T. S. Eliot, still elusive

By James Reiss

Who was the real T. S. Eliot? What did he really think of women? Sex?

Owing to the veil of se'crecy in which the Shy Giant of modern poetry cloaked his private life, these kinds of questions have not been definitively answered. Instead, they have become the drumbeats to an echoing chorus of gossip. The maker of such masterpieces as "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and "The Waste Land" has been called a homosexual, a cuckold and a prude-not to mention an anti-Semite and a phony!

In the latest unofficial biography of Eliot, Great Tom (Harper & Row; $8.95),: T. S. Matthews attempts to quiet rumor and offer an accurate portrait of the master. Matthews presents the basic facts of Eliot's life: that he grew up of all places-in St. Louis, went to Harvard, became an expatriate in London along

with Pound and others, married, won his Nobel Prize for literature, remarried, and so forth. Such facts, Matthews argues, hide the dirty little secret of Eliot's life, that he suffered from Puritan sexual hangups.

"Did he masturbate?” Matthews asks about Eliot at Harvard. "Of course," Matthews answers. "And was he ashamed of it? Unspeakably.'

I don't object so much to the silly with-it frankness of Matthews's questions as I do to the heavy weight he gives to the answers. Ac cording to Matthews, Eliot's shame, his fear of sex, catapulted him into his first unhappy marriage with the neurasthenic Vivienne. And because of his unhappiness with Vivienne

according to MatthewsEliot became the suffering saint capable of producing. the half-dozen or so great poems on which his reputation rests.

This all sounds a bit too patly Freudian and soapoperaish for me, especially considering the paucity of solid evidence in Matthews's argument. Rather than quieting rumor, this book adds to the din and

perpetuates the enigma

about the man one critic has called "the invisible poet."

Still, there's a lot to like about this book. Matthews is best when he recounts dozens of verified, often hilarious anecdotes. It is refreshing to learn that the clerical Eliot enjoyed being shaved by his second wife, Valerie, while he would sing "A Bicycle Built for Two" or "Too Many Gins Give the Ladies Double Chins.” And it is positively invigorating to read that "Valerie seemed to like bossing him, and he seemed to like being bossed by her. At tea at Prince Caetani's in Italy, Eliot dropped a canape on the floor, picked it up and was about to eat it when she lightly slapped his

T.S. Eliot

hand and said, “Tommy, not off the floor!"

Surely Matthews's anecdotes come closer to portraying a believable, if not the REAL, T. S. Eliot than do his probing but unanswerable questions. As for a more comprehensive portrait, we must wait for an official biography, which is now apparently in process. Even that, however, might well be a disappointment, Eliot's famous letters (love letters?) to Emily Hale will remain locked in the University Library at Princeton until the year 2020. And, as Matthews tantalizingly says, "There are a

good many letters there from Eliot to Emily-more than a thousand.”