Humankind,​ he told us himself, ‘cannot bear very much reality’. One way to escape having to confront that disagreeable element was to go into hiding. For much of the second half of his life, T.S. Eliot was a man on the run, retreating to actual or symbolic boltholes, wearing a succession of masks, relying on routine to help him escape detection – even, it sometimes seemed, detection by himself. In his twenties and thirties he had known ‘torment’ (his word): he had abandoned his country, his family and a promising academic career to move to England to become a poet; he had contracted a disastrous marriage that soon descended into frustration, disappointment and conflict; after their separation he had to make provision for an increasingly distraught and unstable wife; he had confronted his soul and tried to pacify that troubled entity by, improbably, joining the Church of England. But by the mid-1930s, when he was in his late forties, he had built his fortifications: only inside the walls, deep in the central keep, in a small bolted cell, did he allow his most powerful and private emotions to express themselves. In the world beyond the walls, he was ‘Mr Eliot’, an ever courteous facsimile of respectability, a three-piece-suited self desperately searching for forms of orderliness that would make life manageable while shutting out the pain. After a visit to Dublin, he reported to his close friend John Hayward that ‘you would hardly recognise my usually reticent self there: all the Curzon-like aloofness which has been so useful in other contexts, is dropped and a mask of playful blarney is assumed.’* There is self-satire as well as self-knowledge here, but what he describes is one mask being substituted for another, each equally ‘useful’ in its context.

‘I never see a news sheet or hear the news in the morning: that is a point of principle with me, a punctilio.’ Eliot always chose his words carefully (he did everything carefully), and there was no little identification wrapped up in his invocation of the slightly archaic ‘punctilio’, which the OED defines as: ‘a minute detail of action or conduct; a nicety of behaviour, ceremony or honour; a small or petty formality. Formerly sometimes, a fine-drawn or fastidious objection; a scruple’. Practically every element in that definition finds repeated illustration in Eliot’s behaviour as recorded in his wartime correspondence. Even in an age and at a level of society defined by much greater formality than we have become used to, he was punctilious to a fault. But in this case his insistent orderliness was functional in another way too: every writer will recognise the urge to protect the precious morning hours. When staying for several days each week with the Mirrlees family at Shamley Wood in Surrey during the Second World War, Eliot negotiated an arrangement that met his needs. Geoffrey Faber, who knew his colleague better than most, immediately grasped the benefit Eliot would derive from his move out of London: ‘An excellent life for him – breakfast by himself; no contacts till lunch; privacy for writing; and domestic comfort and peace from ARP [Air Raid Precautions].’ During the early months of the Blitz, Eliot had done his bit as an ARP warden in Kensington, frequently complaining that the sleeplessness of night duty made any serious work impossible. German bombs destroyed large parts of London, but they also destroyed Eliot’s carefully constructed routines. In October 1940, he bemoaned the effects of this disruption: ‘I am still trying, in the face of difficulties, to elaborate some routine of life which will allow me to persist in some intellectual aims.’ Once he established the pattern of spending four days in Surrey and three days in London each week, Eliot complained a good deal about the time and effort involved in travelling, but in some ways it suited him just because it was a pattern.

Reading someone’s letters in bulk is an odd kind of voyeurism. Not only has each letter lost its principal original character as an up-to-the-minute communication to a specific individual, becoming instead a historical document, scrutinised for what it reveals about its now celebrated author rather than for the news it brings, but also the ability to look over the letter-writer’s shoulder in this way gives us, as with other kinds of voyeurism, the frisson that comes from catching someone in an unguarded, private moment we were never intended to witness. But apart from occasionally confessional letters to Hayward, Eliot’s letters contain precious few unguarded moments, and even when writing to his friend he mostly sustained a playful or entertaining register that was another sort of performance.

