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T.S. Eliot in Love and Los Angeles: A Photo Essay
The following piece on poet and Nobel Prize laureate T.S. Eliot (1888–1965), whose birthday is on Sept. 26, was written by Joseph Maddrey, who is contributing a book on Eliot’s life and work for our Great Lives series. Maddrey is a freelance writer, TV producer and author of several books, including The Making of T.S. Eliot: A Study of the Literary Influences (2009). He resides in Los Angeles, CA.
In the summer of 2009, I attended the inaugural T.S. Eliot Summer School in London, England. Before the first session, I started chatting with a group of international Eliot scholars. One of them asked me where I was from. When I said Los Angeles, he responded dryly, “I’m sorry.”
It was a predictable bit of snobism, entirely appropriate to the setting. T.S. Eliot hated California. In a series of private letters written in early 1933, he called it “a horrible place,” “a nightmare,” and one of America’s “two great mistakes” (the other being New York). Eliot’s correspondents were, not surprisingly, British — and the missives may be partly indicative of the poet’s longing for England, after nearly a year abroad, rather than of full-hearted contempt for California. At the very least, there was one thing about California that he was sincerely devoted to.
