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The facts of Eliot's life are generally known, and Gordon gives them their due. She describes the American back grounds, the Harvard and Oxford education, the crucial year in France, and the move to London in 1914. She covers the miserable marriage, the early fame, the conversion, and the return to America and his first love in the early 1930s. She chronicles his labor in the classroom, at the bank, and in the boardroom; she guides us through his dismal years l'entre deux guerres, his wartime duties and postwar prizes, and finally, reminds us of his bliss in a May-December marriage.
These events, however, are for Gordon primarily a scaffold for revealing the poet's hidden life, which she accesses by reading his poems, plays, and essays. Eliot, Gordon claims, lived a double life:
publicly at the centre of a sycophantic buzz; privately there was the incommunicable life of a solitary that was all the stranger because it was conducted in the stir of the city, in the glare of fame. ... It was his nature to have scruple within scruple and to regulate his conduct on principles ignored by men of the world, like Lot in Sodom or Daniel in Babylon ... In a solitude guarded by public masks he lived a hidden life. It would be unreachable if he had not been a poet with a need to explore and define that life. His poetry distills ... a coherent spiritual autobiography, direct, honest, and more penetrating than any outsider could dare to determine, a life so closely allied to creative works as to be a reciprocal invention.
In Eliot's Early Years, Gordon argued from a reading of an unpublished poem, "Silence," that in 1910-11 Eliot had a mystical experience, a glimpse of glory that launched him on a lifelong quest for salvation, a quest that is at the heart of both his personal and his artistic life. His poetry began from a confluence in his college years of spiritual crisis and sexual conflict, a confluence she traces in his poetry and in his relationships with a series of women: his mother, Charlotte; his first love, Emily Hale; his first wife, Vivienne Haigh Wood; his friends Virginia Woolf and Mary Trevelyan; and finally his second wife, Valerie Fletcher. It is in and through these relationships, Gordon argues, that Eliot's spiritual life takes shape, that both his virtues and his flaws become apparent.
The task of the literary biographer, in Gordon's view, is to remove the mask and show the face, to X-ray the face and reveal the heart. She argues that there are three distinct but parallel and interrelated levels in the life of a poet, and that these can be identified and mapped by analyzing his creative work. First, there is the surface self, the face put on to meet the faces that one meets. Second, there is the hidden self of which the artist is conscious, the thoughts, the longings, the thousand sordid images of which one's soul is constituted. And third, there is the buried self of which the poet is unaware or half-aware.
Gordon builds her surface level from the same documents other biographers use—public records, letters, diaries, supplemented by a literal reading of Eliot's poetry and prose. On this level, she finds a high-minded, well-meaning figure, a great poet who sought but failed to find personal happiness. But taking a cue from The Waste Land (real existence is "not to be found in our obituaries / ... Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor / In our empty rooms"), she discounts the historical level: "Eliot's visible life offers only the shell of a character. ... To all appearance, Eliot was conventional, mild, decorous, yet the hidden character was daring and savage. The outward appearance proclaimed normality; the hidden self refused all norms as it struck out for the frontiers of existence."
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