* * *
Vivien Haigh-Wood met Tom Eliot in Oxford, at a luncheon party at Magdalen College, in March 1915. Tom, awarded a Sheldon Traveling Fellowship in philosophy at Merton College for the academic year, was twenty-six and nearing the end of his fellowship. That spring he was reading Plotinus and once a week writing short papers he hoped would form part of his Ph.D. thesis at Harvard. Vivien, also twenty-six, was one of the “emancipated Londoners” who entranced him, a group of English girls over twenty-five who, he wrote a friend, were very different from other women he had met in America or even in England, “charmingly sophisticated (even ‘disillusioned’) without being hardened.” Any younger, and the girls were completely managed by their mothers, he’d decided. He had gone to tea or dinner on several occasions with these girls who had “such amusing names” and whose flouting of convention Tom found intoxicating. He took great pleasure in seeing women smoke. If that wasn’t shocking enough, he had even danced.
Perhaps Vivien was drawn by the oblique allure of the “sleek, tall, attractive transatlantic apparition” that Tom seemed to Wyndham Lewis, who met him at this time in London and noticed his “sort of Gioconda smile,” into which the transfixed admirer poured meanings of her own. Vivien was beautiful and flirtatious, and there was something elemental in her frank allure that was utterly new to the inexperienced Tom.
* * *
The host of the Magdalen College party was Scofield Thayer, whom Eliot had met at Milton Academy, and whom he also knew at Harvard. Thayer would later become the editor of the Dial, the New York literary magazine for which Eliot began writing a “London Letter” in 1921. Thayer was himself attracted to Vivien and wrote in a notebook at about the time Tom and Vivien met in his rooms, “Vivien’s smell peculiarly feline.” Aldous Huxley, observing the Eliots early in their marriage, wrote to Ottoline Morrell of the erotic charge between them, “one sees it in the way he looks at her … she’s an incarnate provocation.”
The Gioconda Tom, Lewis saw upon meeting him, was “the author of Prufrock” to the life—“indeed, it was Prufrock himself: but a Prufrock to whom the mermaids would decidedly have sung.” Eliot may have been an indecisive J. Alfred Prufrock, the title character of his most important early poem—constitutionally hesitant and uncertain about anything apart from the intellectual life—but he was also “a handsome young United States President,” Lewis later recalled, praising Eliot’s beauty but underscoring the hard lesson he had by then learned from their long association, that Eliot was an adept politician, too. For Vivien, Tom was an exotic outsider who, under the sway of Ezra Pound, was staking his life on London as the only place where a literary career meant something. A poet’s reputation established in England might spread to America, and worldwide. It would not work the other way around. His career as a poet and his marriage began at the same time—“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” his first published poem, appeared in the June 1915 issue of Poetry; Vivien and Tom were married on June 26, 1915—but they would not be equally satisfying.
The reasons for Tom and Vivien’s haste in marrying are unclear; perhaps there was no reason. Eliot’s own explanations varied through the years. He told one friend decades later that he was too busy courting Vivien to “be fully conscious of” why he was doing it. At the time, writing to J. H. Woods, his philosophy professor and thesis adviser at Harvard, he was cryptic. “Our marriage was hastened by events connected with the war,” he wrote, offering a decorous justification to a person in whose eyes he would not willingly appear impulsive. This was, perhaps, an oblique reference to the death of his friend Jean Verdenal on May 2, 1915, a suggestion of Tom’s desire to solidify an emotional relationship in the wake of unexpected loss, and to overcome his Prufrock indecisiveness at a time of uncontrollable change. He would dedicate “Prufrock” to Verdenal.
