OK, I can’t believe this! I have never, in the history of this blog, made fun of one of le plus noir of my many bêtes noirs, T. S. Eliot. Well, no time like the present to remedy this most grievous fault, because Princeton University has recently “made available” (though not to you)1 over a thousand love letters written by Eliot to Emily Hale, with whom he fell in love at the age of 22, proposing marriage to her in 1914, though she turned him down, though there seems to be some question of whether she let him down so gently he didn’t altogether know he’d been let down. In any event, he shortly left for England and, a year later, made a famously unhappy marriage with Vivienne Haigh-Wood, a glamourous bohemian who was unsurprisingly the exact opposite of the relentlessly proper Eliot and the relentlessly proper Emily, a marriage that, Emily later said, “was a complete surprise to his family and friends and for me particularly, as he had corresponded quite regularly with me, sent flowers for special occasions, etc., I meanwhile trying to decide whether I could learn to care for him had he returned to the States.” Well, a guy doesn’t have to tell a girl everything, does he?
Bertrand Russell, who knew Eliot and Vivienne, said in his autobiography that he recognized that they were very unhappy and felt very sorry for them until he realized that they wanted to be unhappy, which is both true and snotty. Russell had himself escaped from an unhappy marriage—though at the advanced age of 38—and no doubt enjoyed being contemptuous of men who lacked his guts, which strikes me as a more than a bit ridiculous, since it took him 17 years to separate from his first wife.2
Eliot left all thought of Hale behind, it seemed, until 1922, when she was in London, when he visited her, and, now that he was safely, though unhappily, married, informed her that he still loved her, and began a long correspondence with her, making such declarations as the following:
You have made me perfectly happy: that is, happier than I have ever been in my life; the only kind of happiness now possible for the rest of my life is now with me; and though it is the kind of happiness which is identical with my deepest loss and sorrow, it is a kind of supernatural ecstasy.
Well, if you know anything about poets, and T. S. Eliot in particular, you might guess the following: though Eliot eventually separated from Vivienne, he did not divorce her, claiming that, as a good Anglican, he could not, even though, if Vivienne had been unfaithful to him, as it is quite believable that she had, since Eliot’s poetry reeks with disgust at the thought of the sexual act, he could have obtained a divorce. Vivienne effectively collapsed emotionally as a result of the separation and was committed to an asylum, where she eventually died in 1947. One can say, both snottily and accurately, that Eliot was quite comfortable having his wife in an asylum and his muse both unmarriable and on the far side of the Atlantic Ocean, though she did come for visits from 1935 until the outbreak of World War II.
When Vivienne did die, Eliot “explained” to Emily that he now lacked the emotional energy for marriage, though 10 years later he did remarry, again without telling her, to Valerie Fletcher, 30 years old to his 68. Now that he was safely past the age of sexual desire he could touch a woman comfortably.3
Well, if this isn’t enough to make you think little of Mr. Eliot, there’s a whole lot more, because when Tom found out that Emily had saved his letters and was donating them to Princeton he was furious, furious enough to pen a monumentally fussy, pissy, unknowingly self-demeaning “statement”, just now available, “explaining”, among other things, that, whatever you want to say about his marriage to Vivienne, “it saved me from marrying Emily Hale.”
Whew, n’est-ce pas?
But wait, there’s more. “Emily Hale would have killed the poet in me; Vivienne nearly was the death of me,4 but she kept the poet alive. In retrospect, the nightmare agony of my seventeen years with Vivienne seems to me preferable to the dull misery of the mediocre teacher of philosophy which would have been the alternative.”
Of course, when Vivienne died, Tom suddenly realized that Emily, well, she really was kind of a jerk, when you thought about it.
From 1947 on, I realised more and more how little Emily Hale and I had in common. I had already observed that she was not a lover of poetry, certainly that she was not much interested in my5 poetry; I had already been worried by what seemed to me evidence of insensitiveness and bad taste. It may be too harsh, to think that what she liked was my reputation rather than my work. She may have loved me according to her capacity for love; yet I think that her uncle’s opinions (her uncle by marriage, a dear old man, but wooly-minded) meant more to her than mine. (She was fond of her uncle John but did not get on very well with her Aunt Edith). I could never make her understand that it was improper for her, a Unitarian, to communicate in an Anglican church: the fact that it shocked me that she should do so made no impression upon her. I cannot help thinking that if she had truly loved me she would have respected my feelings if not my theology. She adopted a similar attitude with regard to the Christian and Catholic view of divorce.
“It may be too harsh, to think that what she liked was my reputation rather than my work.” Yeah, only when she met you were not even writing poetry! It was you who pushed the relationship, turning to her for emotional outlet and sustenance during your seventeen “nightmare” years!
“She may have loved me according to her capacity for love”. Gag me with a spoon! A fucking big one!
“I could never make her understand that it was improper for her, a Unitarian, to communicate6 in an Anglican church: the fact that it shocked me that she should do so made no impression upon her.” Kill me now, Tom. Kill me right now, you pathetic whiny bitch.
It is considered polite, or at least politic, during a breakup to say ‘it’s not you. It’s me.” But Eliot says “It’s all you!” Some “Christian”!
