Following up on the partial explanation of my puzzlement, the next three posts will attempt to explore two possible obstacles to my understanding of the poem: concealment and modernist fragmentation. I’ve banged on ad nauseam about the problems I have with modern puzzle poetry so I’ll leave that second issue, along with Eliot’s mental health, till later. (By the way, you may notice that my spelling of his wife’s name oscillates between Vivienne and Vivien as she started off with the first spelling and ended with the latter, my spell checker got confused and I haven’t had the time to make sure I got every spelling right from the original text.)
So, what is this concealment about in my view. For present purposes I’ll focus on two clear and different explanations, though not mutually exclusive:
- his marriage, and
- his gender identity.
Vivienne’s importance & significance
It was somewhat stunning that, at one point in my explorations, Vivienne, his wife, and not the poem, became the focus of my concern. He had heavily disguised her presence to conceal its true significance. And for me at least his strategy had been successful.
She was an important presence in the poem in at least three ways. First of all, as Seymour-Jones explains,[1] ‘In page after page of [Vivienne’s] notebooks lay irrefutable evidence of the close literary partnership she and Eliot shared.’
Then, as muse:[2]
. . . Vivienne was Tom’s muse: she was ‘the true inspiration of Tom,’ said Virginia Woolf…
And finally as a source of the kind of trauma that frequently lies behind a great work of art:
Tom’s sister-in-law wrote: ‘Vivienne ruined him as a man, but she made him as a poet.’ Without Vivienne, in all probability, Eliot would not have given the world The Waste Land.
The latter two factors are intertwined.
According to Seymour-Jones, Eliot did drop a massive hint about the personal significance of the poem:[3]
The poet had thrown down the gauntlet to researchers when he admitted that The Waste Land, far from being an expression of horror at the fate of Western civilisation, ‘was only the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life.”
So in fact:[4]
. . . the longer I worked, the more sure I became that it was justified to view T.S.Eliot’s poetry and drama, bedrock of the modernist canon, through the lens of his life with Vivienne; that the autobiographical and confessional element in Eliot’s texts had been greatly underestimated, due at least in part to a paucity of information.
Tackling the first issue, what evidence is there that Vivienne was perhaps at least as important an editorial presence as Ezra Pound who usually gets all the credit. Seymour-Jones and Hollis provide a number of examples between them. Here’s a sample:
-
“WONDERFUL’ wrote Vivien, who was closely involved in the editing of The Waste Land, and suggested three lines of her own. [incl. One cannot get him to speak.][5]
-
Vivienne added to Eliot’s typescript her own revealing line which he retained: ‘What you get married for if you don’t want to have children?’[6]
(Vivien’s own longing for a baby may have contributed to the Eliot’s marital problems.)
- Abigail Eliot, Eliot’s first cousin, remembered of Tom and Vivien: ‘In the beginning he lived through her. Her hand was all over his work,’ a judgement confirmed by Vivien’s notebooks, as by the facsimile edition of The Waste Land, with its fifty lines of ‘Fresca’ verse, some in Vivien’s style; cut by Pound from ‘The Fire Sermon’[7]
- Vertically, in pencil, beside the first twenty-seven lines, Vivien wrote in the right-hand margin Don’t see what you had in mind here. And she was right to do so: she had identified by far the most ritualised of all the sections of the draft to date . . .[8]
5a. What indeed would autumn bring to the Eliots? Loneliness, lovelessness, fearfulness, the poem (The Death of the Duchess) appeared to imply: But it is terrible to be alone with another person. . . .[Quotes game of chess lines] It would be from these tortured, torturing lines that A Game of Chess’would soon draw for The Waste Land. . . . Vivien would ask of her husband in 1921 what she had never asked before: to remove a line from his work.[9]
5b. [re: the game of chess line ‘the ivory men make company between us’]: Vivien objected to this line… the possibility that they hinted at the absence of generational company, of life without children.… When Eliot first wrote the line for The Death of the Duchess, the couple had been three years childless, almost four.[10]
That line being: ‘The ivory men make company between us.’
5c. Vivien had insisted upon the removal of the line because she didn’t want her friends looking in upon a childless marriage.[11]
(This gives a clear sense of why hiding the personal element was not just a major concern for Eliot.)
5d. [12]‘You want to keep him at home, I suppose,’ had been Eliot’s faltering first effort; Vivienne crossed that out decisively with what would become one of the poem’s better known lines. What you get married for if you dont want to have children.