The marriage was also a bid to be, at last, an adult, free of his parents’ control, if not completely from their purse strings or his family’s expectations that he would return to America and pursue an academic career. A week after the wedding he wrote to his brother, Henry, “The only really surprising thing is that I should have had the force to attempt it,” his marriage a breakthrough that had left him more confident “and much less suppressed” than he had ever been, perhaps an allusion to sex, or simply to the elation of having acted on his own without any consultation or warning to his family. It was as if he married in order to say he was mature enough to be responsible for himself, though the price of his action was that now he was also responsible for Vivien, too. He welcomed this enlargement of self through duty; his ability to make Vivien happy depended on his being himself “infinitely more fully” than before. In his letter to Henry, Tom mentioned nothing of romantic attachment or love. They were attracted to each other, as others had observed, but there had barely been time for anything beyond first impressions, and each was far more fragile emotionally and physically than the other understood. The happiest moments of the relationship were all before the wedding.
The mistakes were shared equally between them. He had married the wrong woman and made a complete mess of his personal life, he would much later confide to a friend whose marriage was failing. He had sought relief in Vivien’s admiration from “a maddening feeling of failure and inferiority” that had accompanied his desire to abandon academia. He had only wanted a distraction, a “flirtation or mild affair” with Vivien, one of the girls who had such amusing names. Unfortunately, he had been “too shy and unpractised to achieve either with anybody,” even at twenty-six, he realized near the end of his life, “very immature for my age, very timid, very inexperienced” when he met Vivien. Vivien had been a means to an end; looking back, he thought it might simply have been a matter of persuading himself he was in love with her “because I wanted to burn my boats and commit myself to staying in England.”
He committed himself, and became anchored by marriage in a country that he had wanted to live in for the good of his career. Vivien, too, was thinking of the poet Tom was and would become. Her faith in his career had persuaded her, he later thought, to marry him—to “save the poet” by keeping him in England where his work might really matter. Tom and Vivien’s impulsiveness had helped to make a mess of Vivien’s life, too, he knew, but he seemed, facing her unhappiness and in judging his own role, to both accept responsibility and deny it. Perhaps this was why he felt such a heavy burden of guilt in addition to regret and helplessness. Decades later, he would write in his play The Cocktail Party of the disastrous marriage between “A man who finds himself incapable of loving / And a woman who finds that no man can love her.” This put the husband’s fault first, then the wife’s. The couplet was unsparing of the failure in the man, who was congenitally incapable. But it rendered a harsher judgment of the woman, who was unloved by all men. Eliot might be responsible for the emotional sterility of the marriage, he might admit that much, but he was not to blame.
During rehearsals for the play, produced in 1949, the actress Irene Worth recalled that Eliot sat silently at the back of the theater, making notes and smoking. At only one moment did he intervene. It was during a scene in which Worth, as the wife, was arguing with her husband, played by Alec Guinness. Something was missing, and Eliot “bolted up to the stage” from his place in the shadows. “The wife,” he insisted, “must be fierce. Much more fierce. The audience must understand that she is impossible.”
It was their sad lot to be yoked to each other. Tom put it all in the poem he was trying to finish in 1921.
“My nerves are bad tonight,” an unknown “she” said in one passage amid the fragments. “Yes, bad. Stay with me. / Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak. / What are you thinking of? What thinking? What? / I never know what you are thinking.” Reading these lines in Eliot’s typescript, Ezra Pound wrote the word “photography” next to them. He thought it was perhaps too realistic a reproduction of an actual conversation. Except that it was not a conversation. There were two people, but only one spoke.
The silence of the man sparked another anxious volley, and once again the woman, her need rising into vituperation, was confronted by silence: “Do / You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember / Nothing?… Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?” she said. Pound wrote again, “photo.”
In the margin of the draft, Vivien wrote twice that all of this was “wonderful,” praising the poetry even as she despaired, and Tom did, too, about the married life that had led him to write it. He could not, as a husband, answer her questions, but as a poet, at least, he had heard them and used them.
“To her the marriage brought no happiness,” Tom was to write when he was in his seventies, adding that “to me it brought the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land.” The making of his career had come at a very great price for both of them.
