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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

T.S. Eliot’s Background

page 739

T.S. Eliot’s Background

The authoritative voice of T.S. Eliot seemed to be at the same time English and cosmopolitan. I think that unconsciously both his readers and his critics (not necessarily the same people) assumed that Eliot was an English poet who had broken through the barrier of insularity that tends to separate English culture from the traditions of Europe and Asia. We praised him for it. We respected this intelligent moralist, the Matthew Arnold of our age, who analysed the Jacobean dramatists, but whose own hybrid genius had more in common with the Milton of Samson Agonistes. We even loved him with the uneasy love reserved for the ideal father figure, a traffic officer at the busy crossroads of the spirit. But we forgot he was fundamentally American – and Mr Howarth’s book remedies the unaccountable omission.

Mr Howarth traces in abundant detail the Unitarian thought of the Eliot family and their forays into the fields of philosophy and social reform. This portion of the book reveals clearly the vigour and the eccentric privacy of American culture before the turn of the century. In particular T.S. Eliot’s mother emerges as the many-handed American goddess – genteel, imaginative, energetic in good works, yet defeated by a too great fear of the coarseness of life – an able writer herself of Utopian verse. I was much moved to read how, when The Waste Land was first published, she deplored its lack of a positive message, yet defended it against the negative comments of the men of her household. One suspects that Eliot’s own lifelong conflict between an enormous sense of duty and a solitary free-booting imagination derived in a large degree from the influence of this remarkable woman.

The development of Eliot’s tastes and character, first at Harvard, then in France, could no doubt be paralleled in many biographies of American writers. He remains the observer and interpreter, influenced a trifle by Asian studies at Harvard, thrown off his feet by French scepticism, and then asserting through the mask of Sweeney the hard-bitten American comic spirit. This book, however, is not a biography – rather it is a loosely bundled thesis on Eliot’s literary mentors. Perhaps only an American, always a little outside the conservative structure of English society, could have become spokesman for that society and for what is best in the Church of England. Mr Howarth’s writing, though undistinguished, is lucid enough; and one is grateful for the material he has unearthed. The sections on Eliot as editor and dramatist are perhaps the least satisfactory. They imply no separation between a journalist’s and an artist’s world. Nor is it made plain just why Eliot remains unshakeably the one great Christian moralist of our century.

1965 (361)