So, half a century after this great poet died, there is more, not less, need for the narrative work of biography.

When I first wrote on Eliot in the 1980s, my doctoral supervisor, Richard Ellmann, told me that Valerie Eliot had discussed the idea of his writing her husband’s life. Eventually, Ellmann, a great biographer from a Jewish background, who had already authored a substantial account of Eliot for the Dictionary of National Biography, decided he did not want to go ahead. He told me that, though he had huge admiration for Eliot’s work, he was put off by an anti-Semitic streak he discerned there. As far as I know, Valerie Eliot, true to her husband’s wishes, blocked all would-be official biographers. Lyndall Gordon, herself of Jewish descent, wrote two insightful biographical volumes, but few others have followed. Instead, over the ensuing decades accounts as different as the 1984 play and Hollywood biopic Tom and Viv (which sees Eliot as a misogynistic persecutor), Anthony Julius’s T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form (which prosecutes relentlessly the case that the poet was anti-Semitic), and several works by James E. Miller and others that portray Eliot as a gay man in love with a French male companion, all combined to make Mrs Eliot very wary of what she regarded as exploitative biographical distortions. Resolutely, she continued to assemble an Eliot archive, and embarked on the meticulous publication of his letters, some of them both pained and painful. Latterly, she was instrumental in commissioning editors including Christopher Ricks and Ronald Schuchard to collect and reprint Eliot’s work in modern annotated editions. ‘It’s time’, Valerie Eliot is reported to have said in 2004 as her health began to fail, ‘to put Tom together now … but I’ll need some help’.7

This is not an official biography. Published fifty years after the poet’s death, Young Eliot offers an account of his life and work up to and including the first appearance of what many regard as his greatest poem. In due course I hope to publish a second volume, Eliot after ‘The Waste Land’. When I wrote The Savage and the City in the Work of T. S. Eliot (published in 1987), Valerie Eliot, with whom I corresponded, was generous and encouraging. She allowed me to quote from published and unpublished materials after she had read my typescript. In the 1980s she wrote me a few letters, telling me, for instance, about how, while she ‘darned his socks’, Eliot would read to her from Victorian poet James Thomson’s despairing masterpiece, The City of Dreadful Night.8 At that time I was nervous of Mrs Eliot. I knew that had she refused me permission to quote material, not just my book but my career might have been damaged. Some years later, once as a judge of the T. S. Eliot Prize for poetry and once as a poet shortlisted for it, I met her. She was politely friendly, and I found it easy to talk to her, not least because I wanted nothing from her. My wife had written a book about the English novelist Rose Macaulay, whose notoriously bad driving Mrs Eliot enjoyed recalling. She told me how ‘Tom’, sitting in the back seat, had urged ‘Rose’ to keep her eyes on the road. Like other people, I was always impressed by the way Valerie Eliot would speak of ‘Tom’, using his first name. It was natural for her to do so, but there was also, I think, a strategy involved. It was a way of reminding people that T. S.