Years ago, when a Vanderbilt graduate-school party was careening toward promiscuity, a quiet young woman, an English major, suddenly shocked everyone by saying, “Tell you what let’s do: Let’s all name the books we’ve never read.”  Suddenly it was time to go home.  In five minutes the room was empty, except for the host and hostess, hauling half-filled glasses to the kitchen and dumping cigarette butts out of ashtrays.

I for one could have mentioned a number of “essential books” I hadn’t read, among them Russell Kirk’s Eliot and His Age, a study I’d frequently recommended to students as “the best single work on the subject.”  I made that pronouncement without reservation.  I knew Russell Kirk.

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute recently reissued the title, and after having actually read it, I can confirm my original assessment: It’s the best book on Eliot ever written.  And, more than that, it is a brilliant performance, the finest literary biography I’ve ever read.

First of all, it is gracefully written, yet full of linguistic surprises—witty and imaginative.  Kirk was one of the premier stylists of his generation—and that means more to me than all the footnotes in the Library of Congress.  In addition, his commentary on the poetry and the age is clear and precise, nothing like the academic prose that ruins most literary histories, even for other academics.  Herbert Read once observed that “style is the ultimate morality of mind.”  No style illustrates that truth better than Russell Kirk’s.  The clarity of his mind is mirrored in the clarity of his prose.

And the book is full of Kirk’s own memories of T.S. Eliot.  It’s as if the reader had come across an album filled with snapshots of a long-dead friend.  Kirk knew Eliot well.  When in London—and he spent a lot of time there—he called on the great poet, had lunch or dinner with him, and discussed the important matters that later critics and biographers would have to address only through the reading of verse, essays and reviews, letters, and the testimony of others.  As Kirk wrote:

He was thirty years older than I, but we had read the same books, knew the same places, were almost as one in literary preferences and social convictions, and had several old friends in common.

Both men were committed Christians who had come to orthodoxy after a period of doubt, and both had discovered England about the same time, though Kirk remained a disgruntled American while Eliot became a British subject.  So no one born in the second half of the 20th century could possibly know Eliot the man and poet as well as did Russell Kirk.

In fact, many early critics who tackled poems like “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and The Waste Land concluded that they were pure literary constructs, that Eliot was writing poetry unrelated to his private life.  Had they known him better, they would have seen the neurotic face of Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot, his first wife, peering out from behind key allusive images and ironic dialogue.  As Kirk shows, Eliot’s problem with the world was both philosophical and personal—a bad ontology and epistemology on the world’s part, a bad marriage on his.

You can understand the poetry without knowing about the marriage, but the philosophy is crucial; and Kirk, like Eliot, was steeped in it.  As this book suggests, both men had sifted through and understood the work of the important philosophers—classical to modern.  T.S. Eliot’s dissertation—begun at Harvard, completed at Oxford—was an abstruse display of learning: Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F.H. Bradley.  When it was published in 1964, shortly before his death, Eliot wrote: “Forty-six years after my academic philosophizing came to an end, I find myself unable to think in the terminology of this essay.  Indeed, I do not pretend to understand it.”  But Kirk understood it and showed the reader just how much of Bradley was essential to a full understanding of Eliot’s poetry—and how much was irrelevant.

Both Kirk and Eliot were deeply interested in social history, particularly those works that shed light on what Eliot-oriented critics would come to call “the modern predicament.”  A generation of intellectuals would begin to see the present as Eliot saw it—as a falling away from certitude, a loss of tradition and hence of faith, an aimless wandering in self-doubt.  In such a world, the individual could no longer identify with a rich and vital past—or shrug off a sparse and decadent present.

“Prufrock,” The Waste Land, and “The Hollow Men” render 20th-century society in imagery and dialogue that reflect the fragmentation of modern consciousness.  Eliot’s first readers didn’t think of themselves as solipsistic until they read “Prufrock.”  Then many recognized their own shriveled souls as reflected in Eliot’s protagonist.  At the same time, they experienced a sharp sense of loss, enhanced by the ironic tone of the poem, which pricked the conscience of an entire generation.  That tone—or something akin to it—was replicated by a generation of poets writing in a “period style” that dominated the literary scene for decades.  Everybody wanted to sound like—indeed, to be—T.S. Eliot.

Following The Waste Land, which ends in hope, he wrote poetry that was less ironic and more overtly Christian.  Eliot had thought his way out of a despair that to him was both highly personal and endemic to the society around him.  In 1927, he was baptized in the Church of England, and a year later he published a collection of essays, For Lancelot Andrewes, saying in the Introduction, “The general point of view [of the essays] may be described as classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion.”  On that platform he stood unyielding for the next 38 years.

