T.S. Eliot: A Life

by Peter Ackroyd

In the twentieth century, no Anglo-American poet or critic has matched the influence of Thomas Stearns Eliot. Despite his political and religious conservatism, Eliot was among the most innovative of the literary modernists, a figure to be reckoned with by admirers and critics alike. In his Whitbread Prize-winning biography, Peter Ackroyd delves into the work and mind of a man who redefined the very terms of modern poetry.

From his early days in America to his later life as a British citizen, Eliot fought successfully for his work and his privacy. But with careful research and splendid insight into the poet's character, Mr. Ackroyd has tracked Eliot to ground and brought this remarkable figure to light in an authoritative and fascinating study.

"The fullest and most plausible portrait yet achieved." (Frank Kermode, Oxford scholar and literary critic)

Genres: Biography, Poetry, Nonfiction, Literature, History, Biography Memoir, English Literature

400 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Peter Ackroyd CBE is an English novelist and biographer with a particular interest in the history and culture of London.

Peter Ackroyd's mother worked in the personnel department of an engineering firm, his father having left the family home when Ackroyd was a baby. He was reading newspapers by the age of 5 and, at 9, wrote a play about Guy Fawkes. Reputedly, he first realized he was gay at the age of 7.

Ackroyd was educated at St. Benedict's, Ealing and at Clare College, Cambridge, from which he graduated with a double first in English. In 1972, he was a Mellon Fellow at Yale University in the United States. The result of this fellowship was Ackroyd's Notes for a New Culture, written when he was only 22 and eventually published in 1976. The title, a playful echo of T. S. Eliot's Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948), was an early indication of Ackroyd's penchant for creatively exploring and reexamining the works of other London-based writers.

Ackroyd's literary career began with poetry, including such works as London Lickpenny (1973) and The Diversions of Purley (1987). He later moved into fiction and has become an acclaimed author, winning the 1998 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for the biography Thomas More and being shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1987.

Ackroyd worked at The Spectator magazine between 1973 and 1977 and became joint managing editor in 1978. In 1982 he published The Great Fire of London, his first novel. This novel deals with one of Ackroyd's great heroes, Charles Dickens, and is a reworking of Little Dorrit. The novel set the stage for the long sequence of novels Ackroyd has produced since, all of which deal in some way with the complex interaction of time and space, and what Ackroyd calls "the spirit of place". It is also the first in a sequence of novels of London, through which he traces the changing, but curiously consistent nature of the city. Often this theme is explored through the city's artists, and especially its writers.

Ackroyd has always shown a great interest in the city of London, and one of his best known works, London: The Biography, is an extensive and thorough discussion of London through the ages.

His fascination with London literary and artistic figures is also displayed in the sequence of biographies he has produced of Ezra Pound (1980), T. S. Eliot (1984), Charles Dickens (1990), William Blake (1995), Thomas More (1998), Chaucer (2004), William Shakespeare (2005), and J. M. W. Turner. The city itself stands astride all these works, as it does in the fiction.

From 2003 to 2005, Ackroyd wrote a six-book non-fiction series (Voyages Through Time), intended for readers as young as eight. This was his first work for children. The critically acclaimed series is an extensive narrative of key periods in world history.

Early in his career, Ackroyd was nominated a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1984 and, as well as producing fiction, biography and other literary works, is also a regular radio and television broadcaster and book critic.

In the New Year's honours list of 2003, Ackroyd was awarded the CBE.

Reviews

[Alok Mishra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful coverage of Eliot's life, thoughts and impressions that he observed and he permeated. I admire the work by Peter Ackroyd in sketching a real-life biography of Mr T. S. Eliot. This work will certainly help all those who are doing their research around T. S. Eliot.

[木漏れ日 · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Thomas Stearns Eliot, in his last years, declared that there had been only two periods of his life when he had been happy—during his childhood, and during his second marriage. This will be in large part an account of the years between, the years in which he wrote his poetry."


