All the same, the result is a most engaging study – and not just of Hayward himself. Like so many studies of this type, it also provides a keyhole into the times, in this case, the first half of the twentieth century when high-art Modernism ruled supreme. Smart, through Hayward, takes us into that snobbish, cloistered, largely private-school world in which Art (properly capitalised) was the property of a self-selected few: Bloomsbury, the Woolfs, the Sitwells, and so on.

Above all, it was Eliot, in such highly influential essays as ‘Hamlet and His Problems’ and ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (with its core notions of ‘impersonality’ and ‘objectivity’), who set the rules. Don’t do what the world accepts as art, make the world accept what you do as art. Wordsworth, Coleridge, the late Romantics – they all did it.

Hayward, who grew up in Wimbledon and attended Hillside preparatory school in Surrey (which was later depicted by one of its former students, Aldous Huxley, in Eyeless in Gaza, and where he made friends with his contemporary, John Gielgud), always dreamed of being a writer and was born for the intrigues of literary circles. But he was also born with a debilitating disease, muscular dystrophy. From an early age, he couldn’t close his eyes while sleeping. His father, a physician, took him to specialists, who diagnosed the worst. Nearly all the well-known photographs of Hayward show him in the wheelchair that the disease would eventually consign him to; always with a confronting, don’t-mess-with-me stare for the camera, thick lips (a symptom of the disease), and a cigarette in hand. He was invariably dapper, possibly to compensate for the effect of the wheelchair. When friends booked taxis and trains for him, he referred to himself as convenient cargo.

By the time he attended Gresham’s School in 1918, at the age of thirteen, he was still walking, though his knees were giving him increasing trouble. There he shone at debating (under the tutelage of a socialist French teacher); later he edited the school magazine, in which he published the first poems of a junior student called Auden. But what is most apparent, and Smart is very good at capturing this, is Hayward’s spirit, his strength of will. He would defy his disease; he would live. In this sense, it is quite an inspiring tale, because live he did.

John Hayward at Carlyle Mansions

From Gresham’s he went to Cambridge, in 1923, and this is where the Hayward who would be familiar to generations of Eng Lit students and who would later edit the highly popular Penguin Book of English Verse (1956) begins to emerge. It is also where he met Eliot for the first time, in 1926.

He had also met the love of his life, Elaine Finlay. Hayward had a number of love affairs throughout his life and, in a Fielding-esque way, claimed to have lost his virginity to a nurse while still at school. Finlay and Hayward never married, and when they eventually parted he was rocked. Many other affairs followed.

All the time Hayward was charming his way into the most exclusive literary circles in London – falling in with, and out with, the biggest names of the day. By the 1930s he was reviewing for Criterion (edited by Eliot), had befriended Graham Greene (with whom he shared a lifelong appreciation of erotica), and was becoming known as an editor in his own right, especially with his collections of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester and John Donne, both of which received high praise.

But it’s his work on Four Quartets for which he is most, and justifiably, known. After their first meeting, Hayward and Eliot gradually became close friends, and when Hayward moved into Bina Gardens in London it became something of a salon – guests (Hayward kept a guestbook) being as diverse as the Marx brothers and Paul Valéry. But it was the Sunday evening gatherings of Eliot, Geoffrey Faber, Frank Morley (Faber editor), and Hayward that became the highlight of the week. They gave each other animal names: Eliot was Possum, Faber the Coot (for his baldness), and Hayward the Tarantula (Smart notes, ‘Hayward’s cutting tongue earned him the reputation of being “the most malicious man in London”’).

‘Eliot trusted [Hayward's] judgement to an extent that he had not trusted anyone’s since Pound’

They drank, and sang, and wrote scholarly witty poems about one another, collectively titled Noctes Binanianae. It was all hopelessly undergraduate and eventually folded when the war broke up the old gang and Hayward went into exile, as he put it, in Cambridge. It was during this time that Hayward, though missing London and society, did some of his finest editorial work. By this stage, Eliot trusted his judgement to an extent that he had not trusted anyone’s since Pound (il miglior fabbro) and his first wife, Vivien, who gave Eliot his title for The Waste Land. The first of the Four Quartets, Burnt Norton (1936) was already written, but as Eliot wrote East Coker (1940), Dry Salvages (1941), and Little Gidding (1942), he sent them to Hayward for close editing. Hayward’s most crucial work was on Little Gidding, the poem that Eliot drafted and redrafted seventeen times, and which he could not complete until he had nailed the unifying image of the dove and the Pentecostal fires – much of the poem’s imagery inspired, Eliot said himself, by his time as a firewatcher on the rooftop of Faber and Faber during the Blitz.

After the war, Hayward and Eliot shared a flat in Carlyle Mansions in Chelsea, Hayward taking a large room overlooking the river, Eliot the more monastic small rooms at the back of the flat. It was a common sight on Sundays for Hayward to be seen being pushed through the parks by Eliot and friends. As time went on, and as Eliot became grumpier and grumpier (‘Why’, he said to Mary Trevelyan one day, ‘must I be cursed with such mediocre contemporaries?’), the friendship began to sour. When Eliot married his secretary, Valerie Fletcher, in 1957 (he was sixty-eight, she thirty), Eliot moved out. As Smart points out, there are various stories concerning the manner in which Eliot departed. One version has it that Hayward did not know until the morning Eliot left; others suggest there was more notice. Either way, it was calculating and callous of Eliot. Apart from occasional meetings, the friendship did not survive. Both men died in 1965, Eliot in January, Hayward surviving his friend by eight months.

Hayward emerges from this study as a man of contradictions; acerbic but kind and generous; eager to please but with a history of falling out with friends; an atheist with a fine appreciation of deeply religious poems such as Four Quartets. He could also sustain a vendetta, as in his long war with F.R. Leavis, in which Leavis, for once, comes out looking good. Above all, this is a moving, highly informed portrait of a man intent on living as full and productive a life as his affliction would permit, until it finally rendered him unable to write.