A Review of The Letters of T.S. Eliot Volume 8

The Guardian's Tim Adams reviews the eighth volume of T.S. Eliot's letters, edited by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden for Faber. "We have reached number eight, which takes in the correspondence that Eliot wrote immediately before the war, between 1936 and 1938," he writes. An excerpt:

The task of editing and glossing and footnoting has been (since the death of Eliot’s widow, Valerie, in 2012) the indefatigable work of John Haffenden. His pace of production, 7,600 pages in 10 years, is impressive. The only comparable effort, the processing of the complete correspondence of Bertrand Russell, Eliot’s erstwhile friend and the secret lover of his first wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, has long submerged a batallion of editors at McMaster University in Canada, with no end in sight.

So what is the experience of combing through the business memos and notes of encouragement to literary hopefuls that the poet wrote as he approached the age of 50? In some ways it is like eavesdropping on the most maddening of confessionals: just as the poet seems about to mine some inner anxiety, he digresses into bland thank you notes and exhaustive letters to the Church Times on the proceedings of the Anglican synod.

Eliot had built a life as a one-man publishing industry... 

Read on at The Guardian.