Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements to the Texas University Library, Austin; McMaster University Library, Hamilton, Ontario; Berg Collections, New York Public Library; Bodleian Library, Oxford.

And to friends and relatives of Louise Purdon; the matron of Northumberland House (1945-65) who wishes to remain anonymous; Mrs Isabelle Lockyer for a detailed interview; relatives of Dr Reginald Miller; the surviving members of the Schiff family; Sir Sacheverel Sitwell; Dora Russell and Shirlene Todd Backus, of Turdus Gorge, Wyoming; and the kind and detailed medical summaries and advice from Professor Derek Russell Davis. And further medical commentary from Dr Alexander Walk, Dr Eliot Slater, Dr Rudolph Freudenberg and Annie Gatti. A word of thanks to Edith Morgan, Mary Appleby and especially Dr David Stafford-Clark for his inspired guidance.

I am further indebted to Herbert Howarth (Notes on Some Figures behind T S Eliot), Lyndall Gordon (Eliot’s Early Years) and Yale University Library.

Victoria Hardie made substantial contributions to Parts One, Three and Five, when in particular, I was quite unable to make accurate devolution of scene from a female character’s point of view.

I am very grateful for further contributions to the research and the text from Michael Attenborough and Jenny Worton. Jenny Worton provided considerable input in reshaping the text. I wish to add that all my research in the Haigh-Wood/Eliot/Thayer families has always been made freely available to Peter Ackroyd, Carole Seymour Jones and others in this field.

Note

I interviewed Colonel Maurice Haigh-Wood over five months in 1980, the year he died. I am also indebted to the remaining members of his family, Mildred Haigh-Wood, and the Colonel’s grandchildren Jane and Ann. A member of the Hoagland family, Judge White, provided some kind guidance. Many studies in Eliot have encountered degrees of animosity and obstructiveness from Faber & Faber and the Eliot Estate, and I certainly am not alone in this matter; nevertheless, given time and patience and the understanding and belief in the greater good via sharing information, these unusual situations will not prevail. Meanwhile, a thousand or so letters in the Emily Hale file at Princeton are under embargo until 2020. The Mary Trevelyan diaries which refer to the 1940s are at present withheld. And the John Hayward papers at Cambridge are only available to a select few. The Hope Mirrlees documents, which were sold off at various times, are scattered in a number of American universities, and proper collation has not been attempted. The same applies to the Lucy Thayer/Scofield material (1908-22), some of which remains in the possession of two families.

A significant problem attaches itself to the papers of Vivienne Haigh-Wood. At the time of her internment all rights of identity, passport, bank accounts, insurance contributions, possessions and even clothing were stripped from her. She had no means of redress, and such items as family pictures, personal keepsake trivia, photographs and incidental family silver, and carpets and books were promptly placed out of her legal reach. Her income from the Haigh-Wood estate was handed on to the authority of the official family trustees. The thorniest problem remains the right of attachment on her papers and documents; according to her own notes there are at least ten short stories, a number of poems, review pieces and some sketches. According to her brother, Maurice, there are many more diaries which she kept up, and a number of letters she wrote to Eliot from the asylum over a period of 10 years. There is, in addition, a small library of books which Tom and Viv gathered out of their own shared interests. From Vivienne’s final will – bearing in mind the more recent rulings on copyright in unpublished material – the indications are that all her papers remain the property of the Bodleian Library. The Library has not disputed any copyright claims on this material; however, in recent years it has become more difficult to gain access to the material and such copyright as it entails.

It is necessary to make a few comments about my text. I have not intended some inconsistences to appear arbitrary. For example, ‘Gert ’n’ Daisy’ is a phrase which more righdy belongs to the 1940s. And the title ‘Royal Ballet School’ came into being somewhat later than the text indicates. I have used these phrases because I believe they fitted the intention behind the speeches. The street voices I have used are there to underline the curious habit Tom and Viv had of mimicking street vernacular as if it was something quaint and rather lurid. Any city vernacular has a deeply grained validity; it contains within its texture historic roots of lifestyles. There are indications that Tom and Viv, not unlike Coward, found themselves compelled to extract a comical quality from ‘cockneyisms’. For all their intelligence, Tom and Viv were only able to coin a semblance of the vernacular. They assumed phrases like ‘balmy in the crumpet’ or ‘warn’t they off their chump’ to be true street slang. Thus, it is not easy to explain which of them influenced their domestic tongue. Tom certainly did not adopt Viv’s high resonances. And yet Viv must have presided over the years when the greatest change occurred in Tom’s voice. When that ever-present ‘guitar’ in the American throat made a gradual retreat.

Introduction

by Michael Hastings

IN THE THEATRE all biography is fiction and some fiction is autobiography. The idea of omniscient narrative in straightforward biography doesn’t apply to the stage. No play can delineate the factual substance of the years, or spell out circumstance; all this belongs to the book. What a play can achieve is to take time past and time present and thread it through the needle of the years and provide the audience with a pictorial statement.

For example, there is a scene in Tom and Viv where the mother, the brother and the husband attend a Magistrate’s Court during an application for Viv’s internment in an asylum. In reality these three did not of course meet in the Court; in essential truth no three people were more responsible for this application for an internment. So one can see at a glance in order to reclaim the past sometimes a different perspective is required.

Eliot’s own view of biography was acute. He believed that we may search for anecdote in a private life to give us the feeling for a moment of seeing a person as his contemporaries saw him. And we may try to put two things together – the mind in the masterpiece and the man of daily business. But however hard we try, no-one can be ultimately understood. A mystery remains. It is something we cannot explain, but we accept and in a way understand.

