homosexual, heterosexual or asexual, whether his outrageous later statements were the result of conscious outsider position taking or genuinely held beliefs, remains and will remain a matter for opinion and his next biographer. Who will probably benefit from this book if only in being reminded to stick to the evidence.
All new biographies are to an extent revisions of previous ones, but Worthen takes this one stage further and this is not so much a biography as a critique of Eliot biography, a stripping back of assumptions to what he perceives to be the evidence. There’s a sense that he is lining up the various versions of T.S. Eliot and knocking them down one by one to leave his preferred version last man standing.
He makes extensive use of Virginia Woolf’s diaries and the poetry, and his central thesis is summed up in his final paragraph:
‘I have attempted in this biography to reveals the disturbing and at tiems terrifying openness to moral, verbal, emotional and sexual ‘actuality’ which had for so long, made him such a terribly unhappy and vulnerable individual, but which also helped him be such a very great poet (p234).’
Which leaves out the argument running through the book that Worthen wants Eliot’s first marriage to be central to his poetry. He argues that Vivienne was crucial to both it and Eliot, allowing for/or causing the fracture between the prim young man he was trained to be and the poet who could write the Waste Land.
Without Pound and Viv, no Great Tom the Poet.
‘Painted Shadow’ gets the critical handling it needs, the claim for the ménage a trois with Russell is dismissed and the ‘evidence’ for Eliot’s homosexuality paraded in other biographies is raised, discussed and then dismissed. The conclusion:
‘In spite of Seymour-Jones’ relentless assertions that these relationships and alliances were taking place –there is not actually a scrap of hard evidence for any such alliances…”
and
‘At the heart of all the arguments I have seen for Eliot’s homosexuality lies a series of fabrications , half truths and suppositions…But evidence for his homosexuality does not exist, whereas evidence for his being a troubled hetero-sexual exists in quantity.’
At the end of the day, what remains is the poems. Who or what TSE was, whether he was anti Semitic, misogynist (until his second marriage), homosexual, heterosexual or asexual, whether his outrageous later statements were the result of conscious outsider position taking or genuinely held beliefs, remains and will remain a matter for opinion and his next biographer. Who will probably benefit from this book if only in being reminded to stick to the evidence.
February 15, 2016
Just finished translating it into Catalan, now going for the Spanish version, soon in your local bookstore!
Probably not the best introduction to Eliot if you know nothing about him, but definitely a very good introduction to his poetry, read in combination with his life.
Probably not the best introduction to Eliot if you know nothing about him, but definitely a very good introduction to his poetry, read in combination with his life.
December 22, 2020
Did you know that Eliot was born in St. Louis, Mo? I saw “Cats” there at the Muni several years ago. I picked this book up by mistake, but decided to read it anyway, and am glad I did. Poets have always been pretty incomprehensible to me, but it’s interesting to see how their lives and their poetry intertwine, and this book does that very well.
February 28, 2023
T S Eliot is my tenth cousin; I figured I should learn something about him. This book hit all the high points of his personal life, plus added some reviews of his best-known works. Very informative.