An edition on this scale (ten volumes already, with twenty years still to be covered) is a monument to a pre-digital age – indeed almost to a pre-telephonic era. Eliot would occasionally encourage a correspondent to ring him at Faber and Faber’s offices to arrange or confirm some meeting, but there is very little sense here that the main business of communication has been carried on off the page by phone. Even though Eliot spent much of the war years as a guest in other people’s houses, his was still an essentially solitary life. Wartime conditions made it more difficult for him to spend time in the company of friends, especially those who had moved out of London, and so letters assumed an even greater importance (as early as October 1939 he reflected that ‘the keeping up of correspondence seems more important than ever, at the present time’).

Epistolary relationships suited Eliot in some ways, giving him more control over the way he presented himself. This was, after all, the man who would propose to his second wife by letter, even though she was at that point his secretary whom he saw nearly every day. We might even say that he didn’t have a ‘relationship’ with Emily Hale, the woman whom some scholars have seen as providing the defining emotional thread of his middle years: he had instead a correspondence with her. Their meetings were few; their letters were many – 1131 of his survive in Princeton University Library (and have recently been made available online, though they are not included in this edition).† Doing his slightly strangulated, self-protective best to disabuse Hale of the expectation that they would marry after Vivienne, his first wife, died, he surely found it a relief that the whole disturbing business could largely be managed by carefully crafted correspondence rather than the emotionally tumultuous unpredictability of face-to-face meetings. Eliot was, in more senses than one, a man of letters.

His most frequent, as well as most revealing, letters were written to Hayward. Partially disabled by muscular dystrophy from an early age, Hayward had been at the centre of London literary life in the 1930s, a sometimes waspish recycler of gossip and sharp judgments. He now found himself evacuated to Cambridge, exiled from the world that had kept his lively spirit nourished and so, fortunately for later scholars, he and Eliot mostly sustained their friendship by correspondence. These letters show Eliot at his most amusing, mixing Wildean epigrams with boarding-school japery, plus comments on various contemporaries, such as George Orwell (‘a very queer bird’) or Stephen Spender (‘he seems to like himself as a chairman, and indeed as a public speaker altogether’) or his hosts at University College in Bangor (‘The Moses Williams’s are nice, even though he is a Professor of Education’). But there are also moments when he comes as near as he ever came to being unbuttoned, with several pieces of extended self-examination that scholars will continue to pick over in their search for keys to this deeply defended writer.

Such passages aside, there are inevitably longueurs in the wartime correspondence, as Eliot the dutiful publisher writes to yet another author turned down by Faber and Faber, and makes arrangements for lunches in London and visits to the country at weekends. But for at least three of the six years covered in Volumes IX and X there is a subterranean drama at work beneath the endless pages of meticulously edited politeness, as we from time to time catch sight of the last three of the Four Quartets forming themselves amid the trivia and distractions of a busy, war-interrupted life.

Until dissuaded by wiser counsels, Eliot initially wanted to call his set of poems ‘Kensington Quartets’, having spent the greater part of the 1930s in lodgings just off Gloucester Road. Hayward was at first sympathetic: ‘I can understand Tom’s wanting to associate the tetralogy with the Gloucester Road Period, as anyone must who knows how thoroughly he took on its protective colouring.’ Hayward’s phrasing leaves open the possibility that the poems were tinged with some of that ‘protective colouring’, their moments of apparent self-revelation functioning as yet another mask.

Although Volumes IX and X cover the years during which the last three of the Four Quartets were written, they do not greatly add to our understanding of the process of composition. This is partly just for the usual reason: the intention to write a poem, the fact that one is spending time trying to write a poem, the retrospective report on having written a poem – all these may be communicated to correspondents, but the actual process of composition will remain something of a black box. With the exception of ‘Little Gidding’ (or ‘Spittle-Skidding’ as Eliot whimsically termed it in a letter to Hayward), the writing of which was a more protracted process, these poems took shape off-stage, in relatively condensed bursts of creation. The most striking case is that of ‘The Dry Salvages’. The first mention comes in a letter to Hayward dated 10 December 1940: ‘I have been working this morning at a poem to follow E. Coker.’ Then silence on the topic until three weeks later when he announced to another correspondent: ‘I have just completed another poem to go with “East Coker” and contemplate a fourth to complete the sequence.’

