Young Eliot: From St. Louis to The Waste Land by Robert Crawford

Abstract

108 WLT MAY–AUGUST 2016 US Southwest, a literature that “negotiates between Anglo society and the Mexican community” in search of its own identity. A key component of this type of literature is that it bridges frontiers because writers and readers are continuously crossing over political, social, and cultural boundaries in search of a community of their own. Bonazzi comments that in “these narratives of otherness, we begin to hear the emerging chorus of genuine diversity.” Outside the Margins: Literary Commentaries excels in its analytical commentaries because there are selections from a diverse group of writers that represent a unique style of writing and a rich thematic approach. José Banuelos Montes Roanoke College Robert Crawford. Young Eliot: From St. Louis to The Waste Land. New York. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2015. 493 pages. In his essay on Philip Massinger, T. S. Eliot wrote that good poets steal but convert their thefts into something new or at least different. Robert Crawford has shown that they also absorb whatever impinges on their consciousness. By tracing the arc of Eliot’s life from his St. Louis boyhood to the publication of The Waste Land, Crawford has opened the vaults of Eliot’s memory bank, releasing his myriad influences. His Eliot, whom he affectionately calls Tom, was the youngest of six siblings, including four sisters. He was a bookish lad whose mother also wrote poetry and whose father quoted Latin. He was girlshy but, like most adolescents, hormonal and eager to lose his virginity. If one feels currents of sexuality rippling throughout The Waste Land with its motifs of impotence , sterility, mechanical lovemaking, lost innocence, and even homosexuality (Mr. Eugenides propositioning the speaker ), Crawford supplies evidence that Eliot was much obsessed with sex, quoting his scatological limericks that can still evoke a blush. Although Crawford has tracked down Eliot’s sources, he presents his findings in a conversational way, as if the reader were in his seminar, and Crawford is sharing his research with colleagues, suggesting that Prufrock’s surname may have been inspired by the Prufrock Furniture Company in St. Louis and that Eliot’s fascination with the Grail myth may have originated with Bullfinch ’s Legends of King Arthur. Family and friends may have thought of him as Tom, but within the boy was a poet who, like Prufrock, had an inner and outer self. Within Tom Eliot was T. S. Eliot who, as Crawford shows, kept evolving as he World Literature in Review navigated the flux of his inner life, which included everything—observations, emotions , places visited, conversations overheard , texts old and new, and experiences personal and shared—that came together to form the man who gave his name to an age. One hopes Young Tom is just the first installment of what promises to be the definitive life. Eliot may never have so understanding a biographer. Bernard F. Dick Fairleigh Dickinson University Christopher Hitchens. and yet . . . essays. New York. Simon & Schuster. 2015. 339 pages. Christopher Hitchens died in December 2011 from cancer, long before publication of four dozen of his previously uncollected essays, all commissioned by some blue-ribbon sources. The lowercase title with open punctuation of this posthumous collection signifies Hitchens’s ability to qualify his polemical arguments, virtually as if he were thinking a new idea on the instant, with utmost celerity and clarity. Devastatingly ironic, vitally analytical, the essays (many of which are book-review articles) create an anthology of pugnacious or mocking rhetorical punishment for assorted subjects: national and international politics, national security, the American Deep South (“where all politics is yokel”), NASCAR events (where God is popularly regarded as “a Republican, with a good chance of being white”), Thanksgiving (of which he approved), Christmas (which he detested), the Fox network, etc. His venom is always potent (especially against the Clintons, Saddam Hussein, and Hezbollah), but history has already come to mock several of his arguments—none so much, perhaps, as his virtually hysterical championing of the second Gulf War, a crime that is most responsible for the current chaos in the Middle East. To his credit, he did not refrain from self-criticism or self-satire—as his Vanity Fair essays on physical self-improvement show...