The best SEX of his life — at 68!

As a highbrow poet, T.S. Eliot found fame and fortune, but in private he was lonely, shy and deeply unhappy. Then a much younger woman set her cap at him and he fell erotically in love

BOOK OF THE WEEK

ELIOT AFTER THE WASTE LAND by Robert Crawford (Cape £25, 624 pp) BEL MOONEY

He SeeMeD aridly highbrow yet loved the rhythms of jazz and songs from the Music hall. his published poetry baffled many yet he liked to pen silly, scurrilous verses for friends.

he was rigidly high Church yet sympathised with ideas about suffering and peace in Buddhism.

even friends found him austere, yet he enjoyed idiotic puns and practical jokes.

Childless and deeply unhappy in his private life, he delighted young and old with Old Possum’s Book Of Practical Cats. Capable of quiet kindness and always striving towards idealism, he still expressed the repulsive anti-Semitism of his time.

Success tormented him but love transformed his life. Prim, proper and sexless, as an old man he fell deeply, sensually in love with a much younger woman and wrote one of the most joyous and erotic love poems in the language.

This odd, awkward, unhappy mess of contradictions was T.S. eliot — arguably the greatest poet of the 20th century. This second part of Robert Crawford’s excellent two-volume biography takes us from his extraordinary, tormented years after publication of the The Waste Land (1922), until his death in 1965.

Crawford presents a sympathetic, sensitive portrait of the great man of letters — banker, poet, playwright, essayist, critic, public figure — which avoids fashionable, pseudo-psychological explanations and easy judgments.

his introduction offers a lesson for all biographers: ‘I have tried to stay true to my belief that a human life is too rich and subtle to be explained away through one neat, interpretative matrix.’

ThOMAS Stearns eliot was born in St Louis, Missouri, in 1888. he was raised in a solidly upper-middle-class family. Summers were spent by the sea but the movement of the great Mississippi, flowing through St Louis, was the music of his soul — heard throughout his poetry. A university contemporary described him later as ‘rather dreamy, bookish, tousleheaded, and very unobtrusive’.

This odd, shy, melancholy young man was to move to Britain at the age of 25 and begin the long, painful transformation into a literary superstar who would be pressed by autograph-hunting crowds wherever he went.

While still in the States, eliot (called ‘Tom’ all through Crawford’s book) first met emily hale, sent roses, fell in chaste love. This transatlantic relationship would last — full of angst — for almost four decades. But in england in 1915, fatefully, eliot met the first woman who was to change his life — for the worse.

Shy and virginal, he married nervy, vivacious and sexy Vivien haigh-Wood, dooming them both to misery.

By 1922 (when Crawford picks up the story) the couple, both just 34, were ‘completely worn out’ (eliot’s words) by ill-heath, their fundamental incompatibility and Vivien’s mental instability.

Still safely in love with the far-off emily hale, eliot told friends he could not go on — and yet had to, since his sense of duty and Christian faith made divorce unthinkable. Acid-tongued yet perceptive, Virginia Woolf described Vivien as ‘mad as a hare’. At a dinner, Vivien taunted Woolf as ‘the bloodiest snob I’ve ever known’. Both women were, of course, correct.

It’s probably impossible for the modern reader to understand the bombshell effect of eliot’s fractured, allusive poetry on the reading public when Prufrock (1917) and The Waste Land challenged both aesthetic and moral values and gave voice to an age of anxiety which segued into the horror of two world wars.

even in 1964, when I studied eliot for A-level, the poet’s work (like that of Picasso and Stravinsky) seemed to

embody the dislocated, iconoclastic angst of my generation, as well as his own. Famously Eliot, as critic and teacher, was later to claim that poetry can illuminate before it is properly understood. He proved it true.

Robert Crawford is scrupulously factual in detailing Eliot’s racism and anti-Semitism, noting that he disassociated himself from Ezra Pound’s fascistic views while still remaining loyal to the man who had been such a support to him.

Fellow American Pound, who lived for a time in England and was more famous than Eliot both for his poetry and for his literary criticism, championed, mentored and edited Eliot with enthusiasm — and Eliot never forgot it.

Was Eliot culpable in his devotion to Emily Hale — leaving his wife alone to go to America and failing to deal properly with her unhappiness and mental illness, and finally having her committed? Nothing is simple within this hefty, detailed narrative and Crawford remains impeccably fair.

Sad, lonely, desperate Vivien died in 1947 and for Eliot the shock was ‘harder to bear than simple grief’.

The following year he was awarded both the Order of Merit and the Nobel Prize in Literature, and honours would follow in the U.S., France, Germany and Italy.

But no amount of renown and no official bauble was to matter to the faintly querulous public figure nearly as much as the late discovery of passion. The great romance was already sitting in his ‘little Dickensian office’ at Faber & Faber, in the shape of his secretary, a 23-year-old from Yorkshire called Valerie Fletcher.

AT 14, Valerie had heard his work read by John Gielgud and allegedly vowed to meet and marry the great poet. Determined ‘to get to the author’ she wrote to him, got a book signed, became more obsessed.

Finally her dream came true and she was hired by his secretary in 1949, becoming indispensable in every aspect of his life and prompting teasing from other secretaries who observed her devotion.

At last, in 1956 he proposed to her by letter, still addressing her as ‘Miss Fletcher’.

Once public, the liaison between the grand 68-year-old and his 30-year-old secretary shocked the public and hurt his friends, including the two women (Emily Hale and Mary Hutchinson) who had longed for years to marry him. Mr and Mrs Eliot discovered boundless happiness. Eliot’s passionate letters about their sex life (‘nipple to nipple’ . . . ‘tingling and burning’) are almost embarrassing to read.

Rejuvenated and delighted, he admitted this was a world he had never known: ‘I was transformed by Valerie.’ He praises his wife joyfully in the frank love poem, A Dedication To My Wife — in which he celebrates ‘lovers whose bodies smell of each other’ and who ‘babble the same speech without need of meaning’.

Utterly devoted and physically affectionate, they had nine years before Eliot (a lifelong smoker) died in 1965. Valerie was to become the keeper of his flame — and very rich after the success of Cats.

One detail in this absorbing biography is quietly moving. After her husband’s death, until hers in 2012, Valerie Eliot took delivery of a bouquet of flowers every Monday at her Kensington flat. Her beloved Tom had arranged this with his solicitor, a weekly proof of their undying love.