the last book I ever read (The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot's Hidden Muse, excerpt eighteen)

from The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot's Hidden Muse by Lyndall Gordon:

At this time his old bond with Eleanor revived over her well-chosen wedding gift. It was a first edition of The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne’s novel about a New England family curse blighting the descendants of a man who had perpetrated murder during the witchcraft frenzy in the seventeenth century. A ‘Bull’s Eye’, Eliot said, ‘exactly right’. A young woman in the novel, Phoebe, a ray of sun, transforms the gloom of the old Puritan house (Hawthorne’s model, which still stands in Salem, with its dark corners emblematic of dark minds). ‘The dry-rot of the old timbers of the skeleton frame was stayed’. The young woman kindles ‘the heart’s household fire’ of the forlorn inhabitant.

the last book I ever read (The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot's Hidden Muse, excerpt seventeen)

from The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot's Hidden Muse by Lyndall Gordon:

The American poet Donald Hall often recalled Eliot as he had been in the autumn of 1951. Hall, a New Englander, had arrived in London as a diffident young Harvard poet, as Eliot himself had been. Hall too was about to go up to Oxford as a graduate student. He cherished his meeting with Eliot, its sense of kinship, all the keener for the fact that Hall asked nothing for himself. ‘Eliot was only sixty-three … but he looked at least seventy-five,’ he recalled. ‘His face was pale as baker’s bread. He stooped as he sat at his desk … He smoked, and between inhalations he hacked a dry, deathly smoker’s hack. His speech–while precise, exact, perfect–was slow to move, as if he stood behind the boulder of each word, pushing it into view.’

the last book I ever read (The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot's Hidden Muse, excerpt sixteen)

from The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot's Hidden Muse by Lyndall Gordon:

Eliot was only fifty-eight when he sees himself as an old man who lacks resilience for fresh adaptation. There was a physical reason: his hernia, which had been repaired at nineteen, now needed repair again. Age, though, is an old excuse. ‘I grow old … I grow old …’ Prufrock says to himself as he goes among the women. It’s a weary voice Eliot invented when he was twenty-one. In 1947, he creates a man ‘meeting himself as a stranger face to face’. Instead of the poet’s encounter with his timeless self in the Quartets, he meets a victim of time: a crumpling man. Eliot wants to convince Emily that ‘while I still love you … as much as ever, it is this previously unknown man whom I … will have to get to know’.

the last book I ever read (The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot's Hidden Muse, excerpt fifteen)

from The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot's Hidden Muse by Lyndall Gordon:

Vivienne escaped from Northumberland House on 15 September. She was caught twenty-four hours later when she tried to draw money from her bank without knowing that her funds had been blocked. Her next and more promising attempt at escape took place with outside help. In the thirties there were Lunacy Law reformers, who realised that some people were wrongly diagnosed as insane. Part of their work was to rescue people who were put away for life only because they were disturbed and difficult. Previously, in the eighteenth century a husband had the power to incarcerate a troublesome wife in a madhouse, the target of Mary Wollstonecraft’s novel The Wrongs of Women. But in the course of the nineteenth century, legislation did not leave wives entirely helpless. The law in place in the 1930s stated that if a certified person could live undetected in normal society for six weeks, they were automatically de-certified.

A Lunacy Law reformer called Marjorie Saunders had successfully sheltered one such escapee in her London house when she was approached by Louie Purdon, a pharmacist from Allen & Hanbury, to help her one-time customer and friend Vivienne Eliot. Mrs Saunders duly waited for Mrs Eliot at the appointed place in Oxford Street–in vain, for she was caught once more. From then on, Miss Purdon was not able to communicate with Mrs Eliot. Northumberland House did not pass on telephone messages and letters were returned.

the last book I ever read (The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot's Hidden Muse, excerpt fourteen)

from The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot's Hidden Muse by Lyndall Gordon:

Vivienne’s fear of pursuit mirrored his. From 1936 she feared a danger she could not name. Yet she sensed it coming. Might she disappear for her better safety (as her husband had)? Vivienne decided to give out a story that she had gone to America under the name of Daisy Miller, an American heroine of independence who is damaged by a Europeanised American, a gentleman of the utmost rectitude. In this seasonal allegory by Henry James, the gentleman’s chilling name is Winterbourne, and as the narrator of Daisy’s story his belittling view of her will take hold. She had loved him and he had disapproved of her by his mannered standards. All his detachment allows him to acknowledge is a minor part in her downfall when he stands, eventually, at her grave. The reader must question his version of events. Vivienne’s claim to be Daisy Miller, mad as it may appear, is her coded message as haunting as her image of hornets under the marriage bed.

the last book I ever read (The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot's Hidden Muse, excerpt thirteen)

from The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot's Hidden Muse by Lyndall Gordon:

His next move, on 13 February, was to urge Emily to read René Basin’s life of Charles de Foucauld, the hermit shot dead in 1916 by Senussi insurgents at Tamanrasset in southern Algeria: ‘that was a real saint’–a ‘thrilling’ life. He was not keen on the lives of men who attained what they did without conflict. Such men fell short of sainthood because conflict was essential to the making of saints. When it came to novels, he fixed on the Russians, War and Peace and The Brothers Karamazov, where principles conflict with passions.

The saints whose lives the poet had explored in Murder in the Cathedral and now in Burnt Norton inspired in Eliot a need for ‘a really ascetic (and from an English point of view, quite useless) order’. Lady Ottoline found Eliot decidedly un-English in his strenuousness. When she mulled over his character in her journal, she took issue with his opposition to the humane form of sainthood. ‘Tom is an orthodox Churchman–not a Saint.–He is a man who is timid & needs the backing & Safety of the Church …’ She thought him alien to the ‘queer humanity of English people’, too rule-bound, too devoid of leniency and ‘good old English Compromise’ to be an Anglican.

the last book I ever read (The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot's Hidden Muse, excerpt twelve)

from The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot's Hidden Muse by Lyndall Gordon:

A clue to the change in Hale can be found in Burnt Norton. During the month after Emily left, in December–January, Eliot is writing one of his greatest poems. He looks on Burnt Norton, in five parts, as the start of a ‘new period’ (along with the huge and unexpected success of Murder in the Cathedral on both sides of the Atlantic). On 13 January he calls it a ‘new kind of love poem, and it is written for you, and it is fearfully obscure’. Three days later the poem is done and on its way to Eliot’s New York editor, Donald Brace. It is ‘our’ poem, he repeats to Emily on 16 January, with a good deal ‘that you and no one else will identify’.

In retrospect the poet calls up the play of light on an empty pool so that it appears filled with water. This grants the visiting pair a moment of ‘reality’. It’s as ephemeral as sunlight in England. The moment passes: ‘Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind / Cannot bear very much reality.’ Yet it could last in memory as ‘one of the permanent moments’.

the last book I ever read (The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot's Hidden Muse, excerpt eleven)

from The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot's Hidden Muse by Lyndall Gordon:

When the American critic Edmund Wilson had Eliot to stay in New York, he was struck by his performance. ‘He is an actor,’ Wilson realised. ‘He gives you the creeps a little at first because he is such a completely artificial, or rather, self-invented character … but he has done such a perfect job with himself that you often end up admiring him.’

