Happily married to a young Englishwoman of literary tastes, Pound urged Tom to stay in England too. Assembling poems including ‘Aunt Helen’ and ‘Mr. Apollinax’ that April, Tom denounced what he saw as characteristically stifling American phenomena.128 These included ‘the Maiden Aunt and the Social Worker’: his mother and at least one sister fit this last description.129 In works written against Bostonian repression, including ‘The Boston Evening Transcript’, he chafed against the confinements of a way of life he had aspired to escape:
When evening quickens faintly in the street,
Wakening the appetites of life in some
And to others bringing the Boston Evening Transcript130
‘Something might be said’, he added to Pound in April, ‘about the Evil Influence of Virginity on American Civilization’.131
Tom knew about Vorticist art and avant-garde poetry, but didn’t know what to do. He imagined marrying (not that he had anyone to marry yet), having a family (he seems to have taken it for granted that he would become a father) and living in America, buttoning his lip and forfeiting his ‘independence for the sake of my children’s future’. Alternatively, he considered saving hard, then retiring to France at the age of fifty, watching the world go by as he sipped his ‘aperitif at 5 p. m.’ Neither possibility compelled him, but a crisis was coming: he had to decide whether or not to accept a renewal of his Sheldon Fellowship. ‘The great need is to know one’s mind, and I don’t know that.’ He wrote respectfully to J. H. Woods, postponing his decision. More vividly and a touch melodramatically he presented to Aiken, ‘The idea of a submarine world of clear green light – one would be attached to a rock and swayed in two directions – would one be happiest or most wretched at the turn of the tide?’132
Tom seems never to have gone punting in Oxford with sixteen-year-old Miss Petersen. Instead he punted and danced there with vivacious twenty-six-year-old Vivien Haigh-Wood. Born in 1888, she was a young woman exactly the same age as himself. They met in March at a lunch party in Scofield Thayer’s Magdalen College rooms. Punts were moored at the adjacent Magdalen Bridge: one thing led to another. Slim, dark-haired Miss Haigh-Wood was a talented artist; one of her most lovingly detailed sketches, made around this time, is of an empty punt by the grassy bank of Oxford’s River Cherwell, which flows under Magdalen Bridge.133 Tom took pride in how ‘from one virginal punt’ he and Thayer could glide along ‘charming the eyes and ears of Char-flappers’ (coquettish young women on the Cherwell), even though he remembered himself as excelling in his ‘voracity for bread and butter’ rather than in flirtatious eloquence; it was Thayer who spouted ‘Sidneian showers of discourse upon Art, Life, Sex and Philosophy’.134 Anyhow, this exciting day finished with dancing. Vivien was pretty, and an eager, excellent dancer.
Born in the northern town of Bury, Lancashire – which she loathed as provincial – this young Englishwoman had grown up in sophisticated London. She had known Thayer’s unstable, lively cousin Lucy since 1908: they had met on holiday in the Alps. Clever, artistic, Francophile, Vivien Haigh-Wood, like Tom, savoured poetry, sailing and acting. Having topped up his St Louis terpsichorean skills with those extra Harvard dancing lessons, Tom was attracted to this lively, petite companion. Soon on Saturday nights he was spending time in London where one could go to dance parties in big hotels.
Vivien, Tom recalled, had ‘a genius for dancing’.135 At first neither he nor she enjoyed each other’s exclusive attention. To his delight he found his American style of dancing gave him an almost dangerous appeal: ‘I terrified one poor girl (she is Spanish at that) by starting to dip in my one-step’, he informed Eleanor Hinkley, mentioning also two other women – ‘very good dancers’ who, with his help, ‘caught the American style very quickly’. By no means the reserved young ladies of Boston Unitarianism, such women excited him all the more for that.
