MARY AND MR. ELIOT

The story of the friendship between T.S. Eliot and a woman who pined for more.

Trevelyan (1897-1983) was the warden of London’s Student Movement House, which provided housing for British and foreign students. She also traveled widely throughout Africa, India, and Asia as part of “her mission to make foreign students feel part of English cultural life.” In 1936, she invited Eliot to read for her students at the Student Christian Movement Conference in Derbyshire. Thus began a two-decade friendship that Trevelyan chronicled in an unpublished diary, The Pope of Russell Square. Wagner, a contributing writer for the New Statesman, excerpts parts of Trevelyan’s diaries and correspondence with Eliot in this book, interspersed with her own commentary. Entries range from 1938 until 1957, when Trevelyan, who had hoped their friendship could evolve into a romance, was shocked to learn that Eliot was to marry his secretary, Valerie Fletcher, nearly 40 years his junior, a revelation that “hurt her profoundly.” Unfortunately, her story focuses less on her accomplishments and more on quotidian details of her time with Eliot. In 1955, after attending an All Saints’ Day service, Eliot told Trevelyan, “People are so afraid of repetition—they don’t seem to realise that it is the essence of poetry.” That may be true for poetry, but in a diary, repetitiveness gets wearying in the absence of tension or sufficient variation. Much of Trevelyan’s diary describes meals eaten together, church services attended, vacations taken, and so on, which makes for dull reading. Wagner’s commentary helps but doesn’t fully alleviate the monotony. Eliot devotees will appreciate this peek into his personal life even though, admirably, Wagner doesn’t sugarcoat his bigotry, including his antisemitism and his reference to the “little brown men” of Burma, which Wagner calls “a glimpse of the prejudice which still taints his reputation”—a fact, she is careful to note, Trevelyan was willing to overlook.

A revealing if tedious account of life with one of the 20th century’s most famous poets.