Henry Eliot did not admire the actor. He excused his brother on the grounds of an outsider’s ‘stage-fright’ under English eyes, forced to conform to a caricature thrust upon him by the alien affectations of the Bloomsbury Group. Henry blamed the English for what he could not approve. He deplored his brother’s switch to Anglicanism, backed by an ‘irresistible, instinctive, more or less unconscious talent for publicity’. Dismissing the public performer, Henry stressed the gift for capturing ‘the macabre and gloomy grandeur of the early Fathers’. Yet in mixing Puritan conscience with Catholic doctrine, Eliot took to acting, Henry said, more ‘literally than do sophisticated Catholics’.

the last book I ever read (The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot's Hidden Muse, excerpt ten)

from The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot's Hidden Muse by Lyndall Gordon:

Dante’s Beatrice would not have cut her hair, as Emily did in preparation for Scripps, ignoring Eliot’s mutter at how barbarous it was. As far as Eliot was concerned, whenever his poems entertain a possibility of love, long hair comes into play, going back to the hair over La Figlia’s arms. In The Waste Land a speaker dreams of a girl’s wet hair after staying out late in a garden, and there’s the sweetness of ‘brown hair over the mouth blown’ in Ash Wednesday. Long hair aroused desire, most blatantly in The Scarlet Letter when Hester Prynne, meeting her one-time lover in the woods–the frontier (the moral wilderness) is close by in seventeenth-century Boston–takes off her sober cap and shakes down her hair. Eliot is pure Arthur Dimmesdale, the impeccable minister, leaving the woman he has loved to face her hard lot alone. Temperamentally, Eliot is a throwback to Dimmesdale with his hand hiding his heart, who secretes desire, fixates it on one woman–and forbids it.

the last book I ever read (The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot's Hidden Muse, excerpt nine)

from The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot's Hidden Muse by Lyndall Gordon:

The most conspicuous layman in the Church, he put his standing to Emily rather grandly. ‘If I had a divorce it would be the greatest misfortune to the Anglican Church since Newman went over to Rome.’ He wrote this from Boston on 16 April 1933 as he proposed a separation, not divorce, to his wife’s family and a lawyer, Mr Bird.

He put it to Emily once more, six months later, that punishment and disgrace would follow a divorce: excommunication, together with estrangement from the clerics who had welcomed his conversion. He would like nothing more than to marry her, but the rulings of the church must come first. Yet if she was to remain a gift of God, what does this mean for the woman who’s the gift? Does she exist in her own right? Emily Hale had no doubt that she did. She took for granted the right to pursue happiness.

the last book I ever read (The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot's Hidden Muse, excerpt eight)

from The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot's Hidden Muse by Lyndall Gordon:

Whenever Emily’s letters stopped flowing, Eliot became agitated. Was she preoccupied with acting? To judge by the succession of plays in which she performed, it can’t have been her career that brought her low. It could have been worry over money. She was not paid for performances in non-commercial theatre, so if she were living on savings her freedom to pursue acting was probably coming to an end and she had to think of supporting herself once more. This, alongside Eliot’s insistence that their relationship must continue to be ‘abnormal’. Three times during 1931 she broke it to him that she was in ‘despair’–an unlikely word from a reserved woman.

Eliot did not discuss the content of her despair. He regarded despair as a sin on the part of a person who presumes to think she deserves better and traced despair to egotism. To Emily, this came as a ‘blast’.

the last book I ever read (The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot's Hidden Muse, excerpt seven)

from The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot's Hidden Muse by Lyndall Gordon:

Emily took time to consider. To be cast as a ‘Lady of silences’ meant a role without a script. Her prime gift was a resonant onstage voice; her own purpose was to pursue a theatre career. In Milwaukee she had put on about five productions a year, including Shakespeare each summer in the woods behind the college. In 1929 she had staged the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet, playing Juliet herself, in one of these outdoor productions. After resigning her post at the end of that academic year, she’d resolved to lecture on American and European theatre, and to give dramatic recitals and programmes of American and foreign poetry while living for extended periods in Back Bay as a companion to a benevolent and wealthy Bostonian called Mary Lee Ware.

