From The Times Literary Supplement
Chloral hydrate, Bertrand Russell and little poetry: married life for the author of The Waste Land
Eric Griffiths
February 1915 found T. S. Eliot in Oxford and a quandary: “The great need is to know one’s own mind, and I don’t know that: whether I want to get married, and have a family, and live in America all my life, and compromise and conceal my opinions and forfeit my independence for the sake of my children’s future”. On June 26 of that year, he married Vivien Haigh-Wood in Hampstead; he never lived in America again and had no children. He went in four months from the “Do I dare?” of Prufrock, dawdling between plaintiveness and amusement on the edge of risk, straight over that edge into irreparability such as The Waste Land voices in lines pierced by thought of “The awful daring of a moment’s surrender / Which an age of prudence can never retract”.
He wrote to his brother a week after the event: “You will have heard by this time of the surprising change in my plans . . . . The only really surprising thing is that I should have had the force to attempt it”. The marriage was actually a change of planner as well as of plan. Eliot turned out a Gauguin in reverse: the painter gave up family and stockbroking in pursuit of colour; the poet grew beyond foreseeing through immersion in miseries at home. Each staked a lot on what would become of him, though neither could know at the time of daring whether, looking back, he would be seen to have made the right choice. Eliot had provided a reflection on the unscannability of how we develop – “(And our beginnings never know our ends!)” – for the disappointed woman left behind in his poem of 1910–11, “Portrait of a Lady”, but there the exclamation, demurely clad in parentheses, sounded wistful-flirtatious, playing for wry smiles rather than acute realizations. In the decade from his marriage to the year in which the second volume of these Letters comes to a halt, Eliot’s imagination sombred. He became adept at odd, volatile conjunctions, as when he spliced Othello’s “set you down this” into a scriptural story, letting the converted Moor speak for one of the Gentile magnates who searched out the infant Jesus:
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death?
(“Journey of the Magi”)
Over the ruins he has made of Desdemona, Othello insists he loved not wisely but too well; the Wise Men in Eliot’s poem travel, not unwisely but still further than they could have had clearly in mind when first they registered the star.
Comparing the poems in Eliot’s first book, Prufrock and other Observations (mostly written before 1915), with those in the 1919–20 volumes, it looks as if a harsh, oblique light had been turned on his world. Contour stands out with a cartoon sharpness; the gulfs between words have deepened. The word “fear” makes its debut in his published verse. There is a rash of factitious proper names, confined to “Prufrock” and “Mr Apollinax” in his first book, but spreading across nine of the twelve new pieces – Mr Silvero; Sir Ferdinand Klein; Phlébas, le Phénicien; Grishkin. These names combine a motley residue from his many hours spent in the Colonial and Foreign department of Lloyd’s Bank, eventually working on the reparations dreamed up at Versailles, taking in “what a fiasco the reorganisation of nationalities has been” (to his mother, December 1919), with an intimate reflux from his married life and its daily reminders for him that “I am a metic – a foreigner” (to Mary Hutchinson, July 1919). He headed more of his poems with lines dislocated from their place in the exchanges of Jacobethan drama; only “Portrait of a Lady” has such an epigraph in the early volume, while there are five to the poems that came out of his marriage. When accused of traducing their betters with these scenarios of aristo-skulduggery, the old playwrights could rely on the defence that the plays took place abroad, the nastiness was foreign (and mostly Catholic anyway); but Eliot put such shifts of scene to work in the service of a principle he had stated long before he saw how much it would cost him: “suffering, if it’s tragic suffering . . . takes you away from yourself – and petty suffering does exactly the reverse . . . . The thing is to be able to look at one’s life as if it were . . . somebody else’s” (to Conrad Aiken, September 1914). After he married, he didn’t need to go out looking for something rich and self-estranged.
He drew distinctions with a free hand in prose, distinctions which don’t always survive the harsher grind, the finer mesh, of his poems. For instance, that neat line between the “tragic” and the “petty” segregates the elevated from the grating, though it can sometimes be difficult to tell them apart, as it is in much of the writing Eliot admired, like the line from The White Devil he considered but discarded as an epigraph, “I have caught an everlasting cold”. The hell of perpetual snivelling envisaged there is not less hellish for being less than Miltonically sublime. Writing about Andrew Marvell’s “The Nymph Complaining . . .” in 1921, he saw how its poignancy arises from the way it calibrates against each other several scales of distress, so what is “more slight” from one angle is “more serious” from another; squinting between the angles (looking at somebody else’s life as if it were your own) helps us sense “that inexhaustible and terrible nebula of emotion which surrounds all our exact and practical passions and mingles with them”.
