Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot
Encyclopedia
Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot (28 May 1888 – 22 January 1947) was an English governess and writer who became notable as the first wife of the American poet, T.S. Eliot (1888–1965). Her legacy, and the extent to which she influenced Eliot's work, has been the subject of much debate. She has been seen variously as a neurotic femme fatale
who enticed the patrician Eliot into an inappropriate and disastrous marriage, or as his muse
, without whom some of his most important work would never have appeared. His second wife claimed the copyright of Vivienne's writings in 1984, including her private diaries, which has complicated the research into her role in Eliot's life.
They met in Oxford in March 1915, while he was studying philosophy at Merton College
and she was working as a governess in Cambridge, and were married in Hampstead Register Office three months later. They remained married until her death in 1947, but Vivienne's poor physical and mental health, and Eliot's apparent intolerance of it, produced a stormy relationship, made worse by Vivienne apparently having an affair with the philosopher Bertrand Russell
. Eliot arranged for a formal separation in February 1933, and shunned her entirely, hiding from her and instructing his friends—including members of the Bloomsbury Group
and the publisher Faber & Faber, where he was a director—not to tell her where he was. Vivienne could not accept the end of the relationship. She became panicky and depressed, her frantic attempts to reach out to him appearing to confirm that she was mentally ill. Virginia Woolf
, a friend of Eliot's, called her a "bag of ferrets" that he wore around his neck.
She finally caught up with him on 18 November 1935 at a Sunday Times Book Fair in Regent Street
, London, where he was giving a talk. Carrying her dog, Polly, and three of his books, she arrived in clothes she had started wearing to performances of his plays: a British Union of Fascists
uniform, a black beret, and a black cape. As he signed copies of the books for her, she asked him, "Will you come back with me?" and he replied, "I cannot talk to you now," then left. It was the last she saw of him.
Her brother, Maurice, had her committed to an asylum in 1938, after she was found wandering the streets of London at five o'clock in the morning, apparently asking whether Eliot had been beheaded. Apart from one escape attempt, she remained there until she died nine years later at the age of 58—ostensibly of a heart attack, though there is a suspicion that she took an overdose—the year before Eliot won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Carole Seymour-Jones
writes that it was out of the turmoil of the marriage that Eliot produced The Waste Land
, one of the 20th-century's finest poems. His sister-in-law, Theresa, said of the relationship: "Vivienne ruined Tom as a man, but she made him as a poet."
She was registered at birth as Vivienne Haigh, though as an adult she called herself Haigh-Wood. Her paternal grandfather was Charles Wood, a gilder and picture framer from Bolton
, so her father called himself Charles Haigh-Wood to distinguish himself. The "Haigh" came from his mother, Mary Haigh, originally from Dublin. Mary Haigh had inherited seven semi-detached houses in Kingstown (now Dún Laoghaire
), an affluent Dublin suburb, which gave the family financial stability and a certain status, allowing Vivienne's father to be sent to Manchester Art College, and to join the Royal Academy School in London when he was 17.
Charles Haigh-Wood inherited his mother's property when she died, as well as the family home at 14 Albion Place, Walmersley Road, Bury, and he became a landlord, which allowed him to move his wife and Vivienne to Hampstead, a fashionable part of north London. They settled into a house there at 3 Compayne Gardens around 1891, where Vivienne's brother, Maurice, was born in 1896; he went on to train at Sandhurst
, and fought during the First World War. Although the family was clearly well-to-do, Seymour-Jones writes that Vivienne was ashamed of her connection to Lancashire, perceived as working-class, and was left with a sense of inferiority that made her self-conscious and snobbish, especially when mixing with Eliot's aristocratic London friends.
of the bone in her left arm when she was a child; this was before the discovery of antibiotics, and there was apparently little that could be done. She was treated by Sir Frederick Treves
, the surgeon who had treated Joseph Merrick
, the "Elephant Man," and said she had had so many operations, she had no memory of her life before the age of seven.