* * *
Tom’s tact hadn’t hidden that state of mind, or that price, from his family after all. Henry saw the difficulties. So did his mother Charlotte, who worried that in addition to Tom’s other problems, or certainly as a result of them, his work “has deteriorated.” Henry tried to smooth over her fear that this marked an irreversible decline, but he agreed that Tom’s more recent poems were “much less inspired” than his earlier ones. One of the problems was Tom’s living in London, he thought, the old disappointment, which the family had never come to terms with, revived. Seeing Tom again after so long a gap, Henry told her, “to me he seemed a man playing a part” among foreigners for whom he “always must be an American—even Henry James never became a complete Englishman.”
Tom had confided to his brother that having to be “keyed up, alert to the importance of appearances, always wearing a mask among people,” had taken a toll on him. The mask was visible to all his friends (and enemies) in London, too, and Tom remained, after more than seven years in England, a divided man who spoke with a “still-trailing Bostonian voice”; even two decades later his accent would seem neither “recognizably English” nor similar to that of “the general run of Americans who came to England.” And as if to confirm his foreignness, at the very moment in 1921 that his life was in most precarious balance, there were new tensions related to his living in England at all. Amid his other woes, he had been “further exasperated by insults from the American Consulate”—attempts to collect income tax from him—which only left him more anxious about money. He was also worried about the status of his naturalization papers, which languished in bureaucracy and required “some prominent person in the Home Office to press it forward,” a connection he did not have and which underscored that he was an outsider in the place he most wanted to call home.
After meeting Eliot for the first time, Ottoline Morrell had written in her diary about what appeared to her Eliot’s willed opacity. Their conversation had turned to Ezra Pound’s true gift as a poet. “He only really expressed himself when he hid behind the mask of some Antique Writer[.]—Then he was at ease,” Eliot told her. But Ottoline took this as a revelation, unintentional though it may have been, of Eliot himself, as a poet and as a man, who could not speak in his own voice. Ottoline was awed by Eliot’s intelligence and charmed by his interest in her, but she had been warned by Aldous Huxley to be wary: “Aldous says that Eliot has created a character for himself—a sort of wooden artificial armour.”
Vivien had belatedly discerned what Huxley described. Tom in his tactful armor had become impervious to her, more and more so as the years passed and his obligations to her increased. Writing a long letter to Henry after he left England in the autumn of 1921, Vivien added a postscript that revealed her loneliness. She feared, and no doubt knew, that her husband was no longer in love with her, however dutifully preoccupied he was by tending to her illnesses. “Good-bye Henry,” she wrote. “And be personal, you must be personal, or else it’s no good. Nothing’s any good.”
Almost immediately after his family’s departure, Tom found a new way to add to his portfolio of burdens. Lady Rothermere, Mary Lilian Harmsworth, the wife of the publisher Harold Harmsworth, agreed to subsidize a literary magazine he would edit. This was to be the Criterion. Taking it on fulfilled one ambition, at the same time as it severely limited any time he might have to write poetry or, perhaps even more urgently, to earn any extra money from his own journalistic work. Lady Rothermere promised a subsidy of £600 a year for three years, including £100 he could take as his annual salary if he wished. But Tom did not want to risk that Lloyds would object to his being on salary elsewhere.
As his commitment to Lady Rothermere and what was as yet a “Hypothetical Review” got under way, his evenings became an extension of his day at Lloyds: “Therefore I am immersed in calculations and estimates, and problems of business management,” he wrote to Mary Hutchinson, a cousin of Lytton Strachey in addition to being Clive Bell’s mistress, who was one of his closer confidantes. He apologized to her for the exhaustion that had left him “little time … for the amenities of society or even the pleasures of friendship.” The prospect of the quarterly made Vivien nervous; work on the review would mean Tom also had little time left for the amenities—or simply the realities—of marriage. Here was another distraction, another willfully added division, a particularly obvious one given that Tom would work on the review in the evenings from their flat. Vivien’s pride in Tom’s ambition, and her sacrifice to it, led her to some degree to see the review as a shared endeavor on which she might advise him. But she saw more clearly than he could, or than he would admit, the overwhelming new burden it would be for him and for both of them. “It is going to be the most awful affair, so difficult and tiresome,” she wrote to Henry, carefully adding, “all the business I mean … I see rocks ahead.”