Easily one of my favorite reads this year. Ackroyd provides, not a nonsensical patchwork caricature of the poet, but an elegantly arranged stained glass window—arranging each facet and shard of Eliot's nuanced biography in order to unveil a luminous, shimmering whole. Entirely unapologetic about Eliot's undeniably American upbringing, Ackroyd manages to explicate Eliot's complicated existence as a 'resident alien' (or metoikos, as Eliot occasionally signed his correspondence)—throbbing between America, France, and England—along with his unique relationship with his mother, father, and the ghost of his grandfather (as Eliot himself says of George Herbert, "The family background of a man of genius is always of interest"). I also enjoyed such a lucid and un-generalized portrayal of Eliot's often contradictory relationships with his contemporaries (especially Ezra Pound, Conrad Aiken, & Virginia Woolf).

Eliot, in his younger years, said that "all great art is based on a condition of fundamental boredom—passionate boredom." After the long and arduous pilgrimage of his life, one might imagine him to amend—"all great art emerges from pain—impossible pain." Eliot's life was one filled with pain, and out of that pain came his poetry. Every verse was paid for dearly. Every hollow man, gerontion, and agéd eagle is a part of the poet himself. To witness his work is to peer into Eliot's very soul. Eliot is, however, undeniably theatrical. This biography, then, pulls aside the curtain, granting us the context of Eliot's life in order to better understand his writing. Ackroyd's 'humanizing' of Eliot does nothing to take away from the depth and beauty of his work. Rather, it paints us a picture of a man who, when inquired about the meaning of one of his lines, replied, "My dear, don't ask me—I don't know!" A man—an oracle—capable of writing verses he could not explain. A Tiresias, blind, but always seeing. Great art transcends the artist, but, perhaps, great art also lifts the artist along with it.

Between confidence and self-doubt, between atheism and Anglicanism, between one wife and the second, between America and England, between comedy and tragedy, between the prosaic and the poetic, falls, not the shadow, but a life of light—illuminating the paths of countless others to come. We owe a great debt to Eliot. I hope, in better grasping his character, we can begin to repay it. Perhaps we too, someday, when carried over the threshold, can cry,

hurrah! hurrah! hurrah!

shantih shantih shantih

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

I hardly ever read poetry, but for some reason T.S. Eliot's poetry speaks to me. Perhaps it's because, like Eliot, I used to work at a bank in the City of London, and the feeling of his poems is the exact feeling I had as a 'Hollow Man' looking at the masses of other Hollow Men crossing London Bridge to the Waste Land of the City. "I had not thought death had undone so many" - lines like that just express so much for me.

So I was happy to be able to borrow this biography of T.S. Eliot from my neighbours. It was quite a depressing read, but fascinating. Eliot was apparently very cold and detached from his emotions, sexually repressed, withholding of emotion, distrustful of the passionate side of him, and stuck for much of his life in a disastrous marriage with Vivien, who was perpetually ill and mentally unstable.

His writing depended a lot on other literature, feeding on others' work, adapting it and using it in hiw own. "His was an imagination which went to literature for that which life could not give - a sense of order and significance, and the possibility of dramatic intensity."

I was struck by how much of a record we have of people's lives and thoughts in those days, through letters and other paper archives - there's even a record of what books Eliot borrowed from his local library in 1917. Today, how much will there be for future historians to draw on? Nobody writes letters any more. Emails and blogs and websites could theoretically be retained forever, but are in practice deleted frequently. Not to mention tweets, texts, instant messages, etc.

I was also interested in how small and accessible 'literary' society seemed in those days. Even before Eliot was famous, he was mixing quite easily with the likes of Ezra Pound (who mentored him and edited the Waste Land), the Woolfs, James Joyce, etc etc. Eliot came from a privileged background so clearly that was important, but I was interested in how easily he seemed to get 'in', and how everybody seemed to know everybody.

His poetry was written sproadically, partly due to other commitments - his work at the bank and then as a publisher at Faber & Faber, his own poor health and that of his wife, their eventual breakup (Eliot split from her in a very cowardly way, going to America for a year and then just avoiding her when he got back to London and getting his lawyer to write to her and explain everything). For some years, there's almost nothing in the biography apart from a catalogue of worries and difficulties and ailments.

