Fergusson enforced bed rest for another two or three weeks. She was nearing the “two whole months rubbed out” that had undermined her in the summer. She could not concentrate and she had the lethargy of an alligator at the zoo, she wrote Lytton Strachey. As the end of February approached, she was already “furious, speechless, beyond words indignant with this miserable puling existence which has now lasted over 6 weeks, and doesn’t really pay,” she wrote to Vanessa. It was as if she were being held prisoner, and she resolved that at Fergusson’s next visit she was “going to make him let me out.” She hoped that “a little air, seeing the buses go by, lounging by the river, will, please God, send the sparks flying again.” But it was not to be, not quite yet.
* * *
Virginia’s illnesses had tried Dr. Fergusson’s skill, or his patience, or both. He came twice in two days the last weekend in February. Leonard kept to his habits, recording in his diary the facts of the situation: “Work morn Fergusson came & saw V. shd see heart specialist Print aftn.” Roger came for tea and “stayed dinner played chess.” An appointment was made for Monday the twenty-seventh with Dr. Harrington Sainsbury, in Wimpole Street. Leonard worked in the morning as usual. They “motored” to the appointment, Leonard noted in his pocket diary, having ordered a car to take them to Sainsbury’s office, despite the expense. The doctor examined her for an hour and prescribed more bed rest, as well as a cancellation of their planned trip to Italy in the spring. She could go out for brief walks, Sainsbury said, but for only ten minutes—“The cat lets this mouse run a few steps once more”—and not uphill, which would be too much of a strain.
As writing would be, though in the case of this prohibition the treatment was worse than the disease, as the passing weeks had proved. Her mind, and perhaps her career, was atrophying while her body rested, for bed rest had not left her mind at ease. Her constant temperature, over 99.5, as well as the slackening tensity of her brain at work, left her feeling “all dissipated & invalidish,” as she put in her diary for February 14, a most unromantic day that year. Exasperated at her lack of progress in writing anything substantial, she listed in her diary the books she had been reading, a catalog of fiction and “an occasional bite” of biography that she hoped “like dead leaves” would fertilize her brain—Moby-Dick, Walter Scott’s Old Mortality, a life of Lord Salisbury, and “anything else I can find handy”—but which left her bloodlessly uninspired as far as her own delayed prospects were concerned, and demoralized about both past and future: “what a 12 months it has been for writing!—& I at the prime of life, with little creatures in my head which won’t exist if I don’t let them out!”
* * *
Clive Bell, writing to Vanessa, gave the view from outside, as if describing a still life of Vanessa’s. He had been seeing Virginia. Her bed had been moved downstairs, for everyone’s convenience and to make her convalescence less lonely. He found her reclined “exquisitely on a bed in the drawing-room (banked up with bits of card board & odd scraps of stuff—to make the light fall right I suppose)—I hope I shan’t fall more deeply in love. However it’s a great compliment for a woman of forty don’t you think.”
In fact, now that Virginia was forty, she was aware of how crucial the right lighting was, and how precisely, if unconsciously, women of a certain age, now her own, moved to find it. One afternoon, “the fire dying out,” she realized sitting there, all in shadow, that it was “the best light for women’s nerves once they’re passed 40. I observe that my women guests of that age … move to have their backs to the window, on some excuse or other.”
Clive was only part of a spring resurgence of people she wanted to see. In March two people who had been away returned to her: Forster and Tom Eliot.
* * *
Virginia and Tom met in November 1918, though he was not yet Tom to her but only Mr. Eliot—“That strange young man Eliot,” as she called him in writing to Roger Fry, who had first mentioned T. S. Eliot to them and suggested he might have some poetry they could publish. Leonard wrote him that he and Virginia “both very much liked your book, Prufrock; and I wonder whether you would care to let us look at the poems with a view to printing them.” He came to tea on Friday, November 15, at the end of the week that began with the Armistice.
