Books: A Long Way from St. Louis

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis on Sept. 26, 1888. He died in London on Jan. 4, 1965. These dates and places bracket a life but are swamped by its reverberations. For Eliot, in transit, not only wrote The Waste Land, the single most influential poem in English of the 20th century. He also produced a body of work -- poetry, criticism, plays -- that permanently rearranged the cultural landscapes of his native and adopted lands.

Exactly how he created himself and his era remains something of a mystery, the topic of continuing debate. And this discussion is about to intensify nearly everywhere, thanks to the occasion provided by Eliot's centenary. For openers, a long awaited addition to the Eliot canon will be published next week on his 100th birthday: The Letters of T.S. Eliot, 1898-1922 (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 736 pages; $29.95), the first of four volumes of Eliot's correspondence, edited by his second wife Valerie. Presses on both sides of the Atlantic are churning out new issues of Eliot's writing. The British Council has mounted an exhibition illustrating Eliot's life and work that will eventually travel to 70 countries. The U.S. observances will include a memorial lecture at the Library of Congress and a gathering of Eliot scholars + and critics at Washington University in St. Louis. There will even be a conference in Japan.

And then there is Cats, Andrew Lloyd Webber's extravagant musical adaptation of Eliot's book of light verse, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939). The smash show has been seen by some 25 million people in 15 countries and contributed more than $2 million in royalties to the Eliot estate. Purists shudder at such commercial success and its spin-offs. Says Critic Hugh Kenner: "Eliot wanted to connect with a popular audience, but Cats wasn't what he had in mind."

But Cats and the hoopla still surrounding Eliot attest to the poet's surprising vitality. By many standards he should have been old news by now. He professed conservatism, elitism and sectarian Christianity at a time when the fashionable tides were running against all three. As a shy, uncertain young man, he was torn between the dictates of his proper upbringing and the tug of his emotions. He looked inward and saw himself coming apart; he looked outward and saw Western civilization dissolving into chaos. He tried to heal these rifts with words: "I have measured out my life with coffee spoons . . . April is the cruellest month . . . I will show you fear in a handful of dust . . . This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper . . . And let my cry come unto Thee . . . In my end is my beginning."

His poems struck many readers as acts of mind reading. There was no need for them to memorize Eliot; he had, it seemed, already memorized them. He became famous by age 35 without growing satisfied with his accomplishments or happy with himself. Words were not enough. Behind the lectures and public appearances of the latter decades -- the tall, stooped figure in the three- piece suits, issuing pronouncements -- was concealed a soul in torment, trying to purge itself of sin and of the world that lavished so much praise on what he considered his unworthiness before God.