Unlocking the archives: The secret passions of T.S. Eliot

"How unpleasant to meet Mr Eliot," the poet once wrote of himself, "With a bobtail cur, and a porpentine cat, and a wopsical hat: how unpleasant to meet Mr Eliot (whether his mouth be open or shut)."

But just how unpleasant was he? The answer is that we do not know. He is the mystery poet. The material that would shed light on his personal life is locked in a massive archive, out of which has come, so far, just one volume of his private papers and letters, edited by his widow, Valerie, and published in 1988. It covered the years from 1898, when 10-year-old Thomas Stearns Eliot was packed off to school in St Louis, to 1922, when he published The Waste Land. He lived for 43 years, more and continued writing until the 1950s.

Eliot wrote a lot of letters. In 1923 alone, his correspondence stretched to 88,388 words, the length of a short novel. In 1926, he wrote 112,878. Up to 200 letters from the period before 1923 have turned up since 1988, so even that one published documentary source is incomplete. There is, as yet, no official biographer. Peter Ackroyd, who wrote what is possibly the bestknown book about the poet, was denied permission even to quote his poetry.

Up to now, Mrs Eliot has been working on this project alone, keeping a fierce guard on who has access to the Eliot papers. Quite apart from any unpleasant or unhurtful publicity that some of Eliot's more indiscretions could cause, there has been the sheer volume of work falling on the shoulders of a woman now in her late seventies. For the years 1922-40 alone, there are an estimated two million words still unpublished.

Now, with the 120th anniversary of Eliot's birth only 16 months away, work on the archives has speeded up. Faber and Faber, Eliot's original publisher, which employed him for years as their literary editor, is preparing a seven-volume collection of his prose, edited by Professor Ron Schuchard, of Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. And Hugh Haughton, from York University's English department, has been commissioned to help Valerie Eliot to create a multi-volume edition of his letters, everything except one cache, that lies under lock and key in Princeton University. The project will begin with the republication of an expanded version of the 1988 volume.

Mr Haughton says: "It's quite an extraordinary archive. Eliot was not only one of the great modern poets, but a critic, political commentator, editor and dramatist. It is great news that the doors are opening on an archive which will change the way Eliot is read and understood."

Opinions on Eliot the poet are polarised. There are those who loathe his work, usually because they were forced to study it too early in life. For many others, he is simply the greatest English language poet of the 20th century, and there is nothing in modern English to match the grim Dadaism of The Waste Land, or the curious, haunting beauty of the The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. The largest body of T S Eliot fans probably do not know they are his fans. If they recognise the name at all, they may think of Eliot as a lyricist, like Tim Rice, knowing him only as the man who wrote the words to the songs of the musical, Cats. With his nonsense poetry about Macavity, Mungojerrie and other feline rogues, Eliot created an audience beyond the reach of any other major 20th-century poet.

The man himself is not so widely admired. From what we know of him, his views on race and politics were abysmal, and his sex life was a failure. Mr Haughton has promised that his collected letters will illuminate "the difficulties of his personal life with his first wife, Vivien". This was Vivien Haigh-Wood, whom Eliot married on impulse in 1915, a few months after settling in England. They separated legally in 1933. Some of the problems in that marriage arose from the proximity of the Bloomsbury group, that brilliant coterie of intellectuals who hopped in and out of each other's beds like so many over-educated gay, lesbian, bisexual and heterosexual rabbits. Vivien Eliot had an affair with Bertrand Russell that went on for years. Her biographer, Carole Seymour-Jones, has suggested - without much in the way of accompanying evidence - that Eliot tolerated it because he fancied old Bertie himself.

Eliot may or may not have been homosexual. Many people think he was, but the evidence is like Macavity, not there. As his marriage fell apart, he found comfort in the friendship of an old girlfriend, Emily Hale, whom he had known at Harvard. Some of their friends had expected "Tom" and Emily to marry, but the relationship ended when he visited England on a fellowship in 1914, and decided not to go back. She took up lecturing at Downer college, Milwaukee. In 1927, she wrote to him while she was on holiday in Florence. They then entered into an intense, secret relationship, which they took up when she could get to England, or on his occasional trips back to the US. Her hopes of marrying him were raised when Vivien died in 1947, but dashed on his next painful visit.

