Fame & Folly

by Cynthia Ozick

  She brought out in him all his responsibility, vigilance, conscientiousness, troubled concern; in brief, his virtue. Her condition bewildered him; nothing in his experience, and certainly nothing in his upbringing, had equipped him for it; her manifold sicknesses were unpredictable, and so was she. Her sanity was in fact going. Daily she made him consider and reconsider his conduct toward her, and her ironic, clever, assaultive, always embarrassing responses ran tumbling over his caution. He dreaded dinner parties in her company, and went alone or not at all. It became known that Eliot was ashamed of his wife. But he was also ashamed of his life. Little by little he attempted to live it without Vivien, or despite Vivien, or in the few loopholes left him by Vivien. She was in and out of sanitoria in England, France, and Switzerland; it was a relief to have her away. What had once been frightened solicitude was gradually transmuted into horror, and horror into self-preservation, and self-preservation into callousness, and callousness into a kind of moral brutality. She felt how, emotionally and spiritually, he was abandoning her to her ordeal. However imploringly she sought his attention, he was determined to shut her out; the more he shut her out, the more wildly, dramatically, and desperately she tried to recapture him. He was now a man hunted—and haunted—by a mad wife. He saw himself transmogrified into one of the hollow men of his own imagining, that scarecrow figure stuck together out of “rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves”:

  The eyes are not here

  There are no eyes here

  In this valley of dying stars

  In this hollow valley

  This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

  He carried this Golgothan self-portrait with him everywhere; his lost kingdoms were in the stony looks he gave to the world. Virginia Woolf was struck by “the grim marble face … mouth twisted and shut; not a single line free and easy; all caught, pressed, inhibited.” “Humiliation is the worst thing in life,” he told her. Vivien had humiliated him. Torment and victimization—she of him, and he of her—had degraded him. Bouts of drink depleted him. At times his behavior was as strange as hers: he took to wearing pale green face powder, as if impersonating the sickly cast of death. Virginia Woolf thought he painted his lips. In 1933, after eighteen years of accelerating domestic misery, he finally broke loose: he went to America for a series of angry lectures (published later as After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy) in which he attacked Pound, D. H. Lawrence, liberalism, and “free-thinking Jews,” complaining that the United States had been “invaded by foreign races” who had “adulterated” its population. In London, meanwhile, a remorseful Vivien was refurbishing the flat for his homecoming; she even offered to join him overseas. In the black mood of his lectures her letter shocked him into a quick cruel plan. Writing from America, he directed his London solicitors to prepare separation documents and to deliver them to Vivien in his absence. When he arrived back in England, the deed was done. Vivien in disbelief continued to wait for him in the reupholstered flat. He moved instead into the shabby guest rooms of the parish house of St. Stephen’s, an Anglican congregation with a high-church bent. There, subdued and alone among celibate priests, he spent the next half-dozen years in penance, suffering the very isolation and detachment he had once prized as the influential poet’s reward.

  Yet Vivien was in pursuit. Though he kept his lodgings secret from her, with fearful single-mindedness she attempted to hunt him down, turning up wherever there might be a chance of confronting him, hoping to cajole or argue or threaten him into resuming with her. He contrived to escape her time after time. By now he had left the bank for Faber; she would burst into the editorial offices without warning, weeping and pleading to be allowed to talk to him. One of the staff would give some excuse and Eliot would find a way of sneaking out of the building without detection. She carried a knife in her purse—it was her customary flamboyance—to alarm him; but it was a theater knife, made of rubber. She sent Christmas cards in the name of “Mr. and Mrs. T. S. Eliot,” as if they were still together, and she advertised in The Times for him to return. She called herself sometimes Tiresias, and sometimes Daisy Miller, after the doomed Jamesian heroine. In a caricature of what she imagined would please him, she joined the newly formed British Union of Fascists. One day she actually caught him; she went up to him after a lecture, handed him books to sign as if they were strangers, and begged him to go home with her. He hid his recoil behind a polite “How do you do?” When she got wind of a scheme to commit her to a mental hospital, she fled briefly to Paris. In 1938 she was permanently institutionalized, whether by her mother or her brother, or by Eliot himself, no one knows; but Eliot had to have been consulted, at the very least. When her brother visited her in 1946, a year before her death, he reported that she seemed as sane as he was. She had tried on one occasion to run away; she was captured and brought back. She died in the asylum a decade after her commitment. Eliot never once went to see her.

  Out of this brutalizing history of grieving and loss, of misalliance, misfortune, frantic confusion, and recurrent panic, Eliot drew the formulation of his dream of horror—that waste land where

  … I Tiresias have foresuffered all

  … and walked among the lowest of the dead

  Here is no water but only rock …

  If there were only water amongst the rock

  Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit

  … blood shaking my heart

  The awful daring of a moment’s surrender

  Which an age of prudence can never retract

  By this, and this only, we have existed

  Which is not to be found in our obituaries

  Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider

  Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor

  In our empty rooms

  He might have regarded his marriage and its trials as a regrettable accident of fallible youth—the awful daring of a moment’s surrender—compounded by his initial sense of duty and loyalty. But he was shattered beyond such realism, and finally even beyond stoicism. He felt he had gazed too long on the Furies. The fiery brand he had plucked out of his private inferno seemed not to have been ignited in the ordinary world; it blackened him metaphysically, and had little to do with fractured expectations or the social difficulties of mental illness. What he knew himself to be was a sinner. The wretchedness he had endured was sin. Vivien had been abused—by doctors and their scattershot treatments, and by regimens Eliot could not have prevented. The truth was she had been drugged for years. And he had abused her himself, perhaps more horribly, by the withdrawal of simple human sympathy. It was she who had smothered his emotional faculties, but reciprocal humiliation had not earned reciprocal destinies. Vivien was confined. He was freed to increase his fame. Nevertheless—as if to compensate her—he lived like a man imprisoned; like a penitent; like a flagellant. He was consumed by ideas of sin and salvation, by self-loathing. The scourge that was Vivien had driven him to conversion: he entered Christianity seriously and desperately, like a soul literally in danger of damnation, or as though he believed he was already half-damned. The religiosity he undertook was a kind of brooding medieval monkishness: ascetic, turned altogether inward, to the sinful self. Its work was the work of personal redemption. In “Ash-Wednesday” he exposed the starting-point, the beginning of abnegation and confession:

  Because these wings are no longer wings to fly

  But merely vans to beat the air

  The air which is now thoroughly small and dry

  Smaller and dryer than the will

  Teach us to care and not to care

  Teach us to sit still.

  And in a way he did learn to sit still. He was celibate. He was diligent and attentive in his office life while conducting an orderly if lonely domestic routine. He was at Mass every morning, and frequently went on retreat. During the night blitz of London in 1939, he served for a time as an air raid warden, often staying up till dawn. Then, to escape the exhausting bombings, like so many oth
ers he turned to commuting from the far suburbs, where he became the paying guest of a family of gentlewomen. In 1945, at the war’s end, he made another unusual household arrangement, one that also had its spiritual side: he moved in with John Hayward, a gregarious wit and bookish extrovert whom disease had locked in a wheelchair. Eliot performed the necessary small personal tasks for his companion, wheeled him to the park on pleasant afternoons, and stood vigilantly behind his chair at the parties Hayward liked to preside over—Eliot reserved and silent under the burden of his secret wounds and his eminence, Hayward boisterous, funny, and monarchically at ease. In the evenings, behind the shut door of the darkest room at the back of the flat, Eliot recited the rosary, ate his supper from a tray, and limited himself to a single game of patience. This odd couple lived together for eleven years, until Eliot suddenly married his young secretary, Valerie Fletcher. She offered him the intelligent adoration of an infatuated reader who had been enchanted by his poetry and his fame since her teens; she had come to Faber & Faber with no other motive than to be near him. Vivien had died in 1947; the marriage to Valerie took place in 1957. After the long discipline of penance, he opened himself to capacious love for the first time. As he had known himself for a sinner, so now he knew himself for a happy man.

  But the old reflex of recoil—and abandonment—appeared to have survived after all. From youth he had combined ingrained loyalty with the contrary habit of casting off the people who seemed likely to impede his freedom. He had fled over an ocean to separate himself from his demanding parents—though it was his lot ultimately to mimic them. He was absorbed by religion like his mother, and ended by writing, as she did, devotional poetry. Like his father, he was now a well-established businessman, indispensable to his firm and its most influential officer. (It developed that he copied his father even in trivia. The elder Eliot was given to playful doodlings of cats. The son—whose knack for cartooning exceeded the father’s—wrote clever cat verses. These, in the form of the long-running Broadway musical, are nearly the whole sum of Eliot’s current American renown: if today’s undergraduates take spontaneous note of Eliot at all, it will be Cats on their tape cassettes, not The Waste Land.) Still, despite these evolving reversions, it was the lasting force of his repudiations that stung: his scorn for the family heritage of New England Unitarianism, his acquisition in 1927 of British citizenship. He had thrown off both the liberal faith of his fathers—he termed it a heresy—and their native pride of patriotism. He had shown early that he could sever what no longer suited. The selfless interval with John Hayward was cut off overnight: there is a story that Eliot called a taxi, told Hayward he was going off to be married, and walked out. After so prolonged a friendship—and a dependence—Hayward felt cruelly abandoned. He never recovered his spirit. Eliot was repeatedly capable of such calculated abruptness. His abandonment of Vivien—the acknowledged sin of his soul, the flaming pit of his exile and suffering—was echoed in less theological tones in his careless dismissal of Emily Hale and Mary Trevelyan, the wounded women whose loving attachment he had welcomed for years. When Vivien died, each one—Emily Hale in America and Mary Trevelyan close at hand in London—believed that Eliot would now marry her.

  Miss Hale—as she was to her students—was a connection of the New England cousins; Eliot had known her since her girlhood. Their correspondence, with its webwork of common associations and sensibilities, flourished decade after decade—she was a gifted teacher of drama at various women’s colleges and private schools for girls, with a modest but vivid acting talent of her own. Eliot’s trips to America always included long renewing visits with her, and she in turn traveled to England over a series of summer vacations to be with him. One of their excursions was to the lavish silent gardens of Burnt Norton, the unoccupied country mansion of an earl. (That single afternoon of sunlight and roses was transformed by “a grace of sense, a white light still and moving,” into the transcendent incantations of “Burnt Norton,” the first of the Quartets.) In America she waited, in tranquil patience and steady exultation, for the marriage that was never to come: generations of her students were informed of her friendship with the greatest of living poets. Eliot found in her, at a distance, unbodied love, half-elusive nostalgia, the fragility of an ideal. When she threatened, at Vivien’s death, to become a real-life encumbrance, he diluted their intimacy; but when he married Valerie Fletcher he sloughed Emily off altogether—rapidly and brutally. Stunned and demoralized—they had been friends for fifty years—she gave up teaching and spiralled into a breakdown. She spent the rest of her life in the hope that her importance to Eliot would not go unrecognized. Her enormous collection of his letters (more than a thousand) she donated to Princeton University, and—Eliot-haunted and Eliot-haunting—she asked him to return hers. He did not reply; he had apparently destroyed them. The “man I loved,” she wrote to Princeton, “I think, did not respond as he should have to my long trust, friendship and love.” She stipulated that the Princeton repository not be opened until 2019; she looked to her vindication then. Having been patient so long, she was willing to be patient even beyond the grave. Eliot may have bestowed his infirm old age on Miss Fletcher, but the future would see that he had loved Miss Hale in his prime.

  As for Mary Trevelyan, she was a hearty pragmatist, a spunky activist, a bold managerial spirit. For nineteen years she was a prop against Eliot’s depressions, a useful neighbor—she drove him all over in her car—and, to a degree, a confidante. From the beginning of Vivien’s incarceration until his marriage to Valerie—i.e., from 1938 until 1957—Eliot and Mary were regularly together at plays, at parties, and, especially, at church. Their more private friendship centered on lunches and teas, domestic evenings cooking and listening to music in Mary’s flat, her matter-of-fact solicitude through his illnesses and hypochondria. They made a point of mentioning each other in their separate devotions. Mary was at home in the pieties Eliot had taken on—she came of distinguished High Anglican stock, the elite of government, letters, and the cloth, with a strong commitment to public service. Her father was a clergyman who erected and administered churches; the historian G. M. Trevelyan was a cousin; her relatives permeated Oxford and Cambridge. (Humphrey Carpenter, author of a remarkably fine biography of Ezra Pound—fittingly published in Eliot’s centenary year—represents the newest generation of this family.)

  With Mary, Eliot could unbutton. He felt familiar enough to indulge in outbursts of rage or contemptuous sarcasm, and to display the most withering side of his character, lashing out at the people he despised. Through it all she remained candid, humorous, and tolerant, though puzzled by his unpredictable fits of withdrawal from her, sometimes for three months at a time. He drew lines of conduct she was never permitted to cross: for instance, only once did he agree to their vacationing together, and that was when he needed her—and the convenience of her driving—to help entertain his sister, visiting from America. Mary was accommodating but never submissive. During the war she organized a rest hostel in Brussels for soldiers on leave from the front; in 1944 she nursed hundreds of the wounded. After the war she traveled all over Asia for UNESCO, and founded an international house in London for foreign students. Plainly she had nothing in common with the wistful and forbearing Miss Hale of Abbot Academy for girls. But her expectations were the same. When Vivien died, Mary proposed marriage to Eliot—twice. When he refused her the first time, he said he was incapable of marrying anyone at all; she thought this meant his guilt over Vivien. The second time, he told her about his long attachment to Emily Hale, and how he was a failure at love; she thought this meant psychological exhaustion. And then he married Valerie. Only eight days before the wedding—held secretly in the early morning at a church Eliot did not normally attend—he and Mary lunched together for hours; he disclosed nothing. On the day of the wedding she had a letter from him commemorating their friendship and declaring his love for Valerie. Mary sent back two notes, the earlier one to congratulate him, the second an unrestrained account of he
r shock. Eliot responded bitterly, putting an end to two decades of companionship.

  BUT ALL THIS—the years of self-denial in the parish house, the wartime domesticity among decorous suburban ladies, the neighborly fellowship with John Hayward and Mary Trevelyan, the break with Hayward, the break with Emily Hale, the break with Mary Trevelyan, the joyous denouement with Valerie Fletcher—all this, however consecrated to quietism, however turbulent, was aftermath and postlude. The seizure that animated the poetry had already happened—the seizure was Vivien. Through Vivien he had learned to recognize the reality of sin in all its influences and phases; she was the turning wind of his spiritual storm. Vivien herself understood this with the canniness of a seer: “As to Tom’s mind,” she once said, “I am his mind.” The abyss of that mind, and its effect on Eliot as it disintegrated, led him first through a vortex of flight, and then to tormented contemplation, and finally to the religious calm of “Burnt Norton”:

  Time present and time past

  Are both perhaps present in time future.

  And time future contained in time past.

  Time past marked the psychological anarchy of his youthful work, that vacuous ignorance of sin that had produced “Prufrock,” “Gerontion,” “The Hollow Men,” The Waste Land. Not to acknowledge the real presence of sin is to be helpless in one’s degradation. Consequently Prufrock is a wraith “pinned and wriggling on the wall,” uncertain how to “spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways”; Gerontion is “a dry brain in a dry season”; the hollow men “filled with straw” cannot falter through to the end of a prayer—“For Thine is / Life is / For Thine is the”; the voice of The Waste Land—“burning burning burning burning”—is unable to imagine prayer. And the chastening “future contained in time past” is almost surely the inferno that was Vivien: what else could that earlier hollowness have arrived at if not a retributive burning? The waste land—a dry season of naked endurance without God—had earned him the ordeal with Vivien; but the ordeal with Vivien was to serve both time past and time future. Time past: he would escape from the formless wastes of past metaphysical drift only because Vivien had jolted him into a sense of sin. And time future: only because she had jolted him into a sense of sin would he uncover the means to future absolution—the genuine avowal of himself as sinner. To the inferno of Vivien he owed clarification of what had been. To the inferno of Vivien he owed clarification of what might yet be. If Vivien was Eliot’s mind, she had lodged Medusa there, and Medusa became both raging muse and purifying savior. She was the motive for exorcism, confession, and penitence. She gave him “Ash-Wednesday,” a poem of supplication. She gave him Four Quartets, a subdued lyric of near-forgiveness, with long passages of serenely prosaic lines (occasionally burned out into the monotone of philosophic fatigue), recording the threshold of the shriven soul: