His biography is that of a very complicated, often subtle, sometimes prickly human being, but also one whom readers can come to understand to a perhaps surprising degree. Throughout this book, rather than employing paraphrase, I have taken care to give readers frequent and direct contact with Eliot’s own words, published and unpublished, and with the words of his contemporaries. The aim is to offer a close-up view and, cumulatively, through successive brushstrokes, to make a nuanced and intimate portrait.

In some ways young Eliot knew himself well. He discerns a ‘Mélange Adultère de Tout’ that makes a man in different places and circumstances a professor, a journalist, a banker, a philosopher, a Parisian flâneur, and also something much wilder – that insight is astute in its self-perception. Articulated in his second language, French, it may be an obliquely voiced analysis of how Eliot managed to cope. He had an acute sense of himself as multiply displaced, and wrote on the day of England’s patron saint, St George’s Day, in 1928:

Some day I want to write an essay about the point of view of an American who wasn’t an American, because his America ended in 1829; and who wasn’t a Yankee, because he was born in the South and went to school in New England as a small boy with a nigger drawl, but who wasn’t a southerner in the South because his people were northerners in a border state and looked down on all southerners and Virginians, and who so was never anything anywhere and who therefore felt himself to be more a Frenchman than an American and more an Englishman than a Frenchman and yet felt that the U.S.A. up to a hundred years ago was a family extension.18

This is a writer who could view himself with obsessive, complexly inflected self-consciousness. Yet it is important to see him, too, through the eyes and words of others. His most perceptive observers included Vivien Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Mary Hutchinson and Conrad Aiken. While drawing on their viewpoints, however, Young Eliot presents a portrait of an individual, not a panorama of his life and times; but it shows the part Eliot played in his era, from his immersion in World War I enemy debts handled by the Colonial and Foreign Department of Lloyds Bank in London to his participation in small magazines, lectures and social gatherings. Increasingly haggard and ill, he often masked his shyness and tenacious ambition with a businessman’s demeanour. In writing, his unflinching examination of his own pain was both shielded and made possible by an aesthetic of impersonality. This is the man Virginia Woolf came very close to loving, and whom she was reported to have described as a poet in ‘a four-piece suit’.19

Though he had written fragments of it before he left Harvard, in London around 1919 Eliot began to focus on The Waste Land. In its drama of voices fragmentation, lost or illusory love and communion with literary tradition clash jaggedly together. As Vivien made clear in her comments, the poem’s pain was also bound up with the hurt of Eliot’s most intimate relationship. This biography shows clearly links between Eliot’s circumstances and The Waste Land, but refuses to reduce that artistically crafted, strenuously edited poem to a mere offshoot of personal crisis. If for Eliot in one mood The Waste Land represented an outburst of personal ‘grumbling’, offering him ‘the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life’, then he understood too the way it came to be interpreted not just as a monument of the ‘modernist’ era but an enduring, polymorphous and profound work of art.20 In pieces, it is the poem of a man ‘going to pieces’; but it is also brilliantly pieced together by Eliot and Ezra Pound. Quickened by Joyce’s Ulysses and by Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, ultimately The Waste Land emerges as a poem of desperation. It draws on personal experiences as diverse as its author’s interrogation of anthropology and his fondness for dancing, to produce a vision of unending spiritual and physical torture. The ‘Shantih’, that peace with which the poem appears to conclude, is perceived, but not achieved. The Waste Land is a musical astonishment, one to which Woolf listened with admiration in 1922 as its maker seemed to sing it aloud.21

Young Eliot aims to communicate a sense of the tentativeness, the shakiness of the young poet’s reputation. His work’s acceptance was no foregone conclusion. Repeatedly he felt he had dried up as a poet, and feared he had wasted his life. Not marmoreal, but wounded and sometimes wounding, young T. S. Eliot may be imposingly erudite, but is also conflictedly human.

Where I have gone to the original publications to locate Eliot’s prose writings, and have consulted numerous original manuscripts of poetry, prose and drama, future generations will have access to electronic editions of much of this material. Yet there will never be an absolutely definitive biography of Eliot. Each age will crave its own portrait. My aim, no small one, is to offer a convincing account of a great poet whose life was impressive, dauntingly complex and, at times, a mess. Eliot’s story, like his poetry, contains deep unhappiness; but at the beginning of his life, as at its end, he was happy.