These letters are awash with complaints, mostly nervous – “neuralgia”, “neuritis”, “nerve-storms” – but also, among others, hemicranial migraine, anaemia, toothache, trouble with “glands”, malnutrition and “suppressed influenza”. Husband and wife shadowed each other through an intent, valetudinarian tango, one shuffling in retreat when the other strode forward (“I had influenza just after Christmas and I was scarcely out of bed before Vivien suddenly rushed into bed and refused to get up any more”, to Charles Haigh-Wood, July 1925). While they were associates in dismay, they might listen to the roster of each other’s ailments with sympathy, participation even, but at any time they could go out of tune with one another and start hearing the tales of woe as wheedling, extortion or connivance. They became third parties to their own experience, reciprocally suspicious, as Eliot’s brother suspected Vivien (“she unconsciously encourages her breakdowns”), as Eliot in 1926 suspected John Donne: “this deliberate over-stimulation, exploitation of the nerves – for such it is – has in it, to me, something unscrupulous”. What struck her as the unstable straining of their lives for effect – “life is so feverish and yet so dreary at the same time” (1918) – came across to him bearing the force of an artistic convention like revenge tragedy, with its routines, its precarious “mixture of tedious discourse and sudden reality” (1927), ambivalently powerful either to flatten out or throw into high relief the interactions which it frames.
“What went wrong” for the Eliots is easy yet impossible to say. In any case, Bertrand Russell didn’t help. Vivien crooned about his attentions to her in August 1915: “He is all over me, is Bertie, and I simply love him”. In the light of the probability that the philosopher cuckolded the poet, some of Eliot’s letters to Russell can be read only with the steeled grin required for those gibes at “a hornèd man” that Othello imagined at his own expense: “I am sure you have done everything possible and handled her in the very best way – better than I” (January 1916). In the late teens and early twenties of the century, while he wrote poems about shadowy liaisons, Eliot was reading Ulysses and its daylong, serio-comic fret over how Molly Bloom had spent her afternoon. The novel sustained him; he said he had “lived on” the episode where Shakespeare is discussed in the national library. What occupied Eliot under the headings “literature” and “life” often converged, as in this instance, but not often so ticklishly; his proneness to such convergences is one reason why his allusive habit as a writer shows more about him than bookishness or a tendency to swank. Reading fed into him, nourished his power to abstract from a specific plight and orient himself in its regard by setting it amid analogies. He was not alone in this capacity to attend as a spectator at experiences in which he was also a protagonist. Baudelaire, for example, who couldn’t do much about his own weaknesses but whom Eliot credited with a creepy yet still productive skill like his own: “what he could do, with that immense passive strength and sensibilities which no pain could impair, was to study his suffering” (1930).
Vivien, by contrast, shied away from suffering. After protracted denials, she “was most concerned to emphasize” to Sydney Schiff in December 1925 that “her habit of taking chloral during many years was the cause of all her troubles”, though it is unlikely that only one thing troubled her. Chloral hydrate is no longer in vogue; its hypnotic calm was more largely supplied later in the twentieth century first by barbiturates and then by benzodiazepines. But in the late nineteenth century many were tied to it, notably Dante Gabriel Rossetti; along with diethyl ether and nitrous oxide, it remained the anaesthetic of choice for those who liked their highs legal and faintly experimental. Eliot had once been enthused by Rossetti and his woozy cult of the “blessed damozel” on the rampart of “God’s house” which “lies in Heaven, across the flood / Of ether”, pining away for ever for her lover, but lost his taste for that kind of sub-Dantescan soft-core thrill. He became sharp and sour about the brew of mystic eroticism that the PreRaphaelites had on tap, perhaps because he felt he was living with some of its side-effects.
One of his specialities as a critic is stinging a literary discussion into life by an acutely angled word, as when he writes of what Francesca da Rimini in Inferno 5 remembers about Paolo’s embraces: “Francesca is neither stupefied nor reformed; she is merely damned; and it is a part of damnation to experience desires that we can no longer gratify” (1920). “Stupefied” is bizarrely medicated (the OED shows connections with narcosis from the seventeenth century); it suddenly opens a window onto the abuse of painkillers, alerts us to the fact that numbness can be hellish though we think of it as a relief from hell. (Eliot told Violet Schiff in April 1923 that Vivien was suffering “utter prostration and general numbness”.) To speak of “damnation” may seem hyperbolically severe, especially when glancing sidelong at your wife, but addiction such as hers really was a form of hell. His vexed and weary “merely” in “she is merely damned” shows that it was a hell not only for the addict, but for those like Eliot caught in the addict’s wake, in the petty tragedies of recidivism, the bitter wait for new purpose, and the charring that comes from hope abandoned. Ethics and anaesthetics are one.
Eliot’s mother wrote to his uncle in 1923: “One of his greatest misfortunes has been the invalidism of his wife. It was not an eugenic marriage”. Naturally, she wanted to think well of her boy, but she spares him criticism at the cost of denying him agency; she treats his marriage as a misfortune that blankly happened to him (like the hernia with which he was born), not something he had himself entered into. The finicality of “eugenic” reminds us that Eliot grew up in the United States under a prevailing cloud of scientistic racism, and also displays what a schooling in false sentiment a truly nice family such as his can afford. It was for him both a resource and a predicament that, on any occasion, he could just imagine what Mother or others would say. He switched between first- and third-person purchases on his situation in that “recognition, implicit in the expression of every experience, of other kinds of experience which are possible” which he had seized on in 1921 as a vital principle, long ago known as “wit”, in “the greatest, as in poets like Marvell”. The ways of words themselves are constantly throwing up new grounds for the exercise of this wit – sadly remote from a sense of fun – because words outgrow their earlier senses or acquire new circles of acquaintance and become outsiders to the attitudes they once had carried. Take what happened to “ether” when it came down from the heavens after diethyl ether was invented and in the 1750s stole the name for itself, thereby permitting worm’s eye views of the “ethereal” who were perhaps no better than someone “etherized upon a table” (or indeed under it).
