Books: Old Possum at 70

Though T.S. Eliot, cruel April’s bard, Once found romance’s wasteland bleak and hard,

An autumn curtain rises—and they play The melting strains of “Love Will Find A Way.”

Thus Punch reviewed Eliot’s latest play. The Elder Statesman (TIME, Sept. 8). Cruel April’s bard and the elder statesman of Anglo-American letters is 70 this week, and to the surprise of practically everybody, including himself, Thomas Stearns Eliot seems in love with love and life. The poet who was old at 23, when he wrote Prufrock, is getting young in his old age. Last year the erstwhile “aged eagle” talked about taking dancing lessons, and now he can be seen dining out and piloting his 31-year-old wife Valerie across dance floors. “His brow so grim and his mouth so prim” radiate such dimpled benevolence that one crusty old friend likens the new Eliot to “an enormous, overstuffed Angora.”

Purring contentedly. Eliot is quick to admit that he owes his resurgent health and happiness to his copper-haired second wife,* an attractively plump Yorkshire lass with a creamy complexion, who has reminded more than one Eliot fan of Grishkin with her famous “promise of pneumatic bliss.” Says a hard-boiled pal: “He’s got this mad thing about love. The way he gazes with sheep’s eyes at his wife you’d never guess they’d been married nearly two years and seen each other every day before that for seven.” Valerie

Eliot relentlessly sees to it that, after years of bachelor living, Eliot is properly fed. Friends crack that he rhythmically carves a roast “in iambic pentameter—five stresses to each slice.”

At Last, Maturity. Though Eliot is probably the wealthiest poet alive (The Cocktail Party netted the lyrical sum of $1,000,000), he still reports for his thrice-weekly chores as a partner of the publishing house of Faber & Faber, where he is renowned as the firm’s best jacket-blurb writer. There, last week, in his picture-lined office, he made a remarkable confession: “I’m just beginning to grow up, to get maturity. In the last few years. everything I’d done up to 60 or so has seemed very childish.” Reminded of a youthfully immature shaft at Chekhov (“I like my Ibsen straight”). Eliot grinned: “That doesn’t make sense to me now.” As for the once admired A.E. Housman. he now dismisses him as a youthful “phase” but still approvingly quotes the couplet Housman wrote in his sleep:

As I woke up in this world of sin, Heaven be praised, it was raining gin.

Which of his own works has given Eliot the most satisfaction? “I had more unadulterated pleasure out of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats—my young godchildren call me Uncle Possum—than anything else I’ve ever written.” What would he like to write next? Possibly more poetry, but “it will have to be in a new idiom—Four Quartets brought something to an end.” Possibly “abstract prose.” Possibly another play “which would be completely successful theatrically and give the highest possible quotient of poetry.” Smilingly he added: “That’s aiming at Shakespeare under different and more difficult conditions.”

Stirring the Young. Bedecked with the Nobel prize, the Order of Merit, the Legion of Honor and sixteen honorary degrees, Eliot next month will join France’s small but select Academic Septentrionelle and take a seat left vacant since the death of Rudyard Kipling. Among the birthday salutes this week is a book of personal tributes (T. S. Eliot: A Symposium for his Seventieth Birthday; Farrar. Straus & Cudahy; $5). Its contributors, alongside the usual literary figures, include English schoolboys and girls between the ages of 14 and 18. most of whom sound so solemn and professional as to suggest that England is raising a generation of literary critics. But there are also many signs that Eliot can still stir the young. A 15-year-old girl named Penelope Hodges pays the poet a compliment that may please Old Possum more than all his other honors. Writes Penelope: “T.S. Eliot’s poetry affects me keenly, and in a completely different manner from anything I have ever known, because it is literally honest to God.”

* Eliot’s first wife, Vivienne Haigh, a ballet dancer, was mentally ill during much of their 32-year marriage. She died in 1947.