His conversion to Anglo-Catholicism surprised many, given his scepticism and ironic distance from any idea. But his sister Ada thought that it was a way for him to withdraw from the world even further, seeing it as unreal and merely "acting" in it while maintaining a separate, inner world of mysticism. He was also seeking some kind of order and tradition to cling to. He became increasingly preoccupied with the absurdity of most activities and the deceitfulness of human affections. Even his writing didn't seem to give him much pleasure - in his letters there are repeated references to poetry as something dark and viscous that clogs him up and has to be evacuated.

At the end of his life, however, he did seem to find happiness. He married his secretary Valerie Fletcher in 1957 and lived a simple, domestic life of semi-retirement with her until his death in 1965. After he died, Valerie said, "He felt he had paid too high a price to be a poet, that he had suffered too much."

[Julio The Fox · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ackroyd rips apart Eliot for the anti-semitic genius that he was. This Eliot biography stirred bones when it was published in England, then the U.S. Can literary worth ever be disassociated from moral rectitude? A follower of Nabokov would say "yes" but Ackroyd begs to differ. Eliot hated the modern world, how else to explain THE WASTE LAND, and saw in the Jew the epitome of modernity. If he failed to take the path of Celine, or his friend Ezra Pound, towards criminal acts, it was because he was too conservative for fascism, and too religious. A gutsy entry in Eliot studies.

[Illiterate · Rating 3 out of 5]

“It was human love, the love that he had dismissed in his writings as the consolation only of ordinary men, that rescued him from a lifetime of misery.” Quite.

[Isidore · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eliot is one of those towering figures who, safely dead, become fair game for critics. Initial hostility subsided in the 1980s, and by the 1990s a new generation deriving energy from identity politics was able to resume the attack. In between there was a lull in which this scholarly but sympathetic biography could emerge.

Even so, Ackroyd faced formidable obstacles, of which the greatest was Eliot himself. Determined to keep his private life private, he inserted a clause in his will forbidding his wife and others controlling his estate from cooperating with biographers. As a result Ackroyd was denied access to Eliot's unreleased papers, and, incredibly, was even refused permission to quote from published works. This prevented detailed analysis of the poems, and relevant sections of essays and letters could only be paraphrased.

In spite of all this, I find Ackroyd's book very satisfying and convincing, more so than the work of more recent biographers with full access to Eliot's papers. His Eliot fits a New England stereotype, tall and lean, reserved and laconic, a political and social conservative, with a quirky sense of humour that has him secreting firecrackers in the coal scuttle and writing quantities of obscene verse for the amusement of his literary friends. Profoundly shy, he invents useful poses and personas for himself, even his New Englandness being something of an affectation, since he was born in St. Louis. But it is always very hard to tell where pose leaves off and true self begins, since his other famous identities, as Englishman and Christian, were both deeply felt and also detached and critical. Ackroyd points us at the inconsistencies and does not psychoanalyze his subject in an effort to uncover Eliot's mostly unknowable inner life.

Ackroyd's discussion of Eliot's verse is quite illuminating, although necessarily confined to generalities. He explains how Eliot's fear of the imminent end of Western civilization runs through his work; the early writings, "The Waste Land" in particular, being gloomily retrospective, while the later dramatic works promote Christianity as a bulwark against barbarism, although with little hope of success. He sees Eliot as a poet of pessimism and despair, bewildered by his fame and popularity, happiest taking refuge in the offices of Faber & Faber writing book blurbs, or playing a game of solitaire.

[Domhnall · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a well written biography and tells Eliot's life story in a lively enough way, bearing in mind the challenge of making any sedentary poet seem interesting, and noting also that Ackroyd was prevented by the Eliot estate from accessing or quoting from important sources. To compensate, he is not intimidated by his subject and quite cheerfully points out limitations in Eliot's work, while noting that Eliot himself would often agree. Allegations that Eliot was anti-Semitic or even fascist are considered in the book and effectively answered. Of The Wasteland, for example, he suggests that its fans often projected their own ideas and assumptions onto a poem that was actually quite bare, though this is not, when one thinks about it, a defect, since the poem allows such creative readings. Eliot did not, however, subscribe to attempted autobiographical interpretations of this and other poems, and in one case employed solicitors to prevent publication. The quality of Eliot's prose writing has been questioned, albeit it is can be interesting, but Ackroyd shows that Eliot himself expressed quite dismissive opinions about his own prose work. However, Eliot's practical appreciation of other poets' writing, even when very different to his own, was demonstrably outstanding.