Or again, when Eliot sketched the disparity between enlightened and inward views of a less than “eugenic” marriage, he noted how individual disaster gets summarized and tidied away under a familiar generality: “Bistwick is classed among the unhappily married . . . . The awful importance of the ruin of a life is overlooked”. He relies here on the ability of “awful” to sustain the gravity he gave it in The Waste Land’s “awful daring”, but the word will not stay still, because it has learnt to play the part assigned it in locutions like “a most awful cold” or “thanks awfully” which are strewn across these letters. Vivien was signally prey to these slews of phrase which teeter between the petty and the tragic, her days related in the shrieking idiom of “frightful”, “crazy”, “dreadful”, “torment”, “torture”, until she wrote from the institution in Watford where she spent Christmas 1925 “I am in such an awful position. The humiliation of it”.
The little poetry Eliot wrote is dense with matter that has imploded into his pages. His work was crystallized out of him under high pressure from desire and work and sadness, and, though he moaned that “it is no use squeezing a dry sponge and it is no use trying to work a tired and distracted mind” (to Gilbert Seldes, December 1923), his writing is in its element when it represents the verge of being worn out, from the “violet hour, when the eyes and back / Turn upward from the desk”, the “voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells” of The Waste Land to the “Rose” which Ash-Wednesday calls in one breath “Exhausted and lifegiving”. His was in this respect grim writing, and the story of the attritional processes, verbal and nervous, which produced it, makes grim reading, particularly when told in such painful detail as the 1,631 pages of these two volumes record. Though his poems are famous for abeyances of communication – gists cryptically withheld, connecting nothing with nothing – Eliot himself corresponded vigorously; since the first edition of his letters 1898–1922 was published in 1988, another 200 messages have turned up for inclusion in the second edition, and since that edition was published at the end of last year, five more have been found. How wisely Faber and Faber have called this grand enterprise just The Letters of T. S. Eliot, refraining from the dream of “Complete” and even from the ambiguous brag of “Collected”.
The scale on which this edition is conducted doesn’t make the going any smoother, and the rationale for that scale isn’t always clear – even an edition “of record” can get by without printing in full multiple copies of the same form-letter in search of contributions for the Criterion, varying only in the name of the big cheese Eliot was courting. But Eliot was deeply susceptible to maddening iteration, the recurrence of chores and formulae, and made many attempts in his work to transmute the drain of routine experience into ritual configurations, as he noted when he declined to publish some pieces by Gertrude Stein because they would not interest the “ordinary reader” though “they are extremely interesting to me, as I have been working in a method of repetition and variation lately myself” (October 1924). These volumes let you follow those transmutations with matchless intimacy; they are indispensable for anyone who wants to get closer to Eliot as a writer. There may not be many people who do in fact want to get quite so much closer to the slow burn of his poems as study of these letters permits. He has a more obvious, less demanding appeal as a cultural pundit; his pronouncements may be deplorable, but at least they are soon deplored (some commentators save intellectual energy by treating the poems themselves as pronouncements, knottier no doubt, but still in the same business of holding forth as the commentators).
As this edition’s virtue is to help develop an eye and ear for Eliot’s linguistic behaviour across all its shades, it is a pity that the editors’ own attention to what he wrote wavers at key moments and so renders their texts unreliable and puzzling – did he really for one day in August 1923 believe that “rhythm” is spelled “rythym”? The editors let that pass unremarked three times though they purse their lips over his “Sacheverill \[sic\] Sitwell”, a mistake, like its subject, of much less literary consequence. In these volumes, it looks as if Eliot sometimes knew the past participle of “écrire” and sometimes didn’t, and only occasionally put circumflex accents where they belonged. On page 734 of Volume One, the editors correct one error in his German, but leave seven unnoticed on page 674, but perhaps this German is theirs as much as it is his. It’s not his ignorance of Italian that shows when “Asti Spumante fresca” is translated in a footnote as “fresh Asti Spumante”, though “spumante” is masculine and doesn’t go with the feminine “fresca” which anyway means in this context “cold” not “fresh”. A writer so keen on the mind of Europe (and actually on its tongues too) deserves better than the haphazard accuracy supplied here.
