Volume 35, Number 17 · November 10, 1988
The Beast in the Jungle
By Robert M. Adams
Eliot's New Life
by Lyndall Gordon
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 356 pp., $19.95
The Letters of T.S. Eliot Vol. I, 1898–1922
edited by Valerie Eliot
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 639 pp., $29.95
'Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe how much it altered her person for the worse.' The voice is that of the author of the 'Digression on Madness' in Swift's Tale of a Tub; the application to literary biographies is all but universal. Writers are veil makers, illusion weavers; the most admiring of biographers cannot help exposing his author's artifice. A writer's outside—the face he prepares to face the faces of his public—is almost always more imposing and less nasty than the inside. Thomas Stearns Eliot forbade biographies.
Review, 5232 words
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