This book is not a critical examination of the poetry itself, offers very limited guidance for the reader, and also does not really explore or explain Eliot's influence on other poets, on the modernist movement, nor on literature generally in his time (though it does offer pointers), so that for example it is not entirely obvious why he was awarded the Nobel Prize - which of course he fully merited, but for reasons only hinted at in this biography. There are many writers in this period whose biographies make significant references to Eliot, to the point that reading Eliot himself becomes indispensable. This merely identifies what the book is not. What it is - a biography - it does very well and arguably it is better to retain a focus in this way. Eliot is worth more than one book.

[Michael Lineback · Rating 2 out of 5]

Biographical details of TS Eliot's life are hard to come by. Acktoyd's biography covers Eliot's life but is a bit dry and tedious.

[Scott Pearson · Rating 4 out of 5]

T.S. Eliot was one of the great poets in the English language during the twentieth century. He grew up in St. Louis and after graduating from college, moved to England. He loved his new country so much that he eventually became a subject of the English king. He wrote noted poems and plays over his lifespan. He also worked as a banker and as an editor for a publishing firm.

The author of this biography (Peter Ackroyd) is an Englishman who is one of the great historians of our time. Compared to his later writings on a multi-volume history of England, this relatively early work seems relatively superficial. It describes a poet of great emotion and depth in relatively simple terms. Perhaps this is due to Eliot’s nature, but surely some of it is due to Ackroyd’s youth. Fortunately for us, Ackroyd grew as a writer as he aged, and his writing on the history of England is simply majestic. Nonetheless, this work on Eliot was obviously written in Ackroyd’s youth.

What is this book’s value? Anyone who reads Murder in the Cathedral, Notes on a Christian Culture, The Waste Land, or anything else written by T.S. Eliot will wonder what sort of a human being produced such varied and ingenious works as these. Ackroyd’s biography will elucidate such curiosities. It peaks beneath the curtain into Eliot’s personal life. It brings to light his two marriages, his friendships, his religious conversion, his love of England, and his intellectual development in stark terms. Eliot’s story is well-researched as demonstrated by the comprehensive bibliography.

As told in this biography, Eliot was often asked what such-and-such a line in his poetry “meant” – as if there were some simple symbology at play. Eliot usually demurred and left the questioner wondering. Despite its shortcomings, this tale fills in some of those questions. It does not give us a definitive word on what opaque works like The Waste Land “truly mean” (if there is an answer to that question at all). Instead, it helps us see clearly the creative person behind the works, and it fulfills that job quite well.

[Laura · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don’t understand how some biographies are so fabulous that you can’t stop reading them. This was not one of those. I had to force myself to pick up this book and read it, sometimes skimming it. It is dull as dirt. I did learn some new things about Eliot and feel like he lived a sad life overall.

[Andrea Engle · Rating 4 out of 5]

This detailed biography of the American-born, English poet T. S. Eliot engages as well in bits of literary criticism … it also seeks to describe the effects that Eliot had on his time period … wide-ranging in scope … also includes a helpful “Bibliography” …

[justin, the geezer]

leaves a lot to be desired, but works as a fine, very basic introduction to eliot’s life. his discussion of bradley and his “appearances and reality” and its ties to eliot’s work is of considerable importance though, and i’m grateful for having been introduced to that aspect of eliot’s work.

[Caleb Parnin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very researched and impressive summation of one of the great modernist poets. That said, periods were quite hard to maintain interest....

[Cep Subhan KM · Rating 5 out of 5]

A good biography. I have read several TS Eliot's biographies and this one has one interesting style: it tries to connect his life's moments to his poems.

