The Love Song of T. S. Eliot
T. S. ELIOT
What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.
—T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding
During his disastrous honeymoon, T. S. Eliot reportedly spent the night in a deck chair while his bride barricaded herself inside their hotel room. The neurotic pair’s eighteen-year partnership produced numerous nervous breakdowns and some of the twentieth century’s finest poetry.
“The truth will all come out, if not in our life—then after it,” promised Vivienne Eliot, wife of famed modernist poet T. S. (Thomas Stearns) Eliot, from the asylum where she had been committed against her will in 1938. She blamed Eliot’s cruelty for causing her breakdown and longed for the world to know her side of the story.
Although she was eccentric and plagued by a nervous disposition, Vivienne may not have been the “mad” Ophelia that history has made her out to be. Decades after her death in 1947, her brother, who signed her incarceration papers, admitted, “It was only when I saw Vivie in the asylum for the last time I realised I had done something very wrong. . . . She was as sane as I was.” Like Zelda Fitzgerald, the neurotic wife of another famous writer, Vivienne died while institutionalized.
She had spent her last hours of freedom wandering the streets of London in a delusional state, not unlike the tortured wife in Eliot’s poem The Waste Land, who proclaims in desperation, “I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street.” When her brother was summoned to collect her, he wrote alarmingly to the vacationing poet that Vivienne was “full of the most fantastic suspicions. She asked me if it was true that you had been beheaded.”
Vivienne’s grip on reality had steadily loosened after Eliot deserted her five years earlier. Coldly, he had informed her of his desire to separate in a letter from his solicitor, sent while he was abroad teaching. His cowardly action avoided a painful confrontation, which he continued to forestall after his return to England by going into hiding.
Denied even the chance to meet with her husband, Vivienne refused to accept their breakup and became convinced she could change his mind if she could only speak to him again in person. Eliot refused, insisting through his lawyers that further discussions were “fruitless and unnecessary.” His abrupt and inexplicable withdrawal would have driven even the sanest of wives to the brink, but for a woman already plagued by abandonment issues, it spelled disaster. Overcome with a growing sense of helplessness and hysteria, Vivienne began to stalk him.
Her attempts to track him down through the passport office and their dentist were foiled by his frequent moves, and she took to haunting his workplace. Embarrassingly, she would sit weeping in the waiting room while Eliot slipped out the back door, alerted by a special ring from his secretary. Evenings would find her canvassing performances of his plays, hoping for a sighting.
Out of options, she attempted to place an advertisement in theTimes personals, which the newspaper withheld from publication. The ad pleaded: “Will T. S. Eliot please return to his home 68 Clarence Gate Gardens which he abandoned Sept. 17th, 1932.” Even after bailiffs raided her apartment to repossess her estranged husband’s belongings, she clung to the hope that he might return and would often leave the door ajar.
After three long years, Vivienne’s perseverance was briefly rewarded when she tracked Eliot down at a book signing. She approached him but was swiftly rebuffed: “I cannot talk to you now,” Eliot said dismissively, before rushing off. He never again made an effort to see her, either before or during her nine-year incarceration. Although he was said to be acting on the advice of her doctors, his complete disengagement seems unfeeling and inhumane.
When Vivienne’s brother rang in 1947 to tell him she had unexpectedly died (possibly from a deliberate overdose), the poet is said to have become profoundly distressed, crying out, “Oh God, oh God.” Despite his conviction that leaving had been a necessary act of self-preservation, he was nonetheless tormented by his decision. His autobiographical play The Family Reunion, about a tortured man who may or may not have killed his wife, is thought to have been an attempt to grapple with his conflicted feelings.
For a repressed man who spent a lifetime fleeing emotion, Eliot’s choice of a flamboyant, high-strung bride like Vivienne is puzzling. The mismatched pair had wed after a whirlwind courtship while the shy American poet was a student at Oxford. Cracks in their marriage began showing immediately, when Vivienne’s unpredictable menstrual period arrived on their honeymoon.
It’s hard to say who was more distressed, the nervous bride or the inexperienced poet, who was still a virgin and squeamish about female sexuality. The reluctant Romeo was also hamstrung by embarrassment over his hernia, and the abortive first night of passion did little to boost his confidence. Vivienne’s insistence on bringing home the soiled sheets for laundering only prolonged the painful ordeal.
Flummoxed by her husband’s disinterest in sex, Vivienne consoled herself in the arms of his former teacher, the philosopher Bertrand Russell. Eliot may have tacitly condoned the affair, happy to be off the hook in the bedroom. At the time, he was preoccupied with his dawning awareness of Vivienne’s many maladies. In addition to suffering from manic depression and a hormonal imbalance, she had debilitating migraines, neuralgia, rheumatism, and later developed an eating disorder and addiction to pain medication.
