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Lyndall Gordon

T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life Paperback – December 1, 1999

by Lyndall Gordon (Author)

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Lyndall Gordon's biographical work on T. S. Eliot has won many dramatic accolades.

In this "nuanced, discerning account of a life famously flawed in its search for perfection" (The New Yorker), Gordon captures Eliot's "complex spiritual and artistic history . . . with tact, diligence, and subtlety" (Boston Globe). Drawing on recently discovered letters, she addresses in full the issue of Eliot's anti-Semitism as well as the less-noted issue of his misogyny. Her account "rescues both the poet and the man from the simplifying abstractions that have always been applied to him" (The New York Times), and is "definitive but not dogmatic, sympathetic without taking sides. . . . Its voice rings with authority" (Baltimore Sun). Praised by Cynthia Ozick as "daring, strong, psychologically brilliant," Gordon's study remains true to the mysteries of art as she chronicles the poet's "insistent search for salvation."

Print length

754 pages
Language

English
Publisher

W. W. Norton & Company
Publication date

December 1, 1999
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5.5 x 1.4 x 8.2 inches
ISBN-10

9780393320930
ISBN-13

978-0393320930
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Editorial Reviews

Review

The most authoritative life of Eliot thus far. -- Publishers Weekly starred review

[D]aring, strong, psychologically brilliant. -- Cynthia Ozick

[D]efinitive but not dogmatic, sympathetic without taking sides. . . . Its voice rings with authority. -- Baltimore Sun

[R]escues both the poet and the man from the simplifying abstractions that have always been applied to him. -- New York Times

About the Author

Lyndall Gordon is the author of eight acclaimed biographies, including T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life. She lives in Oxford. England.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0393320936
Publisher ‏ : ‎ W. W. Norton & Company; Reprint edition (December 1, 1999)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 754 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780393320930
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0393320930
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.02 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 1.4 x 8.2 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #138,901 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #760 in Author Biographies

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Lyndall Gordon

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Lyndall Gordon is the prize-winning author of six biographies, including Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds; The Imperfect Life of TS Eliot; Shared Lives, a memoir of women's friendship in her native South Africa; and Divided Lives: Dreams of a Mother and a Daughter, which tells her own story. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and lives in Oxford where she is a fellow of St Hilda's College.

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John

T S Eliot for the world at large, an indispensable book.

Reviewed in the United States on October 23, 2020

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This is a brilliant work. It captures the very essence of Eliot’s unique personality and his rather sad, melancholic life which changed with the appearance of his second wife, who gave him joy, a sense of security, as well as strength in his spiritual quest which was so important in his personal and creative self. This unique life will satisfy readers who cherish his poetry and also the newcomer, who will discover this magnificent man who gave so much sense and beauty to the tragic 20th century, without hiding the sadness and deep sorrows that we had to endure. The Waste Land is a monumental work of art and a deep psychological portrait of those life changing years. A must read!!

One person found this helpful

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Fred Campbell

Finally, a necessary blend . . .

Reviewed in the United States on December 4, 2000

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After reading the trite Eliot biography written by Peter Ackroyd, a man who specializes in biography and not thinking (apparently), I thought all hope lost for an accurate examination of Eliot's life and poetry. Lyndall Gordon's book has restored my faith in biographers. Eliot, himself, was a complex man, and taking on the task of his biography seems as complex as the man and as intimidating as one might assume. Gordon pursues the historical Eliot and the poetic Eliot, finally yielding the necessary blend of biography and poetry required by the life of any moder poet, and certainly more of Eliot than any other. Gordon sees the same need for discussing poetry and biography that Yeats speaks of. This book is for those in need of something much more substantial that the usual tabloid fodder biographers seem intent on producing these days. In it, Eliot comes to life physically, intellectually, and spiritually. A truly romantic effort.

41 people found this helpful

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Eddie C. Williams

He was an extremely complex man who wrote poetry to match his personal complexity. Great book.

Reviewed in the United States on March 7, 2022

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The book is somewhat tedious, but so is the subject. What I dislike most is the author’s frequent use of foreign language parenthetical inserts without providing translations for the less educated among her audience. I consider this to be a bit pretentious and unnecessary. The book is highly detailed and provides explications for Eliot’s more obscure poems that are very helpful.

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Marianna

Covers the man as a whole, as well as the poet, excellent

Reviewed in the United States on December 17, 2018

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Couldn't have wished for a better 'synopsis' of Eliot's life. We now wait for release of the Hale letters in 2019....

