The Letters of T.S. Eliot: 1923-1925 was finally published 23 years late

Four years ago while writing “Three’s company: T.S. Eliot, Vivienne Eliot, and Bertrand Russell”, I wrote, “My sources of reading include The Letters of T.S. Eliot (Volume I: 1898 – 1922—see photo, Volume II is somehow not available at Waynesburg University or Carnegie’s Library), Virginia Woolf’s letters and diaries, . . . ”  The Volume I was published by T.S. Eliot’s widow (second wife), Valerie Eliot, in 1988, and she hope to “publish the second part next year.”  Little did I know that “next year” never came until now.

There is an almost one-page Book review at Wall Street Journal on September 17-18 (see photo below), and a lengthy (7 or 8 pages) book review (“Practical Cat: How Eliot became Eliot”) in the September 19 issue of The New Yorker.

I was critical of T.S. Eliot in his treating his first wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood.  Carole Seymour’s The Painted Shadow: a life of Vivienne Eliot is more sympathetic to Vivienne’s ordeal, so am I.  The New Yorker article says Vivienne was “an unhealthy, demanding, and unstable woman.”  This is why I very much wanted to read T.S. Eliot’s letters to see the story from his perspective to get a more balanced view.

To me letter writing is an important genre in literature.  I may gain more insight into the author’s life and heart by reading the letters.  I know Virginia Woolf gossiped with style in her letters and diary.  Emily Dickinson’s letters show her prose is as original and innovative as her verses; unfortunately only a fraction of her letters survived.

Would the emails and posts in a blog evolve into a genre of literature one of these days?

Three’s Company: T.S. Eliot, Vivienne Eliot, & Bertrand Russell

Today (Jan. 4) was a sad for for literary world; Albert Camus died in a car accident in 1960 (he got his Nobel Prize only about 2 years prior) and T.S. Eliot died in London in 1965.

I wrote an article of “Three’s Company: T.S. Eliot, Vivienne Eliot and Bertrand Russell” in 2007.  I am somewhat reluctant to post a negative comment about this great poet/critic on the day of his death.

My curiosity about this photo led me to the readings of many books (The Letters of T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf’s letters and diaries, Bertrand Russell’s 3-volume autobiography and above all Carole Seymour’s The Painted Shadow: a life of Vivienne Eliot). This photo was taken in September 1932 when Vivienne and T.S. Eliot last visited Virginia Woolf at her Monk’s House, just before T.S. Eliot left off for America to deliver his six-month Charles Eliot Norton poetry lectures at Harvard. (He lived at Eliott House and the lectures, I believe, were delivered at Sanders Theater, where Janice took us to enjoy the Boston Philharmonic once)  Vivienne, a ghost-like figure in white, head-bending, stood away from Tom and Virginia Woolf, lots of sad stories to be told.

After spending 8 years at Harvard, T.S. Eliot was awarded a one-year scholarship at Merton College, Oxford University with the intention of an academic appointment at the Department of Philosophy at Harvard when he returned.

Eliot met Vivienne (AKA Vivien or Vivie) Haigh-Wood at a dance in London in March 1915 and they wed 3 months later, thus beginning a high drama of a marriage that is worthy of a literary work or as some critics claimed that the trial and trepidation of marriage was the drive behind his great work—a tragedy with comic flavor.

T.S. Eliot was a graduate student when Berti (Bertrand Russell) was a visiting professor at Harvard.  The intimate relationship between Vivie and Berti began a few weeks after her marriage to T.S. Eliot when the poor young couple moved into Berti's flat to save money. i.e. having an “affair” while still in honey moon, so to speak.

Bertrand Russell never mentioned his affair with Vivienne in his autobiography and he destroyed all the letters Vivienne wrote him (the intimate relationship lasted between 1915 and 1918).  Being a man obsessed with keeping private correspondences, he must have something to hide from the posterity.

Russell’s unscrupulous lust and immoral behavior in his affairs of heart destroyed Eliots marriage and probably helped driving her into insanity and eventual commitment into an asylum (mental institution) in 1938. 

Why did T.S. Eliot acquiesce in this “Three’s Company” comedy is a mystery.  His letters (before 1922) never questioned the intimate relationship between Vivie and Berti.  For a while Vivie and Berti lived in the country while Tom lived alone in London (as T.S. Eliot was working in Lloyd Bank then), and would join them on the weekends.  Vivienne was aspired to be a professional dancer, and Berti paid for the dancing lessons.  Berti was an important contact to the literary circle that would help advance Tom's career.

T.S. Eliot’s resentment was evident in his letter to Ottoline in early 1930s saying he would prefer never to see Vivienne again, arguing that “it could do no good to a woman to live with a man to whom she was morally unpleasant as well as physically repugnant.”

T.S. Eliot showed callous indifference to Vivienne, bordered on ‘cruelty’ in the late years of their marriage.  After returning from America in February 1933, Tom avoided seeing her on all occasions.  In 1935, Vivienne tracked him down at a book fair where he was to give a talk.  She recorded in her diary: 

“I turned a face to him of such joy that no-one in that great crowd could have had one moment's doubt. I just said, “Oh Tom”; he seized my hand and said how do you do, in quite a loud voice. He walked straight on to the platform then; and gave a most remarkably clever, well thought out lecture. . . . I stood the whole time, holding Polly up high in my arms. Polly was very excited and wild. I kept my eyes on Tom's face the whole time; I kept nodding my head at him; making encouraging signs. He looked a little older, more mature and smart, much thinner; not well or robust or rumbustious at all.  No sign of a woman’s care about him.  No cosy evenings with dogs and gramophones I should say.”

A good book review article of The Painted Shadow in September 30, 2002 issue of The New Yorker. The sad story was so described:

“After the lecture, she went onstage and stood next to him while he signed copies of his books. ‘I said quietly, Will you come back with me?’  ‘I cannot talk to you now,’ Eliot replied. He signed the books she had brought with her, and then he left.  She never saw him again.”

Vivienne didn’t live to see the two men in her life becoming the Nobel laureates in Literature (T.S. Eliot in 1948, Bertrand Russell 1950) as she died in January 1947.

At age of 68, T.S. Eliot married Valerie Fletcher (38 years his junior) in January 1957.  Some critics (those who suggested he was a gay.  Caroline Moorehead, in her The Painted Shadow, also not so subtly hinted.) would say that having emphysema, he needed a ‘nurse’ as he refused to marry the other two women he apparently ‘loved’ (Emily Hale and Mary Trevelyan, who proposed to him twice.)

By all accounts, he had a happy second marriage (1957 until his death at age of 76, on January 4, 1965) during which he wrote no plays or poetry of importance, in contrast to what he had produced during his melancholy 17 years with Vivienne.  The Waste Land was out in 1922.

Oppenheimer admired Eliot’s The Waste Land so much, he was very pleased when Eliot accepted his invitation to Princeton’s the Institute of Advanced Study [of which Oppei was a director after the completion of the Manhattan Project] for one semester in 1948 (during which his Nobel Prize in Literature was announced)  It didn’t work out as those mathematicians and theoretic physicists wouldn’t know what to do with a poet.  Eliot often spent his time with undergraduate students.  Oppei was hoping a master piece of work would come out during his stint at the Institute, in stead, he produced The Cocktail Party, apparently “the worst thing he ever wrote.”

Click https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqvhMeZ2PlY to hear T.S. Eliot reciting his The Waste Land.

What is a Classic?

What is a Classic? This was the topic of the Presidential Address to the Virgil Society delivered by T.S. Eliot in 1944.  Eliot said classic is used “as an indication of the greatness, or of the permanence and importance of a writer in his own field.” and “for it is only by hindsight, and in historical perspective, that a classic can be known as such.” And a classic requires “a lifetime of labour” of a writer with a matured mind.
    

EB says the classical literature is used for “the literature of any language in a period of any notable for the excellence and enduring quality of its writers’ works.”

T.S. Eliot was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948 “for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry.” His verse departed from the ‘classic’ of the age that he had so arduously studied and produced a classic--The Waste Land.  James Joyce’s novels were shockingly revolutionary in technique comparing to the classical novels that we come to know, and yet one needs not apologize if one declares Ulysses or Finnegans Wake a classic.

This is my way to convey the concept of classic, which is also defined as “A book which people praise and don’t read.” by Mark Twain.