Fame & Folly (6 page)

If there is any answer to such questions—and there may not be—it may lie hidden in one of Eliot’s most well-appointed impersonations: the voice he employed as essayist. That charm of intimacy and the easy giving of secrets that we like to associate with essayists—Montaigne, Lamb, Hazlitt, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf when the mood struck her—was not Eliot’s. As in what is called the “familiar” essay, Eliot frequently said “I”—but it was an “I” set in ice cut from the celestial vault: uninsistent yet incontestable, serenely sovereign. It seemed to take its power from erudition, and in part it did; but really it took it from some proud inner figuration or incarnation—as if Literature itself had been summoned to speak in its own voice:

Who could talk back to that? Such sentences appear to derive from a source of knowledge—a congeries of assumptions—indistinguishable from majesty. In short, Eliot would not
permit
himself to be ignored, because it was not “himself” he was representing, but the very flower of European civilization. And there may have been another element contributing to the ready acceptance of his authority: as a foreigner, he was drawn to synthesizing and summarizing in a way that insiders, who take their context for granted, never do. He saw principles where the natives saw only phenomena. Besides, he had a clear model for focused ascent: Henry James. Knowing what he meant to become, he was immune to distraction or wrong turnings. “It is the final perfection, the consummation of an American,” Eliot (in one of his most autobiographical dicta) wrote of James, “to become, not an Englishman, but a European—something which no born European, no person of any European nationality, can become.”

So much for the larger trajectory. He had mapped out an unimpeded ideal destination. In the lesser geography of private life, however, there was an unforeseen impediment. Henry James had never married; Eliot had married Vivien. In 1915 she was twenty-seven, slender, lively, very pretty, with a wave in her hair and a pleasant mouth and chin. By 1919, Virginia Woolf was describing her as “a washed out, elderly and worn looking little woman.” She complained of illness from the very first, but otherwise there were few immediate hints of the devastation to come. She was absorbed in Eliot’s career. He brought his newest work to her for criticism; she read proofs; she assisted in preparing the
Criterion
. She also did some writing of her own—short stories, and prose sketches that Eliot admired and published in the
Criterion
. She had energy enough at the start: there were excursions, dinners, visits to Garsington, dance halls, dance lessons, theater, opera; even a flirtation with Bertrand Russell that turned into a one-night stand. (“Hellish and loathsome,” Russell called it.) A month after the wedding she told Russell that she had married Eliot because she thought she could “stimulate” him, but that it could not be done. She began to suffer from headaches, colitis, neuralgia, insomnia. “She is a person who lives on a knife edge,” Russell said. Eliot himself often woke at night feeling sick. He was plagued by colds, flu, bronchial problems; he smoked too much and he consistently drank too much, though he held it well. Retreating from Vivien,
he threw himself into the work at the bank and into developing his literary reputation. Vivien had nowhere to go but into resentment, ill-will, hysteria. In the mornings the bed linens were frequently bloody—she menstruated excessively, and became obsessed with washing the sheets. She washed them herself even when they stayed in hotels. Morphine was prescribed for her various symptoms; also bromides and ether (she swabbed her whole body with ether, so that she reeked of it), and mercilessly bizarre diets—a German doctor combined starvation with the injection of animal glands. She collapsed into one nervous illness after another. Eliot repeatedly sent her to the country to recuperate while he remained in town. When his mother, now an elderly widow, and one of his sisters came on a visit from America, Vivien was absent, and Eliot was obliged to manage the complications of hospitality on his own. Anxiety over Vivien crept into all his business and social correspondence: “my wife has been very ill”; “she is all right when she is lying down, but immediately she gets up is very faint”; “wretched today—another bad night”; “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? That’s the way she is. The doctors have never seen so bad a case, and hold out no definite hope, and have so far done her no good. Meanwhile she is in screaming agony …”

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

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

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

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

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

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