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T.S. Eliot: The Making Of An American Poet, 1888-1922

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This is a fascinating book that throws a flood of light on matters about which one had long been curious. Eliot's youth was intense and privileged, a crisscross of stimuli shaping a great poet, who here more than ever is seen as the product of American soil. There are "paths not taken" and "jolly corners" on every side and one could project from this biography a hundred possible Eliots. That the author of so revolutionary as poem as "Prufrock" (at age 23) should devote years to a thesis on F. H. Bradley is only one of the paradoxes of this career.

The puzzles of Eliot's sexuality are illuminated by the provision of a social context in Bostonian Bohemia (which gave Eliot a rather bad reputation among his Harvard elders). He had trouble loving, let alone falling in love with, women: "I should find it very stimulating to have several women fall in love with me -- several, because that makes the practical side less evident." Pacing city streets at night, he was tormented by restless urges, often perverse and obscene. His scabrous wit was laced with ancestral puritan contempt for sex.

The figure of Jean Verdenal, the most lovable in these pages, looms as being for Eliot what Hallam was for Tennyson, and we also meet a brilliant young Yorkshireman, Karl Henry Culpin. Both died in the Great War in 1917. "The Waste Land" offers itself to be read anew as an "anthem for doomed youth."

Eliot's impulsive, unconsummated and catastrophic marriage was the mutual gravitation of two radically conflicted people who thought they understood one another and could each be the other's salvation -- "the awful daring of a moment's surrender" made possible only by not giving themselves time to think.

Throughout the story one is aware of Eliot's stubborn, quirky intelligence, processing the material of his life with unfailing virtuosity and self-confidence, and able to take deep plunges into many domains of "knowledge and experience" (notably in three years' study of Sanskrit and Eastern religion under Woods, Lanman and Anesaki).

Miller commits some odd solecisms, calling the Pantheon (rue Soufflot) the Parthenon, attributing "pray for us at the hour of our death" to the Lord's Prayer, referring to "Wilde's opera, Salome," but his archeology of the poet's youth deals in a sensitive and scholarly way with its sources, making up for various Aspernian holocausts, and he does not exceed the bounds of sensible speculation in his biographical decipherment of the poems.