The end of the war and the last page of Virginia’s diary for the year came simultaneously, and as she wrote in the last entry of the book, on the twelfth: “Peace is rapidly dissolving into the light of common day,” she wrote, describing the mental change that peace quickly brought. “Instead of feeling all day & going home through dark streets that the whole people, willing or not, were concentrated on a single point, one feels now that the whole bunch has burst asunder & flown off with the utmost vigour in different directions. We are once more a nation of individuals.” Part of the change she allowed herself to feel—or at least to express—was a kind of loneliness. As she wrote to Vanessa on the thirteenth, “There’s practically no one in London now whom I can talk to either about my own writing or Shakespeares [sic].”
Into this world, into this need, walked T. S. Eliot.
She was writing in her diary—in order to save money, she was now using a notebook in which she usually made notes on books she was reading—when he arrived, and was “interrupted somewhere on this page” by his visit. Eliot wished so much always to be properly courteous, to be so carefully mannered, it is perhaps ironic that his arrival at Woolf’s home was an interruption of anything. They talked about his poetry—but also of the end of the war. The question of peace was an interesting one, she wrote to Vanessa. “We literary people have been comparing our feelings a good deal,” she told her the day after his visit. With Eliot there was some difficulty, however, as she reported to Roger Fry. “His sentences take such an enormous time to spread themselves out that we didn’t get very far.”
Her first comments on Eliot foretold the ensuing two decades of their friendship. She noted immediately the disparity between who he appeared to be and who, “beneath the surface,” as she put it, he might really be. Nothing about him was casual or seemed to be spontaneous; as if in reaction to this, Woolf, too, was guarded. Once, after a visit from him, she wrote, “To go on with Eliot, as if one were making out a scientific observation,” and in this spirit of experimentation, she would never be satisfied she had understood him. Early on she questioned the six-year gap in their ages—“What happens with friendships undertaken at the age of 40?”—but in the next two or three years felt herself drawn increasingly into a friendship based on what she knew they shared, “our damned self conscious susceptibility.” Yet on her side this meant there was always some new aspect revealed, an eccentricity of his or characteristic to test or break or stretch her theory and discomfort her. From the start she was dubious of many of his literary ideas, and more intrigued by the persona he adopted in announcing them—his manner, she thought, was variously comic and effete, almost unbearably formal and pretentious.
One of her rituals was to offer a January accounting of her friendships, a gallery of portraits of those she knew and what she felt about them. In January 1919 she wrote of Eliot that she liked him “on the strength of one visit & shall probably see more” of him, too, “owing to his poems which we began today to set up.” The book was published later that year. As they got to know each other better she realized that intimacy did not increase. “I plunge more than he does: perhaps I could learn him to be a frog,” she wrote in her diary.
Chapter 2
ELIOT IN JANUARY
T. S. Eliot marked the end of 1921 in Lausanne, Switzerland, continuing to recover from a nervous breakdown so severe that in October he had taken a three months’ leave of absence from his job at Lloyds Bank. The new year looked to be an improvement on the one very soon to be behind him. It seemed unlikely it could be worse.
Tom had stayed overnight with Virginia and Leonard at Monk’s House on Saturday, September 24. Leonard’s date book records, simply, “Eliot.” Virginia didn’t seem to be looking f
orward to the visit. She wrote to Vanessa with a less than thrilling invitation: “I suppose you wdn’t come for the 24th? When Eliot will be here?” But the visit “passed off successfully,” Virginia wrote in her diary, “& yet I am so disappointed to find that I am no longer afraid of him—.” She punctuated it with a long dash and left her reflection on him incomplete. It was a new era in their friendship, whatever it might mean.
Thomas Stearns Eliot, born in Saint Louis, Missouri, in 1888. “What a big white face he has … a mouth twisted & shut; not a single line free & easy; all caught, pressed, inhibited,” Virginia wrote, his outsized head a symbol of his imperious intellect, and of the literary talent, and ambition, that had won him a place among both the Bloomsbury set, including Virginia and Leonard, and the anti-Bloomsburians, too, led by Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and others. But his big white face and his mouth twisted shut were elements of a mask, a facade, that had, by the summer of 1921, become less and less effective in hiding the depression, and hopelessness, beneath.
