Four Quartets held out the ideal of a life open to the most radical revision in the midst of the most habitual of existences. In late 1957, at the age of 68, Eliot proposed to his 30-year-old secretary Valerie Fletcher, and she accepted. His last years seem to have been as happy as the majority of his life had been full of woe. He told a reporter from the Daily Express: ‘I am thinking of taking up dancing lessons again as I have not danced at all for some years.’ The story goes that when he left his flat the day before he was to get married, he gave his flat mate of more than a decade, John Hayward, a letter with the request that he open it on the morrow. Hayward said that was nonsense and read the letter, which informed him of the marriage, with Eliot standing in front of him. I suppose this is ‘lurve’, he said, producing the word in its full vulgarity. ‘Yes I suppose it is,’ replied Eliot. When young, he had been a man so crippled by social and sexual anxieties that he could not imagine himself shaving in front of a woman; in his last years he was content to let his young wife shave him. He died with her name on his lips.

There can be little doubt that he foresaw with loathing the avalanche of interest surrounding his life. No biography, he said as early as 1925; ‘suppress everything suppressible,’ he instructed Hayward when he was his literary executor. When in 1952 a young academic, John Peters, published a reading of The Waste Land as centred in an experience of homosexual love, Eliot, through legal and moral threats had every copy of the magazine destroyed. Some have read this as a panicked reaction to an unwelcome revelation about homosexuality. It is as easy to understand it as a worldly wise Eliot making sure that no one discussed his early marriage. But, while it is difficult not to sympathize with anyone who does not want his life monstered by what Joyce called the biografiends, it is difficult to regret the knowledge of recent years.