By the end of this exhaustive and exhausting book I felt as though I had myself been married to Vivien Eliot and barely survived to tell the tale. Oxford scholar Ann Pasternak Slater spares us no squalid detail about TS Eliot’s infamous first wife, the “madwoman” whom the author of The Murder in the Cathedral was obliged to keep hidden not in his attic but in Northumberland House, an Italianate country house asylum in suburban north London. Before the Eliots reached that point of relative stasis in 1938 though, he (and we) have to get through two decades of a relationship that Eliot himself famously described as “utter hell”. Prepare yourself for nearly 800 pages of emotional mayhem, including (but not limited to) hysterical laughter, fake letters, ruinous medical bills, explosive diarrhoea, bloody bedsheets and some really terrifying road trips (the driving test had yet to be invented and neither Eliot was exactly a natural behind the wheel).
None of this is new and most of it will be familiar to the reader of the monumental The Letters of TS Eliot. What Pasternak Slater has done is, in her own words, “pick out a coherent narrative” from this sea of material, to which is added Vivien’s own writings, published here for the first time, with her journals, which have been digitised by the Bodleian library and are now available online. Pasternak Slater will, she promises, be “objective” and shun all “conjecture” and contemporary gossip (unless it comes from Virginia Woolf, who is just too funny to be excluded). All this sounds eminently sensible, bordering indeed on the radical impersonality that was such a key component of Eliot’s own thinking about art.
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