Vol. 40 No. 1 1973 - page 139

PARTISAN REVIEW
139
and women), and leave the works to engage unaided in their hard
secret struggle with the next hostile decades." Admirers of T.S.E. might
weI! wish to add his initials to the list. But it must be granted that a
biographical shadow is certain to accompany the works into the "hard
secret struggle"; it is
by
now common knowledge that a private anguish
underlies
The Waste Land, The Hollow Men, Ash Wednesday .
...
Even those who care about poetry rather than gossip, or psychological
excavation, will not find it easy to exorcize the haunting presence, be–
hind or between Eliot's lines, of his first wife Vivienne: as
1.
A. Richards
put it, simply and movingly, "She was his muse." All the same, what
should not be forgotten is what people like Sencourt, or the reviewer in
the
Times L iterary Supplement
of
The Waste Land
manuscripts, seem
to have forgotten: that the only thing that matters now is what that
presence becomes in Eliot's poetry. The life of Eliot which is now bound
to be written will have to show the virtues of sensitive literary criticism
as weI! as human insight and sympathy.
Mr. Russell Kirk's
Eliot and His Age
is unlikely to become the
standard literary biography. But it is an interesting and readable survey
of Eliot's career, by an American friend of his later years. Mr. Kirk's
approach is more informal and personal than academic, but there is
nothing gross about it, and he makes good use of quotation from the
poet's letters, as do Messrs. Margolis and Kojecky - the three books, if
they do nothing else, whet our appetite for a
Collected Letters of T. S.
Eliot.
Mr. Kirk is himself the exponent of a form of American conserva–
tism which has quite a lot in common with Eliot's own position; and I
found particularly interesting his attempts to relate the poet's political
and social ideas to early American sources. It is in this area that Mr.
Kirk makes perhaps his most distinctive contribution to the study of
Eliot. He also deals extensively, in chronological sequence, with the
poems, but I found his explications and paraphrases long-winded and
his bluff and breezy manner somewhat incongruous. His book is ex–
cessively lengthened by these analyses, and further diluted by a con–
tinuous daubed-on commentary on "the march of events" in the Eng–
land of Eliot's lifetime, which is always rather superficial and some–
times prejudiced and inaccurate. He seems less at home with English
politics and affairs generally than Eliot himself was eventually to be–
come, and consequently he is in danger of coarsening and simplifying
Eliot's subtler insights. But his book does succeed (though it supplies
disappointingly few anecdotes and memorabilia) in presenting us with
a warmer and more genial Eliot than the austere figure who dominates
the other two.
Mr. Hugh Kenner's large book deals only incidentally with Eliot,
but students of Eliot will find useful things in it (though I do not care
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