Was he anti-Semitic?

Letters give us the life as lived — day-to-day, shapeless, haphazard, contingent, imperfect, authentic.

Letters give us the life as lived — day-to-day, shapeless, haphazard, contingent, imperfect, authentic. That is their value. Life-writing, biography, is plotted, shaped by an argument and is summary, selective and often tendentious. There is a lovely moment in these letters when the shivering Eliot, trapped on the top of a French mountain, a long mule ride from civilisation, is writing to Richard Aldington on a defective typewriter. It sticks and repeats. ‘I’m writing there fore the r therefore more briefly than I intended and shall do when I get to Nice again and hie h ire hire a typewriter merde.’ Half of each letter is missing. ‘This type looks just like Hebrew.’ For a brief existential moment, the amused irritation of a complicated, deeply troubled man, at the end of his tether, whose dangerously loopy wife is in a nursing home, ‘recovering’ but actually on the edge. The typewriter is part of unedited, impure, actual life. It wouldn’t make it into the Life.

We read the letters of writers for high reasons — to illuminate their art. And for low reasons — to discover, as it were, what they were like in bed. We would like to catch them unbuttoned, if possible with their trousers down. Curiosity is a powerful, ineradicable human instinct. In T. S. Eliot’s case, hostile critics are eager for shameful revelations of anti-Semitism and misogyny.

Volume Two covers the inception of the Criterion, usefully outlines the magazine’s Tory, classicist, reactionary stance and reproduces much repetitive editorial boiler-plate. The drab commendably elided by biography. Eliot’s editorial persona is in place, except to Ezra Pound: ‘It doan matter a toad’s fart,’ writes Eliot, emulating Ezra’s forthright, backwoods manner. There isn’t much here to compel the ordinary reader, except for unsurprising moments of venial hypocrisy.