Playing Up Old Possum

By John Skow

GREAT TOM

by T.S. MATTHEWS 219 pages. Harper & Row. $8.95.

A poet snores through the months of dormancy, then for a moment slips free of neurosis, professional chores, friends, money problems, sexual despair, family clatter and habits of sloth, and writes six lines. Four of these are bad, and as he sinks back into the murk at the bottom of his mind, he scratches them out. In a working lifetime he may only slip free for a very few days of these moments, and may accumulate enough good lines to fill at best a few hundred pages.

Then comes a biographer, who begins with the fact of genius. He moves off in exactly the wrong direction because it is the only direction available to him: back to neurosis, profession, friends, money problems, sexual despair and the rest.

Why write a biography of a poet at all? That is no easy question to answer, particularly in the case of T.S. Eliot, a poet who during his lifetime repeatedly said that he did not wish to be the subject of a biography. Because of that reluctance, a great deal of Eliot material is still unavailable. Some of it is sealed up in a time capsule at Princeton, not to be opened until the year 2020, and some of it awaits permission from Eliot's widow Valerie, who ever since the poet's death in 1965 has refused to cooperate with researchers.

Despite these limitations, what T.S. Matthews' unofficial interim biography does, with considerable grace and affection, is bring Eliot back onstage.

His portrait is of a tormented, intensely private man who hid his true face as he hid the meanings of his poems. No, Matthews says--clearing away the kind of speculation that even a researcher who means to do honor to his subject must revive and deal with--Eliot was not a homosexual. Yes, he had "a lifelong horror of women," although Matthews might better have said a horror of sex, since, as the book points out in another connection, there were perhaps more women than men among the very few people with whom Eliot had close friendships. No, his sickly and neurotic first wife Vivienne was not a drug addict, although she was more or less constantly on medication.

Eliot was born in St. Louis in 1888 into a family stiff with tradition. He was raised on rectitude and duty. His books were carefully selected; the Encyclopaedia Britannica was permitted, but Tom Sawyer was not. At Harvard, Eliot took boxing lessons, fell under the influence of Irving Babbitt, a hard-minded classicist who was one of his professors, and was introduced to the poetry of Jules Laforgue.

At Harvard, too, Eliot met Emily Hale, an attractive Brahmin who may have been the most enduring love of his life. More than a thousand letters to her from England, to which Eliot migrated in 1914, form the most important part of the material locked up at Princeton.

That Eliot kept Emily at arm's length for five decades does not, considering his character, disprove the supposition of love. They met rarely, but Matthews is satisfied that Emily is the Aunt Agatha of Family Reunion and, more important, half of the "we" in the haunting passage at the beginning of Burnt Norton:

Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take

Towards the door we never opened

Into the rose garden ...

Emily, as well as Eliot's family back in St. Louis, was jolted by the news in 1915 that the 27-year-old student had married Vivienne Haigh-Wood, an Englishwoman of his own age about whom they knew nothing. She was pretty, intense, to some degree artistic, talented, and a disaster for the poet.

There seems to have been no period of happiness. She was not only ill and unbalanced, but early in the marriage apparently allowed herself to be seduced by Philosopher Bertrand Russell. Eliot at the time was working in a bank to feed himself, writing book reviews to supplement his income, editing his own literary journal, the Criterion, and weekending with Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury set. Very soon he was forced to add another task, that of being an almost full-time nurse during Vivienne's steady affliction from migraine headaches.

Parochial Coziness. The marriage broke up in 1932 when Eliot moved out. Nevertheless, he felt almost as guilty as a murderer for leaving her and regarded himself as married to her for life. The ailing Vivienne, who never resigned herself to the separation, died 15 years later in a mental hospital. In 1957, at the age of 69, Eliot married Valerie Fletcher, his secretary. She was cheerful and loving, he was old and affectionate. There is no mystery about this happy second marriage.

The story of Ezra Pound's great hearted help to Eliot in the early London years is familiar, especially since the recent discovery of Eliot's original Waste Land manuscript with Pound's extensive excisions and imperious editorial notes. In dealing with it, Matthews tends to overvalue many of the lines Pound cut and to assume that if Pound had failed him, Eliot would never have got round to cutting them himself.

Matthews served as TIME's managing editor from 1943-49. In some ways his own life has paralleled that of his subject. He was born in the American Midwest only a few years after Eliot, was educated privately in the East, and like Eliot -- though much later in life -- emigrated to England, married there and became an Anglo-Catholic. This commonality serves him well as a cultivated cicerone to the poet's life, though when Matthews discusses Eliot's extreme religiosity, a note of parochial coziness sometimes slips in.

Faults and all, the book may help stir fresh interest in what is central: those crystalline obscurities, Eliot's poems.

John Skow

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.