T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life - Hardcover

Gordon, Lyndall

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393047288 ISBN 13: 9780393047288

Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc, 1999

Synopsis

Drawing on scores of unpublished letters, the author offers an unflinching rendering of the accomplished Modernist poet, including his famous anti-Semitism and misogyny, his serious insecurities, and his search for personal salvation.

About this title

About the Author

Lyndall Gordon is the prize-winning author of Charlotte Bronte: A Passionate Life (Cheltenham Prize), Shared Lives, Virginia Woolf: A Writer's Life (James Tait Black Prize for biography), Eliot's Early Years (British Academy Prize), Eliot's New Life (Southern Arts Prize), and, most recently, A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and His Art.

Reviews

Remaining in awe of Eliot's literary greatness, Gordon (A Private Life of Henry James) has rewritten her slim but influential Eliot's Early Years (1977) and her somewhat overlapping Eliot's New Life (1988) into a new biography that concedes the man's serious flaws. Yet Gordon finds "no adequate explanation" for the fact that a writer "of his sensibilities" was an anti-Semite, revelations of which caused a stir in the mid-'90s, and a misogynist (excepting toward his worshipful second wife, who cosseted him in his last, failing years). Although Eliot set himself up as a lofty moral and spiritual authority, Gordon reluctantly acknowledges that he is an "idol... made in part from certain waste products of his century." Gordon sees Eliot struggling constantly with his "two almost antithetical selves," and as "a loner in the American tradition of cranky loners." While publication of his early letters and suppressed early verse has now made it possible for quotations to replace paraphrase, crucial correspondences remains under embargo. Eliot, Gordon concludes, consciously pared down his experiences to reflect the "life of a man of genius," whatever the impact upon his intimates. "To be a genius does not preclude common faults," Gordon writes, but she forcefully demonstrates Eliot's faults to be uncommon, a fact that limits her sympathies and almost jeopardizes her efforts at presenting a balanced view. Still, Gordon's book is the most authoritative life of Eliot thus far, and is certain to spark new controversies. 41 b&w illus. not seen by PW. (Aug.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Veteran biographer Gordon ballasts Eliot's listing reputation with a weighty volume that combineswith heavy revisions and some new additionsher well-received partial biographies Eliot's Early Years (1977) and Eliot's New Life (1988). Eliot's decision to frustrate biographers hampered Gordon's first two books (as well as Peter Ackroyd's incisive complete life in 1984). Since then, Eliot's early correspondence and the apprentice poems Inventions of the March Hare have been published, and Gordon has assiduously tracked down correspondence and manuscripts that the Eliot estate has not put under embargo. Her thesis, first stated in Eliot's Early Years, that his poetic output, from the Modernist despair of The Waste Land to the sacred quests of Four Quartets, should be interpreted as an essentially coherent spiritual biography is reinforced in this newest volume. Delving into Eliot's reading, from Jules Laforgue's submerged religious obsessiveness to Lancelot Andrewes's sermons, Gordon puts Eliot's religious conversion to an idiosyncratically Puritanical Anglo-Catholicism in the context of his family's Bostonian Unitarian tradition and New England Calvinism, although she also believes his search for saintliness was a failure. For what she calls a ``public hermit,'' the difficulty of mapping an inner life is further complicated by Eliot's loathing of self-revelation, in both his private and public existence. Gordon also deals with his flaws: anti-Semitism, misogyny, and a penchant for scatological verse are among the most glaring. As Gordon laid out in her second volume, one of Eliot's worst personal failures was his inability to commit to a shared life with Emily Hale, whom he had known since 1913. Despite Gordon's painstaking reconstruction of this crucial relationship here, much remains unsaid: Eliot had Hale's letters to him destroyed, and his to her are sealed until 2019. Whatever Eliot's biographic blanks, An Imperfect Life intelligently charts his lifelong ``escape from personality.'' (b&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Though the century's most influential English-language poet championed the impersonality of art, British literary biographer Gordon (The Private Life of Henry James) demonstrates that Eliot greatly influenced works that are far more personal than traditionally believed. In Eliot, Gordon delineates a dual personality struggling with the flaws in his nature, a devout Christian who nonetheless could be anti-Semitic and misogynistic. The present volume combines material from Gordon's previous award-winning works, Eliot's Early Years and Eliot's New Life, with extensive additional research. Subjects covered in depth include Eliot's complex relationships with women and the American-ness of his work despite his near-obsession with things British. Eliot scholarship has been hampered by the poet's ban on any official biography; the best previous work was Peter Ackroyd's T.S. Eliot: A Life (LJ 11/15/84). Gordon's superb study is thoroughly researched and documented. Of particular interest to scholars is her lengthy section on sources, with specifics on accessing unpublished items. Highly recommended for academic and public libraries.
-ADenise J. Stankovics, Rockville P.L., Vernon, CT
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393047288
• ISBN 13: 9780393047288
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 721