T S Eliot, by Richard Thomas

 The literary and broadcasting world is awash with Eliot just now. Books and articles galore have appeared, prompted by The Waste Land’s centenary, and the BBC has treated us to three excellent television programmes: T S Eliot: Into the Waste Land, Four Quartets, and Return to T S Eliotland. The first two will be available on iPlayer for another eleven months, but, annoyingly, the third will be there for only another week or so. So perhaps I should address it first, and come back to the other two later.

Return to T S Eliotland is a literary travelogue in which we are introduced by A N Wilson to the significant places lived in or visited by Eliot, and shown both how he used them as building blocks and how he was influenced by them, figuratively or literally, in his poetry: St Louis (childhood home, with its mighty Mississippi); Gloucester, Massachusetts (summer home, with the sea and sailing); Harvard (during his time there he first met his muse Emily Hale); Merton College Oxford (and during his time there he met his first wife, Vivienne Haig-Wood); London (Lloyds Bank and breakdown; Margate and Lausanne (recovery); London again (marriage failure, interaction with Ezra Pound, publication of The Waste Land, editorship at Faber and Faber, Second World War, second marriage – to his secretary, Valerie Fletcher, Nobel Prize); Burnt Norton and Little Gidding (visited, with Emily Hale); East Coker (also first visited with Emily Hale – and where he, and many years later, Valerie were buried). 

Wilson is an engaging and highly informative guide, with plenty of lateral, but always relevant, digression on, for instance, rivers (Mississippi, Thames, Ganges, Styx) and Dante’s Divine Comedy. Wilson regards The Waste Land as the greatest poem in the English language of the twentieth century (followed, though only by implication, by the Four Quartets), and he tells us why in an engrossing programme. But he is not starry-eyed. He is outraged by Eliott’s antisemitism and racism, and puzzled and saddened by the way he treated both Vivienne and Emily – in the latter case even posthumously, with a meretricious and wounding disclaimer of even the slightest degree of influence or affection, left to coincide with the release by Princeton University of his letters to her fifty years after her death, which occurred just two years before The Waste Land centenary. (He had already ensured that all her letters to him were burnt.) This programme neatly complements the other two, to which I shall revert shortly. What a pity that it cannot remain with them on iPlayer for a whole year.

Richard Thomas