Financial uncertainty, an unhappy marriage, and a stultifying anxiety over the lack of time his job at Lloyds left to write had sculpted what Virginia called the “grim marble” of Eliot’s face into puffy hollows. Sagging cheeks deepened the lines around his nose, and dark circles shadowed his eyes. The strain of his private disappointments, including his own ill health and, more significantly, the fragility of his wife’s, had been growing more evident for some time. In 1919, he was able to assure his mother that he was establishing himself as a significant critic, perhaps the most influential American in England since Henry James. But his responsibilities at the bank grew alongside his reputation, and he had once explained to Lytton Strachey that poetry had been pushed aside and that he was preoccupied instead by questions of “why it is cheaper to buy steel bars from America than from Middlesbrough, and the probable effect—the exchange difficulties with Poland—and the appreciation of the rupee.” This was making light of it, but when Eliot wrote this to Strachey, in the summer of 1919, he was still able to make light of it. The effect of all this business, he told Strachey, was to make him look at London with “disdain” and to see mankind divided into “supermen, termites and wireworms.” He himself, “sufficiently specialized,” was “sojourning among the termites.” Strachey expected raillery, and Eliot, happy to oblige the more famous author and to prove his wit, rose to the occasion. But by the summer of 1921, he no longer was able to. His life in the previous two years had revealed his bleak metaphor as very far from funny. He had proved himself a termite eating away at his own foundations. There was very little humor left in his letters, or himself, enmeshed as he was in a depression that became more crippling as the astonishing career he had so recently foreseen—and which so many others, including Ezra Pound and Virginia Woolf, had foreseen too—slipped farther and farther away.
“Have you ever been in such incessant and extreme pain that you felt your sanity going, and that you no longer knew reality from delusion?” he wrote a friend in March 1921. “That’s the way she is,” he wrote, referring to his wife’s agony, and to another recent diagnosis of her series of illnesses, neuritis. But it was more and more the way Eliot himself was, undone not only by worry over Vivien’s health but by the expense of her recuperation, first at a nursing home and, when the cost of that became too great, at home, a situation that inevitably trapped him in a flat turned hospital ward, where the patient, Vivien, and her attendant, Tom, came to alternate their roles amid a medley of symptoms—nervous exhaustion, colitis, and other digestive troubles—that only seemed to get worse with treatments that in Vivien’s case were more severe and debilitating than her ailments. What had been “very anxious moments” over Vivien’s health gave way to very anxious days and months, which then became indistinguishable from anxious days and months about Tom’s health and his career, the toll taken on him increasingly too dangerous and perhaps too selfish to acknowledge as long as Vivien was so ill.
In April 1921, in the wake of Vivien’s most serious crisis yet, he wrote to a friend that he could not yet let anyone see the poem he was trying to finish, a mix of typed and handwritten drafts that he had been working on slowly and intermittently almost from the time he’d arrived in England, seven and a half years before. It was a “hoard of fragments” he had not had “the freedom of mind” to put into a final and as yet unforeseen form. At one time, freedom of mind had meant the free time in which to write. But more recently he had been losing his ability to concentrate; his mind was itself no longer free, and he had become a “prey to habitual worry and dread of the future.”
* * *
Tom had come to England in 1914 to study at Oxford, and to complete the Ph.D. in philosophy he had been working on at Harvard. But he had also come to write poetry, as he had done in Europe before arriving in England, where, liberated from family strictures, he might pursue the literary—and not academic—career that he preferred. By the end of that school year, he was married to Vivien Haigh-Wood, the daughter of Charles Haigh-Wood, a modestly successful painter who had studied at the Royal Academy, and whose inheritance of his mother’s properties, and their rentals, supported a comfortable life for him, his wife, Rose, their son, Maurice, and Vivien, who continued to receive a small allowance after her marriage. Six months after their June 1915 wedding Eliot wrote to the poet Conrad Aiken that he had “lived through material for a score of long poems in the last six months.” Some of the hoard of fragments evidently preceded his marriage, and there were pieces that had been written before Eliot left Harvard in 1914, or earlier. The six months Eliot had mentioned to Aiken had now stretched into years, and the longer it took Eliot to write the poem he had in mind, the more and more material he lived through that might be a part of it.
