Review by Booklist Review
Picking up where he left off in Young Eliot: From St. Louis to The Waste Land (2015) with this intimate biography of T. S. Eliot in middle age, Crawford finds "Tom" sleep-deprived and anxious, torn between literary aspirations and the stability of his job at Lloyds Bank. Unhappily devoted to his chronically ill wife, Vivien, Eliot fell into a decades-long epistolary romance with speech and drama teacher Emily Hale. His letters to her, made public only in 2020 and a major component of this portrait, reveal tender longings but also enduring torment. Eliot's desire for amatory communion collided with ingrained notions of duty tied to his fierce Anglican faith. Meanwhile, though writing came only sporadically, Eliot produced some of his most compelling works, including "Ash Wednesday" and the haunting war poems "East Coker" and "Little Gidding." Crawford, himself a poet as well as a top-notch literary scholar, largely resists the temptation to explicate Eliot's personal life through his poems or vice versa. But he makes a strong case that suppression and sublimation of desire were instrumental in Eliot's greatness.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The Nobel-winning poet and playwright Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888--1965) claws his way out of modernist despondency in this revelatory biography from Crawford (after Young Eliot). The author surveys the American-born Eliot's life in London after the 1922 publication of The Waste Land, sharply dissecting the tensions between the public acclaim he received and his private turmoil and angst, with his political conservatism (and antisemitism), and in the moral certitudes of the Anglican Church, which he embraced in a religious turn that baffled other modernist literati. Eliot had a rough marriage with the mentally unstable Vivien Haigh-Wood; a passionate affair with Emily Hale (Crawford makes good use of their recently released letters), whom he refused to marry; and a brief but happy marriage to the much younger Esme Valerie Fletcher. Braiding piquant detail with rich analysis ("In his life, he worried about his hernia; in his poetry, he turned again to structuring an account of modern existence on an ancient fertility ritual... balanced between feverish action and strict control"), Crawford illuminates the contradictions that make Eliot such a fascinating symbol of his times. The result is a rewarding look at a key literary figure. Photos. Agent: David Godwin Assoc. (Aug.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
With Animal Joy, poet/psychoanalyst Alsadir, a National Book Critics Circle finalist for the collection Fourth Person Singular, gets serious about studying the importance of laughter (30,000-copy first printing). Long-listed for the National Book Award and a Granta Best of Young American Novelists, Ball was inspired by French writer/artist Édouard Levé's memoir (written at age 39) to offer his own frank Autoportrait in his 39th year. In 1920s Paris, Kiki de Montparnasse was a model, muse, and friend to cultural greats and an artist, cabaret star, and driving force in her own right, as Braude (The Invisible Emperor) highlights in Kiki Man Ray. With Eliot After "The Waste Land," award-winning scholar/poet Crawford follows up his highly regarded Young Eliot (10,000-copy first printing). Standing as both memoir and memorial, Black Folk Could Fly is a first selection of personal nonfiction from the late author/mentor Kenan, whose award-winning works powerfully communicate his experience of being Black, gay, and Southern. Lowell's Memoirs collects the complete autobiographical prose of the great poet, including unpublished early work (10,000-copy first printing). What is home but A Place in the World, and Tuscany celebrant Mayes's new book explores what home really means in all its variations. As Morris explains in her first book of nonfiction, she came to the writing career launched with the multi-million-copy best-selling The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Listening Well (50,000-copy first printing). Composer of the Tony-nominated musical Once Upon a Mattress, author of the novel Freaky Friday and the follow-up screenplay, and chair of the Juilliard School, Rodgers has a lot more to discuss in Shy than being the daughter of Richard Rodgers (25,000-copy first printing). Addressed to Wohl's brother Bobby, who died in 1965, As It Turns Out reconstructs the life of their sister, the iconic actress/model Edie Sedgwick made famous by Andy Warhol (30,000-copy first printing).
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
An authoritative life of a towering poet. After completing a two-volume biography (Young Eliot, 2015), Crawford continues his meticulous, perceptive examination of the life and work of T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) beginning with the 1922 publication of The Waste Land. Drawing on voluminous letters and archival sources, he constructs a finely detailed chronicle of the poet's last four decades, focusing on how Eliot's work--poetry, plays, essays--arose from his "sometimes tormented life." Much of that torment was caused by his marriage to the volatile Vivien Haigh-Wood, whose physical and mental deterioration--recounted in sometimes tedious detail--vexed both of them. Although overwhelmed with Vivien's problems, Eliot found sustenance in his relationship with Emily Hale, whom he had met in 1912 and professed to be in love with. Their correspondence, made public in 2020, reveals an intimate friendship. Hale was Eliot's confidante, and she longed to marry him if only he would divorce Vivien. For Eliot, though, a convert to the Anglican Church, divorce was forbidden. When Vivien died in 1947, Emily's hope revived, but "it was as if Vivien's death pointed him all the more definitely towards renunciation." Suddenly, he realized that "his love for Emily now was so different from what he had felt in his youth." Marriage, he explained to her, was impossible. Crawford examines Eliot's "bleak private life," which became exacerbated by the deaths of family and friends--and even by winning the Nobel Prize, which he feared would quash his creativity. "The Nobel is a ticket to one's funeral," he complained. Despite travels, teaching, honors, and lectures; despite his work as an editor at Faber & Faber; despite an active social life, Eliot appeared deeply solitary and withdrawn. "In public," Crawford writes, "his carapace remained impermeable." Marriage to his young secretary Valerie Fletcher, in 1957, which surprised everyone who knew him, seemed to rejuvenate him. Eight years later, he was dead. Exemplary literary scholarship. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