[Patti · Rating 4 out of 5]

1888-1906 - born in St. Louis, Missouri on September 26, 1888. His parents were in their 40s when he was born and had already been married 20 years. He had 4 sisters (the oldest was 19) and 1 brother (9 years older). He grew up in an old Victorian home w/servants. His mother was over-protective.
Grandfather - William Greenleaf Eliot was a Unitarian minister who left Harvard Divinity School to establish that faith in the frontier wilderness (St. Louis which was then a French town with a large population of Catholics).
1906 - 1914 - Eliot went to Harvard - traveled to Europe - dabbled in poetry
1914 - 1917 - Harvard offered him a "Sheldon Travelling Fellowship" & he returned to Europe
1915, June 26 - married Vivien Haigh-Wood, they met through a mutual friend. She died on January 22, 1947 alone in a mental hospital. He was unhappy married to her as she was often ill...
1917 - 1918 - Mr. Eliot, the banker. Worked in a bank for 9 years, to supplement his income. Vivien had a lot of health problems and he needed money. The bank was stable and he felt he was a better writer because of it. He also reviewed & critiqued other works & taught classes & gave seminars.
1921 - 1922 - The Collapse - quit the bank and became editor for "THE CRITERION". This gave him more freedom for his creative writing. The first issue was published in October 1922.
"In the absence of illustrious models, he was compelled to work on his own - and as with "plays" he wanted to write - there were no literary context for such writing from which to draw energy or inspiration.
Eliot - urged by friend Irving Babbitt, who he met in 1928 - declared himself (Eliot) to be a "classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and a anglo-catholic in religion".
1932 - 1934 - Separate Lives - Eliot leaves his wife. He accepts a professorship and travels to Harvard for the academic year 1932-3. His extended time in America begins the process to divorce his wife. She is distraught, eventually ending up in a mental hospital.
1935 - Murder in the Cathedral - a play written by Eliot, with favorable reviews. The play is focused on one man and as the play goes on more and more of the man is revealed...
1946 - 1949 - The Rigours of Life - Eliot is now becoming famous and recognized. In the summer of 1946 he moved to a new home with friend John Hayward, a man confined to a wheelchair. They lived together for the next 11 years. Eliot's life is full and busy with teaching, and seminars and conventions and he still works for the publisher Faber and Faber.
1948 November - received the Nobel Prize for Literature, as well as many other honors that year
1950 - 1956 - The Public Man - drew crowds wherever he went.
1965 January 4 - died, after going into a coma. He had been becoming more sickly the past few years of his life. He was cremated and his ashes were spread at the little church of St. Michael's in East Coker (a village and civil parish in the South Somerset district of Somerset, England) - the village from which his ancestors had come.
Memorial tablet reads = Thomas Stearns Eliot, poet. (dates of birth & death) "in my beginning is my end" & "in my end is my beginning"

[Larry · Rating 3 out of 5]

About one third of the way into this difficult biography I was about to abandon it due to frustration, but I am very glad that I did not. Let me say at the offset that my frustration arose from the constraints placed on the author (Peter Ackroyd) being forbidden to quote T S Eliot’s published works which at times made a good deal of the book, especially the early years when his poetry was more dense, a challenge in that his literary criticism becomes so dense as to be unintelligible without the ability to quote directly. At the best of times literary criticism can be a challenge to the non academic but to add the component of post modernist poetry of Eliot is a recipe for frustration. I am so glad I managed to wade through those sections and while my eyes glazed over I managed to turn the pages and discover an overall good biography of one of the most enigmatic writers of the 20th century.
What strikes one almost immediately after commencement of the biography is that Eliot, overall had a miserable life. One of the primary causes of his ill health was his ill-fated marriage, page after page show physical and mental break-downs, rehabilitations, etc and that’s a understatement. I have one major question that the book never answers; why would such a talented highly intelligent man place himself in such a horrendous marriage, which would haunt him for his entire life? My personal theory is it was due to his puritanical religious upbringing in the USA. Finding himself alone in London/Paris mixing with the crème Da la crème of the top artists of the century (including the Bloomsbury group) all very much in free Bohemian lifestyles, his upbringing became a major impediment in finding companionship and intimacy without having to marry his first flirtation in 1915, a rash and tragic decision which he regretted for the rest of his life. While later becoming a high church Anglo-Catholic his fundamentalist religious beliefs was reflected in a letter of his 20’s: “Syphilis… is God’s punishment for nastiness” His constant ill-health,(its astounding to read the litany of his complaints) together with mental and physical decline of his wife makes one wonder how he managed to survive never mind write and lecture as he did culminating with his Noble Prize for literature.
The biography has some gaps which I found a little confounding as an example his relationship with James Joyce. Early in his stay in Europe his meeting with Joyce wasn’t very memorable with a clash of polar opposite personalities. Time elapses and he is corresponding with some intimacy with Joyce (what happened to allow this to occur?) and later they appear to have a solid friendship? I realize that the writer has not had access to what must be consider the pot of gold of documentation being the letters between Eliot and his second wife which supposedly may reveal more of the man. Ackroyd says in one the final pages of the book which may be his “mea culpa” for the “good” biography that could have been “great”: “We cannot reach into the mystery of Eliot’s solitude”.

