On April 24, 1915, a young American poet, Thomas Stearns Eliot, struck up a relationship with a young English girl from a well-to-do family who used to haunt famous bookshops and, above all, to dance "like a faun" every Saturday in the Savoy. To Eliot the names of the English girls sounded very amusing: Phyllis, Ottoline, and Vivien.
Vivien, or Vivienne Haigh-Wood, was the daughter of a Victorian artist who made his fortune painting sentimental landscapes. She lived with her parents in Hampstead in a massive house with twelve rooms and a tennis court. Two months later, on June 26, Eliot and Vivien tied the knots discreetly. Eliot confessed to his brother Henry: I love her simply because I want to burn my ships and stay in England. They spent the honeymoon in the Landsdowne Hotel in Eastbourne. It was seemingly a disaster. April used to be the cruellest month for those who, like Eliot, cannot dance.
Seven years later, Eliot published The Waste Land, probably the most famous and misunderstood poem of the century. Incidentally, seven years lasted the metamorphosis of Tiresias into a woman:
"I, Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,
old man with wrinkled female breasts"
And, according to Eliot's notes on The Waste Land, Tiresias holds the key to the whole poem. He also was torn between two lives, two identities. Vivien tittered in two minds too, or else several minds. Actually, in 1936, when she was already insane, she adopted three identities: Daisy Miller, a nurse called Gordon and Cataline the Great. Eliot profoundly distrusted the feminine and detested "the female stench". Ironically, he ended up living as a nurse looking after his wife, always bedridden with neuralgia, colitis, neuritis, migraine, damaged liver, insomnia, anxiety... By that time, Eliot could not know that Vivien suffered what the psychiatrists called today "Munchausen syndrome". Neither did he know until 1925 that his wife was anorexic and a drug addict for many years. However, on the positive side, Vivien showed off her charms as a flapper muse: an outstanding dancer, exquisite taste for books and a very good reader of poetry, with a critical eye and a quick ear for the cockney. Her contribution was capital to the final version of The Waste Land. Vivien was his muse, although a sick and unfaithful muse, because besides dancing, Vivian also craved to be desired. Unfortunately, Eliot, unlike his friend Ezra Pound, was not a regular student of the Kama-sutra.
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Vivien started to dally with the Welsh philosopher Bertrand Russell, a pacifist and staunch supporter of "free love", such a kind samaritan that offered to the Eliots his flat in London. Russell, a renowned philanderer, wanted to take Vivien to bed in sooth. "Bertie is all over me," complained Vivien, though she was really enjoying the situation, even more if Bertie treated her with expensive jewels and silk knickers. "We have here a kind of ménage à trois, more or less," said Vivien, who frequented, three times a week, a basement lounge in Carnaby Street, Soho, to take dance classes (paid for by Bertie). She danced there and danced with a very short black skirt. Bertie and Eliot used to come over oftentimes. The dance teacher called them "darling". In those days, Tom Eliot hardly ever wrote a line of poetry, earning his bacon as a schoolmaster in Highgate. He owned up to his brother Henry that, many times, he believed "Prufrock" was his swangsong. At least, he promised himself to learn dancing that "Negro rag-time" as well as Vivien in the Savoy or in the Elysee Galleries.
An utter hell; that was the blunt conclusion of Bertrand Russell about his fleeting affair with Vivien Eliot. Curiously, Eliot weighed up that same conclusion about his marriage: "I have been boiled in hell-broth," he said to Virginia Woolf in 1925 when the doctors had already identified the cause of Vivien's everlasting ailments: her addiction to chloral hydrate, a hypnotic anti-depressant that can damage irreversibly the liver, apart from causing gastritis, convulsions, dizziness, stomachaches, etc.
In the last ten years, Eliot had turned, gradually and deliberately, into a machine of no feelings, a machine that had killed Vivien alive. He had become the banker Tom, hard-working in a lugubrious office from 9 to 5, then arrived home, shattered to bits, with just the sap to read a little, tend her nearly invalid wife, who demanded punctually a hot water bottle at ten. Hence these verses in 'A Game of Chess':
'What shall I do now? What shall I do?
I shall rush out as I am and walk the street
with my hair down, so.
What shall we do tomorrow?
What shall we ever do?
The hot water at ten"
At the end of 1921, Eliot slumped in a depression so crippling that he had to leave his work at Lloyds Bank for several months. He went first to rest in Margate and later to Lausanne, Switzerland, for psychiatric treatment. It was in both places where, playing the mandoline, Eliot got the final élan to craft the poem that made him famous, The Waste Land:
"By the water of Leman I sat down and wept...
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In a rather cryptic essay on Dante, Eliot posited the idea that the Vita Nova was a manual of sexual psychology. One should affirm the same idea about The Waste Land, an erudite and poetic testimony about a conjugal humiliation. Lyrical and blinding flashes of an armour hiding someone who yearns to be natural and authentic, lest he cannot be a great lover. "I don't know yet what the core is, the egg of things," confessed Eliot, always torn between the stringent Protestant ethics of the Unitary Church and savage, metic soul. He couldn't dump Vivien to the river like a dead animal, but he didn't want either to renounce his secret soul of a Sweeney with homoerotic or even pornographic penchants. "I never lay with a woman I liked, loved or even felt any strong physical attraction to," said Eliot in 1939 when Vivian was already admitted to a mental asylum. This homoerotic impulse came to surface, for example, in Mr Eugenides of The Fire Sermon: a merchant of Smyrna, unshaven, with the pockets full of Corinth raisins, invites the poet to a weekend in the Metropole (a luxurious hotel in Brighton, well known by then for his gay and loose atmosphere). It's clear that, after seven years of marriage, the poet is feeling wasted and intellectually barren and diagnoses himself as neurasthenic. His sinister and gloomy gaze terrorised Virginia Woolf, and Lady Ottoline Morrell called him mockingly "the undertaker".
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"Complimenti, you bitch," wrote Ezra Pound to Eliot from Paris on February 24, 1922, just the day Tom gave the last touch to The Waste Land. Even so, he was not completely sure the poem would work. On April 20, Eliot told Sydney Schiff that he was ready to abandon poetry and literature. That same April, Vivien had been in bed for eight weeks with psychotic delusions. Tom was also on the verge of another suicidal depression. April is becoming the cruellest month afresh. Fortunately, his father-in-law paid him for a sojourn in the hotel in Bristol in Lugano, near the village called Paradiso. There, Eliot got over quickly, quaffing red wine Barolo and Asti Spumante, enjoying an Italian-Swiss festival at the lake with night fireworks. "I should like six months of Italy and heat and sunshine and have never felt so lazy and languid. " And, to top his feeling of bliss, he met Hermann Hess, who, by this time, lived in Montagnola, writing Siddhartha. His marriage was in tatters, but Eliot, loyal to the Unitarian faith, nursed his sick 'Belladonna, Lady of the Rocks' until 1932, when, taking advantage of a trip to the United States, he decided to separate for good
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