Playing Possum

The contending versions of T.S. Eliot on display in the latest bumper instalment of his collected letters are practically legion. To begin with there is the hieratic, if not downright priestly, Eliot, soberly petitioning  Father D’Arcy, the correspondence columns  of the Church Times, or studious clergymen who may be flattered into taking charge of his pet project for a library of 17th-century theological classics. Next there is the sedulous Elizabethan scholar gravely conferring with Professor Grierson over textual complications in Marlowe, and circulating the results around the Cambridge combination rooms.

Then comes a third Eliot, the deferential protégé of elderly men-of-letters such as Charles Whibley or J.M. Robertson, who had helped him at crucial moments in his career, and on whom flattering encomia are heaped as with a trowel. But there is a fourth Eliot, the doting family man, writing to his elderly mother with details of General Haig’s funeral or assuring his Aunt Susie that her enjoyment of his poem gave him great pleasure.