November 29, 2023
' (27)
"The role Eliot was adopting (as he adopted so many: 'I must borrow every changing shape / To find expression')" (30)
"But Vivienne [Eliot] ... challenged him constantly, in particular his carefulness and restraint, his 'subtle, splitting mind,' his passivity and despairs, and people remembered this about her (and sometimes against her). She was sexually provocative, and made him feel and react: she saw do it that he ' *lived* through' new experiences. I suspect that he first allowed himself to feel and show real anger with her, something he had previously always suppressed; later in his life, people were certainly aware of his savage capacity for rage. In 1933 he would write how our lives are 'mostly a constant evasion of ourselves', but it seems that, married to Vivien, he could not help confronting himself and those 'deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being.' " (57)
"Eliot was not trying to put the clock back, in his stress on tradition: he wanted to alter the way we think about the past, and what we value about it, by becoming surer about what it is that we value in what he called 'the conscious present.'" (73)
Eliot writing about Donne's poetry in 1926 (words the author argues actually fit his own work better than Donne's: "words 'like a strange kaleidoscope of feeling, with suggested images, suggested conceits' ... 'The feeling is always melting, changing, into another feeling' 'every image has a particular feel to it.' " (81)
"His poetry remained the one place where he could, as it were, be at home and voice what otherwise seemed an entangled mess of hopes, failures, and limited successes." (88)
Vivien Eliot "would later boast happily how she was 'very *hypnotic, always was.* Could be 1st class MEDIUM.'" (103)
aboulie (French) noun. absence of will-power or decisiveness. (utilisee 108)
"He [Eliot] explained how 'I wasn't even bothering if I understood what I was saying,' and he preferred to believe that the experienced reader 'does not bother about understanding' either. For he was at last engaged in what, three years earlier, he had called 'thinking with our feelings,' a state in which he believed that 'the "psychic material" tends to create its own form.' " (107)
" 'These fragments I have shored against my ruins' says the narrator [in The Waste Land's Section V 'What the Thunder Said'] - but they *are* fragments, and the ruins are only ruins, even though they are still standing." (110) ("I see myself, I see myself, said the Narcissus...")
"Eliot would speak in 1933 about 'that at which I have long aimed, in writing poetry; to write poetry which would be essentially poetry, with nothing poetic about it, poetry standing naked in its bare bones.' " (126)
from 'Sweeney Agonistes' verse play by T S Eliot:
'I gotta use words when I talk to you / But if you understand or if you don't / That's nothing to me and nothing to you / We all gotta do what we gotta do ...' (126-7)
from 'Sweeney Agonistes'
'Any old tree for me will do / Any old wood is just as good' (127)
"The drinking was of course partly to do with the unhappiness and stress; but at times it would alos have been a way of attempting to lower his level of conscious intelligence and awareness, to try and get into something more like a dream state, in which (ideally) he might be able to write what he called 'poetry so transparent that we should not see the poetry, but that which we are meant to see through the poetry.'" (129)
'Lips that would kiss / form prayers to broken stone' from The Hollow Men, T S E
"one early review had described it [The Waste Land] as 'so much waste paper'" (134)
"As was natural for men of his age, background and education, he had spent his formative years with other men; and if he had fallen in love with anyone when young (a common enough experience) it might well have been with a boy or with a man." (136)
"As he [TS] remarked in 1933, when in love 'we do not so much see the person' as recognise the prescence of something external, 'which sets in motion these new and delightful feelings.'" (137)
"At the heart of all the arguments I have seen for Eliot's homosexuality lies a series of fabrications, half ruths and suppositions." (140)
"But evidence for his homosexuality does not exist, whereas evidence for his being a troubled heterosexual exists in quantity." (140- 1)
"The role Eliot was adopting (as he adopted so many: 'I must borrow every changing shape / To find expression')" (30)
"But Vivienne [Eliot] ... challenged him constantly, in particular his carefulness and restraint, his 'subtle, splitting mind,' his passivity and despairs, and people remembered this about her (and sometimes against her). She was sexually provocative, and made him feel and react: she saw do it that he ' *lived* through' new experiences. I suspect that he first allowed himself to feel and show real anger with her, something he had previously always suppressed; later in his life, people were certainly aware of his savage capacity for rage. In 1933 he would write how our lives are 'mostly a constant evasion of ourselves', but it seems that, married to Vivien, he could not help confronting himself and those 'deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being.' " (57)
"Eliot was not trying to put the clock back, in his stress on tradition: he wanted to alter the way we think about the past, and what we value about it, by becoming surer about what it is that we value in what he called 'the conscious present.'" (73)
Eliot writing about Donne's poetry in 1926 (words the author argues actually fit his own work better than Donne's: "words 'like a strange kaleidoscope of feeling, with suggested images, suggested conceits' ... 'The feeling is always melting, changing, into another feeling' 'every image has a particular feel to it.' " (81)
"His poetry remained the one place where he could, as it were, be at home and voice what otherwise seemed an entangled mess of hopes, failures, and limited successes." (88)
Vivien Eliot "would later boast happily how she was 'very *hypnotic, always was.* Could be 1st class MEDIUM.'" (103)
aboulie (French) noun. absence of will-power or decisiveness. (utilisee 108)
"He [Eliot] explained how 'I wasn't even bothering if I understood what I was saying,' and he preferred to believe that the experienced reader 'does not bother about understanding' either. For he was at last engaged in what, three years earlier, he had called 'thinking with our feelings,' a state in which he believed that 'the "psychic material" tends to create its own form.' " (107)
" 'These fragments I have shored against my ruins' says the narrator [in The Waste Land's Section V 'What the Thunder Said'] - but they *are* fragments, and the ruins are only ruins, even though they are still standing." (110) ("I see myself, I see myself, said the Narcissus...")