She was also plagued throughout her life by heavy, irregular menstruation
, to her great embarrassment, and severe pre-menstrual tension, which led to mood swings, fainting spells, and migraines. She would insist on washing her own bedlinen, often twice a day, and would take her sheets home with her to clean when on holiday—once leading a hotel to claim she had stolen them, much to Eliot's dismay. She apparently felt unable to turn to her mother, Rose, for help, and her father—reportedly wanting a quiet life and no match for his dominant wife—was no comfort. Eventually Rose took her to a doctor in Queen Anne Street in London's West End
, and he prescribed potassium bromide
to sedate her, which probably meant she was diagnosed with "hysteria
," a common label for difficult women. Virginia Woolf famously described her on 8 November 1930 in her diary:
As the medical bills rose, so too did the family's resentment of her. Her brother, Maurice, blamed her for what he saw as his second-rate education, because there was no money left to send him to one of the top public schools. Vivienne is known to have had one relationship before Eliot, also stormy, with a schoolteacher, Charles Buckle, in 1914. They got engaged after Buckle asked Vivienne's father for her hand, and he agreed, but Buckle's mother was apparently unhappy about it, and Vivienne's health problems appear to have persuaded Rose that her daughter was suffering from "moral insanity." She decided Vivienne was not fit to marry or bear children, and overruled her husband, withdrawing the family's permission for the match.
's rooms at Magdalen College, Oxford
. Eliot and Thayer, both from privileged New England
backgrounds, had been at Harvard together, where Eliot had studied philosophy, and both had arrived in Oxford on scholarships. According to another friend of Eliot's, Sacheverell Sitwell
, Eliot had spotted Vivienne earlier, punting on the River Cherwell
, which runs through Oxford. Seymour-Jones writes that Oxford attracted young women visitors, or "river girls," who would come in search of eligible husbands—women were not allowed to take degrees at Oxford until 1920—and although the town was somewhat empty of British men in 1914 because of the war, a number of American students had arrived to fill the gap.
Lyndall Gordon
writes that Eliot was jolted to life by Vivienne. He was a repressed, shy, 26-year-old who was bored in Oxford, writing of it that it was very pretty, "but I don't like to be dead." She was flamboyant, a great dancer, spoke her mind, smoked in public, dressed in bold colours, and looked like an actress; not the kind of woman, Gordon writes, that a young gentleman of the time could introduce to his mother. Impressed by her apparently wealthy background, the artist father, and the brother at Sandhurst, he failed to realize that, within the rigid English class system, Vivienne was no match for his New England background or for the English aristocrats he was surrounded by— although a few of them, including Aldous Huxley
, said they liked her precisely because she was vulgar. For her part, she fell instantly in love with Eliot, seeing in him what she described as "the call to the wild that is in men."
in 1911, the poem that was to make his name when it was published in Chicago in 1915, and he saw remaining in England as a way to escape his parents' plans for him. When he was in his 60s, Eliot wrote that he was immature and timid at the time, and was probably in love with Emily Hale, a Bostonian he'd had a relationship with back in the U.S.; he wrote her 1,000 letters over the course of his life, letters that his estate has so far not allowed to be published. What he really wanted from Vivienne, he said, was a flirtation. But a meeting with the American poet, Ezra Pound
, had persuaded him that the pursuit of poetry was possible, and in Eliot's mind marrying Vivienne became part of that, in that it meant he could stay in England and avoid philosophy at Harvard. "'I came to persuade myself that I was in love with her," he wrote, "simply because I wanted to burn my boats and commit myself to staying in England."