As they are emancipated Londoners I have been out to tea or dinner with them several times, and find them quite different from anything I have known at home or here. (I fear my previous generalisations were misleading – they do not seem to apply to London girls over twenty-five.) They are charmingly sophisticated (even ‘disillusioned’) without being hardened; and I confess to taking great pleasure in seeing women smoke, though for that matter I do not know any English girls who do not. These English girls have such amusing names – I have met two named ‘Phyllis’ – and one named ‘Vivien’.136
To Tom ‘Vivien’ was an exotic English name. Vivien was the famous, gossipy seductress who enthralled Merlin in Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. Lithe Miss Haigh-Wood, who shopped at London’s Poetry Bookshop and had worked as a Cambridge governess in the winter of 1914–15, was not that Vivien, but she did enjoy attracting clever men; pleased he could impress her, Tom relished her vivacity. She was Scofield Thayer’s friend when he met her at Magdalen, and Thayer knew more than Tom about her background. Thayer had been in touch with her in February about his and Tom’s American poet friend Butler-Thwing whom Vivien’s brother was going to contact; she had invited Thayer to a dance. When he did not go, Vivien made sure to tell him what a wonderful experience he had missed. Impressed he was a philosopher, she teased him about his studies and urged him to visit her at her parents’ substantial home, 3 Compayne Gardens in Hampstead: ‘I need cheering up badly – awfully – just now. You’d better come & do it!’137
In childhood Vivien (or ‘Vivienne’ as she sometimes styled herself) had had a ‘terror of loneliness’.138 Her artist father was distinguished enough to be elected to the Royal Academy. Vivien was his favourite model. He had painted her with her younger brother Maurice in a picture originally entitled Small Girl Sulking, ‘an early indication’, her biographer Carole Seymour-Jones points out, ‘of the moods from which Vivienne suffered increasingly from the age of twelve’.139 Vivien had painful (possibly menstrual) problems for which, from her sixteenth year, she took various drugs. As Scofield and Lucy Thayer knew, she had become engaged to a London schoolteacher Charles Buckle. Her best friend married in 1914, and Vivien hoped to emulate her. However, familiar with Vivien’s disturbing mood swings and apparent hysteria, and sure she suffered from ‘moral insanity’, her mother ‘warned CB off’, as Maurice put it.140 The engagement – a sexual relationship Maurice termed ‘a real affair’ – was broken.141 Vivien went on seeing at least one specialist doctor.
Summoned to cheer her up, Scofield Thayer went. Through Lucy he had first met Vivien in spring 1914 while she was going out with Buckle. Vivien had felt attracted to the young American philosophy student Thayer. Now, visiting her at her parents’ house on Thursday 25 February 1915, and telling her she looked radiant, he compared her with Mona Lisa. They chatted. She showed him Buckle’s photograph. No sooner had Thayer left than Buckle phoned up. Home from the army on leave, he called for Vivien at 10 p.m. and, though she had a high temperature, took her dancing to the Savoy. Mrs Haigh-Wood was annoyed. Immediately, Vivien fell ill with influenza. ‘Please excuse pencil, I am in bed’, she wrote to Thayer in a letter sent on 3 March in which she complained of ‘a good deal of mental, as well as physical distress & depression’. She felt boxed in. Thinking of his likening her to Leonardo’s Mona Lisa (which thieves had carried off in Paris in 1911), she told Thayer she wished someone would cut her out of her frame. She asked if he liked some of the poems she had been reading in Ezra Pound’s Ripostes, especially ‘A Girl’, and other erotic pieces including ‘An Immorality’ and ‘Virginal’, as well as T. E. Hulme’s poem of sexual indiscretion, ‘Conversion’. She made it clear she wanted Thayer to move to an opulent London bachelor’s flat – much closer than Oxford. Would he be willing to teach her Italian in the Easter vacation?142 She tried, too hard, to attract him.
