The Book Club: what do T.S. Eliot's letters reveal?

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🗓️ 8 January 2020

⏱️ 39 minutes

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Summary

In this week’s Book Club podcast, we’re talking about the life and loves of the greatest poet of the twentieth century. Professor John Haffenden joins Sam to discuss the impact of the opening of an archive of more than 1,000 of Eliot’s letters to Emily Hale — his Harvard sweetheart and the woman who for fifteen years he believed to have been the love of his life. Was he really in love with her or, as he later claimed, simply imagining it? What does he mean when he says that marriage to Emily would have killed him as a poet? And what light does it shed on his poetry? John — who as the editor of T. S. Eliot’s collected letters is one of the first people to have had access to this trove — says that it’s an 'astonishing' haul, and shows Eliot opening up as never before.

The Book Club, what used to be known as Spectator Books, is a series of literary interviews and discussions on the latest releases in the world of publishing, from poetry through to physics. Presented by Sam Leith, The Spectator's Literary Editor. Hear past episodes here.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Just before you start listening to this podcast, a reminder that we have a special subscription offer.
0:04.8	You can get 12 issues of The Spectator for £12, as well as a £20,000 Amazon voucher.
0:10.3	Go to spectator.com.uk forward slash voucher if you'd like to get this offer.
0:20.5	Hello and welcome to the Spectator Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator.
0:26.4	This week I'm very privileged to be joined by Professor John Hafenden, who's the biographer of William
0:31.7	Empson and John Berryman, and most recently has been engaged in the monumental task of editing T.S. Eliot's complete letters for publication.
0:40.9	He's up to volume 8, but he's just had a bombshell dropped on him, because over Christmas we've had a sort of brouhaha.
0:48.8	You could maybe go so far as to call it a stushi about the opening of an archive of about 1,100 odd letters from t s elliot
0:56.4	to his first love emily hale in the princeton university archives john welcome why has this
1:03.7	been such a sort of explosive thing leaving aside for a moment your own difficulties as an
1:09.1	yes yes bombshell i think you caught it.
1:11.7	We can say it's also a Benison.
1:13.2	It's a huge gain in our knowledge of T.S. Eliot.
1:18.3	It's been a long time coming.
1:20.6	Some people have known about this for 50 years.
1:22.7	I suspect I've known about it for more than 40.
1:26.6	You know, one always thinks I'm of a certain age now and I'll never see it through,
1:30.0	but it has come to pass that this thing has suddenly, after so many years, been revealed.
1:35.1	And it is the most astonishing find.
1:37.5	One expected a few love letters and chatty things,
1:41.7	but in fact there are letters of extraordinary depth and range. And we get
1:45.9	whole new dimensions. I said it's in applaud deliberately, whole new dimensions of this man,
	...

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