The couple were married after three months, on 26 June 1915 at Hampstead Register Office in London, with Lucy Ely Thayer, Scofield's sister with whom Vivienne had become close, and Vivienne's aunt, Lillia C. Symes, as witnesses. Eliot signed himself as of "no occupation," and described his father as a brick manufacturer. Neither of them told their parents. Cyril Connolly
, the writer, spread a story that Vivienne had seduced Eliot in a punt, and that he had felt obliged to marry her—the "awful daring of a moment's surrender/Which an age of prudence can never retract" that Eliot writes of in The Waste Land—though James Edwin Miller argues that it was unlikely either would have felt that sex had compromised Vivienne, because she had already had at least one affair. In any event Eliot told a friend, Conrad Aiken
, that he wanted to marry and lose his virginity.
in the way Eliot regarded Vivienne. Elliot once wrote to a friend that she had an original mind, but "not at all a feminine one." Louis Menand
argues in The New Yorker that Eliot regarded women the way he regarded the Jews, seeing both as responsible for irrationality and romanticism. He had an additional horror of female sexuality—which led Seymour-Jones to suspect he was gay—a horror manifested both in his poetry and in his attitude toward Vivienne's body and the monthly battles with her out-of-control menstruation. Menand writes that Eliot's work is replete with oversexed women, whom he saw as modern succubae
, such as Grishkin in Whispers of Immortality:
Femme fatale
A femme fatale is a mysterious and seductive woman whose charms ensnare her lovers in bonds of irresistible desire, often leading them into compromising, dangerous, and deadly situations. She is an archetype of literature and art...
who enticed the patrician Eliot into an inappropriate and disastrous marriage, or as his muse
Muse
The Muses in Greek mythology, poetry, and literature, are the goddesses who inspire the creation of literature and the arts. They were considered the source of the knowledge, related orally for centuries in the ancient culture, that was contained in poetic lyrics and myths...
, without whom some of his most important work would never have appeared. His second wife claimed the copyright of Vivienne's writings in 1984, including her private diaries, which has complicated the research into her role in Eliot's life.
They met in Oxford in March 1915, while he was studying philosophy at Merton College
Merton College, Oxford
Merton College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England. Its foundation can be traced back to the 1260s when Walter de Merton, chancellor to Henry III and later to Edward I, first drew up statutes for an independent academic community and established endowments to...
and she was working as a governess in Cambridge, and were married in Hampstead Register Office three months later. They remained married until her death in 1947, but Vivienne's poor physical and mental health, and Eliot's apparent intolerance of it, produced a stormy relationship, made worse by Vivienne apparently having an affair with the philosopher Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic. At various points in his life he considered himself a liberal, a socialist, and a pacifist, but he also admitted that he had never been any of these things...
. Eliot arranged for a formal separation in February 1933, and shunned her entirely, hiding from her and instructing his friends—including members of the Bloomsbury Group
Bloomsbury Group
The Bloomsbury Group or Bloomsbury Set was a group of writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists who held informal discussions in Bloomsbury throughout the 20th century. This English collective of friends and relatives lived, worked or studied near Bloomsbury in London during the first half...
and the publisher Faber & Faber, where he was a director—not to tell her where he was. Vivienne could not accept the end of the relationship. She became panicky and depressed, her frantic attempts to reach out to him appearing to confirm that she was mentally ill. Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf
Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century....
, a friend of Eliot's, called her a "bag of ferrets" that he wore around his neck.
She finally caught up with him on 18 November 1935 at a Sunday Times Book Fair in Regent Street
Regent Street
Regent Street is one of the major shopping streets in London's West End, well known to tourists and Londoners alike, and famous for its Christmas illuminations...
, London, where he was giving a talk. Carrying her dog, Polly, and three of his books, she arrived in clothes she had started wearing to performances of his plays: a British Union of Fascists
British Union of Fascists
The British Union was a political party in the United Kingdom formed in 1932 by Sir Oswald Mosley as the British Union of Fascists, in 1936 it changed its name to the British Union of Fascists and National Socialists and then in 1937 to simply the British Union...
uniform, a black beret, and a black cape. As he signed copies of the books for her, she asked him, "Will you come back with me?" and he replied, "I cannot talk to you now," then left. It was the last she saw of him.