At the centre of these volumes lies The Waste Land, the work of Eliot’s which has been most promoted as an essay in cultural diagnosis. When the poem is returned, as these letters return it, to the real harshnesses among which it began, schematic accounts in which it charts the breakdown of civilization or suchlike seem more implausible than ever; it becomes clearer why Eliot stressed instead (in his terminally discreet manner) the effort that went into it as part of the civilization of a breakdown: “The poem is neither a success nor a failure – simply a struggle” (to Otto Heller, October 1923). It has its share of a quality which Eliot praised in William Blake, “a peculiar honesty, which, in a world too frightened to be honest, is peculiarly terrifying”. Honest in itself, it is the cause that honesty was in others, Vivien in particular, who loved it with a love beyond defensive compulsions, because “it has become a part of me (or I of it)” – she rarely spoke a truer word. Virginia Woolf too, who was not to be relied on for sympathetic understanding of Eliot any more than she could always count on him, was stimulated by The Waste Land to a rare lexical precision, recording how Eliot read it to her: “He sang it & chanted it, rhythmed it. It has great beauty & force of phrase: symmetry; & tensity”. “Tensity” is right on target, though fetched from far in the recesses of the OED: 1658, “stiffnesse, or a being stretched out hard”. Her old word catches a physiological strain within the aesthetic “intensity” that Eliot valued so highly in these years. When he desired “poetical work of the first intensity, work in which the thought is so to speak fused into poetry at a very high temperature” (The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry, 1926), he left the phrase ambiguous so we cannot tell whether the “very high temperature” is something the writer controls, as a welder directs acetylene, or undergoes, sweating, as a patient.
It’s no surprise that Eliot is mistaken for a fount of cultural pronouncements, since he mistook himself for such an eminence, and devoted seventeen years to the mistake (also known as the Criterion). The Waste Land may have been no more than “a struggle” but Vivien was confident that his role as editor of a quarterly would be “an achievement” (to Sydney Schiff, October 1922). In pursuit of such distinction, Eliot had to go against the genuine aims of his imagination, which always clung to the individual and frail, to those reaches of experience where the categories we steer by lose their hold. He regretted that, among the knowing, “a man is only important as he is classed”, but trawled for contributors “on the principle of trying to secure the best people of each generation and type”. He inquired about a prospective German correspondent “Is he what in journalism is called a representative writer of the present time?”, availing himself of the short cut while implying it was an intellectual dead-end, as if he wanted to get his copy and disdain it too. Eliot by temperament thought of himself as an eternalist rather than a journalist; the ponderously suave irony of his writing in the Criterion can’t hide the undercurrent of disbelief in the slogans and campaigns with which he sought to entertain his subscribers, though it was designed to do so. By the third year of the journal’s run, he had already cooled towards his task of providing “opinions to give material for dinner table conversation” in pages so cramped by his need “to put in so much of immediate interest for the moment” that room for “more permanent work is limited”. When Eliot had enthused about their prospects if the Criterion succeeded, Ezra Pound for once took the more sober view, “et tu exageres. NO periodical cd. be the ‘thing of our lives’”. This is the best piece of advice Pound gave Eliot which Eliot did not take.
After all, when is “the present time” whose pulse cultural punditry is eager to take and quicken? Such a “now” is always an overlap, the interim in which a hangover begins to show signs of becoming a false dawn. D. H. Lawrence was sure what 1918 needed from its poets: “in free verse we look for the insurgent naked throb of the instant moment” (“Poetry of the Present”). Juicy though this sounds, the “throb” was not a birth-pang but, like several other arty ideals of the early twentieth century, an echo of Pater’s The Renaissance, which fifty years before Lawrence’s “Present” had ended with the assurance that “art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake”. People who profess to be speaking “frankly” are usually deceiving at least themselves and often trying to deceive others too. As Eliot noted in his essay on Baudelaire, Pater may have imagined he was illustrating the doctrine of Art for Art’s sake, whereas he was “expounding it as a theory of life, which is not the same thing at all”. His suspicions of Pater’s aspirational “moments” had been deepened within his marriage, where he lived for years through a nightmarish parody of the gratuitous intensities a previous generation had advertised as the highest quality time.
Pater’s “simply for those moments’ sake” rings hollow when read against Eliot’s accounts of his wife’s despairs. To Ottoline Morrell in March 1920: “We have simply been living from moment to moment. I cannot tell you how worried I am”. To his brother in February 1924: “Vivien is too ill to go and too ill to be left . . . . Her condition of anaemia and complete exhaustion is not merely a question of the moment but of the whole future, as it is a result not of the moment only but of the whole past”. It’s an instance of how long it took him to write a poem, how disparate the material he brought to bear on his lines, that this note of Vivien’s impasse from 1924 surfaces in 1940 towards the end of East Coker, as part of an abstract passage outlining what intensity really is and really asks: “Not the intense moment / Isolated, with no before and after, / But a lifetime burning in every moment”.
Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton, editors
THE LETTERS OF T. S. ELIOT
Volume Two: 1923–1925
878pp.
978 0 571 14081 7
Volume One: 1898–1922
Revised edition
871pp.
978 0 571 23509 4
Faber. £35 each
Eric Griffiths is a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. His books include The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry, 1989, and, as editor (with Matthew Reynolds), Dante in English, 2005.
