The Letters of T S Eliot: Volume 4: 1928-1929 ed by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden: review In 1928, the professional Eliot is almost swamped by two administrative struggles. The future of The Criterion, the literary magazine he founded in 1922, is in jeopardy after its chief backer, Lady Rothermere, removes her financial support. This anxiety is compounded by tricky negotiations in a dispute between the two chief business partners of Eliot's publishing firm, Faber and Gwyer. Meanwhile, he works with a white-knuckled energy, as over his desk pass the daily minutiae of a publishing office: submissions, deadlines and staff problems. The trouble that Eliot takes with young writers discloses an endearingly considerate side of him. On numerous occasions manuscripts by people he either admires or cannot include in The Criterion are politely rejected or recommended to other publishers, most frequently Leonard Woolf at The Hogarth Press. At the same time Eliot is acting as agent for his own backlist, managing translation queries, anthology requests, invitations to lecture to students and commitments to broadcast on the fledgling BBC wireless service. In addition, he conducts a vibrant correspondence about literary theory, humanism, classicism and myriad philosophical and theological questions with a huge variety of pre-eminent poets and thinkers including Ezra Pound, I A Richards, Max Scheler, Robert Frost, W H Auden, John Middleton Murray and Virginia Woolf - and although there is little humour here, the still lingering anti-Semitic barbs have dwindled from earlier letters. But the chief drama and interest of this volume, sometimes concealed within the margins, revolves around Eliot's fragmenting marriage to Vivien and her deteriorating mental health. Theirs was a relationship that alternately threatened, sustained and fuelled Eliot's creative energy. In a rare newspaper interview in 1994, Valerie Eliot said that her husband wrote The Waste Land because Vivian made him suffer. We owe the poem to her, no question: he wouldn't have written it if she hadn't given him such hell. And in oblique confirmation of this claim, in a letter included here, discussing The Waste Land with E M Forster on August 10 1929, Eliot says: "You exaggerate the importance of the War... The Waste Land might have been just the same without the War." It is perhaps not surprising that during the last near-decade of Eliot's life when his second marriage gave him unprecedented happiness that his creative output diminished accordingly. In 1928, Vivien (or Vivienne, as she sometimes called herself) returns to London from Paris, emerging prematurely from her latest incarceration in a psychiatric clinic. With the absence of any published letters from Eliot to his wife, the inclusion of Vivien's own letters to her husband's two greatest women friends, the bohemian Mary Hutchinson and the Bloomsbury hostess Ottoline Morrell confirm Vivien's disturbing volatility of mind. Her fluctuating moods, quickness to take offence and obsessive hypochondria provoke bewilderment in their recipients but provide the reader with rare insight into a marriage so precarious that Vivien announces "he simply hates the sight of me." Embarrassing public outbursts and Vivien's misplaced suspicion of Ottoline's intentions towards her husband result in Eliot's fraught attempts to protect himself as well as his wife. Sometimes the strain of Eliot's personal life overwhelms him; he constantly makes excuses not to accept social invitations or make public appearances, and on more than one occasion people notice that he has drunk to excess. At times he treads just this side of the fragile line of insanity across which Vivien unwittingly beckons him to step. And yet like some strange, desiccated cactus that suddenly and inexplicably throws out a flower of breathtaking colour, so Eliot continues to produce astonishing poems in the most arid of emotional circumstances. While his growing reputation as a leading critic and thinker is further confirmed in the 1928 publication of Lancelot Andrews: Essays on Style and Order, it is the two beautiful Ariel Poems, following on from Journey of the Magi (1927) that dazzle and move. A Song for Simeon (1928) and Animula (1929) are transitional poems in which one narrator with "eighty years and no to-morrow" longs for "the death wind" and another finds it impossible to "fare forward or retreat." Both poems look back to the spiritually barren wasteland from where Eliot has come, lament the time present, swollen with difficulty, but also look forward to religious salvation. It is with some cheer that one turns to the surviving handful of Eliot's letters to his mother in which the obvious affection of her "devoted son" becomes all the more moving when she dies at home in America before he can visit her. One half wonders why Eliot never made the journey to say goodbye to his mother despite knowing she was seriously unwell, and yet this sabotaging of his own happiness, a manoeuvring of himself into a position of suffering, is a thread that runs throughout much of his life. But it is in God rather than gin that he finds the ultimate balm and in many letters to ecclesiastics he subdues the confusion of his private life by focusing on his evolving commitment to his Anglican faith. In the spring of 1928 he received his first communion and simultaneously took a vow of celibacy while maintaining the utmost discretion and secrecy around his religious life. Included as one of hundreds of superbly enhancing footnotes that pack this volume, the poet and critic Herbert Read remembers spending a night in the Eliots" London house, waking early to see the door of his room being silently opened. I lay still and saw first a hand and then an arm reach round the door and lift from a hook the bowler hat that was hanging there... Mr. Eliot was on his way to an early communion service. There is a particular bleakness attached to this latest lengthy addition to the Eliot biography. This is the last volume that will benefit from the editorship of Valerie Eliot, the other woman to feature large in these pages although technically absent from the text. Her intimate knowledge of her enigmatic husband makes her presence here ubiquitous, especially in the selection of footnotes, the exemplary biographical register and the detailed summary of chronological events all of which ensure the reader is looked after with meticulous care. But with Valerie's death, notwithstanding the impressive scholarship of her co-editor John Haffenden, an invaluable insight into the life of the predominant English language poet of the last century has finally been lost. The Letters of T S Eliot: Volume 4: 1928-1929 ed by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden 1,000pp, Faber t £36 (PLUS £1.35 p&p) Buy now from Telegraph Books (RRP £40, ebook £40)