But in the case of Four Quartets there is a more specific reason why even this great hoard does little to extend or modify our established understanding. For decades following Eliot’s death in 1965, his estate, in the person of his widow, Valerie, jealously guarded all this unpublished material, only very rarely permitting scholars access to any of it. But Helen Gardner, professor of English at Oxford, long-time admirer of Eliot’s poetry, a trusted critic and a friend of Valerie’s, was given unparalleled freedom to examine and quote from the correspondence, especially the treasure trove of Hayward’s papers bequeathed to King’s College, Cambridge. Though Eliot tended not to reveal much about what he was writing, he did submit completed drafts to the scrutiny of two or three valued advisers, Hayward pre-eminent among them – indeed, Hayward played something of the role in relation to Four Quartets that Ezra Pound had played in relation to The Waste Land. This was true of each of the three ‘quartets’ composed in 1940-42, and especially of ‘Little Gidding’, which underwent more revision than the other two. Having had access to this material, often to both sides of the numerous exchanges between Eliot and his first readers, Gardner was able to map the process of writing and revision in minute detail, and the resulting book, The Composition of ‘Four Quartets’, published in 1978, remains an exemplary combination of critical judgment and literary detective work. The notes to the present volumes make generous acknowledgment of Gardner’s book, underlining that the publication of Eliot’s correspondence in extenso does not do much to alter the picture that she had constructed.

Volumes IX and X remind us, if we needed reminding, that Eliot was an occasional poet: there were long periods in which he wrote no poetry and his total published output was not large. But he was a full-time publisher. He clearly had a special status at Faber and Faber: he was a good friend of Geoffrey Faber; his reputation brought considerable cachet to the firm; and he specialised in building up its increasingly admired poetry list. But beyond all that, he was a hard-working director: even in wartime he rarely missed the weekly editorial committee where proposals and reports were considered and decisions taken; he discussed terms with authors and agents; he wrote a large number of blurbs for a range of titles; and he was an extraordinarily conscientious reader of typescripts, both verse and prose. It is easy to become bored by the sheer abundance of letters that play some variation on the theme of ‘I was favourably impressed by the promise shown in this submission … but in present circumstances my colleagues and I do not feel able to make you an offer of publication.’ But actually – ‘It is always desirable to be reminded when one has slipped into using actually’ (to Hayward in June 1943) – those letters frequently contained detailed constructive criticism that was the result of several rereadings: ‘I always say that the bulk of my literary criticism is buried in letters and in marginal comments on mss.’ At times, even he wearied of his task. Writing to Hayward about submissions waiting for his attention, he grumbled: ‘If I did not have to read poetry I should be of a lot more use in the world, as well as of a more serene temper.’

In July 1944 Eliot wrote what became one of the more celebrated rejection letters in literary history, turning down Orwell’s Animal Farm. This letter has been extensively cited by Orwell scholars, but the annotation in the present edition, based on the Faber archive, adds some fascinating detail to the story. Eliot’s letter has always seemed a little unsteady in tone: he declares that he cannot ‘see any reason of prudence or caution to prevent anybody from publishing this book – if he believed in what it stands for’, but concludes that he and the nameless fellow director who he claimed had also read the manuscript ‘have no conviction (and I’m sure none of the other directors would have) that this is the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the present time’. Almost twenty years later, struggling to recall the episode accurately, the ageing Eliot did concede that rejecting the book ‘was a great mistake on our part’. Later still, Fredric Warburg, chairman of Secker and Warburg, the eventual publishers of Animal Farm, claimed that Geoffrey Faber had once shown him Eliot’s report on the script, but at that point (after the deaths of both Eliot and Faber) no such report could be found in the files. Faber himself had been out of London at the time of Orwell’s submission and had not read it, so it seems to have been rejected principally on the basis of Eliot’s judgment. The rejection letter suggests that the book’s ‘positive point of view, which I take to be generally Trotskyite, is not convincing’, but other unresolved questions aside, there is a certain piquancy in seeing Eliot, by this point well known for his conservative political views, appearing unwilling to publish a critique of Soviet communism at a time when the USSR was Britain’s essential wartime ally. With hindsight, we can also see that had Faber and Faber accepted the book, which was an almost unmatched commercial success, it would have transformed the financial position of the firm to which Eliot was so devoted.