[Philip Lane · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was fascinated by this biography of T.S.Eliot as I knew very little about him but had enjoyed his poetry as a teenager. I believe that Ackroyd writes in a very straight forward style and occasionally makes his own assumptions but these are clearly marked as his own views. The problem with the book perhaps is not that of the author but that of the subject. It emerges in the book that there are a lot of unanswered questions and contradictions regarding Eliot's feelings, beliefs and emotions. It seems he chose to express himself mostly through poetry precisely because this medium allows him to remain opaque and frequently refused to provide an official meaning for any of the more obscure phrases in his work. So, despite reading this thick and informative tome I still feel Eliot is a remote figure which is probably just how he wanted it to be.

[Robert Dodds · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very convincing portrait of a complex man, well supported by references to letters and other evidence. As in Peter Ackroyd's equally excellent biography of Charles Dickens, the reader is drawn into a compelling narrative. In the case of T.S.Eliot, the narrative has an unexpected - and true - final twist worthy of a novel, which mitigates some of the gloom that the poet seems to have experienced throughout his life.

[Suzanne · Rating 2 out of 5]

A polished account of a sad and mostly lonely life. Although this is definitely a literary biography with a sustained effort to link the works and the life, it remains unclear why Eliot wrote what he did when he did. While there is clearly respect and even sympathy from the biographer, one has a sneaking feeling that Ackroyd cannot bring himself to empathize with his subject. The end result is a comprehensive but rather clinical account of the man and his works.

[Caoileann · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very sensitive and insightful exploration of the live of the great T. S. Eliot. Rich with genuine concern and regard for the subject whilst retaining a modesty in its penmanship. Like having a fascinating and illuminating chat with a more eloquent and intelligent buddy about a mutually loved writer. This Peter Achroyd seems very charming and skilled.

[The Final Chapter · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mid 2. Given the obstacles Ackroyd faced with having access to the Eliot estate denied, this is an admirable attempt to exploit secondary sources to reveal the poet as an individual man. However, what this reader sought was a greater link between the man and his body of work, and true analysis of the latter was sadly absent.

[Noah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ackroyd's was the first comprehensive account of Eliot's life. Though it has been largely surpassed by Gordon's biography, it was quite a revelation when it first came out, as it offered the first clear glimpse behind Eliot's carefully constructed and maintained facade.

[Sydney · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is extremely well written and informative. The subject matter, Eliot and his life, are what is heavy and sad and difficult. But it gives you an excellent sense of what a complicated man he was.

[Maureen · Rating 2 out of 5]

I liked his biography of Thomas More a lot, but this one was, well, boring. Good for people seriously interested in the poet, not so good for people interested learning about the culture of a time period through the life of one individual.

[Stuart Field · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love Eliot and I love Ackroyd, but this is a little flat. Mainly because Eliot's estate placed restrictions on quoting the poetry! Still very interesting, but into as fascinating as it could have been.

[Stosh Walsh · Rating 5 out of 5]

The definitive biography.

[J. Alfred · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eliot is an interesting guy and this is a strong biography. Delivers what one asks!

[Andrew Darling · Rating 4 out of 5]

Superb. Makes sense of so much that was opaque. Beautifully written, too.

[oswald · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just as I suspected...

[Jordan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good overview of a great poet and a bad man