"Eliot would speak in 1933 about 'that at which I have long aimed, in writing poetry; to write poetry which would be essentially poetry, with nothing poetic about it, poetry standing naked in its bare bones.' " (126)
from 'Sweeney Agonistes' verse play by T S Eliot:
'I gotta use words when I talk to you / But if you understand or if you don't / That's nothing to me and nothing to you / We all gotta do what we gotta do ...' (126-7)
from 'Sweeney Agonistes'
'Any old tree for me will do / Any old wood is just as good' (127)
"The drinking was of course partly to do with the unhappiness and stress; but at times it would alos have been a way of attempting to lower his level of conscious intelligence and awareness, to try and get into something more like a dream state, in which (ideally) he might be able to write what he called 'poetry so transparent that we should not see the poetry, but that which we are meant to see through the poetry.'" (129)
'Lips that would kiss / form prayers to broken stone' from The Hollow Men, T S E
"one early review had described it [The Waste Land] as 'so much waste paper'" (134)
"As was natural for men of his age, background and education, he had spent his formative years with other men; and if he had fallen in love with anyone when young (a common enough experience) it might well have been with a boy or with a man." (136)
"As he [TS] remarked in 1933, when in love 'we do not so much see the person' as recognise the prescence of something external, 'which sets in motion these new and delightful feelings.'" (137)
"At the heart of all the arguments I have seen for Eliot's homosexuality lies a series of fabrications, half ruths and suppositions." (140)
"But evidence for his homosexuality does not exist, whereas evidence for his being a troubled heterosexual exists in quantity." (140- 1)
July 13, 2015
This is a worthwhile biography, but not an excellent one. It delves a little bit into commentary and appreciation, as one expects with literary biography, but bottoms out relatively quickly-- this is an author whose boldest critical claims include the assertion that it is "simply a loss" that Eliot didn't work more in the mode he developed for Sweeny Agonistes-- you know, the mainly-unpleasant pseudo-drama fragment that he never cared to finish. The author does some things very well, but if you're interested in Eliot, I'd suggest one of the other biographers, and if you're interested in his work, I'd suggest Hugh Kenner (who Worthen doesn't mention once).
January 28, 2016
A fairly easy, breezy read. Worthen discusses at length Eliot's marriage to his first wife, Vivien. Worthen attempts to put to rest some of the rumors of this tumultuous couple. He also takes on past critics who may have over emphasized anti-Semitic moments in Eliot's poetry. My biggest complaint is that the last several decades of Eliot's life were crammed into about a chapter and a half, which left me hungry for more.
January 15, 2016
Recently Eliot's life story was raised before me, so I picked it up. I don't know that I would suggest this book, but it was well-researched and presented. The biography gave a person to the poems, and he certainly is an intriguing soul both representative of his times and not. But there was much sadness in his life.
August 20, 2013
Difficult and dark.
Didn't like it.
Didn't like it.
August 21, 2012
This is a must for T. S. Eliot fans. Makes some sense of difficult verse...and the best part is a happy ending to an otherwise difficult life.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews