TS Eliot a champion of lesbian fiction, father figure to younger writers

London, August 30 (ANI): Poet-playwright TS Eliot will be shown as a champion of lesbian fiction and compassionate father figure to struggling writers, when a new exhibition opens at the British Library next month.

According to reports, letters written by him as a publisher at Faber and Faber suggest that he risked the wrath of the British authorities to bring out Nightwood, one of the first lesbian novels ever written.

The previously unseen correspondence shows that Eliot thought the 1936 book, by Djuna Barnes, was "the last big thing to be done in our time".

Also to be exhibited are excerpts from a diary that Ted Hughes wrote in the 1960s, which refer to the poet as "the Guru-in-chief" and describe the older Eliot as a "father figure".

Media reports are suggesting that Eliot's letters to his three-year-old godson, descriptions of his role as a fire warden during the Blitz, and stories about his wartime problems with paper and ink shortages all paint a striking new image of a man with a benevolent, compassionate side.

"There is this interpretation of Eliot as this severe, rather grim author of The Wasteland. But this exhibition shows there was another side to him: that he was tremendously warm and generous in his relationships and that this was reciprocated by others," the Guardian quoted Rachel Foss, the British Library's curator of modern literary manuscripts, as saying.

Eliot backed Nightwood, which was set in the 1920s and depicted the tumultuous relationship between its two female protagonists, despite its rejection by other publishers on the grounds of obscenity.

To avoid falling foul of strict censorship laws, Eliot changed a number of the novel's references to lesbian sex as well as to religion.

Despite that, he confessed to Geoffrey Faber, founder of the publishing house, that he believed himself an unreliable judge when it came to matters of censorship.

"I am perpetually being shocked by what doesn't shock other people and not being shocked (by what does)," he wrote in a letter to Faber in 1936. (ANI)

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