Tom got to know Vivien better in April, May and June. In Oxford he was attending demanding, inspiring lectures on Aristotle. Harold Joachim was discussing pleasure and control of the passions – largely among men. In late April Tom heard a long discussion of ‘attraction’; by 13 May t
he topic was ‘reciprocal affection’; on 27 May Joachim outlined Aristotle’s idea that ‘pleasure is an energeia’ – an energetic force – both ‘timeless’ and sudden. ‘Whatever we may say about the conditions of pl[easure] it is not gradually produced – it has no history.’ Aristotle encouraged a ‘comparison of pleasure to the bloom of youth’. It was, Joachim explained on 1 June, ‘in many cases due to novelty’. He spoke of the headiness of hedonism. He said other things too, but these points were to the fore in what Tom, who was seeing more and more of Vivien by then, chose to write down in his notebook. At the end of the course, though Joachim spoke about knowledge, his summation on 8 June was that ‘Knowledge in all its forms is the activity of a mind grasping a real. This relation presupposes a fundamental identity. What we really have is not two actualities in relation, but a single energeia.’ Now Tom, closer to ‘the bloom of youth’ than his professor, was about to ‘grasp a real’, and to exchange his sense of ‘two actualities in relation’ for that of ‘a single energeia’.143
Maurice Haigh-Wood and Ezra Pound perceived that Vivien and Thayer were ‘going out’ together.144 They visited each other, they danced; he bought her a lavish dinner at the Savoy. Yet their relationship was problematic: she was keener than he to take things further. A couple of weeks before he was due to return to America (the Oxford term stopped in June), Vivien grew annoyed. She felt she had been stood up on what sounds like a double date involving herself and Thayer as well as Tom and Thayer’s cousin Lucy. Staying at her family’s holiday house, Thyme Cottage at Upper Bourne End near Marlow in Buckinghamshire (about halfway between Oxford and London), Vivien complained to Thayer, ‘Re our visit to Oxford, Lucy & I were both given to understand by Eliot & you, severally and definitely, that we were to keep both Saturday & Sunday free, & that if Sat. was wet, we should be expected to come on Sunday.’ Vivien had turned down an attractive dance invitation to keep herself available. Thayer had then cancelled at short notice – on that very day, ‘Thursday’. Vivien suggested to him with an element of moral blackmail that his behaviour could adversely affect her mental health: ‘Remember the specialist’s words, Scofield, & do not be the instrument of pushing me more quickly than is necessary into an untimely melancholia, or else, as he also prophesied, an early grave.’ What she wanted was for Thayer to ‘come to me in London’. He would enjoy having, as she put it, ‘little Vivien to jog along beside you & gaze longingly upon you with her golden eyes’. She told him he was a fool for returning to the ‘savage land’ of America. Once he left,
from that day I do solemnly promise you I will never have speech, or correspondence with you, nor will I ever look upon your promising-much and fulfilling-little countenance again. Never. I have made up my mind, really. And you will never meet such another as I. & one day, I assure you, you will grind your teeth at the raw, childish folly which prevented you distinguishing between a yellow diamond – a white flame – & an ordinary toy of coloured glass. A fool there was, & she made her prayer – to a rag & a bone & a hank of hair. Why indeed cast pearls before swine – yellow diamonds & white flames before hide-bound, unawakened limited savages of Wall Street calibre? O God – WHY?
Wishing Thayer could write her a letter of matching passion, she told him he ‘should snatch every hour in these last days & try, try to burn just one of your fingers in the white flame – just for the experience you know’.145 What Tom admired as Thayer’s ‘passionate detachment’ annoyed Vivien precisely because Thayer was not attaching himself to ‘little Vivien’.146
Unable to spur Thayer to take the plunge with her, Vivien in this letter adopts the position of the foolish lover in Kipling’s poem ‘The Vampire’ who is cast aside after an affair. In Kipling’s verse it is a female vampire who jilts a man: ‘A fool there was and he made his prayer/ … / To a rag and a bone and a hank of hair’.147 Vivien, however, has reversed the gender roles. She makes the scorned lover pointedly a ‘she’, implying that Thayer has abandoned her. Probably her reference is not simply to Kipling’s poem but to its recent, scandalous use to underpin the internationally-popular silent movie A Fool There Was, launched in January 1915 and based indirectly on the poem, whose words feature in its captions. Starring femme fatale Theda Bara as the cinema’s first ‘vamp’, it dealt with the seduction and ruin of a Wall Street lawyer who has sailed from America to England and becomes enthralled by the seductive ‘Vampire’. Playing with references to the vamp, the Wall Street figure and urges to ‘burn’ in a ‘white flame’, Vivien teases the plutocratic American Thayer after their relationship has failed to reach a passionate consummation. The letter makes clear that Thayer would sail in about two weeks, so she must have sent it on Thursday 3 June.148
Tom, too, was due to leave for the States that summer. On 23 June the President and Fellows of Harvard had appointed him once more an Assistant in Philosophy for the coming session.149 Yet, to their surprise, his plans took a very different turn. He sent in his resignation. About ten days after Thayer sailed from England, and without either Vivien or Tom telling their respective parents, on Saturday 26 June they met Lucy Thayer and Vivien’s aunt Lillia Symes at Hampstead Register Office. There, not far from Vivien’s home and a few miles from where Tom, quit of Oxford now the term had ended, was living at 35 Greek Street in Soho, Vivien and Tom (listed as ‘of no occupation’) were married.150 Almost secret, it was, in its way, a sudden elopement. They got a ‘special licence’, which meant that, after they swore to the registrar that there was no legal impediment to the wedding, and once a fee had been paid, advance announcement need not be made. Such marriages were a feature of World War I England where soldiers often wed in haste before setting off for the battle front.
