Christianity & Literature

As of January 30, 2023, T. S. Eliot’s letters to Emily Hale—all 1,131 of them— can now be read online. But before they were made available to the public, Lyndall Gordon was one of the few who were able to read the letters in January 2020, when Princeton University opened the archive to scholars. In her preface, Gordon recounts first becoming aware of the letters in 1972 through A. Walton Litz: “Then and there,” she concludes her preface, “I vowed to live to the day when the letters would be released. I have not been disappointed” (4). Nor have I been disappointed by her masterly new biography of Eliot, based on the countless new insights that Gordon was able to access through the letters and weave into a compelling narrative. Where previous scholarship takes the Eliot of “Tradition and the Individual Talent” at its word in its claim to “impersonality,” Gordon shows us a deeply confessional Eliot. In fact, her very first major claim (chapter 1, “Home Women”) in her biography serves to put pressure on Eliot’s self-fashioning: “His famous claim to ‘impersonality’ was designed to protect poetry so personal that it verged on confession” (5). This is an attractively refreshing approach to literary studies after the decades-long reign of the likes of Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes, with their insistence on the text as a malleable entity, its reception by readers somewhat alienated from the circumstances of its composition. Real-life events matter, Gordon urges us to remember. It inevitably makes a difference for us as readers to know that Eliot actually saw Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde with Hale when we re-read The Waste [End Page 517] Land, to give a concrete example, regardless of what Eliot’s own conception of how a poet should think of the separation between himself and his art.

Gordon’s book consists of twenty-four tightly written, masterfully arranged chapters, spanning from Eliot’s childhood to his and Hale’s deaths in the 1960s. We may not be accustomed to think of hermeneutics as the primary goal of literary biography, but, as Gordon herself seems to be acutely aware, understanding Eliot’s relationship with Hale, especially its role in his efforts of self-canonization as one of the greats of Western literature, is the interpretative key to his poetry. And not just one of the greats of Western literature, but a great English writer. Though an American writing to another American, Eliot’s letters to Hale remind her that it is their time together in the English Cotswolds that has inspired Burnt Norton, the first poem in The Four Quartets. Eliot’s desire to fashion himself as an English writer is part of his effort to demonstrate that he belongs to a European tradition of poetry, going all the way back to medieval times and to one of Eliot’s major influences, Dante’s Divine Comedy. Gordon’s argument, with which I am rather inclined to agree, is that the Eliot-Hale correspondence points to a desire for a transcendental muse as much as—if not more than— the desire for a flesh-and-blood companion. In this sense the letters, which Eliot, at first, ardently wished to see published after their deaths, so that the world could finally understand him both as a man and as a poet, are both deeply personal and deeply impersonal. Gordon is particularly salient in the sections in which she illuminates the Eliot-Hale relationship as a conscious effort on Eliot’s part to reproduce the relationship of Dante to Beatrice. Gordon suggests that, from the beginning of their correspondence in 1930, Eliot “was planning to love [Hale] in the medieval way” (125), explaining that “The manner of courtly love, cultivated by French troubadours, was elevated by Dante into worship. This love did not exist outside the imagination. It had its outlet in poetry...