A woman abandoned: Vivienne Eliot

Carole Seymour Jones wrote a biography of Vivienne Eliot (called Vivien for much of the book) becuse she believed, in common with various others who had known the first wife of TS Eliot, that Vivienne was not mad and should not have been incarcerated in an asylum from 1938 until her death in 1947.

 

The image of the crazy jittery Vivienne of Tom & Viv has haunted modern literary history. There is no doubt that Vivienne was extremely neurotic. She was born Vivienne Haigh-Wood, daughter of an artist belonging to the Royal Academy, a prosperous man who also had a number of Irish properties. When Eliot as a young American at Merton, Oxford, first met Vivienne as a ‘River Girl’ fond of punting on the Cherwell on summmer afternoons, he thought of her as upper middle class. She was not — and friends commented that he had married the ‘landlady’s daughter’. She was not a virgin either. Her own mother had blocked a previous marrige on the grounds of Vivienne’s ‘moral insanity’.

 

But Eliot married the lively moody Vivienne after knowing her only three months. She had menstrual troubles (poly-cystic ovaries?) and bled profusely for weeks of each month, stealing the soiled bed sheets from hotels so that she could launder them and send them back. Eliot was fastidious and easily revolted. He may have had an intimate relationship with his handsome friend Jean Verdenel, who died in the First World War at Gallipoli and became the model of Phlebas the Phoenician in The Waste Land.

 

Within months of marrying, Vivienne was having an affair with philosopher and philanderer Bertrand Russell who helped out the impoverished Eliots with monetary loans and by providing a cottage near London they could share with him, while playing the role of avuncular mentor to the young poet. Seymour Jones goes to pains to indicate that TS Eliot was never as badly off as he claimed to be and often accepted money from friends under false pretences.

 

Illnesses and the michief-making of Bloomsbury made the Eliots miserable — a visit from his 77-year-old New Englnd mother, terrifyingly energetic and implacable in her opposition to Vivienne, may have been one precipitating event that made Eliot decide he needed a life apart from his ill but fiercely loyal wife.

 

And she does sound like a handful. Despite the biographer’s best efforts, Vivienne Eliot comes across as extravagant, self-absorbed, prying, chattering, neurotic and a nightmare to be around. Just reading her letters is enough to fill the reader with exasperation. Yes, it was a tragic life — a waste– and the incarceration was brutal. These days she might have been medicatd with greater success. But without having her put away and locked up, Tom Eliot would have gone mad. Her family despaired of her. Her friends could not bear the sight of her. Madness is not romantic in reality: the gibbering, the endless dramatising and psycho-somatic illneses, the obsessive  and uncesing chatter — and sadly I did feel that Vivienne was much iller than her biographer mkes out. She may have been bipolar nd then had psychotic episodes, perhaps brought on by the chloral that produced dark red and purple blotchines all over her skin.

 

And Vivienne Eliot continues unrehabilitated as the madwoman in the attic, a Victorian ghost lingering on into the 20th century, to be pitied but still seen as hopeless and a nuisance despite herself and all the best efforts of her biographer.