Her brother, Maurice, had her committed to an asylum in 1938, after she was found wandering the streets of London at five o'clock in the morning, apparently asking whether Eliot had been beheaded. Apart from one escape attempt, she remained there until she died nine years later at the age of 58—ostensibly of a heart attack, though there is a suspicion that she took an overdose—the year before Eliot won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Carole Seymour-Jones
Carole Seymour-Jones
Carole Seymour-Jones is a Welsh writer. She is the author of Beatrice Webb: A Life ; Painted Shadow: The Life of Vivienne Eliot, first wife of T.S...
writes that it was out of the turmoil of the marriage that Eliot produced The Waste Land
The Waste Land
The Waste Land[A] is a 434-line[B] modernist poem by T. S. Eliot published in 1922. It has been called "one of the most important poems of the 20th century." Despite the poem's obscurity—its shifts between satire and prophecy, its abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location and time, its...
, one of the 20th-century's finest poems. His sister-in-law, Theresa, said of the relationship: "Vivienne ruined Tom as a man, but she made him as a poet."
Early life
Vivienne was born in Knowsley Street, Bury, Lancashire, the first child of Charles Haigh-Wood (1854–1927), an artist and member of the Royal Academy of Arts, and his wife Rose Esther, née Robinson (died 1941). The couple were local to the area, but had been living in London, and had returned to Bury for an exhibition of Charles's paintings at a gentleman's club, with Rose Esther heavily pregnant. The journey may have triggered the birth earlier than expected, and so Vivienne was born in Lancashire rather than London.She was registered at birth as Vivienne Haigh, though as an adult she called herself Haigh-Wood. Her paternal grandfather was Charles Wood, a gilder and picture framer from Bolton
Bolton
Bolton is a town in Greater Manchester, in the North West of England. Close to the West Pennine Moors, it is north west of the city of Manchester. Bolton is surrounded by several smaller towns and villages which together form the Metropolitan Borough of Bolton, of which Bolton is the...
, so her father called himself Charles Haigh-Wood to distinguish himself. The "Haigh" came from his mother, Mary Haigh, originally from Dublin. Mary Haigh had inherited seven semi-detached houses in Kingstown (now Dún Laoghaire
Dún Laoghaire
Dún Laoghaire or Dún Laoire , sometimes anglicised as "Dunleary" , is a suburban seaside town in County Dublin, Ireland, about twelve kilometres south of Dublin city centre. It is the county town of Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown County and a major port of entry from Great Britain...
), an affluent Dublin suburb, which gave the family financial stability and a certain status, allowing Vivienne's father to be sent to Manchester Art College, and to join the Royal Academy School in London when he was 17.
Charles Haigh-Wood inherited his mother's property when she died, as well as the family home at 14 Albion Place, Walmersley Road, Bury, and he became a landlord, which allowed him to move his wife and Vivienne to Hampstead, a fashionable part of north London. They settled into a house there at 3 Compayne Gardens around 1891, where Vivienne's brother, Maurice, was born in 1896; he went on to train at Sandhurst
Royal Military Academy Sandhurst
The Royal Military Academy Sandhurst , commonly known simply as Sandhurst, is a British Army officer initial training centre located in Sandhurst, Berkshire, England...
, and fought during the First World War. Although the family was clearly well-to-do, Seymour-Jones writes that Vivienne was ashamed of her connection to Lancashire, perceived as working-class, and was left with a sense of inferiority that made her self-conscious and snobbish, especially when mixing with Eliot's aristocratic London friends.