Afterwords
It is probably impossible for anyone who did not experience it to imagine the power and scope of the Eliot cult that reigned over Anglo-American letters almost from the publication of Eliot’s Wasteland in 1922 until the late sixties, when “the sixties” began to influence high culture, greatly weakening the whole cult of high culture, though it still persists. A supposed literary sermon was titled “The Blessed T. S. Eliot Considered as the Very Air We Breathe”. Eliot was regarded almost unanimously as both the greatest poet and the greatest critic in the English language during the 20th century. Quite a few disliked his tedious snobbery, his massive contempt for the “common” man, but no one dared challenge him as a poet and as a judge of poetry. His massive erudition—which of course was not as massive as it seemed—and the overwhelming self-confidence with which he wrote, even while advocating, as he almost always did, social and political policies that no one could take seriously—basically, going back to the time of Dante—intimidated all comers.
Because of Eliot’s unique role as both a great artist and a great critic (so everyone thought), he was the most powerful of all the great “Modernist” figures who first arose just prior to World War I—in Anglo-American culture, at least—all of them aggressively contemptuous of 19th century middle-class society, hating science and hating “progress”, and looking back to some idealized past. His fame was such that virtually anyone who knew him felt compelled to record that they did know him, to contribute at least a crumb to the understanding of the great man. Both Russell and George Santayana, men whose contributions, it seems to me, surpass Eliot’s, described their encounters with him in some detail, claiming to have influenced him in some manner, even though both rejected his self-conscious embrace of a deliberately archaic Anglo-Catholicism—what George Orwell shrewdly called “Trotskyite Christianity.” Trotskyites were so far left they were purer than the communists, and thus did not have to follow the party line. Anglo-Catholics were so Catholic they were more Catholic than the Pope, and thus did not have to obey him.
In retrospect, of course, it’s amazing that he got away with it. Eliot venerated Dante and insisted that Western Civilization reached its peak in his lifetime, as proved by the fact that it could produce a Dante. But if you bother to read Dante, you’ll see that he uniformly portrays his era as a time of terrible decadence, as a great falling off from the times of great holiness two centuries before. If you take Dante seriously, you can’t take Eliot seriously.
Eliot had the honesty to say that in his poetry he wrote about the world as it is, while in his prose he wrote about it as he wished it would be—ambiguity is replaced by dogmatism—though to my mind there is much wishful thinking in his poetry as well, not to mention a shitload of misogyny and bigotry. But his prose is particularly full of tricks and rhetorical flourishes, typical of the “apologist”, and he loves alluding to knowledge that he clearly does not possess, whole forests of meaning to which he unfortunately cannot do justice at the present time, all of this done to intimidate the reader rather than enlighten him. Eliot is, of course, immensely dismissive of modern science,7 which he pretends to understand but does not, other than “understanding” that it is all “Whiggery” and thus not worth his time.
I am not at all a judge of poetry, though to my limited taste both Yeats and Frost are easily Eliot’s superior. In his whole lifetime he wrote, really, only a handful of poems, as well as a number of short verse plays, none of which I liked. You can easily read his entire poetic works aloud in a single day. What was remarkable about Eliot was that his poems and his critical work present a fairly coherent intellectual structure. There are parts that don’t quite fit together—like his early, never disavowed aestheticism, that the quality of poetry is entirely separable from its argument, which clashed fairly obviously with his claim of the objective nature of religious truth—his brand of it, at least, so high pitched and pure and austere that no one quite seemed able to sense it but him—but no other poet achieved anything like his success as a critic—even though very few people were convinced by his arguments to become Anglo-Catholics.
Eliot talked a great deal about humility, for he knew he had much to be humble about. He was a great hater: he hated common people in general, along with women, blacks, Jews, and especially the Irish. I think he did not become a Catholic, which by all rights he should have, if he took his own ideas seriously, because he associated Catholicism with the Irish, who he depicts in his “Sweeney” poems as ravenous beasts. I think attending a Catholic service and listening to an Irish accent from the priest—and of course to have to mingle with actual Irish people in the congregation—would have driven him mad. I get the strong impression that he somehow spent a night in a hotel listening to a drunken Irish couple rut through the night and never really recovered.
Final Afterword
I had originally intended to “prove” my criticisms, of Eliot’s prose at least, by dissecting a famous early essay he wrote on Hamlet, but to prevent this “Afterwords” from stretching on another thousand words or so I’ll save it for a separate post.
1. That is to say, it hasn’t put them up on the web, where ordinary mortals can read them. Never let it be said that the Princeton Inn doesn’t know how to monetize the fury and mire of human veins.
2. It’s been suggested that Russell had an affair with Vivienne. If so, that was more than tacky, since I suspect—I strongly suspect—that anyone half as worldly as Russell thought himself to be could see that poor Vivienne was a mess and should be left alone.
3. People often noted how physically comfortable with one another they were.
4. Eliot actually uses an underscore to stress how important he is, but I can’t manage this online. Sorry!
5. Because it’s all about you, Tom, isn’t it! 24/7!
6. By “communicate” Eliot means “receive holy communion,” the wine and wafer, or blood and body, of Christ. Because Eliot was an Anglo-Catholic, he presumably believed in transubstantiation, that the wine and bread were actually transformed rather than serving as a symbol. It was, of course, blasphemous for non-believers to take communion. But if Tom was so fussy as all that, why did he seek out the company of a virtual heathen? (As a Unitarian, it’s quite likely that Emily “rejected” the divinity of Christ.)
7. In an essay on his beloved Dante, Eliot claimed that Dante’s “allegorical method” was equal to any “trick” we know, as though all of modern science were “unreal”, which it was to him, because he did not understand it.
