The cool images and shattered lines of his poetry spoke eloquently for a whole generation, but his private life has remained - largely thanks to the combination of smoke screen and masks he himself created - mostly a matter of uncomfortable silence. With this hugely impressive study, the South African-born academic and biographer Lyndall Gordon blew the door of T.S. Eliot's domesticity wide open, and the resulting gusts have blown all sorts of unpleasant details out into the unforgiving light of day. It takes a strong stomach to confront this misogynistic, anti-Semitic, bizarrely puritanical man without blinking or backing down; Gordon has done it on behalf of all of us, and the tale she recounts here - reworked, with extensive additions, from two earlier studies, Eliot's Early Years and Eliot's New Life - is fascinating and oddly moving. In a way that would, no doubt, enrage her subject, Gordon places women at the centre of Eliot's life: his appalling, destructive marriage to the neurotic, hypochondriac Vivienne, his on-off affair with the awfully proper Bostonian Emily Hale, his long-standing friendship with the confident Englishwoman Mary Trevelyan, and the totally unexpected, almost shockingly simple happiness of his marriage, at the age of seventy, to his secretary Valerie. The first three, though kept sternly under wraps in one way or another by the almost pathologically cold poet, flit like shadows across the surface of his poems; Gordon's superb readings of The Waste Land and the Four Quartets, in particular, grow directly out of her sympathetic portrayal of those relationships, and her willingness to allow the poetry to go on working its magic while she stares, unflinching, into the face of the man who wrote it is an awesome achievement.
Arminta Wallace