Health and education
Little is known of her education. She played the piano, painted, took ballet lessons, was a good swimmer, and worked for a short time as a governess for a family in Cambridge. She had multiple health problems. She was diagnosed with tuberculosisTuberculosis
Tuberculosis, MTB, or TB is a common, and in many cases lethal, infectious disease caused by various strains of mycobacteria, usually Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Tuberculosis usually attacks the lungs but can also affect other parts of the body...
of the bone in her left arm when she was a child; this was before the discovery of antibiotics, and there was apparently little that could be done. She was treated by Sir Frederick Treves
Sir Frederick Treves, 1st Baronet
Sir Frederick Treves, 1st Baronet, GCVO, CH, CB was a prominent British surgeon of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, now most famous for his friendship with Joseph Merrick, "the Elephant Man".-Eminent surgeon:...
, the surgeon who had treated Joseph Merrick
Joseph Merrick
Joseph Carey Merrick , sometimes incorrectly referred to as John Merrick, was an English man with severe deformities who was exhibited as a human curiosity named the Elephant Man. He became well known in London society after he went to live at the London Hospital...
, the "Elephant Man," and said she had had so many operations, she had no memory of her life before the age of seven.
She was also plagued throughout her life by heavy, irregular menstruation
Menstruation
Menstruation is the shedding of the uterine lining . It occurs on a regular basis in sexually reproductive-age females of certain mammal species. This article focuses on human menstruation.-Overview:...
, to her great embarrassment, and severe pre-menstrual tension, which led to mood swings, fainting spells, and migraines. She would insist on washing her own bedlinen, often twice a day, and would take her sheets home with her to clean when on holiday—once leading a hotel to claim she had stolen them, much to Eliot's dismay. She apparently felt unable to turn to her mother, Rose, for help, and her father—reportedly wanting a quiet life and no match for his dominant wife—was no comfort. Eventually Rose took her to a doctor in Queen Anne Street in London's West End
West End of London
The West End of London is an area of central London, containing many of the city's major tourist attractions, shops, businesses, government buildings, and entertainment . Use of the term began in the early 19th century to describe fashionable areas to the west of Charing Cross...
, and he prescribed potassium bromide
Potassium bromide
Potassium bromide is a salt, widely used as an anticonvulsant and a sedative in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with over-the-counter use extending to 1975 in the United States. Its action is due to the bromide ion...
to sedate her, which probably meant she was diagnosed with "hysteria
Hysteria
Hysteria, in its colloquial use, describes unmanageable emotional excesses. People who are "hysterical" often lose self-control due to an overwhelming fear that may be caused by multiple events in one's past that involved some sort of severe conflict; the fear can be centered on a body part, or,...
," a common label for difficult women. Virginia Woolf famously described her on 8 November 1930 in her diary:
Oh—Vivienne! Was there ever such a torture since life began!—to bear her on one's shoulders, biting, wriggling, raving, scratching, unwholesome, powdered, insane, yet sane to the point of insanity, reading his letters, thrusting herself on us, coming in wavering trembling ... This bag of ferrets is what Tom [Eliot] wears round his neck.
As the medical bills rose, so too did the family's resentment of her. Her brother, Maurice, blamed her for what he saw as his second-rate education, because there was no money left to send him to one of the top public schools. Vivienne is known to have had one relationship before Eliot, also stormy, with a schoolteacher, Charles Buckle, in 1914. They got engaged after Buckle asked Vivienne's father for her hand, and he agreed, but Buckle's mother was apparently unhappy about it, and Vivienne's health problems appear to have persuaded Rose that her daughter was suffering from "moral insanity." She decided Vivienne was not fit to marry or bear children, and overruled her husband, withdrawing the family's permission for the match.
First meeting
Vivienne first met Tom Eliot in the spring of 1915 at a dance in a large hotel in London, where he took tea with her and a friend. They met again that March at a lunch party in Scofield ThayerScofield Thayer
Scofield Thayer was an American poet and publisher, best known for his art collection, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and as a publisher and editor of the literary magazine The Dial during the 1920s.-Life and career:...
