In 1956, Emily Hale donated a thousand letters to the Princeton University Library. The letters had all been sent to her by a single individual and were given to the library on a single condition: they could not be read until fifty years after she and their author were dead. The waiting period that began in 1969 with Hale's death would be without suspense were it not for the identity of the letters' author, T.S. Eliot. 2019 will be a promising year for Eliot scholars, but what the Hale letters will reveal about Eliot's poetry is less interesting than what they will expose about Eliot himself.

No authorized biography of Eliot has ever been written, but James E. Miller's new work, T.S. Eliot: The Making of an American Poet, ventures into the quagmire of uncertainty and innuendo that was Eliot's personal life and asserts that, for all his talk of impersonal poetry, Eliot was chiefly a personal poet. The idea is not revolutionary; Miller himself explored it almost thirty years ago in his first book. The evidence is not new either, only the accumulation of other biographers' work and other critics' opinions. What is interesting about Miller's new book is its roundabout way of proving this overt thesis, that Eliot was an American poet.

When the New York Times ran Eliot's obituary in 1965, calling him "the poet of gray melancholy," it begrudgingly acknowledged his birth in America. The paper took offense at his refusal to return to the United States to accept President Johnson's Medal of Freedom and most of all to his naturalization as a British subject in 1927. Eliot has always had a tortured history with his homeland. America had mixed feelings about its expatriates and continued, even after Eliot's death, to think peculiarly of its anglophile son. The Times's reaction to Eliot's passing was not unlike the skeptical reviews of his greatest poem, The Waste Land, by its initial American reviewers, whose criticisms were several times articulated through a pun on waste paper. Against the tendency to identify Eliot with his adopted homeland, Miller insists on the particularly American qualities of Eliot's formative years and uses his book to trace the thread of American moments and sentiments throughout Eliot's life.

Born in 1888 in the city that Walt Whitman called "the centre of our national demesne," Eliot was unlike his St. Louis peers. Miller details the effeminate tendencies of the poet during his youth (embracing books and avoiding sports), until Eliot was plucked from Missouri and sent to faraway Milton Academy in 1905. A year later, he began his studies at Harvard, where, if only to encourage the delinquent and despondent of future generations, he performed dismally in his first year.

Miller invests a large section of his biography in considering the effects of the landscapes of Missouri and New England on Eliot's poetry. In particular, the Mississippi River was a more-than-human current in Eliot's life that the Four Quartets memorializes as:

a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and ...intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a ...frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyer of ...commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of ...bridges.

Miller offers a convincing case for the importance of American landscapes in Eliot's poetry over any that he found in Europe.

It was not just the wilderness that furnished Eliot with poetic imagery; Miller describes the nightly walks Eliot made through the sordid areas of Boston and Cambridge while still at Harvard. Drawn to frightening and grotesque scenes that ruptured the gentility of his early lyrics, Eliot was in search of a new poetic form to accommodate his experiences.

Having completed an undergraduate and master's degree, Eliot's life turned to Europe. After graduation, he moved from Cambridge to Paris, where he was to meet Jean Verdenal, to whom Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) would be dedicated. Eliot and Verdenal were both tenants at the Left-Bank Pension Casuabon, and the friendship would prove to be one of the closest of Eliot's life. Miller suggests that the relationship included a sexual familiarity that would manifest itself in shrouded nostalgia for the rest of Eliot's poetic career. This suggests a potential source for what feels like an intensely autobiographical section of The Waste Land, the famous episode of the hyacinth garden:

—Yet when we came back, late, from the ...hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

Hyacinths are associated with homosexual desire in Greek mythology, connected to the story of Apollo's doomed love for the athlete Hyacinthus. As early as 1952, during Eliot's own lifetime, critics were reading Eliot's poem as an elegy for a lost male lover (it was in 1969 that Verdenal was named as the likely candidate). What Miller's new book does is extend the claim of Eliot's homosexuality from poetry to biography, compiling mounds of tenuous evidence and suggestions. The only interesting conclusion to be reached from the biographer's labyrinthine evidence is his suggestion that the suicidal poet Septimus Smith of Mrs. Dalloway is based on Eliot.

Miller's unfocused analysis of the relationship with Verdenal comes at the expense of his thesis. Instead of reading as an unprecedented argument of Eliot's Americanism, much of the book confines itself to titillating speculation on Eliot's sex life. Scattered and confused, the leaps that Miller makes in reaching his conclusions are not easily navigable, nor do they generate a coherent account of Eliot's life.

Miller's biography ends in 1922 with Eliot's seminal work, The Waste Land, and has only one remaining chapter, entitled "A Glance Ahead." Any meaningful discussion of the poet's later life is absent. An account of the poet's youth might be more satisfying if it offered a clear account of his development, but Miller's unfocused work leaves one wanting a discussion of the later poems, looking for some clarification or evidence of his many assertions. We find ourselves uncomprehending at the end of the book, when Miller quotes Eliot's late statement on his poetry: "In its source, in its emotional springs, it comes from America."

Biographical precision has been largely lacking in discussions of The Waste Land, despite the abundance of interpretations. In his highly technical but immensely interesting book Revisiting the Wasteland, Lawrence Rainey clarifies the confusing chronology of Eliot's poem. In order to determine the order of the poem's composition, Rainey returns to the manuscripts themselves and uses the variable materials to order the poem's sections. Most readers will trudge through Rainey's documentation without remembering it, but they will appreciate his ultimate conclusion. Despite the standard critical account of Eliot's poem as a unified and streamlined whole, Rainey's research proves that Eliot wrote the poem piecemeal and brought together more than fifty drafts in the final version.

Like Miller, Rainey is returning to one of his own earlier ideas about T.S. Eliot. Where Miller's biography expands a prior idea about Eliot's poetry to his entire life, Rainey's book narrows an earlier theory modeling the institutional aspects of modernism. Rainey's readings fall more into cultural studies than literary criticism, for his interest is always more in how these works came to be than in how we read them.

Although his framing chapters are too dependent on incomprehensibly detailed tables of bibliographical information, the core of his book is an engaging description of how Eliot's masterpiece reached readers. The financial constraints put on Eliot by his refusal to return to America for further education and his strained relationship with familial patrons led him on a desperate search for funding. Conforming to the modernist practice of journal publication, small press limited edition, and then commercial edition for general circulation, Eliot benefited financially from the various modes of his poem's publication.

Seven years after "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" appeared in Poetry, The Waste Land was published simultaneously in the Criterion in England and the Dial in the United States. The poem's publication was as much the result of Ezra Pound's efforts as Eliot's. Rainey calls Pound the "stage director" who convinced editors of national literary magazines to offer Eliot advances three times the national income per capita for the poem without even having read it.

Pound's role as editor of the poem has been appreciated since Valerie Eliot, Eliot's second wife, published the facsimile edition (filled with Pound's scribbles, slashes, and annotations) of the poem's drafts in 1971, but it is through Rainey's book that one can understand his chimerical role as publisher and publicist. Rainey offers a clear view of some of the currents that went into The Waste Land, rejecting polemics and modern literary politics and offering countless reasons to return to the text itself.

All of Eliot's poems, plays, and essays reward patience: those who wait will surely find satisfaction. Emily Hale's letters may reveal something about our chameleon poet, or they may not; her safeguarding them until half a century after her death suggests they will. The stacks of Eliot scholarship will continue to grow aimlessly until 2019, suspended in a state of uncertainty in which we readers have the occasional critic like Rainey to keep us company and the more common biographer like Miller to vex us.

 

To other impatient readers of T.S. Eliot, Casey N. Cep recommends Martha Cooley's novel The Archivist.