T.S. Eliot, Gin Fiend

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William Hogarth, Gin Lane (1750), via Wikimedia Commons

Robert Crawford’s two-volume biography of T.S. Eliot reaches almost 1,000 pages. This isn’t an unsurprising length given Eliot’s stature, but it does allow Crawford to include any tidbit from Eliot’s life that might be remotely interesting—including Eliot’s love of gin.

In 1926, Crawford writes, Aldous Huxley, who had lunch with Eliot that summer found him “as urbane and sophisticated as ever, but ‘terribly grey-green’. Tom ‘drank no less than five gins with his meal’.” In 1927, Eliot explains to Conrad Aiken that he wrote his poem “The Journey of the Magi” “in three quarters of an hour after church time and before lunch one Sunday morning, with the assistance of half a bottle of Booth’s gin.”

It wasn’t just gin he loved either during these years of marital turmoil (with a constantly ailing Vivien) and non-stop work, first at the bank, then at what would become Faber & Faber. He drank to excess regularly. Anthony Powell writes in his diary at the time: “Eliot always drunk these days.”