's rooms at Magdalen College, Oxford
Magdalen College, Oxford
Magdalen College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England. As of 2006 the college had an estimated financial endowment of £153 million. Magdalen is currently top of the Norrington Table after over half of its 2010 finalists received first-class degrees, a record...
. Eliot and Thayer, both from privileged New England
New England
New England is a region in the northeastern corner of the United States consisting of the six states of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut...
backgrounds, had been at Harvard together, where Eliot had studied philosophy, and both had arrived in Oxford on scholarships. According to another friend of Eliot's, Sacheverell Sitwell
Sacheverell Sitwell
Sir Sacheverell Sitwell, 6th Baronet CH was an English writer, best known as an art critic and writer on architecture, particularly the baroque. He was the younger brother of Dame Edith Sitwell and Sir Osbert Sitwell....
, Eliot had spotted Vivienne earlier, punting on the River Cherwell
River Cherwell
The River Cherwell is a river which flows through the Midlands of England. It is a major tributary of the River Thames.The general course of the River Cherwell is north to south and the 'straight-line' distance from its source to the Thames is about...
, which runs through Oxford. Seymour-Jones writes that Oxford attracted young women visitors, or "river girls," who would come in search of eligible husbands—women were not allowed to take degrees at Oxford until 1920—and although the town was somewhat empty of British men in 1914 because of the war, a number of American students had arrived to fill the gap.
Lyndall Gordon
Lyndall Gordon
Lyndall Gordon is a South African writer and academic, known for her literary biographies. Born in Cape Town, she was an undergraduate at the University of Cape Town, then a doctoral student at Columbia University...
writes that Eliot was jolted to life by Vivienne. He was a repressed, shy, 26-year-old who was bored in Oxford, writing of it that it was very pretty, "but I don't like to be dead." She was flamboyant, a great dancer, spoke her mind, smoked in public, dressed in bold colours, and looked like an actress; not the kind of woman, Gordon writes, that a young gentleman of the time could introduce to his mother. Impressed by her apparently wealthy background, the artist father, and the brother at Sandhurst, he failed to realize that, within the rigid English class system, Vivienne was no match for his New England background or for the English aristocrats he was surrounded by— although a few of them, including Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Leonard Huxley was an English writer and one of the most prominent members of the famous Huxley family. Best known for his novels including Brave New World and a wide-ranging output of essays, Huxley also edited the magazine Oxford Poetry, and published short stories, poetry, travel...
, said they liked her precisely because she was vulgar. For her part, she fell instantly in love with Eliot, seeing in him what she described as "the call to the wild that is in men."
Marriage
Eliot was in Oxford for one year only, and was expected to return to Harvard to begin a career as an academic philosopher, an idea he railed against. He wanted to be a poet. He had already completed The Love Song of J. Alfred PrufrockThe Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, commonly known as Prufrock, is a poem by T. S. Eliot, begun in February 1910 and published in Chicago in June 1915. Described as a "drama of literary anguish," it presents a stream of consciousness in the form of a dramatic monologue, and marked the beginning of...
in 1911, the poem that was to make his name when it was published in Chicago in 1915, and he saw remaining in England as a way to escape his parents' plans for him. When he was in his 60s, Eliot wrote that he was immature and timid at the time, and was probably in love with Emily Hale, a Bostonian he'd had a relationship with back in the U.S.; he wrote her 1,000 letters over the course of his life, letters that his estate has so far not allowed to be published. What he really wanted from Vivienne, he said, was a flirtation. But a meeting with the American poet, Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
, had persuaded him that the pursuit of poetry was possible, and in Eliot's mind marrying Vivienne became part of that, in that it meant he could stay in England and avoid philosophy at Harvard. "'I came to persuade myself that I was in love with her," he wrote, "simply because I wanted to burn my boats and commit myself to staying in England."