Vivienne’s illnesses blighted every aspect of their existence, but Eliot stuck it out for more than a decade. He bore her difficulties with saintly patience, even giving up teaching for a higher-paid job in a bank so he could afford her mounting medical expenses. His round-the-clock ministrations brought on his own collapses, which would render him bedridden for weeks at a time.
Still, there were unexpected compensations. “Vivienne ruined him as a man but she made him as a poet,” claimed an acquaintance. Eliot himself later admitted, “To her the marriage brought no happiness . . . to me, it brought the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land.” The 434-line confessional poem, considered one of the greatest of the twentieth century, was largely composed in a Swiss sanitarium while he was being treated for his own breakdown.
Eliot’s illnesses and heavy drinking offered him a refuge from his marriage as his wife’s bizarre behavior intensified. Among other eccentricities, she took to carrying a toy knife in her handbag, once using it to threaten Virginia Woolf, whom she accused of being Eliot’s mistress. Sympathetic to the poet, Woolf spoke of Vivienne as a “bag of ferrets” around his neck, forever “biting, wriggling, raving, scratching.” Vivienne’s erratic actions, Eliot’s compensatory drinking, and their constant mutual sniping hampered their social life. Friends described being sucked dry by their presence, and many refused to see the dysfunctional pair together anymore.
As the marriage reached its inexorable conclusion, Eliot laid the foundations for a separate life by joining the Church of England and taking a vow of chastity, an insurance policy against any more bad sex. He also began a secret correspondence with Bostonian Emily Hale, who had been his first love while he was a student at Harvard. Both of their families had assumed the sweethearts would marry, until Eliot’s move to Europe and his impulsive decision to wed Vivienne. Twelve years after being thrown over, Emily wrote to her former flame, instigating a furtive but chaste cross-Atlantic friendship.
Over the next three decades, the poet penned her more than a thousand letters, and she frequently visited him in England. When Vivienne was found wandering the streets and committed to an asylum, Emily and Eliot were away together. Despite their closeness, Eliot imposed a wall of secrecy around their relationship and few in his circle knew of Emily’s existence.
Emily acquiesced to remaining in the shadows, believing her virtuous silence would be rewarded with a walk down the aisle. But after Vivienne passed away, she was dismayed to find Eliot unwilling to make a commitment. Instead he claimed he felt incapable of ever sharing a life with anyone again. Their friendship continued in spite of the crushing rejection, perhaps because Emily, like Vivienne before her, did not give up hope that he might reconsider.
She might have reacted differently if she had known that the unlikely playboy had another gal pal in the wings. Englishwoman Mary Trevelyan had been Eliot’s confidante and frequent escort to social events since the year of Vivienne’s confinement. Although he gave off mixed signals by sending her presents and sometimes holding her hand, he also discouraged intimacy by limiting their contact to once every two weeks. Undeterred by Eliot’s standoffishness, Mary proposed to him three times. Each time the poet demurred, claiming he thought they were just friends and that the idea of remarrying was like a nightmare.
Despite his seemingly implacable stance on marriage, at the age of sixty-eight Eliot stunned everyone by tying the knot with his thirty-year-old secretary, Valerie Fletcher. The couple exchanged vows in a secret ceremony that took place at 7:00 a.m. to avoid publicity, and was witnessed only by the bride’s parents and a single friend. Not a soul had known of this covert office romance. After hearing the shocking news, Mary Trevelyan stopped speaking to him, while Emily Hale had a nervous breakdown.
Eliot’s second marriage brought him immense happiness. He and Valerie were inseparable, and those who knew him marveled at his profound contentment. Not known for sentimentality or romanticism, he broke the stereotype by publishing a love poem called “A Dedication to My Wife.” The verse describes an ideal union between two people “Who think the same thoughts without need of speech / And babble the same speech without need of meaning.”
The second Mrs. Eliot was equally besotted, having been a devotee of the poet since age fourteen when she heard a recording of his poem “Journey of the Magi.” Fate was on her side when, after training as a secretary, she learned of an opening working for Eliot at the publishing firm Faber and Faber. During Valerie’s seven years as his devoted employee, the couple’s feelings quietly blossomed until she received Eliot’s coy handwritten proposal in a batch of typing.
Cynics claim the ailing poet, who suffered from emphysema and heart problems, had married to secure a trustworthy nursemaid and literary executor, though Valerie disputed this interpretation. “He obviously needed to have a happy marriage. He wouldn’t die until he’d had it,” she said. “There was a little boy in him that needed to be released.”
BREAKING UP IS HARD TO DO 