Imagine for a moment that a chatty, drawing-room comedy written in verse and based loosely upon Euripides'Alcestis, which took as its subject matter the pressures of marriage and the difficulties of redemption, climbed to number 3 on the New York Times bestseller list; that a press conference preceding the play's opening at the Edinburgh Festival was attended by more than a hundred members of the press from around the world; and that once staged in London and New York, it would be seen by over a million people. These, in fact, were the very circumstances that attended T. S. Eliot's third completed drama The Cocktail Party in 1949 and 1950, a situation that would be very hard to envision today. How did Eliot find himself in this position, and why were middle-class theatregoers flocking to a verse play in which a character doing missionary work and trying to ‘avoid the final desolation / Of solitude in the phantasmal world / Of imagination’ (CPP, 419) ends up being crucified by natives?

The answer is complicated, but as good a starting place as any is Eliot's lifelong habit of cultivating a persona of withdrawn reserve while at the same time attracting publicity to help advance his career. Eliot adopted the opposite approach of his friend Ezra Pound, who was renowned for his promotional schemes and for his extravagant dress and behaviour. Eliot depended instead on a quiet, coy manner that forced both public and private audiences to lean forward and pay careful attention.

In March of 1922, T. S. Eliot wrote Ezra Pound to solicit his assistance in launching The Criterion, the influential quarterly Eliot eventually edited for over sixteen years. Eliot envisioned the journal as a vehicle that would allow for the collective articulation of the modernist program, yet with a decidedly internationalist slant: the same week he posted the Pound letter, Eliot contacted both Valery Larbaud and Hermann Hesse seeking contributions for the review. In this regard, he was following the lead of Pound, who had earlier understood the importance of trying to unite modernism's work under the umbrella of a single publication, like Scofield Thayer's Dial. Pound had always conceived of modernism as a collaborative affair, which is why he was so amazed upon first reading Eliot's early work to learn that the poet had seemingly developed without the assistance of other members of the circle. Because Pound simply could not comprehend modernism as anything but a shared experience, he expressed surprise to Harriet Monroe that Eliot had “actually trained himself and modernized himself on his own” (L 40). Collaboration gave weight to individual literary works by highlighting their association with a collective body. It was this approach that Eliot sought for his own project, for collaboration possessed the major advantage of allowing Eliot to maintain exclusive control over the content and direction of the message.

The essays written during the wartime years and the two decades following Four Quartets often seek to make sense of the collaboration Eliot had engaged in during the first twenty-five years of his career. Having benefited enormously from the assistance of both living and dead collaborators, Eliot used many of these essays to step back from that experience and place it in personal, historical, and theoretical contexts. Those essays, for example, are overly preoccupied with questions of voice and influence. They continue the early attempts to pin down the author's place within the creative act and maintain the prejudice of refusing to accept too much responsibility for the generation of imaginative material. Even to the end, Eliot configured himself as an author not in complete control of his language and one who forever looked outside himself for stabilizing figures. But most remarkably, these essays consistently express fear and bewilderment toward the created text, and they most often represent poems as unruly children who are out of reach of their paralyzed parent.

Eliot's late essays often take up subjects that had occupied the writer throughout his career. But they sometimes do this from a slightly different position. For instance, he adapted the model of authorial passivity to accommodate the religious vocabulary that became so prevalent in his essays in the second half of his life.

Eliot's involvement with the Group Theatre, which he joined officially in 1934, two years after its founding, gave him an association with an artistic community that not only sanctioned collaborative achievement but held it up as an ideal, both in the name of the acting company and in its artistic manifestos. A draft of one of those manifestos proposes that creative success would occur “by continually playing together … work[ing] like a well-trained orchestra.” As in Eliot's many attempts to look to other disciplines for models of artistic success, this approach demanded that the individual suppress his personal needs for the greater good of the whole. The Group's interest in countering what its members believed was a degenerate, commercial theatre through the ideal of an amateur dramatic community that would synthesize the many different elements of theatre – from movement to speech to design – also accorded with Eliot's formal introduction to the theatre through the same route. Productions of The Rock and Murder in the Cathedral, for example, depended in large part on amateur performers of varying talents and backgrounds gathered together in the spirit of fellowship and cooperation to bring off the dramas successfully. This approach represented another significant departure from Eliot's early modernist stance in the criticism, which sought to inflate the status of the literary enterprise by lauding the benefits of its professionalization, despite concurrent calls for a restoration of England's great nineteenth-century amateur tradition.

