‘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.
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