During the preceding summer, she had travelled abroad with Margaret Farrand, taking in theatre developments in Germany, France and England. Emily was especially taken with Irish drama in reaction against the dominance of the Abbey Theatre. She was alerted to Seán O’Casey, to a new experimental theatre in Limerick, and to the Gate Theatre in Dublin, newly set up in 1928 to put on modern plays. Her most stimulating experience was to speak to the Gate’s founder, Micheál Mac Liammóir, in his dressing-room. J. J. Hayes, theatre critic for the Irish Times and New York Times, urged her to put on Irish plays in the US.

When Emily re-encountered Eliot in the late summer of 1930, she was not short of parts for the following year, and not really in need of a silent role as a poet’s muse. And like his mother and brother, she was not all that taken with his poems. Her notes for a lecture characterise his work as ‘bitter’. She respected him as an authority on Modernism and pitied his unhappiness.

the last book I ever read (The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot's Hidden Muse, excerpt six)

from The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot's Hidden Muse by Lyndall Gordon:

Like Dickens before him, Eliot tries to induce his audience, each person there, to acknowledge in his secret self a capacity for violence, in the same way that Kurtz faces up to the horror of savagery in himself and all men beneath a veneer of civility. Kurtz has this insight as he confronts mortality. The report, ‘Mistah Kurtz–he dead’, is the epigraph to ‘The Hollow Men’ (one of the last touches to this poem, which Eliot completed and published in November 1925).

It was Eliot’s second use of an epigraph from Heart of Darkness. The first, the original epigraph to The Waste Land, had been ‘The horror! the horror!’ The reader is persuaded to bear witness, like Conrad’s fictional counterpart returned to Europe and moving through a sepulchral city, maddened by his encounter with what lurks in men’s hearts: ‘I daresay,’ he mutters, ‘I was not very well at that time.’ To see brings on mental breakdown.

the last book I ever read (The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot's Hidden Muse, excerpt five)

from The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot's Hidden Muse by Lyndall Gordon:

‘I ought never to have married you,’ Vivienne would say during dreadful nights. ‘I am useless and better dead.’ Her husband would deny this and promise anything, feeling it his fault for being unbalanced. But in the morning it would be just as bad. ‘Oh I am such a trouble to you, I ought to die.’ Then, again, her tears would flow. In a retrospect on the marriage decades later, in 1960, Eliot mirrors her still, saying she ‘nearly was the death of me’. It was a ‘nightmare agony’, but he continued to believe that this conjoined agony protected him from what otherwise would have been a ‘mediocre’ life. He confirms that Vivienne kept him alive as a poet.

the last book I ever read (The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot's Hidden Muse, excerpt four)

from The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot's Hidden Muse by Lyndall Gordon:

Hearing the poem that June, Virginia Woolf had an impulse to rescue so great a poet from toiling as a bank clerk. In league with Lady Ottoline Morrell, she initiated an Eliot Fellowship Fund. Pound too had a rescue scheme called Bel Esprit, to which a New York lawyer, John Quinn, promised a big contribution. Eliot himself ws wary; they would have to collect £3,000 to yield and income of £300 a year (less than his steady rises at the bank to £500 a year by the mid-twenties) and the interest would be subject to fluctuation. No security then for his wife.

His father had not left money outright to his younger son, unlike the bequests to his five other children. The sum was in trust, for us during his lifetime; after that, the capital would revert to the Eliot family. Henry Sr had not liked Vivienne, who’d gone on cadging funds beyond the rent he’d been compelled to pay. As a responsible parent, there had been no alternative, and it had been easier to deplore his son’s wife than ‘my Tom’.

the last book I ever read (The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot's Hidden Muse, excerpt three)

from The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot's Hidden Muse by Lyndall Gordon:

So began a contest for survival. The right to save himself, that moral issue that will haunt him through the next phase of his life, turned on one question and one only: had The Waste Land proved him to be the great poet of his age who, by virtue of that, must grant priority to his gift? Because Eliot’s conscience was so scrupulous and his sense of responsibility for Vivienne so strong, the issue could not be resolved in any simple manner, but an answer came in June 1922 when he disclosed the poem to the Woolfs. They were enthralled when, over dinner, Eliot did not just read The Waste Land but performed it. ‘He sang it & chanted it rhythmed it. It has great beauty and force of phrase,’ Virginia Woolf reports in her diary. ‘What connects it together I’m not so sure … One was left however with some strong emotion.’ This assured showing, a verve unlike the austere public readings, had to do with the Woolfs’ hurrah: an audience of two who had the measure of his achievement and their immediate decision to publish the poem as a book. That very night they planned for it to come out in the autumn. It was deferred by journal publication, but this affirmation from the heart of the English intelligentsia mattered hugely. From now on Eliot was not only ‘Tom’, he was ‘great Tom’, one of the literary ‘Gods’.

the last book I ever read (The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot's Hidden Muse, excerpt two)

from The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot's Hidden Muse by Lyndall Gordon:

Virginia Woolf was the most distinguished of the four Englishwomen who welcomed the poet. Her chief impetus to meet Eliot, backed by her husband, Leonard Woolf, was a result of the Egoist edition of his first volume of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations. Mary’s lover Clive Bell took a dozen copies to Garsington, and there Katherine Mansfield read ‘Prufrock’ aloud to enthusiastic applause. Mansfield, an expatriate herself, understood better than most how insecure Eliot felt, with his side glances and painfully slow speech.

When ‘Prufrock’ came Leonard Woolf’s way, the poem struck him as saying something no one had said before, and as a rarity in that not one line fell below ‘the heights’.

the last book I ever read (The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot's Hidden Muse, excerpt one)

from The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot's Hidden Muse by Lyndall Gordon:

Emily invited Eliot to join her party, along with her friend Margaret Farrand, for Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde at the Boston Opera House on 1 December 1913. This third memorable event (following the charade and stunt show) was independent of the Hinkley connection and momentous enough to provide the earliest scenes for The Waste Land.

The sailors’ chorus on board ship in Act I, as the pair fall in love, was to remain with Eliot and introduce his memory of Emily Hale as ‘the hyacinth girl’. Her effect on him is blind and lasting love. In Act III of the opera, Tristan, bleeding and fatally wounded, needs ‘the healing Lady’; after a delay, Isolde appears but too late to save him. She has come to die with him, and her voice calls him back: ‘his heart swells and, brave and full, pulses in his breast’. This strain too will stay with the poet. The finale of The Waste Land will recall that pulse in the breast as though his own. He would spell out for Emily what followed: ‘After that night at the opera I was completely conscious of it [love], and quite shaken to pieces.’

the last book I ever read (Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country's Hidden Past, excerpt fifteen)

from Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country's Hidden Past by Giles Tremlett:

Catalans were, of course, not all church-burners. Antoní Gaudí, the architect of the Sagrada Familia cathedral which is still rising – its colourful, ceramic-encrusted spires already a symbol of the city – eighty years after he was run over by a tram, was a deeply conservative, religious man. One of his first projects was the restoration of Poblet, which had become a crumbling, vandalized wreck. In later life Gaudí became a pious, ascetic eccentric. He lived on the Sagrada Familia building site, sleeping on a small four-poster bed in the middle of a workshop piled high with plaster models of his ongoing designs. He became a strict vegetarian and turned into a seedy-looking, emaciated, white-bearded old man. ‘We must beg God to punish and then console us,’ he once said. ‘Everyone has to suffer.’ When he wandered in front of the number 30 tram on Barcelona’s Gran Vía, it took a while for someone to recognise him. He died a few days later. Legend has it he died in poverty. His will, however, turned up recently – showing that he still had a pretty pile in the bank.

the last book I ever read (Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country's Hidden Past, excerpt fourteen)

from Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country's Hidden Past by Giles Tremlett:

