The Confidential Clerk

By Paul Gray

T.S. ELIOT: A LIFE by Peter Ackroyd; Simon & Schuster; 400 pages; $24.95

Since plowing through lists of strange names can be dull business, the only people likely to read the acknowledgments in most books are either insomniacs or the ones who are mentioned and thanked by the author for their help. Occasionally, though, these dutiful expressions of gratitude can yield useful information about the works they precede. This first full-length biography of T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) is a case in point. After acknowledging away for nearly two pages, Peter Ackroyd, an English critic and poet, concludes with a terse paragraph: "I am forbidden by the Eliot estate to quote from Eliot's published work, except for purposes of fair comment in a critical context, or to quote from Eliot's unpublished work or correspondence."

This injunction seems insurmountable. How to write the life of one of this century's greatest poets without including more than a handful of his words? To his credit, Ackroyd persisted. He has not produced the definitive biography; Eliot's estate, following the poet's wishes, stands staunchly in the path of any such study. But T.S. Eliot: A Life does more than make the best of a difficult situation; it offers the most detailed portrait yet of an enigmatic and thoroughly peculiar genius.

The main outlines of Eliot's career are well known. Born in St. Louis, a scion of the Midwestern branch of a distinguished American family, he studied English literature at Harvard and then pursued, with diminishing zeal, a Ph.D. in philosophy. He settled in London and worked in a bank to support himself and his English wife. When he found time and inspiration, he wrote poems, including The Waste Land (1922), that helped shape the 20th century imagination. He took up British citizenship and abandoned the Unitarianism of his parents to become a convert to the Anglican Church. He spent the last four decades of his life more or less in the public eye, a polite, carefully tailored lecturer ministering to the declining health of Western culture. His plays, including Murder in the Cathedral, The Cocktail Party and The Confidential Clerk, won him increased fame, as did his Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948. In 1956, 14,000 people gathered in Minneapolis to hear him speak on "The Frontiers of Criticism."

Behind this austere facade, Ackroyd finds a tormented and divided soul. Eliot shied away from attention while courting it with Machiavellian skills. Ezra Pound, another American expatriate, aptly nicknamed him "Old Possum." Pound had tried and failed to take over literary London through energy and bravado; Eliot succeeded through diffidence and self-denigration. He invited sympathy; friends who knew he was overworked were startled to see him wearing a green face powder that accentuated his cadaverous pallor. Yet he repulsed those who tried to ease his burdens; several plans to raise money that would free Eliot of his bank duties only aroused his resentment.

Along with most commentators, Ackroyd agrees that Eliot's long, unhappy marriage to Vivien Haigh-Wood crucially affected his life and career. Their union combined high-strung nerves and physical complaints that seem to have made sexual relations either impossible or undesirable; the sterility in The Waste Land may owe less to the decline of the West than to domestic problems of the Eliots. But Ackroyd suggests that in many ways Vivien was a good wife, supporting her husband in his dark moods and offering solicited judgments on his manuscripts. Eliot's method of divorcing her shimmers with the indecisiveness of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: he went off for a stint of teaching in the U.S., told his lawyers to handle matters in his absence and hid from her when he returned to England. She died in a mental institution in 1947.

Eliot would hate Tom and Viv, an acerbic dramatization of his first marriage that played in London earlier this year and is to open in New York City in January. On the other hand, he might well love Cats, a smash musical hit on both sides of the Atlantic, which uses as its libretto his Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1936). For while Eliot was horrified by the prospect of invasions of his privacy, he also longed for the popular acclaim that not even his most successful plays achieved. He was always at war with himself, and the disembodied voice of his best poetry emerged from the white center of this conflict. Ackroyd does a superb job of identifying and temporarily separating the diverse Eliots who struggled to make up the poet and the man .

-- By Paul Gray