T.S. ELIOT— EX-MID

T.S.ELIOT—EX-MID. John Sutherland in the Financial Times for February 3/4 has a review of Craig Raine’s new book on T.S. Eliot in which Sutherland asks whether Eliot belongs to American or to English literature: “Under which flag should his fame fly?” I wrote previously about how Calvin Trillin classified Thomas Dewey as the kind of ex-Midwesterner who didn’t want anybody to think of him as a Midwesterner. T.S. Eliot, from St. Louis, Missouri, is perhaps the archetype of the Thomas Dewey kind of ex-Midwesterner. Eliot moved to England and spent his life trying to look like a stuffy English banker. The mother of a friend of mine loved to quote Virginia Woolf marveling at seeing Eliot in a four-piece suit (we had no idea what the fourth piece could have been. Perhaps two different vests?). I used to say that the high point of Eliot’s life was being buried in Westminster Abbey.