When Eliot's friend and eventual roommate of over a decade, John Hayward, signed his lengthy letter of 1 August 1941 responding to Eliot's first draft of “Little Gidding,” he chose a rather curious way of doing so: “Love from yr. old creating critick: John” (CFQ 236). That self-characterization follows the lead of Eliot's essays, which conceive of the critical, editorial act as a creative one. Part of Eliot's intent in early collections like The Sacred Wood to reestablish criticism as a professional calling equal in stature to that of creative writing was motivated by the belief that the time had come to offer a counterpoint to the Romantic exaltation of the poet. But that valuation of the critical faculty also arose out of Eliot's conception of the creative process in collaborative terms. He understood that the contributions of auditors had always helped give shape to his work by providing personal encouragement and critical direction. Yet Hayward's self-representation in the 1941 letter is somewhat uncharacteristic, for he usually portrayed himself in modest terms when writing Eliot, tended to downplay his own critical faculties, and elevated the text above the personalities involved in the collaborative discussion. Even in the letter cited above, Hayward begins his comments by calling into question the usefulness of his perceptions: “whatever critical faculty I possess is momentarily distempered by the work it has [had] to do in the past fortnight” (234).

One of the most dependable patterns in Eliot's career is his habit of following one of his own poems or dramas with an essay that explores the procedures of that creative work. This allowed Eliot to gain some distance from the imaginative act and explore the troubling process of creation in the comforting form of prose, where he could assert his opinions much more vigorously and, following Arnold, use criticism to establish order. Since The Waste Land took shape during one of the most turbulent times in Eliot's personal life and it was the first work to benefit from a full-blown collaboration, Eliot was especially eager to make sense of that undertaking in his own criticism that followed the long poem. And while these essays have sometimes been discussed in terms of Eliot's thinking in The Waste Land, placing them within the context of the collaborative model I have drawn up puts them in a drastically new light. In effect, they reveal Eliot wrestling with the implications of Pound's assistance and struggling to align Pound's editorial contributions with his own needs and fears as an artist. Unwilling to acknowledge Pound's assistance overtly, the essays express Eliot's seemingly conflicting impulses of preferring to configure the writer in a passive position in the creative act while at the same time allowing for the exercise of authority. Part of the motivation of the essays, then, seems to be a desire to resolve this contradiction.

This book identifies collaboration as a life-long operating procedure in T. S. Eliot's theory and practice, and it also illustrates the various ways he resisted that same assistance. Eliot's reflections upon this complicated process can be teased out of one of his poetic meditations written in 1935, the same year he visited the gardens of Burnt Norton with Emily Hale. Although “Burnt Norton” now appears as the first of Eliot's Four Quartets, the poem originally stood very much on its own. It turned up as the concluding piece in Collected Poems 1909–1935 and only began to be seen by its author as the opening of a series during the war, when he started composing additional quartets. Consequently, “Burnt Norton” should not necessarily be read as a forward-looking poem that launches themes, images, ideas, and emotions that eventually surface in those subsequent quartets. Instead, it can be understood more accurately as a summary of Eliot's past experiences and the effects of those memories upon the present-day speaker. After offering a fairly dense, philosophical discussion of time, the speaker of “Burnt Norton” declares:

“HE MUST HIDE TO REVEAL HIMSELF”: PUBLIC AND PRIVATE IDENTITY IN ELIOT

Few writers have been so alone amidst so many people. Born in 1888 to parents who were both almost forty-five years old, T. S. Eliot had early in his life the experience of living physically close to loved ones yet remaining emotionally isolated in certain ways. He once confessed to a friend that his father and mother seemed removed enough to be like “ancestors.” This helped establish a pattern in Eliot's life of reserve, withdrawal, and isolation within even the closest of relationships, whether in an intimate friendship like that with John Hayward, his roommate of a decade, or even in his first marriage to Vivien Haigh-Wood. The former learned of Eliot's second marriage only after the fact, while the latter embraced as one of the predominant themes in her published and unpublished writings the utter loneliness of a spouse trapped in an emotionally arid union. Eliot was reportedly so modest that he never shared a bedroom with his first wife and would not even consider shaving in front of her.

Yet Eliot lived an extremely public life, of the type that consisted of conducting whirlwind reading tours of America in front of thousands of eager listeners and receiving accolades that landed him on the cover of Time magazine.

Many of T. S. Eliot's readers have concluded that his treatment of women in the poetry is generally unsympathetic if not entirely unfair. Joseph Bentley once explained that every time he taught Eliot's work, students would ask why the poet seemed not to like women. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have suggested that Eliot “responded to the threats posed by women … with fantasies of femicide,” while M. Teresa Gibert-Maceda points out that when discussing “Eliot's treatment of women … most readers just label [him] ‘misogynist.’” In light of Prufrock's inability to communicate with the women coming and going around him, the unflattering monologue of the self-absorbed woman in “Portrait of a Lady,” Gerontion's fear of History and her “many cunning passages,” and the shrieking epileptic of “Sweeney Erect,” those responses make sense.

It is useful to ponder, however, the implications of Marianne DeKoven's comment that such “vicious representations of women have been allowed to define Eliot's relationship to the feminine.” Actually, Eliot's relationship to the feminine is far more complex than critics usually concede. The poet's attitude toward women alternated at times among fear, disgust, worship, fascination, hostility, attraction, sympathy, and even understanding. In portions of his later work, Eliot's positive representations of the feminine produce some of the strongest characters in all his writing, the Chorus of the Women of Canterbury in Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and Celia Coplestone in The Cocktail Party (1949).