Was he anti-Semitic?

Letters give us the life as lived — day-to-day, shapeless, haphazard, contingent, imperfect, authentic.

Letters give us the life as lived — day-to-day, shapeless, haphazard, contingent, imperfect, authentic. That is their value. Life-writing, biography, is plotted, shaped by an argument and is summary, selective and often tendentious. There is a lovely moment in these letters when the shivering Eliot, trapped on the top of a French mountain, a long mule ride from civilisation, is writing to Richard Aldington on a defective typewriter. It sticks and repeats. ‘I’m writing there fore the r therefore more briefly than I intended and shall do when I get to Nice again and hie h ire hire a typewriter merde.’ Half of each letter is missing. ‘This type looks just like Hebrew.’ For a brief existential moment, the amused irritation of a complicated, deeply troubled man, at the end of his tether, whose dangerously loopy wife is in a nursing home, ‘recovering’ but actually on the edge.