Chloral hydrate, Bertrand Russell and little poetry: married life for the author of The Waste Land
Eric Griffiths
February 1915 found T. S. Eliot in Oxford and a quandary: “The great need is to know one’s own mind, and I don’t know that: whether I want to get married, and have a family, and live in America all my life, and compromise and conceal my opinions and forfeit my independence for the sake of my children’s future”. On June 26 of that year, he married Vivien Haigh-Wood in Hampstead; he never lived in America again and had no children. He went in four months from the “Do I dare?” of Prufrock, dawdling between plaintiveness and amusement on the edge of risk, straight over that edge into irreparability such as The Waste Land voices in lines pierced by thought of “The awful daring of a moment’s surrender / Which an age of prudence can never retract”.
He wrote to his brother a week after the event: “You will have heard by this time of the surprising change in my plans . . . . The only really surprising thing is that I should have had the force to attempt it”. The marriage was actually a change of planner as well as of plan. Eliot turned out a Gauguin in reverse: the painter gave up family and stockbroking in pursuit of colour; the poet grew beyond foreseeing through immersion in miseries at home. Each staked a lot on what would become of him, though neither could know at the time of daring whether, looking back, he would be seen to have made the right choice. Eliot had provided a reflection on the unscannability of how we develop – “(And our beginnings never know our ends!)” – for the disappointed woman left behind in his poem of 1910–11, “Portrait of a Lady”, but there the exclamation, demurely clad in parentheses, sounded wistful-flirtatious, playing for wry smiles rather than acute realizations. In the decade from his marriage to the year in which the second volume of these Letters comes to a halt, Eliot’s imagination sombred. He became adept at odd, volatile conjunctions, as when he spliced Othello’s “set you down this” into a scriptural story, letting the converted Moor speak for one of the Gentile magnates who searched out the infant Jesus:
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death?
(“Journey of the Magi”)
Over the ruins he has made of Desdemona, Othello insists he loved not wisely but too well; the Wise Men in Eliot’s poem travel, not unwisely but still further than they could have had clearly in mind when first they registered the star.
Comparing the poems in Eliot’s first book, Prufrock and other Observations (mostly written before 1915), with those in the 1919–20 volumes, it looks as if a harsh, oblique light had been turned on his world. Contour stands out with a cartoon sharpness; the gulfs between words have deepened. The word “fear” makes its debut in his published verse. There is a rash of factitious proper names, confined to “Prufrock” and “Mr Apollinax” in his first book, but spreading across nine of the twelve new pieces – Mr Silvero; Sir Ferdinand Klein; Phlébas, le Phénicien; Grishkin. These names combine a motley residue from his many hours spent in the Colonial and Foreign department of Lloyd’s Bank, eventually working on the reparations dreamed up at Versailles, taking in “what a fiasco the reorganisation of nationalities has been” (to his mother, December 1919), with an intimate reflux from his married life and its daily reminders for him that “I am a metic – a foreigner” (to Mary Hutchinson, July 1919). He headed more of his poems with lines dislocated from their place in the exchanges of Jacobethan drama; only “Portrait of a Lady” has such an epigraph in the early volume, while there are five to the poems that came out of his marriage. When accused of traducing their betters with these scenarios of aristo-skulduggery, the old playwrights could rely on the defence that the plays took place abroad, the nastiness was foreign (and mostly Catholic anyway); but Eliot put such shifts of scene to work in the service of a principle he had stated long before he saw how much it would cost him: “suffering, if it’s tragic suffering . . . takes you away from yourself – and petty suffering does exactly the reverse . . . . The thing is to be able to look at one’s life as if it were . . . somebody else’s” (to Conrad Aiken, September 1914). After he married, he didn’t need to go out looking for something rich and self-estranged.
He drew distinctions with a free hand in prose, distinctions which don’t always survive the harsher grind, the finer mesh, of his poems. For instance, that neat line between the “tragic” and the “petty” segregates the elevated from the grating, though it can sometimes be difficult to tell them apart, as it is in much of the writing Eliot admired, like the line from The White Devil he considered but discarded as an epigraph, “I have caught an everlasting cold”. The hell of perpetual snivelling envisaged there is not less hellish for being less than Miltonically sublime. Writing about Andrew Marvell’s “The Nymph Complaining . . .” in 1921, he saw how its poignancy arises from the way it calibrates against each other several scales of distress, so what is “more slight” from one angle is “more serious” from another; squinting between the angles (looking at somebody else’s life as if it were your own) helps us sense “that inexhaustible and terrible nebula of emotion which surrounds all our exact and practical passions and mingles with them”.