After she learnt, in 1957, that he had married his secretary, Valerie Fletcher, younger than him by almost 40 years, Emily had what seems to have been a nervous breakdown. Her letters from Eliot are filed in Princeton, and will not be released until 2020. It is rumoured that he burnt his letters from her.

The other question which this mountain of material should answer for us is just how "unpleasant" were the politics of Mr Eliot. Very unpleasant, according to a book in 1995 by a solicitor, Anthony Julius, who accused Eliot of racism and misogyny, and claimed that he was "able to place his anti-Semitism at the service of his art". There is no doubt Eliot's politics were well to the right. One of his dearest friends was Ezra Pound, the first person to whom he showed the completed version of The Waste Land. Pound was a virulent anti-Semite and propagandist for fascism, who avoided trial for treason after the war by pleading insanity. Eliot was no fascist, not least because he entered the Church of England in 1927, and as a practising Anglo-Catholic could not accept the paganist aspects of fascism.

But he was anti-Semitic. When he took his first job as a lecturer, he added to the syllabus inflicted on his Yorkshire students the works of Charles Maurras, a French philosopher whom Eliot admired. Maurras was the founder of Action Française, the prototype for 20th-century fascist movements. In 1927, the Vatican condemned Action Française. Eliot rushed to its defence. "Most of the concepts that might have attracted me to fascism I seem already to have found in a more digestible form in the work of Charles Maurras," he wrote.

In 1933, Eliot delivered three lectures at Virginia University, which were published the following years under the title After Strange Gods, but never republished, though they will now see the light of day again. He had reason to be bashful, because they contained the bluntest public statement he ever made about Jews. "The population should be homogeneous," he said. "Where two or more cultures exist in the same place they are likely to be either fiercely self-conscious or both to become adulterate. What is still more important is unity of religious background; and reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable."

That he could say such a thing at all, and in the year that Hitler took power, even if he was embarrassed about it later, has prompted scholars to pore over his poetry for further signs of anti-Semitism. There are three examples which Eliot's greatest admirers find difficult to defend. In Sweeney Among the Nightingales there is the couplet "Rachel, née Rabinovich, tears at the grapes with murderous claws." Eliot might just get away with that one, on the grounds that every character in the poem is grotesque, and Rachel is not the only one likened to an animal.

His poem Gerontion includes a more distasteful image: "My house is a decayed house,/And the jew squats on the window-sill, the owner/Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp ..." The excuse here is that the poem is an old man's monologue, and arguably it is not Eliot, but old Gerontion, thinking these thoughts, but that does not explain the lower case "j" for Jew in the poem's original edition, which Eliot altered to a capital later, when anti-Semitism was less fashionable. And there does not seem to any defence tenuous, for the poem with the subtitle Bleistein with a cigar with its lines, "... such was Bleistein's way/A saggy bending of the knees/And elbows, with the palms turned out,/Chicago Semite Viennese./A lustreless protrusive eye/Stares from the protozoic slime ..."

But to sustain Mr Julian's thesis that anti-Semitism is the wellspring of Eliot's poetic imagination, he had to present these three poems as if they were his major works. No lover of Eliot's poetry would agree. Literary detectives have also combed his acknowledged masterpieces, The Waste Land, Prufrock, and the Burnt Norton quartet, for evidence of racism or other nasty ideologies, without success.

Professor Schuchard, who is editing Eliot's prose work and is perhaps as biased in his favour as Mr Julius is biased against him, insists that when everything is out in the open, Eliot will be acquitted of anti-Semitism. Four years ago, he found a cache of Eliot's letters to a New York Jewish academic which implied that he was helping Jews who had escaped the Nazis to resettle in Britain and the US.

But probably, the avalanche of new Eliotiana will prove neither one thesis nor the other, Instead, it will allow academics to continue their arguments, because Eliot was too prolific and too complex to be pinned down. His conversation was, to quote his self-description, "so nicely restricted to what precisely and if and perhaps and but".