These volumes illustrate in passing how much of the ordinary business of publishing continued during the war years (Faber and Faber, headquartered in Russell Square, escaped the inferno that incinerated much of the publishing trade situated in its traditional locale around Paternoster Row, though the firm’s premises later suffered some rocket damage). The restrictions imposed by the rationing of paper supplies are a frequent theme, but these also provided a way to sweeten the pill of rejection letters – ‘in normal circumstances … but … the present limited availability of paper’. The wartime hunger for reading has long been remarked, but here we see the situation from the supply side. ‘The publishing world is extremely busy and indeed prosperous,’ Eliot reported in January 1943, ‘as any book you print can be sold, and it is impossible to keep up with the demand.’

Conscientiousness of another kind was evident in Eliot’s resigned acceptance of so many ‘war jobs’: British Council visits, addresses to various societies, broadcast talks to India and so on. He groaned, repeatedly and amusingly, about these obligations, yet it seems possible that they filled a void and kept other demons at bay. In one of his periodic self-assessments submitted to Hayward, he wrote:

As for other activities, there is partly the need for new aliment for poetry – perpetual transformation of thinking and feeling; partly the need to distract my consciousness from poetry, so as to let it work under the surface, and never force it – partly the inherited Social Conscience and the desire to show (to myself) that I can count for something in the kind of activities that my family have pursued for centuries; and partly, of course, the normal sediment of vanity and sloth (it is sloth that makes one do a great deal of work).

Remarks such as this concluding parenthesis are what make it worthwhile staying awake while reading these large tomes. Eliot well understood the palliative functions of busyness, so often his drug of choice.

A significant proportion of that busyness arose from his religious commitments and his position as a prominent Anglican layman. He was a participant in a number of discussion groups, notably the Council of the Christian Frontier and the Moot, a gathering of leading intellectual and religious figures. He was a frequent contributor to the Christian News-Letter, even standing in for its editor on occasion, and an active supporter of journals with whose aims he sympathised, such as Christendom: A Quarterly Journal of Christian Sociology and the New English Weekly, endowing the latter with the distinction of being the first publisher of the three ‘quartets’ written during the war. Again, some of this material has been mined by other scholars, including myself, but we are now given access to the daily details of his involvement. His misgivings about the form of ecumenism encouraged by the 1944 Education Act, for example, are here laid out with his trademark mixture of anxious discrimination and Olympian authority.

For all his ‘Curzon-like aloofness’ in public, Eliot was privately as familiar with the demons of self-doubt as any writer, frequently acknowledging the need for encouragement ‘if one is to persist in this odd occupation of making patterns with words’. Every writer will recognise the truth encoded in the following mock-lament sent to Virginia Woolf:

What profession is more trying than that of author? After you finish a piece of work it only seems good to you for a few weeks; or if it seems good at all you are convinced that it is the last you will be able to write; and if it seems bad you wonder whether everything you have done isn’t poor stuff really; and it is one kind of agony while you are writing, and another kind when you aren’t.

As he confessed more seriously in October 1942 to the theatre director E. Martin Browne:

In the midst of what is going on now, it is hard, when you sit down at a desk, to feel confident that morning after morning spent fiddling with words and rhythms is a justified activity – especially as there is never any certainty that the whole thing won’t have to be scrapped. And on the other hand, external or public activity is more of a drug than is this solitary toil which often seems so pointless.

A choice between drugs, like a choice between masks, may seem to hint at something it would be too painful to confront or display.