These letters are awash with complaints, mostly nervous – “neuralgia”, “neuritis”, “nerve-storms” – but also, among others, hemicranial migraine, anaemia, toothache, trouble with “glands”, malnutrition and “suppressed influenza”. Husband and wife shadowed each other through an intent, valetudinarian tango, one shuffling in retreat when the other strode forward (“I had influenza just after Christmas and I was scarcely out of bed before Vivien suddenly rushed into bed and refused to get up any more”, to Charles Haigh-Wood, July 1925). While they were associates in dismay, they might listen to the roster of each other’s ailments with sympathy, participation even, but at any time they could go out of tune with one another and start hearing the tales of woe as wheedling, extortion or connivance. They became third parties to their own experience, reciprocally suspicious, as Eliot’s brother suspected Vivien (“she unconsciously encourages her breakdowns”), as Eliot in 1926 suspected John Donne: “this deliberate over-stimulation, exploitation of the nerves – for such it is – has in it, to me, something unscrupulous”. What struck her as the unstable straining of their lives for effect – “life is so feverish and yet so dreary at the same time” (1918) – came across to him bearing the force of an artistic convention like revenge tragedy, with its routines, its precarious “mixture of tedious discourse and sudden reality” (1927), ambivalently powerful either to flatten out or throw into high relief the interactions which it frames.
“What went wrong” for the Eliots is easy yet impossible to say. In any case, Bertrand Russell didn’t help. Vivien crooned about his attentions to her in August 1915: “He is all over me, is Bertie, and I simply love him”. In the light of the probability that the philosopher cuckolded the poet, some of Eliot’s letters to Russell can be read only with the steeled grin required for those gibes at “a hornèd man” that Othello imagined at his own expense: “I am sure you have done everything possible and handled her in the very best way – better than I” (January 1916). In the late teens and early twenties of the century, while he wrote poems about shadowy liaisons, Eliot was reading Ulysses and its daylong, serio-comic fret over how Molly Bloom had spent her afternoon. The novel sustained him; he said he had “lived on” the episode where Shakespeare is discussed in the national library. What occupied Eliot under the headings “literature” and “life” often converged, as in this instance, but not often so ticklishly; his proneness to such convergences is one reason why his allusive habit as a writer shows more about him than bookishness or a tendency to swank. Reading fed into him, nourished his power to abstract from a specific plight and orient himself in its regard by setting it amid analogies. He was not alone in this capacity to attend as a spectator at experiences in which he was also a protagonist. Baudelaire, for example, who couldn’t do much about his own weaknesses but whom Eliot credited with a creepy yet still productive skill like his own: “what he could do, with that immense passive strength and sensibilities which no pain could impair, was to study his suffering” (1930).
Vivien, by contrast, shied away from suffering. After protracted denials, she “was most concerned to emphasize” to Sydney Schiff in December 1925 that “her habit of taking chloral during many years was the cause of all her troubles”, though it is unlikely that only one thing troubled her. Chloral hydrate is no longer in vogue; its hypnotic calm was more largely supplied later in the twentieth century first by barbiturates and then by benzodiazepines. But in the late nineteenth century many were tied to it, notably Dante Gabriel Rossetti; along with diethyl ether and nitrous oxide, it remained the anaesthetic of choice for those who liked their highs legal and faintly experimental. Eliot had once been enthused by Rossetti and his woozy cult of the “blessed damozel” on the rampart of “God’s house” which “lies in Heaven, across the flood / Of ether”, pining away for ever for her lover, but lost his taste for that kind of sub-Dantescan soft-core thrill. He became sharp and sour about the brew of mystic eroticism that the PreRaphaelites had on tap, perhaps because he felt he was living with some of its side-effects.
One of his specialities as a critic is stinging a literary discussion into life by an acutely angled word, as when he writes of what Francesca da Rimini in Inferno 5 remembers about Paolo’s embraces: “Francesca is neither stupefied nor reformed; she is merely damned; and it is a part of damnation to experience desires that we can no longer gratify” (1920). “Stupefied” is bizarrely medicated (the OED shows connections with narcosis from the seventeenth century); it suddenly opens a window onto the abuse of painkillers, alerts us to the fact that numbness can be hellish though we think of it as a relief from hell. (Eliot told Violet Schiff in April 1923 that Vivien was suffering “utter prostration and general numbness”.) To speak of “damnation” may seem hyperbolically severe, especially when glancing sidelong at your wife, but addiction such as hers really was a form of hell. His vexed and weary “merely” in “she is merely damned” shows that it was a hell not only for the addict, but for those like Eliot caught in the addict’s wake, in the petty tragedies of recidivism, the bitter wait for new purpose, and the charring that comes from hope abandoned. Ethics and anaesthetics are one.
Eliot’s mother wrote to his uncle in 1923: “One of his greatest misfortunes has been the invalidism of his wife. It was not an eugenic marriage”. Naturally, she wanted to think well of her boy, but she spares him criticism at the cost of denying him agency; she treats his marriage as a misfortune that blankly happened to him (like the hernia with which he was born), not something he had himself entered into. The finicality of “eugenic” reminds us that Eliot grew up in the United States under a prevailing cloud of scientistic racism, and also displays what a schooling in false sentiment a truly nice family such as his can afford. It was for him both a resource and a predicament that, on any occasion, he could just imagine what Mother or others would say. He switched between first- and third-person purchases on his situation in that “recognition, implicit in the expression of every experience, of other kinds of experience which are possible” which he had seized on in 1921 as a vital principle, long ago known as “wit”, in “the greatest, as in poets like Marvell”. The ways of words themselves are constantly throwing up new grounds for the exercise of this wit – sadly remote from a sense of fun – because words outgrow their earlier senses or acquire new circles of acquaintance and become outsiders to the attitudes they once had carried. Take what happened to “ether” when it came down from the heavens after diethyl ether was invented and in the 1750s stole the name for itself, thereby permitting worm’s eye views of the “ethereal” who were perhaps no better than someone “etherized upon a table” (or indeed under it).