I came to the conclusion that I was in The Mad Woman in the Attic territory again with Vivienne. She was his most influential but unappreciated editor, as well as a traumatising inspiration. Ezra Pound simply pruned the poem into increasing obscurity, almost obliterating the personal elements, but got most of the credit.
What about the element of inspirational trauma? According to Hollis, Eliot fessed up to that himself:[13]
‘To her, the marriage brought no happiness,” wrote Eliot. ‘To me, it brought the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land.’
Her infidelity was a part of the pain he felt:[14]
Against the suspicion of Vivien’s affair with Russell, the draft’s last line of all, trailing into elliptical silence, seems a haunting, moving evocation of the mistrust within the Eliots’ own marriage.
‘But I know, and I know she knew…’
Though it must be admitted she made sacrifices too:[15]
‘There [Vivien] fell into familiar patterns of caring for him at the expense of her own recovery.’
Despite the dark side of their marriage:[16]
… For all the tension and strain with Vivien, Eliot, could not bear the prospect of beginning his recovery alone. … More than at any moment in their troubled marriage, Eliot was reliant upon his wife for his stability and security.… Vivien had never been so needed; but at that moment, she appeared intent on a flirtatious correspondence with Schofield Thayer . . .
There’ll be more on that moment later, when I look at his mental health.
In the end though, the darkness probably blocked out most of the light:[17]
Eliot had longed for Vivien to die, he confessed, although he knew such a longing, was sinful. When the moment of her death came, he realised that he had lost not only Vivien, but Emily too, for he discovered that he was not in fact in love with her at all, but with the apparitional life that he hadn’t lived. . .
This, according to Seymour-Jones crept into The Waste Land too:[18]
It is difficult to imagine a more powerful contrast to the tremulous tenderness of love directed towards a ‘brother’ than the deep hostility of the verses whose subject is a woman. Eliot’s fantasy of wife murder is expressed in ‘The Death of a Duchess’, a section of the original Waste Land text . . .
So who is the ‘brother’ and who is Emily? That brings us onto the next topic.
Verdenal’s significance vs Emily Hale’s
Critics and biographers have voiced their sense that Eliot’s sexuality was far from straightforward. For example, Seymour-Jones suggests:[19]
Hugh Kenner has called Prufrock, the ‘generic’ Eliotic voice, the forerunner of Gerontion and the bisexual Tiresias in The Waste Land: the timid lover who hesitates and turns back, whose action dissipates in thought, when he comes face to face with a woman.
Such timidity might explain some of the problems Eliot experienced in his relationship with Vivienne.
Then there is the question of exactly what kind of relationship Eliot had had with Jean Verdenal, who died in the First World War:[20]
Eliot would dedicate his first book, Prufrock and Other Observations, ‘To Jean Verdenal, 1889 to 1915’, adding in time ‘mort aux Dardanelles’. And he would carry a grief that he was hesitant to unburden, one that would cast a shade across the initial years of his life in London. Only later, would he admit to what he called a ‘sentimental’ sunset: ‘the memory of a friend coming across the Luxembourg Gardens in the late afternoon, waving a branch of lilac, a friend who was later (so far as I could find out) to be mixed with the mud of Gallipoli.’
Seymour-Jones is on basically the same page:[21]
[Vivienne’s]’s restless energy may have been psychologically necessary to Eliot in May and June 1915, for he nursed a secret grief he could not share with her. His dear friend, the Frenchman, Jean Verdenal, who had become a medical officer in November 1914, had been killed on 2 May in the Dardanelles.
She feels he never got over the loss:
Eliot never eradicated the memory of Jean, which became an obsession as time passed. . . . Lilacs became Eliot’s symbol of loss: ‘April is the cruellest month, breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/Memory and desire.’
She even suggests that his reaction to the death may have triggered his proposal of marriage as well shaping the figure of Phlebas in the poem:
It seems that Verdenal was later transfigured in his imagination into Phlebas, the drowned Phoenician in ‘Death by Water’ in The Waste Land. . . .
From this, she feels, is derived the idea of The Waste Land as an elegy:
This is a cry of grief which has given rise to the suggestion that The Waste Land is in essence an elegy for Jean. The medical officer, like Phlebas, what ‘a fortnight dead’, when Eliot, on the rebound, proposed to the young English woman he scarcely knew.