As for Eliot’s contact with the literati of London, as Kirk shows, most instantly recognized his genius and began calling him Great Tom long before the world had heard of him.  A few of them—Roy Campbell, Wyndham Lewis—became lifelong friends and encouraged his principled break with the self-satisfied but effete literary establishment of that day.  In several key references Kirk captures the essence of this literary malaise—for example, a dinner presided over by Sir Edmund Gosse, the rich, self-appointed Lord High Chancellor of English letters.  Evelyn Waugh said of him:

To me he epitomized all that I found ignoble in the profession of letters . . . I saw Gosse as a Mr. Tulkinghorn [a character in Bleak House], the soft-footed, inconspicuous, ill-natured habitué of the great world, and I longed for a demented lady’s-maid to make an end of him.

In addition to making several good friends, Eliot also got a close look at the enemies of the permanent things.  Surprisingly, as a newly married banker, he hung out with the Bloomsbury crowd, a squawking nest of atheists, socialists, and sexual adventurers, epitomized by Bertrand Russell, who wrote of Eliot, “It is quite funny how I have come to love him, as if he were my son.”

Funny indeed.  Soon Eliot would become one of the chief defenders of Christianity (The Idea of a Christian Society) in his time.  Bertrand Russell, a social revolutionary and chronic adulterer, was already a chief adversary of the Church, albeit an astonishingly inept and simplistic one.  Of Russell’s feel-good, substitute-religion, Eliot wrote, with heavy irony:

I cannot regret that such views as Mr. Russell’s, or what we may call the enervate gospel of happiness, are openly expounded and defended.  They help to make clear, what the nineteenth century had been largely occupied in obscuring, that there is no such thing as just Morality; but that for any man who thinks clearly, as his Faith is, so will his Morals be.

Eliot’s writings on religion and politics are by no means confined to quarrels with his contemporaries.  In Notes Towards the Definition of Culture Eliot defends, among other things, a concept popular in 2008—that of “diversity.”  Both Eliot and the politically correct of the 21st century believe that diversity is best served by an overarching unity.  As Kirk observes: “It is to Christianity that Eliot looks for a unifying power; to Christian culture, within which much diversity is possible.”  Contemporary advocates of a unifying structure tend to look to the United Nations.  Perennially dissatisfied with America, these believe that a benign, chirpy, all-powerful global government would somehow create a world culture more vital than any existing regional or national culture.  Of that attitude, Eliot wrote, “[Any world culture] which was simply a uniform culture would be no culture at all.  We should have a humanity de-humanized.  It would be a nightmare.”   His words, written in 1948, still speak to us as we argue over the same irresolvable issues with the same prophets of the coming millennium.  (Which millennium?  Any millennium—except, of course, the true one.)

As for a summary of T.S. Eliot’s achievement, Kirk admits that the poet-critic failed to accomplish the great goal of his life:

He had endeavored consciously to redeem the time; at the end, he was under no illusion that he had succeeded.  Self-censorious always—in this very like his ancestral connections John Adams and John Quincy Adams—Eliot entertained no inflated opinion of his abilities or his achievements.  His best poems had seemed only preludes to some splendor of concept that he never wholly contrived to voice; his best plays had been experiments, unperfected; his best essays had been challenging, rather than magisterial; his social criticism had been an exercise in definition, not a grand design.  “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”  Had he been meant, like Coleridge, for something greater?  Like Coleridge, had he procrastinated and lingered in reverie, while time ran out?  Were his the sins of omission?

If T.S. Eliot failed in accomplishing the impossible, Kirk—in a splendid assessment of his subject’s career as poet, playwright, and essayist—rescues Eliot from latter-day critics, biographers, and other bottom-feeders who say he was homosexual, antisemitic, elitist, fascist, cranky, religiose, straitlaced, and—the most absurd charge of all—irrelevant.  It takes Kirk just ten paragraphs to set the record straight: Eliot wrote a substantial body of poetry that perfectly captured the spirit of the 20th century and “renewed that age’s moral imagination.”  His plays revived English verse drama and made it work again on the 20th-century stage.  And his essays and reviews—some 600 of them—“rescued the critic’s art from personal impressionism” and “stripped the follies of the time,” without sparing “the morals of his age, or its politics, or its economics, or its notions of education, or its strange gods.”

Kirk states these conclusions without offering argument, facts, or illustration.  They need no support.  The entire book stands behind his chiseled generalizations, rendering them self-evident.  In writing this monumental study, Kirk built a bridge from the future to the past, from tomorrow’s readers to yesterday’s greatest poet, from ignorance to understanding.

In the 1940’s, Eliot was regarded as “too hard” for students.  Today he is regarded as “too reactionary.”  In both cases, blame the teachers and be assured that as long as Russell Kirk’s matchless book is in print, neither excuse will suffice.

 

[Eliot and His Age, by Russell Kirk (Wilmington: ISI Books) 460 pp., $18.00]