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’.