Quick-witted and determined, Vivien was on the rebound. So, in a subtler way, was Tom. He had by no means forgotten Emily Hale. Just as each of them had felt rebuffed, so both he and Vivien were eager for erotic experience. Flirtatious, vivacious Vivien could offer such experience in a way that Emily did not; indeed, part of Vivien’s allure was that she might become what Thayer later described to Tom as ‘a wife who is not wifely’.151 Poetry-loving Vivien, deprived by her mother of her lover Buckle the year before, and now failing to secure her handsome American literary-cum-philosophical beau Thayer, was genuinely attracted by Thayer’s striking, even cleverer American friend Tom Eliot. She shared several of Tom’s interests, and – encouraged by her own poetic sense and Pound’s confidence – believed in what she knew about his gifts as a poet. Marrying Tom, whom she had known for three months, was impulsive, but hardly ridiculous. Becoming his wife, she would rescue him for poetry, for England and, most importantly, for herself: she secured a brilliant, sensitive husband, a fine dancer, an indisputable catch that her mother could not now rob her of.
Anxiously eager to lose his virginity and his ‘suppression’, Tom had long been uncertain whether he could put his commitment to poetry before his predicted career as a philosopher; he had wondered about staying in England rather than returning to be immured in American academia. In marrying Vivien, he cut through all his problems at a single stroke – or so it seemed. Later he wrote,
I think that all I wanted of Vivienne was a flirtation or a mild affair: I was too shy and unpractised to achieve either with anybody. I believe that I came to persuade myself that I was in love with her simply because I wanted to burn my boats and commit myself to staying in England. And she persuaded herself (also under the influence of Pound) that she would save the poet by keeping him in England.
When he wrote these words almost half a century afterwards, he knew it had all been a disastrous mistake – not only for himself. ‘To her the marriage brought no happiness’, he recorded in one of the bleakest accounts of any union. From one perspective, Pound had been right to encourage Vivien and Tom to throw in their lot together; from another, he had been wildly wrong. ‘To me’, Tom wrote in this same account of their relationship, ‘it brought the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land’.152
10
V. S. Eliot
NO sooner were they married than Vivien was ill. Keeping plans secret from her parents could not have been easy; her brother had to set off for the battle front on the wedding day itself; a combination of Tom’s sexual inexperience and Vivien’s worries probably made their nights together at least as problematic as delightful. About three years later Tom published a poem (soon suppressed) called ‘Ode on Independence Day, July 4th 1918’. Dealing with a wedding night, it contains three one-word-long verse paragraphs – ‘Tired’, ‘Tortured’ and ‘Tortuous’. The bride appears a disembowelled female sexual demon; the bridegroom smooths his hair; there is blood on the bed. An epigraph to the published version conjures up Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. That lonely, proud Roman, accused of betraying his country, and suffering from having his career manipulated by his mother, came to fascinate Tom.1 As usual with his poems, this one deflects autobiographical readings: he was not a bridegroom on 4 July 1918. Yet often his verse was conditioned by his ability to draw on his own sensations and emotions, cladding these in allusion, refraction and ironic distancing to produce devastating observations and to face the worst. His ‘Ode’ presents the most disastrous wedding-night consummation in literature.
Young Eliot Page 32