Eliot's Secret Life
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
On Poetry ELIOT'S SECRET LIFE BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL The best known fact about T.S. Eliot is that he treasured his privacy. Except for the Psalms, no poetry has ever been subject ed to the...
...Vivien proved to be a chronic invalid with serious, undiagnosable maladies—Gordon shows that, among her other problems, she became a drug addict, thanks to her medications...
...First there was the progress of a young Midwesterner from one of America's oldest, most distinguished families...
...Valerie Eliot concludes the first installment of letters here, while admitting ruefully that, except for length, it would have made more sense to end with her husband's conversion to the Anglican Church in 1926-27...
...Consider the following from The Waste Land: My friend, blood shaking my heart The awful daring of a moment's surrender Which an age of prudence never can retract By this, and this only we have existed Which is not to be found in our obituaries Now, in this centenary of Eliot's birth, two newbooks cast some light on what was hitherto obscure...
...Gordon is equally generous in her sympathetic attempts to understand Eliot's sometimes ruthless treatment of intimates...
...Together with the supreme Eliot critic, Helen Gardner, Valerie Eliot and Lyndall Gordon form a triumvirate who help us understand one of the most complex poets of our age...
...Perhaps the ultimate irony is that his personality—obviously attractive to women during his lifetime—should finally be revealed to the public through feminine intuition...
...Although the couple separated in 1933, unwillingly on her part, even after her death in a mental institution in 1947 he appeared to remain celibate until, at the age of 69 to the surprise of everyone including those closest to him, he married his secretary, Valerie Fletcher...
...Happily, she gradually changed his mind enough to allow her to edit selections from it...
...He, too, possessed low stamina, which misery exacerbât ed...
...To support his wife, Eliot was forced to take a job at Lloyd's Bank...
...Speculation about these events cannot be dismissed as mere prurience...
...Ought we to see the Lady of Silences in "Ash Wednesday" as a real beloved, or as an allegorical figure...
...He now was engaged in congenial work as an editor at Faber & Faber, yet friends detected a penitential flavor in everything he did...
...Lyndall Gordon treats the mature manin Eliot's New Life (Farrar Straus Giroux, 356 pp., $19.95), a sequel to her acclaimed Eliot's Early Life (1977), just reissued in paperback (Noonday, 174 pp., $8.95...
...By 1922 these had become The Waste Land...
...Poetry branched out into blank verse plays that audiences found fascinatingly cryptic...
...The themes of The Waste Land to appear to revolve around Vivien, yet why is it dedicated to the memory of a young Frenchman, killed at sea during WWI...
...During the second part of his career, spent in religion, Eliot was ever more guarded and remote...
...Though Gordon (also author of a study of Virginia Woolf) has done exhaustive research, her most impressive accomplishment is a portrait that illuminates the poems...
...Crushed by his remarriage,she donated the letters she received from him to Princeton...
...Gordon substantiates a bigger bombshell: Eliot secretly loved a woman named Emily Hale, whom he had known since his Harvard days...
...Some critics approached his writings reverentially, reading them as a symbolic dissection of our culture's decadence...
...In England he fell under the sway of Ezra Pound, who tried to keep him from returning to the more provincial and mercantile atmosphere of the United States...
...This misreads her purpose, which is neither to condone nor blame Eliot's behavior, but to interpret a man so private that normal intimacy was almost impossible for him...
...You'rean unusual friend," Trevelyan had remarked once...
...Louis and Massachusetts...
...Eliot's marriage to Vivien (or, as he called her, Vivienne) Haigh-Wood resulted in disaster, but what exactly went wrong...
...As "confessional" poetry came into fashion, others began to speculate about autobiography, and to suggest that a pervasive guilty tone stemmed from Eliot's homosexual inclinations...
...Except for the Psalms, no poetry has ever been subject ed to the kind of scrutiny his has received...
...He adored his second wife, however, and throughout his life formed deep friendships with the opposite sex...
...Even when she admits to speculative reconstruction, she carries conviction because her mind seems to travel along Eliot's wave-length...
...In the great tradition of our writers, he made his interior life the subject of his works...
...negotiating the Byzantine world of literary politics in the salons of such notables as Virginia and Leonard Woolf, and Lady Ottoline Morrell...
...After graduation he opted for study abroad...
...Recuperating at a Swiss spa, he began to string together some poetic fragments he had been working on for some time, and to compose several new ones...