Art is one of those things Barcelona and Madrid like to squabble over. In the first half of the twentieth century Barcelona produced some of the most remarkable artists of the time. The modernismo of Gaudí and his fellow architects was accompanied by that of artists like Santago Rusiñol and Ramón Casas.They looked to Europe and loved all things modern. Like Gaudí, however, they also looked back at the Romanesque, at the twelfth-century Cistercian monasteries of the Catalan countryside and at Barcelona’s own, unique, Gothic architecture. Their headquarters, in true Spanish style, was a bar – Els Quartre Gats, The Four Cats. A teenage Pablo Picasso who, although born in Málaga, spent his formative years in Barcelona – was welcomed here. One of his first exhibitions sat on the café’s walls.

Picasso had been studying – and his father teaching – at the fine-art school lodged in the top floor of the fourteenth-century Llotja, the old stock exchange. Another pupil there was Joan Miró, who started off painting the countryside and farms of his father’s native Tarragona before moving on to Paris and surrealism.

The mad, mustachioed, paranoid surrealist Salvador Dalí was a notary’s son from that most conservative of Catalan place, Figueres. When Dalí died it was found that he had recently changed his will. Instead of giving his work to the Generalitat, he donated it to the Spanish state. Catalans cried foul, claiming Dalí had been manipulated into changing the will at the last moment. The inventor of the so-called paranoid critical method left behind him a museum installed alongside his old Torre Galatea house. He had topped it with giant eggs and encrusted, on the outside, plaster imitations of Catalan bread rolls. It is now one of the most visted museums in Spain. Dalí is perhaps the last person to have willingly sported a barretina, the sock-length, floppy red beret of the Catalan peasant. Some catalanistas prefer to forget his enthusiasm for Spain. This included highly formative years in the company of the poet Lorca and film-maker Buñuel as a Madrid student. It also included a fawning reverence for Franco.

the last book I ever read (Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country's Hidden Past, excerpt thirteen)

from Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country's Hidden Past by Giles Tremlett:

Taking the valley road up towards Artea, I was reminded that it was not just Bilbao that took to industry. Up and down the narrow, steep valleys of Vizcaya and Guipúzcoa, workshops and small factories, many making machine parts, thrive. A tradition of working iron in small, water-powered ferrerías extended back at least to the fourteenth century – with some three hundred of them in place by the sixteenth century. The Basques had, however, mainly been farming people. Their system of inheritance by primogeniture ensured that property – normally the family farmhouse, the caserío or basseri – remained undivided. The road to Artea followed on of these valleys. Factories, warehouses, workshops and sawmills were dotted along the valley floor. Lone cyclists, wearing the lurid Lycra colours of some local team, pedaled uphill through the truck fumes. Basques are as obsessed by bicycles as they are by balls. The five-time Tour de France winner Miguel Induráin emerged from these pedal-obsessed valleys. His imitators continue to risk life and limb amongst the traffic every day.

the last book I ever read (Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country's Hidden Past, excerpt twelve)

from Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country's Hidden Past by Giles Tremlett:

Spanish literature has provided us with the greatest honourable fool of all times. Don Quixote de la Mancha, that ‘light and mirror of all knight-errantry’ who is now 400 years old, was a man obsessed by ‘the grievances he proposed to redress, the wrongs he intended to rectify, the exorbitance to correct, the abuses to reform, and the debts to discharge’.

Aznar, with his willingness to get into a fight and refusal to budge on matters he perceived to be of honour, had more than a few Quixotic characteristics himself. The temptation to draw parallels between Don Quixote turning windmills into giants and Aznar, after the Madrid bombings, turning Al-Qaida into ETA are almost irresistible, though there is nothing humorous about the latter. Don Quixote was deaf to Sancho Panza’s warnings before he charged the windmills. ‘One may easily see that you are not versed in the business of adventures: they are giants; and, if you are afraid, get aside and pray, whilst I engage them in a fierce and unequal combat,’ he said before charging at them and being knocked cold by a windmill sail.