Peter Ackroyd has written a benign life of T.S. Eliot. Given the malignity visited on Eliot, this is a good deal. Fair-minded, broad-minded and assiduous, here is a thoroughly decent book. It has none of the sleazy sanctimony of Robert Sencourt's biography, or the vanity of T.S. Matthews'. That it is a feat to be without spite is coincidentally manifested by the appearance of Geoffrey Grigson's Recollections. Grigson's jacket proffers, as a representative gnome: 'I never heard T.S. Eliot laugh.' Back in the book this stands on its lordly own in a section of 'Items'. Some have never heard Geoffrey Grigson do anything but sneer. His Recollections are happy to rebuke everybody for sneering, especially at Eliot: 'Eliot in those Thirties was still a name to earn a sneer'; Auden's work 'allowed for sneering much as Eliot's The Waste Land only eight years before had allowed for the inimical sneering, which still had not died away'. Perhaps Grigson never heard Eliot laugh because Grigson's company was inimical to laughter. Elsewhere Grigson likes to offer himself as better acquainted with Eliot than are those who wrongly suppose him a glum man. How gracefully the names are floated: 'Braque might be there, or Jean Hélion, from Paris, or Eliot gayer than his reputation, actually singing "Frankie and Johnny".'

LRB 1 November 1984 | PDF Download