2 people found this helpful

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Beverly Seaton

Hagiography

Reviewed in the United States on February 2, 2009

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This is not a biography, but a hagiography. Others have noted that it seems more about his work than his life. There is probably a good reason for that. For a corrective, see Carole Seymour-Jones, Painted Shadow: The Life of Vivienne Eliot. This gives us a better idea of what Eliot was like. I find it hard to understand that a book published in 1998 as this was is so terrified that Eliot was a homosexual. The portrait she paints of his idyllic marriage to Valerie Fletcher is hilarious--a 68 year old famous man finds "love" for the first time with a 30 year old who worships him. Well, it takes all kinds. Perhaps this author does not believe that gays can "love" one another. This book does not even deserve one star.

9 people found this helpful

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technoguy

Politic,cautious and meticulous.

Reviewed in the United States on August 31, 2018

T.S.Eliot was from a Unitarian religious background in America, he went out into Europe, Paris, London to complete his education and gain experience in the writing of poetry, adopting verse libre in The Love Song of J. Prufrock, he’d picked up from Laforgue (rather than Whitman), a French poet, after reading Arthur Symons book on the Symbolists. Eliot wanted to overcome the Victorian tendency in verse. He wrote using personae, thinly-veiled characterisations. He had a spiritual mission which laid down a pattern in poetry: his failure to find perfection of the spirit led to success in poetry. He used women, somewhat leading them on, by never committing himself, yet utilising their formidable resources and willpower. He was never in love with them or only nominally to infuse his poetry, like Emily Hale. Eliot followed a Jamesian path in his European explorations, both having been born in the same area of the States. He was also somewhat mentored and guided by Ezra Pound and his example as fellow Americans in France and England. Eliot cultivated impersonality in his essays and poems, and an ‘objective correlative’ of personal experience. Eliot wore a mask to keep others at a distance, the evasive public man. 'The end of the enjoyment of poetry is a pure contemplation from which all the accidents of personal emotion are removed; thus we aim to see the object as it really is…'

Eliot lived for his art and sacrificed a lot of his subjective feelings of love for women for a higher Love. Having drifted spiritually for a few years, he converted to Anglicanism in 1927, overcome by the chaos and fragmentariness of modern civilization. “The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.” He fought vs. Romantic individualism, preferring classicism. His greatest poem was The Wasteland with its variety of dramatic voices counterpoised,aided by Ezra Pound’s editing. This poetry came from the depths of Eliot’s mental state, loosened by illness, giving the poem its rhythms. His volatile marriage to his 1st wife had affected his equilibrium, but given his poetry an imaginative zest, emotional turmoil, and spiritual despair. His interest in philosophy was prior to the poetry and he did a thesis on FH Bradley where Eliot prized extraordinary experience, subjective intuition, above the material world.

Lyndan Gordon’s very readable biography stresses the American background: the family connections of wealth and spirit, he had 3 sisters and his mother Charlotte wrote poetry of transcendence and spiritual uplift. She gives space for Vivienne Haigh-Wood, Eliot’s 1st wife, who wrote herself, but because of her demands and instability, made him appease her and cater to her many illnesses, and then flee her and seek to avoid her, using his friends as a buffer. He also almost encouraged Bertrand Russell to take her off his hands. Russell had an affair and ditched her.Later she ended up in a mental asylum, where Eliot never visited her. His guilt for this treatment lasted many years. Eliot’s deep fear of women comes out in his poetry,although he needed their company, sought spiritual comfort or inspiration; he had a deep disgust of the body and sexuality. She writes well about Emily Hale, a childhood friend with whom he fell in love when young, but moved away from only to take up with her as a friend, during his travails with Vivienne, who revived memories of the past. She became his Beatrice figure. He also had a passionate (non sexual) friendship with Mary Trevelyan, with whom he went out to parties, concerts, literary gatherings with his friends. Both these women nurtured hopes of marriage, but he let them down badly when he got married to a much younger woman,Valerie Eliot, who had been his typist. She took care of his heritage.

Gordon treats the poetry as a continuous backcloth to his changing experiences, hardly quoting more than one line at a time rather than couplets or stanzas. Everything is used as it relates to Eliot’s biography, as grist to the mill, ground into a vast pabulum of informational anecdote. She has no feel for the verse itself, its rhythms and imagery, its quality, whether it is better or worse than what went before. If you judged it by what she said, you’d think The Four Quartets and the plays were his major works, rather than The Wasteland, Prufrock and Sweeney Agonistes. She never discusses for instance whether the religious belief he acquired was imposed on the poetry, making it willed and dogmatic, the Word succeeding the word. She says he could never become the saint he wished, unable to perfect himself. Everything was subsumed to a religious mission, whose by-product was the poetry. Renunciation and self denial pervades his work long before his religious justification for them. Beneath the modernistic paraphernalia is the ascetic, prophetic voice crying in the wilderness. Eliot never believed his life could have a biography. Here’s one.

