Review: How Tom Eliot grew up to write ‘The Waste Land’

Golly, but T.S. Eliot was an unhappy fellow.

Open almost any page in Robert Crawford's biography, 'Young Eliot,” to be published April 1, and you'll see declarations of the poet's grab bag of anxieties.

During his school days at Oxford, Tom, as the author calls him, found the experience of living abroad 'exciting, but lonely, too.” Though he already came across as Anglicized to other Americans - Missouri-born Eliot eventually would reject his American citizenship and become a subject of the British crown - he felt 'foreign” in London.

'…

There seemed to be ‘a brick wall' between him and most Englishmen; English women were at least as hard to fathom,” Crawford writes.

And in his second-most famous poem, 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” which he began writing in 1910, Eliot 'presents a masculinity hampered by incisive self-consciousness and inhibition.” His friend, the writer Virginia Woolf, once described him as 'slightly malevolent.”

That broad hint is to the oft-repeated suggestions of Eliot's homosexuality - a crime in the poet's beloved England until 1967, two years after his death. But whether that was the case, young Tom still had to cope with - among other emotional worries - financial and career issues; his day job as a banker as well as feeding his aspirations as an editor, writer and lecturer; health issues for his folk back home; a nervous breakdown or two; and a decidedly troubled first marriage - to Vivien Haigh-Wood, his muse and who eventually would be committed to a mental institution.

And, of course, there are all those pesky matters of his apparent misogyny and anti-Semitism. Sigh.

But drawing together the threads of Eliot's not-well-documented early years to explain how they meshed to make Eliot the writer of one of the best and best-known poems in the English language is Crawford's mission.

Crawford himself describes the universality of 'The Waste Land,” published in 1922, as 'astonishingly powerful” - '…

It's resonances seem to expand forever.”

Make no mistake: 'The Waste Land” is unsettling, complicated stuff. The opening lines are among the most famous in the English language: 'April is the cruelest month, breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land …

.” But as those ominous words suggest, it isn't easy going.

It's long, divided into five sections. It contains references to the works of Chaucer, Dante, Shakespeare, Homer, Milton, Wagner, Hesse, Baudelaire, Thomas Kyd and Whitman, among highbrow literary lights.

It bounces at the drop of a hat from English to German, Italian to French, Latin to Greek and then to Sanskrit, for goodness sake.

It's a poem that comes with footnotes.

So how did tender Tom, genius though he was, come to create such a fearsome masterpiece? It was the messy blend of all that inner anguish and family and personal drama with the influences of the many turn-of-the-century literary elite with whom he rubbed elbows, Crawford suggests, along with an insatiable appetite for reading apparently everything.

And timing, as they say, surely helps. That was the same year James Joyce's 'Ulysses” saw publication, and Marcel Proust's seven-volume 'Remembrance of Things Past” came out in English - two other literary masterworks not for the faint of heart.

It was, perhaps, Crawford says, 'a new intellectual dawn.”

'… We have acquired sociology and social psychology (and) … our historical knowledge has of course increased,” Eliot wrote for a literary magazine. 'A number of sciences have sprung up in an almost tropical exuberance which undoubtedly excites our imagination …

.”

Crawford notes, too, that the poem was published under the name T.S. - not Tom - Eliot. Hardly the name of a young man.