The magazine's contributors, potential or actual, included authors as exceptional as Italo Svevo and Wyndham Lewis, Paul Valéry and Marianne Moore. Eliot's dealings with them constitute what ought to be an absorbing chapter of literary history. But unfortunately most of the letters he addressed to them were stiff and formal. When he canvassed a contribution from Rebecca West, for instance, he admittedly hadn't met her, but even so she must have been surprised to find him signing off: "I am, Madam, your obedient servant." She might as well have been hearing from her solicitor.

It isn't only when he is writing in the role of editor that the letters are notably buttoned-up. There are some nice dry touches — "Nobody likes being called a ‘highbrow'", he tells a critic who has devoted a friendly essay to him — and even when he is being over-precise he at least has the virtues of precision: he expresses himself firmly and clearly. But what you hardly ever seem to get is the true voice of feeling.

One or two letters stand out in sharp contrast to the prevailing restraint. Writing to John Middleton Murry, Eliot pours out his heart, or his desperation: "In the last ten years — gradually but deliberately — I have made myself into a machine. I have done it deliberately — in order to endure, in order not to feel — but it has killed V." — Vivienne, his wife. (He didn't much respect Murry, but somehow found it easier to confide in him than in people he respected more.) And there is a scary letter to Lady Rothermere, warning her against a madwoman who has been persecuting Vivienne and is "burning" to injure Eliot himself "in every way possible". (The facts seem to be more or less as Eliot described them, but you feel a more general sense of panic at work as well.)

It would take a bold person to pass confident judgment on the rights and wrongs of Eliot's first marriage — and quite a few such bold people have shown up in the past 30-odd years. There is no doubt a great deal that we shall never know. But on the evidence of the newly-published letters Eliot was caring and conscientious, preoccupied with trying to get help for Vivienne's mental condition from doctors who didn't fully understand it, and much of the time on the brink of a nervous breakdown himself.

Despite the glimpses of anguish, the man you encounter in these letters seems worlds away from the poetry. There is nothing new, of course, about the idea of a gulf between a writer and his work. When Henry James met Tennyson, he reported to a friend that "you must understand there is nothing personally Tennysonian about him". Much the same point could be made about many other authors. But in Eliot the disparity seems particularly glaring. You wonder how such a gift came to be lodged in such a figure.

Eliot and his wife Vivienne 

Meanwhile, the new volume is a book to consult rather than one to read. And since the editors quote generously from Eliot's correspondents, many of the best things in it are not by Eliot himself. There are some particularly attractive letters from his elder brother Henry. The aged George Saintsbury gives a genial and witty account of his reactions to Ulysses. And in an exchange between Eliot and Bertrand Russell about conceptions of culture, the last word must go to Russell: "Your opinion is different from mine, but why shouldn't it be? Neither is founded on reason."