Editions​ of correspondence can provide historians with sidelights on the social life of the time. For example, it is striking how much of the prewar life of the comfortable classes seems to have been sustained even in wartime, especially in the form of lunches and dinners at clubs and restaurants. Eliot’s occasional reports of the wines he was served on these occasions make the point. Consider the following sequence spread across just a few months from December 1942. Dining alone with one hostess, he could report ‘a very good dinner, with some very palatable Beaune and some really capital brandy’. A couple of months later, after having dined with the journalist and bibliophile Richard Jennings, he noted: ‘We consumed an excellent Chateau and woodcock. On Thursday I discovered a noble Richebourg ’28 at the club which I shared with Lymington.’ The following month, another friend came to dinner at the Fabers’ Russell Square flat where Eliot lodged for two or three days each week, an occasion prepared for by the friend ‘having brought two bottles of excellent Burgundy (a Corton ’24 and a Clos de Tart ’24) four weeks in advance to condition themselves to the flat’. Faber entertained Eliot and others to supper at Quaglino’s after attending the theatre in December 1943, a meal that included ‘oysters and Chablis’; two months later Eliot reported having had lunch with John Betjeman ‘at the Holborn Restaurant, where he gave me oysters and a bottle of Gruaud Larose 1928’. Such pleasures were reported to Hayward because Eliot knew that they shared these tastes, but clearly life, at least in these circles, was not all Spam fritters and Camp coffee.

Previous volumes of this sumptuous edition have been praised for the excellence of their presentation and annotation, and that high standard continues. Valerie Eliot died in 2012, but John Haffenden, who then assumed sole responsibility, gallantly continues to share the editorial honours with her, in acknowledgment of her extensive preliminary work in collecting and arranging material. The sheer volume of information compressed into the thousands of annotations is jaw-dropping: it is pleasing enough to learn that Pound’s son’s housemaster at Charterhouse was the co-author of 1066 and All That, but my favourite is the identification of Michael Burn, whose mother had submitted her son’s poems to Eliot for possible publication. The annotation begins by identifying Burn as, among other things, ‘journalist, commando … and poet’, then goes on to explain that the bisexual Burn’s lovers ‘were to include the spy Guy Burgess’, before telling of his capture in the 1942 raid on St Nazaire. The detective work is then capped in this fashion: ‘At Colditz, he received an aid package from a sometime lover, a Dutch woman named Ella van Heemstra; after his release, he returned the favour by sending food and cigarettes to van Heemstra (she sold the cigarettes to buy penicillin): his kindness helped to preserve the life of van Heemstra’s ill and undernourished daughter – the future actress Audrey Hepburn.’ Eliot sent Burn’s mother one of his kindly and encouraging rejection letters, but the annotation triggered by this exchange should surely guarantee Burn a different kind of obscure immortality.

Eliot had to write, or chose to write, a great many such letters, but he was being too hard on himself when he declared: ‘If I ever had any small gift for letter writing, it has been ruined years ago by the pressure of the kind of correspondence I have to practise most of the time.’ He could still cultivate a range of registers, especially when writing to close friends, and there are moments of revelation scattered among the hours of dutifulness. A letter of November 1939 contains a remarkable expression of recognition in response to a moment of gloomy introspection from Hayward:

Well, I think I can understand, as well as could be expected, your feeling of ‘having never expected or hoped for very much’ etc. At least I have no family, no career and nothing particular to look forward to in this world. I doubt the permanent value of everything I have written; I never lay with a woman I liked, loved or even felt any strong physical attraction to; I no longer even regret this lack of experience; I no longer even feel acutely the desire for progeny which was very acute once; and since I became a Christian I feel that the only difficulty I should have in a monastic life – which is easy to say because I am not free to enter a monastery – would be the deprivation of French tobacco … I have been very fortunate however, and the last six years have been the only happy years of my life – but that is a good many.

To which we, with hindsight, might retort, be careful how little you wish for. Time was to bring Eliot much more happiness, and vastly more recognition. But that’s the deceptive charm of being a voyeur of another person’s correspondence: we have the illusion of unmediated access to an inner self that may, in reality, not be much more than a passing mood, the expression of which is tailored to a particular recipient. There may be more nuggets to come in the remaining volumes of this edition, but there will surely also be an increasing proportion of conscientious politeness on the part of a dutiful public man.