BIOGRAPHY
John Carey
Eliot After The Waste Land
by Robert Crawford
Cape £25 pp608
To many readers TS Eliot
seems an austere and remote
figure, hidden behind
unintelligible poetry and
intimidatingly erudite prose.
So it is a pleasant surprise to
find that in this whopping
second (and final) volume
of Robert Crawford’s
biography, although due
attention is paid to Eliot’s
writing (and to his rampant
racism and antisemitism),
Eliot’s love life, or lack of it,
is a big concern.
When the volume starts,
Eliot is still married to his first
wife, Vivien (née Haigh-Wood).
Why he married her is a
question he must often have
asked himself. One answer was
that it gave him an excuse for
not returning to America,
where his family expected him
to take up a post at Harvard as
an academic philosopher.
Another answer is that Vivien
may have given him entry into
the Bloomsbury set, Ottoline
Morrell, Virginia Woolf and
their friends.
However, Vivien proved
disgusting to him physically,
and her constant, erratic
demands drove him to
distraction. Their tortured
marriage was, he conceded,
one of the reasons for the
generally rather glum view of
life taken in The Waste Land.
It may be, too, that it was to
get away from Vivien in the
daytime that he stuck to his
full-time job in Lloyds Bank,
requesting a lock of her hair
and vowing that he wished
“to have you with me day and
night, always”.
Here, though, there was a
difficulty. In 1927, finding life
with Vivien “disgusting”, he
decided that only Christianity
could reconcile him to it,
and he was received into
the Church of England at a
ceremony of adult baptism.
Once Emily realised how
miserable he was with Vivien,
she was eager that he should
divorce and marry her. But
Eliot maintained that canon
law forbade divorce and he
refused to budge on the point.
An uneasy period followed,
during which Vivien pursued
him, knocking on the front
door of the Faber building
in Russell Square while
secretaries hustled him out
at the back. Soon she washe wrote, “what a kiss is”. He
had felt “suspended between
heaven and earth”.
Returning to England, he
did not have to go back to the
Lloyds Bank job. In 1924
Geoffrey Faber had invited him
to dinner in All Souls College,
Oxford, and suggested he join
the newly founded firm of
Faber and Gwyer (later Faber
and Faber). Eliot had eagerly
concurred. That was not the
only big change. He had
decided before the California
trip, on which Vivien did not
accompany him, that he could
no longer bear to live with
her. Instead, he moved in to
share a flat with his friend
John Hayward, who suffered
from progressive muscular
dystrophy and needed Eliot’s
help. Meanwhile, Eliot wrote
to Emily several times a week,
expressing his “adoration”,MYRON DAVIS/GETTY IMAGES, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY LIBRARY VIA AP, ALAMYLove triangle
TS Eliot with his
second wife,
Valerie, in 1959.
Bottom left: the
love of his life,
Emily Hale. Bottom
right: his first wife,
Vivien Haigh-Woodfrom which well-meaning
friends wished to “free” him.
It seems to have struck him,
not long after his marriage in
1915, that the real love of his
life was Emily Hale. They had
met back in the US when he
was 17 and she 14, and he had
declared his love for her before
leaving for England. She
became a teacher of drama
and elocution and, until the
Second World War intervened,
spent summers with family
members in Chipping
Campden, seeing him often.
Whenever he went to the
US, usually on lecturing
assignments, they met too.
They had to be careful, for
Eliot was, after all, a married
man. But they both treasured
memories of a single kiss
they had exchanged when he
was on a lecturing trip in
California. It had taught him,The love
songs of
TS Eliot
The poet left his first wife in an
asylum, betrayed the woman who
loved him for decades and then
married his 30-year-old secretary
Valerie
wore high
heels to
take
dictation
declared insane and shut away
in a private asylum where Eliot
never visited her. Then came
the Second World War, in
which Eliot found a role as an
ARP warden, fire-watching on
the roof of the Faber building,
as recorded in Little Gidding.
He wrote passionately to
Emily, sometimes several
times a week. She was his
“nightingale”, his
“Raspberrymouth”, and he
kissed her “dear, dear feet”.
The war ended, and Eliot
went to America again. He
had already decided that even
if Vivien died, he could not
marry Emily. It was hard to
explain why, but he tried. They
were both so much older than
they had been when they fell
in love. “I meet myself face to
face as a stranger whom I have
got to live with.” Vivien did
die, perhaps of an overdose,
in January 1947, and when
Eliot told Emily he could not
marry her she was distraught.
At this point a new actor
comes on stage: Eliot’s
secretary Valerie Fletcher.
When she was at school she
heard a reading of Eliot’s
Journey of the Magi. Valerie
asked who had written it and,
when told, the 14-year-old
said: “I shall marry that man.”
Eliot interviewed several
applicants for the secretary
job but seems to have decided
on Valerie straight away. The
other secretaries at Faber
noticed that she always put
on high heels before taking
dictation from Eliot. They
were married on January 10,- Eliot was 68, Valerie 30.
At first he continued to work,
writing a new play, The Elder
Statesman, and signing up
Ted Hughes for the Faber
poetry list. But he did not need
to work. They holidayed in
Italy and toured the States
again, taking in Texas. In
Barbados in 1962 and 1963, he
swam with Valerie daily. All
seemed well, but he gradually
lost strength, and Valerie was
with him when he died on
January 4, 1965.
He was happier with her
than he had ever been. But
when he writes about their
love, either in verse or prose, it
is embarrassing, and you wish
he would not do it. Yet Valerie
kept and treasured every word.
Perhaps Eliot demonstrates
what Jonathan Bate notes in
Radical Wordsworth. Being
starved of sex brings out a
poet’s greatest work. Sexual
satisfaction is calamitous. c
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