9 people found this helpful

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Adrian Bailey

Seems to be excellent

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 2, 2020

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I have to say first that I have stopped, perhaps paused, about a third of the way through. It's a scholarly and deeply researched book, probably of great interest to scholars. It gives a good overview of Eliot and his place in literary culture, the surveying of the latter interesting in itself. Key poems are located chronologically in the book's development. Eliot's psychological profile presents a conflicted, unhappy and insecure man. He was ambivalent towards women, swinging from savage misogyny to idolisation. His anti-semitism was blatant, though this seems more refracted through his inner life and struggles with puritanism, disgust with contemporary culture and a very confused religious sense: he seems to me to have looked for targets for his chronic deep anger. Very sadly, in his time anti-semitism was the modern manifestation of many centuries of the wicked persecution of Jewry. His first wife joined the Black Shirts, and Ezra Pound was a notorious Fascist. Still, it leaves a very bad taste and his ambitions to become a saint which transmuted to commitment to High Anglicism should remind us that howver 'uplifting' or 'mystical' were texts such as Four Quartets', their high aesthetic appeal epitomises much of highly civilized culture in its concealment of a dirty underbelly. In person, he comes across as sometimes reserved and formal, sometimes a bufoon or buffer, sometimes withdrawn.

The background tp the writing of the poems is useful but one of the reasons I stopped reading was that I felt my connection with Eliot's poetry was being influenced in a bad way. It raises questions for me of the dangers of reading a poet's biography. On the other hand, I came to this book straight after reading Jonathan Bate's 'Radical Wordsworth' biography which greatly enhanced and inspired my engagement with the poet. It's given me food for thought at least.

The disastrous marriage to Vivienne and her descent into severe mental distress, and Eliot's long living with and trying to escape it, I found sad but uninteresting. The descriptions of the Bloomsbury set were illuminating and reinforced my opinions about them.

5 people found this helpful

Mr. D. James

The book reads rather like a mystery-thriller

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 15, 2016

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Gordon, Lyndall. The Imperfect Life of TS Eliot

The revised edition of Lyndall Gordon’s biography (2012) is a comprehensive account of Eliot’s life, dealing mainly with his life in England, and including five appendices plus a profusion of Notes. It is however a fascinating insight into the mind and art of Eliot, his many masks and his difficulties with women, especially those whom he served badly. The book reads rather like a mystery-thriller, the ‘real’ Eliot being kept under wraps until the end. The ‘Imperfect’ of the title reflects on Eliot’s conception of himself and the world he lived in, especially his ‘Waste Land’ experience of London as a young man.

Eliot preserved for the outside world a smooth and cultured exterior, behind which, however, raged a tormented soul, steeped in New England Puritanism. Gordon relates his early life in Boston and Havard to his adoption of England as the only civilised place to live. Early on she introduces us to Emily Hale, a major player in Eliot’s life until suddenly, after years of close friendship in England and the States she becomes for Eliot a non-person. Eliot, who fell in love with Emily as a fellow student and continued covertly to visit her in Chipping Campden, then dropped her completely. She had served her purpose as a loving companion, but closer ontact was damnation for Eliot, whose exacting moral code embraced chastity, austerity, humility and sanctity. Something similar happened to his decade of friendship with Mary Trevelyan, an independent English woman who became his confidante in his frantic marriage with Vivienne Haigh-Wood. Eliot was afraid of women, Gordon asserts, and only at the very end of his life did he find happiness - with his former secretary, Valerie.

For those interested in Eliot’s crises of conscience and for addicts of English writers, such as Auden, Spender, and the Woolfs, not to mention Americans like Lowell, Hawthorne, Emerson and Ezra Pound this book is a gold-mine. Hence one who despised biography (and forbade any during his life) has, thanks to this informed and lively tome, posthumously provided material for an insightful book you’ll not easily put down.

14 people found this helpful

Kirk McElhearn

A fine work, entertaining, but a bit restrained

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 19, 2018

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A very interesting biography, greatly influenced by her work on Henry James (she mentions him many times). I didn't know much about Eliot's life, and this book told his tale in an entertaining manner. It's a sad life, and I felt that Ms Gordon didn't underscore the sadness enough. It's not the definitive biography, and that one remains to be written. (I believe some letters of his will be unsealed in the very near future that may shed light on certain aspects of his life, allowing the definitive biography to be written.)

3 people found this helpful

W. A. D.

Impressive.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 24, 2019

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A fine, sophisticated and thorough account of a complex man and his even more complex relationships. But it may be too detailed for some and the casual reader might be better off with the Peter Ackroyd biography instead.

2 people found this helpful

M. E. Jenkins

Tedious

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 24, 2018

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I found it didn't balance the tediousness o his life with the magic of his poetry

3 people found this helpful

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