* * *
In the spring of 1921, Tom had looked forward to finishing the poem, still untitled, still unfocused, before October. Then he would spend an autumn holiday in Paris, working on it with Ezra Pound. He outlined his plans to friends in letters throughout the year, but his assurances that he was near to finishing whatever it was did perhaps more to convince himself that an end was in sight than it did others. In the winter Wyndham Lewis wrote to a mutual friend, the art patron Violet Schiff, that Eliot had told him he was “engaged in some obscure & intricate task of late: though what his task has been I cannot say.”
Lewis and Pound were familiar with Eliot’s overly optimistic prognostications about delivery of his assignments to the magazines they had edited. “Eliot can not be depended on to have stuff in at a given date,” Pound had written to Margaret Anderson, the editor of the Little Review, years before, in 1917. The long poem was at the forefront of his mind through 1920 and 1921, but between Lloyds Bank, which occupied him five and a half days a week (with a half-day Saturday, and a full day on Saturday every fourth week)—about fifty hours a week including his commute—and the distractions of “Mrs. E” and her many illnesses, he could not actually write it or even think about it very much.
The “chief drawback to my present mode of life,” he wrote a friend, “is the lack of continuous time, not getting more than a few hours together for myself, which breaks the concentration required for turning out a poem of any length.” This straightforward accounting concealed a more dire mathematics of incalculable loss. After Tom finished his days at Lloyds, Vivien wrote to a friend, he then had to tend to her, filling water bottles for her, making “invalid food for his wretchedly unhealthy wife, in between writing!” But, really, he did his writing in between these and other responsibilities. Eliot published forty-nine reviews and essays in the Times Literary Supplement and elsewhere between 1919 and the end of 1921, and was in despair about his inability to concentrate on the creative work he knew he ought to be doing. Tom for his part could seize only “a moment’s breathing space” for his poetry after work, preoccupied as he was by “private worries,” mainly about Vivien and the financial necessity that kept him at Lloyds and also drove him to undertake so much journalism that
further distracted him.
Tom’s brother Henry described Vivien’s illnesses as her “migraines and malaises,” writing to their mother, Charlotte, with a condescension Vivien did not deserve. Vivien liked “the role of invalid,” Henry Eliot thought. If only she had “more of ‘the Will to be Well’ she would have less suffering.” But this Eliot credo was an inconveniently ineffective one, as Tom’s own case was proving.
Henry and the rest of Tom’s family did not meet Vivien until the summer of 1921, by which time Tom had not seen his mother or his brother for six years. Charlotte and Tom’s sister Marian arrived in early June for a two-month visit, and then Henry joined them separately. The reunion was “another anxiety as well as a joy” and added to the strain on Tom, and Vivien, too, who moved into a borrowed flat in order to accommodate Tom’s mother and sister. Whatever “in between” time Tom might have hoped to devote to the poem was now given over to his family’s entertainment. He could, of course, not quite admit that his family’s presence disturbed him even as it brought pleasure, though it revealed a lot that he had called it an anxiety first and a joy second. “These new and yet old relationships involve immense tact and innumerable adjustments,” he wrote a friend. “One sees a lot of things one never saw before etc.”
Not only did he see things about his mother, sister, and brother he had not seen before, he saw his marriage anew; their fresh scrutiny of Vivien brought unbearable exposure of both of them. Vivien, then most recently diagnosed with neuritis and digestive troubles, was to have been out of town at least during part of her in-laws’ visit, but rather than recuperate, she returned to London against her doctor’s (and, it seems, her husband’s) wishes. “So I shall not rest until I have got her away again,” Tom wrote to one friend. But was it that he wouldn’t be at ease until Vivien did what she ought to do to recover; or was it that he wouldn’t be able to rest until they were apart?
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