The couple were married after three months, on 26 June 1915 at Hampstead Register Office in London, with Lucy Ely Thayer, Scofield's sister with whom Vivienne had become close, and Vivienne's aunt, Lillia C. Symes, as witnesses. Eliot signed himself as of "no occupation," and described his father as a brick manufacturer. Neither of them told their parents. Cyril Connolly
Cyril Connolly
Cyril Vernon Connolly was an English intellectual, literary critic and writer. He was the editor of the influential literary magazine Horizon and wrote Enemies of Promise , which combined literary criticism with an autobiographical exploration of why he failed to become the successful author of...
, the writer, spread a story that Vivienne had seduced Eliot in a punt, and that he had felt obliged to marry her—the "awful daring of a moment's surrender/Which an age of prudence can never retract" that Eliot writes of in The Waste Land—though James Edwin Miller argues that it was unlikely either would have felt that sex had compromised Vivienne, because she had already had at least one affair. In any event Eliot told a friend, Conrad Aiken
Conrad Aiken
Conrad Potter Aiken was an American novelist and poet, whose work includes poetry, short stories, novels, a play and an autobiography.-Early years:...
, that he wanted to marry and lose his virginity.
Eliot's attitude toward women
Carole Seymour-Jones, one of Vivienne's biographers, believes there was a strong streak of misogynyMisogyny
Misogyny is the hatred or dislike of women or girls. Philogyny, meaning fondness, love or admiration towards women, is the antonym of misogyny. The term misandry is the term for men that is parallel to misogyny...
in the way Eliot regarded Vivienne. Elliot once wrote to a friend that she had an original mind, but "not at all a feminine one." Louis Menand
Louis Menand
Louis Menand is an American writer and academic, best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Metaphysical Club , an intellectual and cultural history of late 19th and early 20th century America....
argues in The New Yorker that Eliot regarded women the way he regarded the Jews, seeing both as responsible for irrationality and romanticism. He had an additional horror of female sexuality—which led Seymour-Jones to suspect he was gay—a horror manifested both in his poetry and in his attitude toward Vivienne's body and the monthly battles with her out-of-control menstruation. Menand writes that Eliot's work is replete with oversexed women, whom he saw as modern succubae
Succubus
In folklore traced back to medieval legend, a succubus is a female demon appearing in dreams who takes the form of a human woman in order to seduce men, usually through sexual intercourse. The male counterpart is the incubus...
, such as Grishkin in Whispers of Immortality:
The sleek Brazilian jaguar
Does not in its arboreal gloom
Distil so rank a feline smell
As Grishkin in a drawing-room.
Further reading
- Conrad, PeterPeter Conrad (academic)Peter Conrad is an Australian-born academic specializing in English literature, currently teaching at Christ Church at Oxford University....
(2001). His trouble and strife, The Guardian, 21 October 2001. - Christensen, KarenKaren ChristensenKaren Christensen is a U.S. academic publisher, journalist, and author who cofounded Berkshire Publishing Group in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 1998, after working in London at Blackwell Scientific Publications and Faber & Faber...
(2005). Dear Mrs Eliot..., The Guardian, 29 January 2005. - Ferlinghetti, LawrenceLawrence FerlinghettiLawrence Ferlinghetti is an American poet, painter, liberal activist, and the co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers...
(2009). Vivienne Eliot in 1938 Upon Entering an Asylum, oil on canvas, George Krevsky Gallery, accessed 11 November 2009. - James, Caryn (1994). Tom & Viv (1994), The New York Times, December 2, 1994.
- Johnson, Loretta (1988). A Temporary Marriage of Two Minds: T.S. and Vivien Eliot, Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Spring, 1988), pp. 48–61.
- McCrum, RobertRobert McCrumRobert McCrum , is an English writer and editor. He served as literary editor of The Observer for more than ten years. In May 2008 he was appointed Associate Editor of the Observer and was succeeded as literary editor by William Skidelsky...
(2009). Revealed: the remarkable tale of TS Eliot's late love affair, The Observer, 24 May 2009. - Tom and Viv... and Bertie, The Observer, 14 October 2001.