T. S. ELIOT’s life was as extraordinary as his poetry. It’s as though a good fairy gave him every possible gift: a happy childhood, huge talent, universal acclaim — and at the same time a bad fairy was determined to spoil it and make most of his life sheer torment. Then, as though the good fairy won a final battle for his happiness, in old age and ill health, he was given a blissful second marriage.

Robert Crawford taught Eliot for thirty years and has researched this biography for many of them (Books, 2 April 2015). In this second volume, he really gets into his stride. Drawing on a great deal of new material, including Eliot’s letters to his muse Emily Hale and his letters to others, of which nine volumes have so far been published, he sets out every known detail of Eliot’s life with full references.

This is likely to be the standard biography for the next two decades. If it lacks the emotional impact of Lyndall Gordon’s earlier biography and does not capture the sheer intensity of Eliot’s faith, it has two great strengths.

First, as mentioned, everything is there for readers to make up their own mind about, including words about Jews which now make for very uncomfortable reading. Second, it is essentially well balanced and fair-minded. He is fair to Vivian Haigh Wood, Eliot’s wife, and the hell that she lived in, one even more hellish than that of her husband, because of her mental illness. He is fair to Emily Hale and her bitter hurt, first, when Eliot refused to divorce his wife because of his religious convictions, then, when Vivien was dead, he felt that he could never marry anyone, and, finally, when he did in fact marry Valerie Fletcher.

Valerie Eliot’s life is hardly less extraordinary than that of her husband, and had the difference of being blessed by a good fairy without being cursed by a bad one. She fell in love with him when reading “The Journey of the Magi” at the age of 14 and determined to marry him. This she did, and she not only gave him total love in his final years, but fiercely guarded his legacy after his death.

Crawford is good on the daily background and its influence on Eliot when he was writing Four Quartets, the poem of his Christian maturity and the great achievement of the second half of his life. He also brings out well Eliot’s lifelong desire to write something for the stage, which he did in the end, but without achieving the success of his poetry.

A few niggles. Crawford suggests that Eliot was familiar with the Nunc Dimittis because it is part of compline. He would have been even more familiar with it as part of evensong. He says that George Bell, among other things, was editor of the Church Times (a chair that he never occupied). At one stage, there is a reference to “the Faber’s Welsh house at Tyglyn”. In fact, the house, Ty Glyn, is at Ciliau Aeron.

Crawford never quite nails down Eliot’s political views, tending to think of him simply as a Tory. In fact, he despised the Conservative governments of the 1930s, thinking of them as a mixture of social and market liberalism. He was as desperate to find a political philosophy to stop European civilisation falling apart as he was to find a faith to hold his personal life together. In The Idea of a Christian Society, he found this — not in a society dominated by Christians, as the title misleadingly suggests and too many people accept, but in one based on Aristotle, as seen through the eyes of Aquinas. “It would be a society in which the natural end of man — virtue and well-being in community — is acknowledged for all, and the supernatural end — Beatitude — for those who have the eyes to see it.”

The Rt Revd Lord Harries of Pentregarth is a former Bishop of Oxford, and an Hon. Professor of Theology at King’s College, London. He writes on Eliot in Haunted by Christ: Modern writers and the struggle for faith (SPCK, 2018).

Eliot after “The Waste Land”
Robert Crawford
Jonathan Cape £25
(978-0-224-09389-7)
Church Times Bookshop £22.50