Richard Davenport-Hines

Lodging with Old Possum

Tarantula’s Web: John Hayward, T S Eliot and Their Circle

By

Michael Russell 343pp £19.95 order from our bookshop

Who was John Hayward, and does he deserve a full-length biography, readers may ask? The first answer is that Hayward, who died in 1965 at the age of sixty, was a disabled bookman who created a South Kensington salon centred on T S Eliot in the 1930s, and shared a Chelsea flat with Eliot from 1946 until the poet’s second marriage 11 years later. The second response is that John Smart has written a biography of grace and charm, without any padding, but invoking a metropolitan literary London in which sumptuously well-read and mentally disciplined men and women wrote first-rate and enduring books. Smart does not flinch from the unpleasant aspects of Hayward’s temperament, but he is a generous and gentle biographer who, one imagines, wrote this book with a worldly smile.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • Britain’s only travelling lit fest, the Garden Museum Literary Festival is heading to Houghton Hall, Norfolk, for a… ,
    • 'The 19th-century German sage is not my idea of a pleasant travel companion' goes hiking with Friedr… ,
    • If you want ideas about what to read next, sign up to our free email newsletter, and get book reviews, archive mate… ,
    • 'The heroic male nude could not, I think, be used today to signify civic pride and glory', as Michelangelo’s 'David… ,
    • 'Munch’s later works show us a man liberated from the torments that gave rise to some of the best-known early works… ,
    • 'We read from left to right and from start to finish. Or do we?' Stuart Hannabus considers the merits of reading i… ,
    • Domestic scandal, sexual abuse and serial killers are on the menu in April's crime round-up. revie… ,
    Follow Us