...His comic verses about cats surprised readers, without revealing anything more than that the man possessed a rather clerical sense of humor...
...writing tenderly to his mother...
...A less empathetic or perceptive biographer would dismiss him as a monster—though surely no other modern poet has been as self-disciplined or gracious...
...In both of her biographies, as in the letters, Vivien comes across as the primary influence on the young man—his dark Muse, who made life Hell, but transformed him from a minor poet into one of the pre-eminent voices of the 20th century...
...The poems became increasingly mystical...
...Hale had sacrificed her career as a college drama teacher to be with him...
...Nevertheless, he managed to keep details of his personal life secret by swearing intimates to silence, and by destroying letters or safeguarding them from prying, would-be biographers...
...He hastily retorted, "And in the end, unsatisfactory...
...Related to both Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Adams, Eliot grew up in St...
...The widow has included more of Verdenal's chatty, innocuous letters than would be necessary if she were not proving that there are no skeletons in this particular closet...
...Eliot discovered almost immediately that he could satisfy her neither emotionally nor (apparently) sexually, yet she clung tenaciously to the marriage for 16 years...
...They may not be opened until 2019, when the full story will become clear...
...He also exhibited a strong touch of the Hawthorne hero, whose devotion to God created a conflict of interests with earthly affections...
...She acted as Muse to "Ash Wednesday" and "Four Quartets...
...Inexplicably, even after Vivien's death, he would not propose to her, and stopped all communications when he fell in love with Valerie...
...Reread the poems in this light and you will discover the same man and creative genius Gordon so persuasively describes...
...Thus the information we possessed about him was enigmatic, often raising more questions than it answered...
...This matter was settled when he impulsively married Vivien...
...The awful daring of amoment's surrender" might apply to the dead Jean Verdenal...
...Eliot's career, as the letters and Gordon's twin biographies suggest, divides rather more neatly than most into two distinct parts...
...Marital failure and conversion to a rigid, old-fashioned orthodoxy could then be explained as the outcome of sexual conflict...
...He had taken a vow of celibacy even before his separation from Vivien...
...Eliot, Volume 1:1898-1922 (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 639 pp., $29.95) offers an abundance of vignettes of the young poet: writing whimsical, illustrated letters to his cousins...
...Furious, he destroyed hers, but she still continued to admire her erstwhile lover...
...The Letters of T.S...
...In other words, is Eliot's verse as remote and idea-oriented as we have tended to believe, or has he left us fragments of an intensely subjective autobiography...
...Another close female friend, Mary Trevelyan, and his longtime housemate, editor John Hayward, were likewise suddenly eliminated from his life...
...Valerie Eliot tells us that "At the time of our marriage in 1957,1 was dismayed to learn that my husband had forbidden the future publication of his correspondence, because I appreciated its importance and fascination...
...Gordon's Eliot is a quintessential American male—deeply emotional but repressed in showing it, with an imagination that was bawdy yet puritanical...
...He attended Harvard (where a relative was president) and majored in philosophy, despite having already discovered his vocation as a poet...
...Hale was not the only victim of his late-found happiness...
...After his separation, the poet and his beloved were reunited...
...The pressures of uncongenial work, the strain of his home life and the need to hide his unhappiness from his family back in the States brought on a nervous breakdown...
...Gordon compares him with the kind of American male portrayed by Henry James, for whom intense feelings require distance...
...Having been protectively raised by a high-minded mother and older sisters, Eliot easily felt smothered by women...
...Eliot and Gordon both set out to demolish this hypothesis once and for all...
...Mrs...
...GORDON has been accused by some reviewers of composing hagiography, not biography...
...Vivien's hysteria, Mary Trevelyan's importunate proposals of marriage, even Emily Hale's patient fidelity oppressed him...
...conversing in fluent French with Jean Verdenal, André Gide and Hermann Hesse...
...Shortly after wedding Vivien, heconfessed that he had betrayed Hale, his "Lady of Silences," through "a moment's surrender/Which an age of prudence never can retract" to a clinging invalid...
...discussing the composition of " The Love Song of J. Alf red Pruf rock" and The Waste Land...
...That marked the conclusion to Gordon's first volume...
...Gordon's title proclaims that Hale played Beatrice in our modern Dante's La vita nuova...
...engaging in bawdy joking with school chum Conrad Aiken and mentor Ezra Pound...
Vol. 71 • December 1988 • No. 22