* * *
Tom had reached such a nadir in the wake of his family’s visit, lost in dread of a future that appeared darker because of the work he could not accomplish on his poem, that his mind had virtually ceased to function. Even his typewriter was worn out. Henry, in fact, had left behind his own typewriter to replace his brother’s old one, along with a gift of some money. He did it silently, and left it to be noticed after he was gone. Vivien urged Tom to see a “nerve specialist,” made the appointment, and accompanied him, during the last week of September, even joking to Scofield Thayer, “Look at my position. I have not nearly finished my own nervous breakdown yet.”
Vivien might have expected Thayer to be particularly sympathetic to Tom and to her. He had left New York in July 1921 and arrived in Vienna to begin treatment with Freud in September, just as Tom’s condition worsened. His divorce from his wife of five years became final in the second week of October, not long after his sessions with “the Professor himself” had started.
* * *
On Wednesday the twenty-eighth, Tom reported to a friend of his upcoming visit to the doctor he called “the most celebrated specialist in London.” The doctor examined him “thoroughly,” Tom wrote his brother, and described the poet’s malady in financial terms the Lloyds banker might understand, telling Eliot that he had, as he relayed to Henry, “greatly overdrawn my nervous energy.” The doctor, alarmed and decisive, advised action—two or three months away, immediately.
Eliot saw Wyndham Lewis on the afternoon of Friday, September 30, and, after confiding in him, added that he didn’t know whether he would take the doctor’s advice. His planned Paris holiday, visiting Ezra Pound, might be enough, he thought; he might “feel quite different after,” he told Lewis. No doubt aware that Lewis would feel no compunction in sharing Eliot’s confidences with any number of mutual friends and literary acquaintances, he added a warning: “As nobody knows anything about it whatever except the specialist, my wife and yourself, it can go no further if you don’t speak of it.”
By the next morning, Tom had made his decision. He spoke to Lloyds, and invoking his doctor’s “great name, which I knew would bear weight with my employers,” obtained its agreement to a three-month leave, with full salary. It was relief from an unexpected quarter. He had managed it “without
any difficulty at all,” he wrote to Henry, and was to depart in little more than a week, “as soon as I have trained another man to my work.” Eliot dreaded the doctor’s dire regimen—“enforced rest and solitude”; “strict rules for every hour of the day”; he must “not exert [his] mind at all.” It was to be a total withdrawal, and the first phase of the treatment was likely to be the most difficult: a period of great depression would come in reaction to Tom’s release from the pressure and tension of the last few months. The rebound promised to be equally great, but Tom went away trying not “to think of the future” until after New Year’s. He confided to Henry the extent of his breakdown, his forthright account an acknowledgment that this was no more than the culmination of what Henry had already seen for himself. But he asked Henry not to let their mother know the gravity of his situation. Writing to Charlotte, Tom cast his leave from the bank more mildly as a “fortunate opportunity to rest and recuperate.”
“I have not described to her at all how I feel,” he wrote to Henry, “and indeed it is almost impossible to describe these feelings even if one wants to.”
That was what poetry was for.
* * *
The doctor’s plan called for Tom to be “quite alone and away from anyone,” including his wife. Instead, against their original plan, Vivien accompanied Tom, and they took rooms at the Albemarle Hotel, in the Cliftonville district on the eastern end of Margate. Standard treatment called for the isolation of patients “from nervous stimuli,” and overfeeding in order to “‘fatten’ and ‘redden’ them until they could return to active life.”
The World Broke in Two Page 5