Or again, when Eliot sketched the disparity between enlightened and inward views of a less than “eugenic” marriage, he noted how individual disaster gets summarized and tidied away under a familiar generality: “Bistwick is classed among the unhappily married . . . . The awful importance of the ruin of a life is overlooked”. He relies here on the ability of “awful” to sustain the gravity he gave it in The Waste Land’s “awful daring”, but the word will not stay still, because it has learnt to play the part assigned it in locutions like “a most awful cold” or “thanks awfully” which are strewn across these letters. Vivien was signally prey to these slews of phrase which teeter between the petty and the tragic, her days related in the shrieking idiom of “frightful”, “crazy”, “dreadful”, “torment”, “torture”, until she wrote from the institution in Watford where she spent Christmas 1925 “I am in such an awful position. The humiliation of it”.
The little poetry Eliot wrote is dense with matter that has imploded into his pages. His work was crystallized out of him under high pressure from desire and work and sadness, and, though he moaned that “it is no use squeezing a dry sponge and it is no use trying to work a tired and distracted mind” (to Gilbert Seldes, December 1923), his writing is in its element when it represents the verge of being worn out, from the “violet hour, when the eyes and back / Turn upward from the desk”, the “voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells” of The Waste Land to the “Rose” which Ash-Wednesday calls in one breath “Exhausted and lifegiving”. His was in this respect grim writing, and the story of the attritional processes, verbal and nervous, which produced it, makes grim reading, particularly when told in such painful detail as the 1,631 pages of these two volumes record. Though his poems are famous for abeyances of communication – gists cryptically withheld, connecting nothing with nothing – Eliot himself corresponded vigorously; since the first edition of his letters 1898–1922 was published in 1988, another 200 messages have turned up for inclusion in the second edition, and since that edition was published at the end of last year, five more have been found. How wisely Faber and Faber have called this grand enterprise just The Letters of T. S. Eliot, refraining from the dream of “Complete” and even from the ambiguous brag of “Collected”.
The scale on which this edition is conducted doesn’t make the going any smoother, and the rationale for that scale isn’t always clear – even an edition “of record” can get by without printing in full multiple copies of the same form-letter in search of contributions for the Criterion, varying only in the name of the big cheese Eliot was courting. But Eliot was deeply susceptible to maddening iteration, the recurrence of chores and formulae, and made many attempts in his work to transmute the drain of routine experience into ritual configurations, as he noted when he declined to publish some pieces by Gertrude Stein because they would not interest the “ordinary reader” though “they are extremely interesting to me, as I have been working in a method of repetition and variation lately myself” (October 1924). These volumes let you follow those transmutations with matchless intimacy; they are indispensable for anyone who wants to get closer to Eliot as a writer. There may not be many people who do in fact want to get quite so much closer to the slow burn of his poems as study of these letters permits. He has a more obvious, less demanding appeal as a cultural pundit; his pronouncements may be deplorable, but at least they are soon deplored (some commentators save intellectual energy by treating the poems themselves as pronouncements, knottier no doubt, but still in the same business of holding forth as the commentators).
As this edition’s virtue is to help develop an eye and ear for Eliot’s linguistic behaviour across all its shades, it is a pity that the editors’ own attention to what he wrote wavers at key moments and so renders their texts unreliable and puzzling – did he really for one day in August 1923 believe that “rhythm” is spelled “rythym”? The editors let that pass unremarked three times though they purse their lips over his “Sacheverill \[sic\] Sitwell”, a mistake, like its subject, of much less literary consequence. In these volumes, it looks as if Eliot sometimes knew the past participle of “écrire” and sometimes didn’t, and only occasionally put circumflex accents where they belonged. On page 734 of Volume One, the editors correct one error in his German, but leave seven unnoticed on page 674, but perhaps this German is theirs as much as it is his. It’s not his ignorance of Italian that shows when “Asti Spumante fresca” is translated in a footnote as “fresh Asti Spumante”, though “spumante” is masculine and doesn’t go with the feminine “fresca” which anyway means in this context “cold” not “fresh”. A writer so keen on the mind of Europe (and actually on its tongues too) deserves better than the haphazard accuracy supplied here.
