The wasteland that was T.S Eliot's first marriage

12 April 2012

It was a young and tragic marriage. T.S. Eliot's first wife Vivien Haigh-Wood suffered from a severe hormonal illness that required constant medical treatment, exacerbating an already hysterical nature.

The poet wrote: "To her the marriage brought no happiness to me it brought the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land."

That line, which comes in a letter published in Volume 1 of Eliot's Collected Letters, led to an awareness that the distance was less great between "the man who suffers and the mind which creates" than had previously been believed.

Today, Volume 2 of the Letters (1923-1925) is published along with a revised edition of Volume 1 (1898-1922), edited by Eliot's second wife, Valerie.

It covers Eliot's early years as editor of the literary magazine The Criterion, the publication of The Waste Land, his essays on the nature of poetry and his arrival at Faber, the company with which he would forever be associated.

The publication of these letters is a major literary event - but it is more than that, too.

It is also a redress and a warning to all who rush to judgment of others in that most private arena, marriage.

A line from Four Quartets reminds us: "The torment of others remains an experience/Unqualified, unworn by subsequent attrition." For these letters, written by the man Ted Hughes once described as "the greatest poet for 300 years", reveal not an artist celebrating his masterpiece but a man in agony.

The agony is physical: debilitating exhaustion was combined with constant terror of financial collapse that would impact badly on Vivien, "who will never be strong enough to shift for herself I think the work and worry have taken ten years off my life."

The agony is also psychological: "This is an ebbtide, in every respect. I have no longer any confidence."

And above all it is moral. Eliot had a hyper-consciousness of the moral implications of every decision and revision, in every half-spoken line and every hidden thought on the path to action.

"Between the motion and the action falls the shadow," he wrote in The Hollow Men. "Have I the right to kill another person by being dead, or to kill them by being alive?"

That single question, in a letter to John Middleton Murry, is devastating. The man for whom Dante was a perpetual inspiration was now trapped in his own inferno.

"This last illness of V's has been indescribable I have not been able to leave her for three months [I am] bewildered and dazed." In December 1925, Vivien wrote: "When I think of all that my husband has done for me, and of all the life I smashed up I do not know why I don't go out and hang myself."

They separated after 18 years of marriage - one to which, creatively, she made a most serious contribution, a fact always acknowledged by Eliot. He once refused to release a section of The Waste Land until Vivien had approved it.

She was confined for the last 11 years of her life to a mental institution. In Portrait of a Lady, he writes: "Our beginnings never know our ends."

To judge from these intensely revealing letters, that would seem to be as true of marriage as it is of life.

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