Enthralling Eliot, spellbinding Thatcher and Le Carré unmasked
Half a century after TS Eliot’s death, a year of literary biographies kicked off well with Young Eliot: From St Louis to The Waste Land by Robert Crawford (Jonathan Cape). This enthralling portrait of the midwesterner who reinvented himself in England exposes the harrowing backstory to the making of The Waste Land. A shy, brilliant and deeply wounded young man, tormented by a prolonged struggle to reconcile his public and private face, “Tom Eliot” became “Old Possum”, the elderly Anglophile who would later dismiss The Waste Land as “a piece of rhythmical grumbling”. It was as if, says Crawford at the conclusion of this biographical milestone, “he had never been young”.
Ted Hughes, who died too soon in 1998, was always young, trapped in the afterlife of his youthful, impetuous and doomed marriage to Sylvia Plath. I did not expect to like Jonathan Bate’s unauthorised biography, which was initially sponsored by the Hughes estate, whereupon it became the subject of a bruising contractual bust-up. But, setting that issue aside, Ted Hughes (Harper Collins) narrates an extraordinary life with sympathy, tact, and very wide research. Hughes’s life is littered with unexploded literary ordnance that his biographer steps past more or less unscathed. His best pages are literary critical more than biographical. Bate, who modestly admits his cannot be the last word, has crafted a persuasive, credible and nuanced portrait of one of Britain’s greatest poets
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Ted Hughes, who died too soon in 1998, was always young, trapped in the afterlife of his youthful, impetuous and doomed marriage to Sylvia Plath. I did not expect to like Jonathan Bate’s unauthorised biography, which was initially sponsored by the Hughes estate, whereupon it became the subject of a bruising contractual bust-up. But, setting that issue aside, Ted Hughes (Harper Collins) narrates an extraordinary life with sympathy, tact, and very wide research. Hughes’s life is littered with unexploded literary ordnance that his biographer steps past more or less unscathed. His best pages are literary critical more than biographical. Bate, who modestly admits his cannot be the last word, has crafted a persuasive, credible and nuanced portrait of one of Britain’s greatest poets
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