At the centre of these volumes lies The Waste Land, the work of Eliot’s which has been most promoted as an essay in cultural diagnosis. When the poem is returned, as these letters return it, to the real harshnesses among which it began, schematic accounts in which it charts the breakdown of civilization or suchlike seem more implausible than ever; it becomes clearer why Eliot stressed instead (in his terminally discreet manner) the effort that went into it as part of the civilization of a breakdown: “The poem is neither a success nor a failure – simply a struggle” (to Otto Heller, October 1923). It has its share of a quality which Eliot praised in William Blake, “a peculiar honesty, which, in a world too frightened to be honest, is peculiarly terrifying”. Honest in itself, it is the cause that honesty was in others, Vivien in particular, who loved it with a love beyond defensive compulsions, because “it has become a part of me (or I of it)” – she rarely spoke a truer word. Virginia Woolf too, who was not to be relied on for sympathetic understanding of Eliot any more than she could always count on him, was stimulated by The Waste Land to a rare lexical precision, recording how Eliot read it to her: “He sang it & chanted it, rhythmed it. It has great beauty & force of phrase: symmetry; & tensity”. “Tensity” is right on target, though fetched from far in the recesses of the OED: 1658, “stiffnesse, or a being stretched out hard”. Her old word catches a physiological strain within the aesthetic “intensity” that Eliot valued so highly in these years. When he desired “poetical work of the first intensity, work in which the thought is so to speak fused into poetry at a very high temperature” (The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry, 1926), he left the phrase ambiguous so we cannot tell whether the “very high temperature” is something the writer controls, as a welder directs acetylene, or undergoes, sweating, as a patient.
It’s no surprise that Eliot is mistaken for a fount of cultural pronouncements, since he mistook himself for such an eminence, and devoted seventeen years to the mistake (also known as the Criterion). The Waste Land may have been no more than “a struggle” but Vivien was confident that his role as editor of a quarterly would be “an achievement” (to Sydney Schiff, October 1922). In pursuit of such distinction, Eliot had to go against the genuine aims of his imagination, which always clung to the individual and frail, to those reaches of experience where the categories we steer by lose their hold. He regretted that, among the knowing, “a man is only important as he is classed”, but trawled for contributors “on the principle of trying to secure the best people of each generation and type”. He inquired about a prospective German correspondent “Is he what in journalism is called a representative writer of the present time?”, availing himself of the short cut while implying it was an intellectual dead-end, as if he wanted to get his copy and disdain it too. Eliot by temperament thought of himself as an eternalist rather than a journalist; the ponderously suave irony of his writing in the Criterion can’t hide the undercurrent of disbelief in the slogans and campaigns with which he sought to entertain his subscribers, though it was designed to do so. By the third year of the journal’s run, he had already cooled towards his task of providing “opinions to give material for dinner table conversation” in pages so cramped by his need “to put in so much of immediate interest for the moment” that room for “more permanent work is limited”. When Eliot had enthused about their prospects if the Criterion succeeded, Ezra Pound for once took the more sober view, “et tu exageres. NO periodical cd. be the ‘thing of our lives’”. This is the best piece of advice Pound gave Eliot which Eliot did not take.
After all, when is “the present time” whose pulse cultural punditry is eager to take and quicken? Such a “now” is always an overlap, the interim in which a hangover begins to show signs of becoming a false dawn. D. H. Lawrence was sure what 1918 needed from its poets: “in free verse we look for the insurgent naked throb of the instant moment” (“Poetry of the Present”). Juicy though this sounds, the “throb” was not a birth-pang but, like several other arty ideals of the early twentieth century, an echo of Pater’s The Renaissance, which fifty years before Lawrence’s “Present” had ended with the assurance that “art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake”. People who profess to be speaking “frankly” are usually deceiving at least themselves and often trying to deceive others too. As Eliot noted in his essay on Baudelaire, Pater may have imagined he was illustrating the doctrine of Art for Art’s sake, whereas he was “expounding it as a theory of life, which is not the same thing at all”. His suspicions of Pater’s aspirational “moments” had been deepened within his marriage, where he lived for years through a nightmarish parody of the gratuitous intensities a previous generation had advertised as the highest quality time.
Pater’s “simply for those moments’ sake” rings hollow when read against Eliot’s accounts of his wife’s despairs. To Ottoline Morrell in March 1920: “We have simply been living from moment to moment. I cannot tell you how worried I am”. To his brother in February 1924: “Vivien is too ill to go and too ill to be left . . . . Her condition of anaemia and complete exhaustion is not merely a question of the moment but of the whole future, as it is a result not of the moment only but of the whole past”. It’s an instance of how long it took him to write a poem, how disparate the material he brought to bear on his lines, that this note of Vivien’s impasse from 1924 surfaces in 1940 towards the end of East Coker, as part of an abstract passage outlining what intensity really is and really asks: “Not the intense moment / Isolated, with no before and after, / But a lifetime burning in every moment”.
Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton, editors
THE LETTERS OF T. S. ELIOT
Volume Two: 1923–1925
878pp.
978 0 571 14081 7
Volume One: 1898–1922
Revised edition
871pp.
978 0 571 23509 4
Faber. £35 each
Eric Griffiths is a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. His books include The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry, 1989, and, as editor (with Matthew Reynolds), Dante in English, 2005.
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