… Beginning with his thorough account of Eliot’s childhood in St. Louis, Crawford attends to the ways in which the life and culture of that city—including the sounds and songs Eliot probably heard—lingered in the poet’s mind, as if he were silently kneading them for years, before finding expression in this or that brief phrase in the poems. Without derailing a well-told story, Crawford records the uncanny echoes of words from Eliot’s life in his poems.
… A Literary Bloodhound Tracks Eliot.
Crawford is absolutely remarkable in his portrait of Vivienne. He is fair-minded and sympathetic without being false. He summons the ghosts of Bloomsbury, and they come. The book re-creates their dense, competitive, gossipy, incestuous milieu with astonishing success. Crawford conveys the pressure of their personalities, and the forces driving them. We see Tom and Vivienne through their eyes, and hear the voices of censure and approval. Yet, by sticking to facts, Crawford refuses to write pap or to dress up his own emotions in self-indulgent scribbling. His Scots common sense serves him well. He is a kind of great literary bloodhound who has found the right trail.
(Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
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