As I indicated in the previous post, Seymour-Jones flags up that:[22]
A later critic, James E. Miller, has compared The Waste Land to Tennyson’s mourning for the dead of Arthur Hallam in In Memoriam. . . . He identified Phlebas the Phoenician as Jean Verdenal…
In terms of the poem as published, her next comment does not correspond to the texts I have read:
. . . [the] case is a convincing one. The current image in The Waste Land, to which Eliot returns obsessively, is of Verdenal walking towards him in the Luxembourg Gardens, his arms full of lilacs.
What she goes on to say is more firmly based ‘The heartfelt plea to the reader to remember Phlebas, ‘one as handsome and tall as you’ supports the contention that Verdenal is central to The Waste Land.’
She argues that:[23]
. . . Eliot struggled with contradictory urges, to confess and yet to repress his homosexual feelings: it was a kind of torture, but one which explains to some extent, the obscurity of poetry, in which so many secrets demanded concealment.
This would indeed provide a strong argument for hiding at least this personal element from contemporary readers.
There may though have been some overegging of the pudding:[24]
The memory of Verdenal may have been transfigured in Eliot’s imagination into something of far greater significance than the facts of the relationship warrant. . .’
Which might call into question her conclusion derived from a quotation from Eliot:[25]
Eliot’s remark that Tiresias, in whom the two sexes meet, is the ‘most important person in the poem, uniting all the rest’, stresses the androgynous impulse which is central to the poem.
This is certainly not quite how Hollis sees it, nor what the letters to Emily, which the BBC programme discusses, suggest. This data set was not available to Seymour-Jones at the time of her writing Vivienne’s biography. I’m not sure whether it would have altered her opinion:[26]
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?]:
. . . the hyacinth girl, who, after a decade’s silence, Eliot would tell Emily Hale was for her – his last romantic connection to America… In 1930, Eliot would ask her to reread these lines as a measure of his love for her. ‘I shall always write primarily for you.’
Eliot goes on to confirm the picture of Vivien as his traumatic muse:[27]
‘I was never quite a whole man,’ Eliot told Emily Hale. ‘The agony forced some genuine poetry out of me, certainly, which would never have been written if I had been happy: in that respect, perhaps I may be said to have had the life I needed.’
Eliot adds concerning ‘the awful daring of a moment’s surrender’, ‘these lines from the poem were for her, he said, as he embarked on a romantic correspondence with her that he would sustain until his wife’s death in 1947.’
But as we learned, after Vivien’s death he came to see his love for Emily Hale as unreal, ‘for he discovered that he was not in fact in love with her at all, but with the apparitional life that he hadn’t lived.’ Maybe Emily had been just a cover for his feeling for Jean Verdenal. It is impossible to kopek for sure.
I think we now have a clear sense that much of what inspired the poem is carefully hidden from the reader’s gaze, contributing to the level of obscurity that had put me off revisiting it more carefully since I was forced to study it for my degree in English literature in the early 60s.
So where does all this leave the poem? More on that next time.
References
[1]. Painted Shadow – page xvii.
[2]. Op. cit. – page xviii.
[3]. Op. cit. – page xix).
[4]. Op. cit. – page xviii).
[5]. Op. cit. – page 300.
[6]. Op. cit. – page 302.
[7]. Op. cit. – page 379.
[8]. The Waste Land: a biography of a poem – page 266.
[9]. Op. cit. – page 140.
[10]. Op. cit. – page 267.
[11]. Op. cit. – page 268.
[12]. Op. cit. – page 269.
[13]. Op. cit. – page 9.
[14]. Op. cit. – page 141.
[15]. Op. cit –page 265.
[16]. Op. cit. – page 291.
[17]. Op. cit. – pages 380-81.
[18]. Painted Shadow – page 297.
[19]. Op. cit. – page 46.
[20]. The Waste Land: a biography of a poem – pages 4-6.
[21]. Painted Shadow – pages 79-80.
[22]. Op. cit. – pages 294-95.
[23]. Op. cit. – page 211.
[24]. Op. cit. – page 297.
[25]. Op. cit. – page 300-01.
[26]. The Waste Land: a biography of a poem – page 234. The German translates as: Fresh blows the winds for home, my Irish girl, where do you roam?
[27]. Op. cit. – page 380.
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