In recent years I have found my own work breaking up into twin sections. There are private plays entirely in the realm of fiction. And there are public plays from which, in an attempt to explain and define the past, familiar people emerge – Idi Amin, Lee Harvey Oswald, Antoine Saint-Just, Marcus Garvey, David Bomberg and Abie Warburg.

Warburg’s fame rests with his revolutionary idea of a ‘library of ideas’. But illness and mental health cost him dearly. Once, he was confined to an asylum at Kreutzlingen in the early twenties. But Warburg was of the opinion he had regained his sanity. The doctors were not so convinced. For some months prior to internment, Warburg had been in Mexico, and at the asylum he made a fascinating bargain with his doctors. If he could deliver a lucid lecture on the ritual love dances of the Mexican rattlesnake to the doctors and inmates, they would release him. Warburg’s gamble was to return from the broken mind, enlist the limitations and disciplines of his internment, and proceed to redefine the map of his potential. This great scholar wanted to return to the world, to his life of ideas, order of Mnemosyne and library of social memory. And, far from subtracting his illness he was prepared to be judged by it. Far from concealing his inner fragmentation he decided to embrace it. For a moment one could glimpse the idea of humankind as something incomplete but desirous of becoming whole. Trotsky described Tolstoy as a kind of vessel filled with the ‘anonymous massiveness of life and its sacred responsibility’. Gramsci called Italians to political action with his phrase, borrowed perhaps from Rolland, ‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will’. Warburg’s asylum lecture on the love dance of the Mexican rattlesnake appears to me to be a revelation of the human spirit.

T S Eliot is undoubtedly one of the greatest poets of our century. A poet of such refined sensibilities, who freely ransacked cultural history to make his early poetry. An acknowledged master magpie of modern letters. At the same time I noticed his characteristic of unhinging a part of himself, which was quite the opposite to Warburg, who was willing to embrace an entirety of self. But Eliot refined this in public. He found it necessary to detach his personality to surrender to writing. To achieve this characteristic of self-fragmentation meant burying sections of his pained and private life. Yet there were indications that this very same private life was the source of his finest work.

Anybody foolish enough to embark on a study of Eliot which seeks to place the man and the work in a somewhat different light is sure to run into a minefield of abuse and obstruction from certain vested interests. But there seems a growing realization that we have here, above all, an unrestrained lyric poet of almost confessional intensity; and eventually we may be allowed to discard the idea of the monolithic prophet of rightist despair which has so clouded our education.

At the outset my interest was in writing a play which explored the premise that the distress Eliot experienced in his marriage to Vivienne Haigh-Wood was a major influence on his poetry. After research, it became even more apparent that her hand is all over the early drafts of The Waste Land, and to such an extent it is impossible in some instances to separate her contributions from his. The least this indicates is that the presence of Viv belongs in there. The most one might find is that the two of them shared a working life of some sort, no matter at what cost or pain, and were partners to some degree. Eliot, at one point during the making of The Waste Land, was determined to wait upon Vivienne’s judgement before he continued. It remains true that for certain Eliotians, only too eager to underscore his fear and hatred of the female body and its functions, and only too determined to apotheosize his later oath of chastity, this is something of an unpleasant paradox. Not only was he the poet who detached his personality in order to write, he was also the husband who spoke of Vivienne as someone who gave him everything he wanted, and to whom he owed everything. Thus there remains a curious silence about the private origins of the work, and any scholar who trespasses there can prompdy find himself forbidden to quote from any sources, published or otherwise, and this absurd, often comical, form of judgemental censorship has claimed a number of hapless victims.

Perhaps, unbeknown to the playwright, the very presence of an actor impersonating the poet drives something of a coach and horses through the Eliotian theory of impersonality and the belief in the artist’s need for an extinction of his personality. But what other way is there to debate Eliot on the stage? And if one is to pull Eliot back from the maw of political despair, surely this problem of personality will not go away? The answer to this problem may lie in Edmund Husserl’s view of personality. Far from being a mirror which only reflects surfaces (Eliot), personality may be a constituent of experience from which it is not possible to unhinge oneself. In Husserl’s terms, a husband who denies himself the love of a woman in exchange for a devotion elsewhere is creating a pattern of behaviouristic perversion. The larger nature of the man is reduced, there is a limiting of the natural standpoint Husserl indicates, and though ‘the wakeful life of our personality is a continuous perceiving actual or potential’, such a man can only diminish his being. Transcendental knowledge, even that gained through the everyday momentum of personality, remains knowledge gained within experience. And the possibility arises that Eliot took a fundamentally mechanistic view of personality as something base and soiled which had to be detached. In so doing he approached Belief with the curious notion, during the early twenties, that a man needs only to be jolted by any trivial series of events to achieve a sense of Faith. At the culmination of this journey, he gave himself up to the Anglo-Catholic Church with the grace of passionate surrender. No matter the cost to his personal life. Or, for that matter, any explanation to those who were under the impression that the poet of ‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land was a revolutionary artist, an inventor of form and a public spokesman for the notion of a fragmented world. Instead, the man acquired classicism, entertained the idea of royalty in an ideal society, was baptized in the Church of England and took up British nationality. His critics from the Republican Left, particularly those Americans trying to create an indigenous culture, found themselves out in the cold, and accused him of taking an antinomian pathway to an aloof, locked kingdom filled with sexual disgust and human withdrawal. Others, like Wyndham Lewis, articulated that Eliot was hiding ‘in a volatilized hypostasization of his personal feelings’. Whatever that may mean.

The Waste Land were