Please consider the following prose as a ’Talking Heads’ example, based on the facts of Emily Hale’s life which are publicly available but which have been reimagined into a dialogue.
“ Let us go then, you and I and share the journey of my life with the poet whom we all knew as Tom. We met in 1912. He was 24 and I was 21. At least that’s the best I can recall although he claimed he met me years ago when he was 16. I don’t remember and it seems doubtful I would have forgotten meeting him. Teenage girls have crushes but they seldom lead to bliss. I’ll come back to that later.
I thought he was really nice as a friend very sympathetic and kind but also a bit lonely. I met him through his cousins ,the Hinkleys .Eleanor Hinkley was a dear friend of mine. We grew up together, she was such a fun friend – here she is as a youngster , described as a playmate of Toms, I think this was taken outside her house in Eastern Point .
I would say he got on well with Eleanor and he didn’t seem to have many friends outside the family. A very posh American though. “Boston Brahmin” as my uncle described him. At first I thought something Indian or of a non Christian faith but soon found out it simply meant he could trace his family back to the early settlers. And these Brahmins, they have a strong tendency towards formal dress. Oh I noticed that right away, and a few years later, when his much acclaimed Prufrock was published, I immediately saw the resemblance to ‘my morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin, my necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin.’ Perhaps his lineage gave him a responsibility towards formal dress. Perhaps there was a responsibility stitched into the worsted wool along with the leather buttons. I don’t know. We never discussed it. I certainly gave him respect. A man three years older than me, far better educated what with both Harvard and Sorbonne on his calling card, good family, well travelled ( in my eyes Paris, which I assumed to be filled with smoky cafes and endless intellectual conversations, was to this American girl an exotic location).
Me? Initially I only went to Miss Porters School and thereafter became a speech and drama teacher. But later, I took to the stage where I was much acclaimed, although not by Tom. Mother, an invalid in a sanatorium since I was five, had no say in my future, or even any interest. And Father considered I wasn’t strong enough for college. Probably expected to marry me off anyway. Did you know that in Harvard they ascribe three categories to eligible young women; Deb, Pre-Deb and LOPA.? Eleanor Hinkley was most certainly a Deb but the category I fell into was known as LOPA ( Left On Papas Hands.)
Ha! That’s what they expected. Well, they were wrong. None of the expectations daunted me anyway. I have had a brilliant career in the arts and I still maintain I was always, right from the beginning, more worldly- wise than he was.
The young Tom enjoyed opera and I remember inviting him to a performance of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde in 1913, before he went to Oxford, for what was to have been a fellowship year. Many years later he told people that he was “shaken to pieces” by the opera, He must have been because nine years after that performance he incorporated his memories into The Waste Land.
Anyway, in those early days we spent hours together walking, talking, comparing experiences, before he surprised me with his declaration of love. I know! Just as he was going to Oxford, England, for a year’s fellowship, promising to write, he unexpectedly declared that he loved me. Saying he is in love with me. It was completely out of the blue, embarrassing, I couldn’t believe it at first, we’ve had great companionship but that is all, and it didn’t seem as though we had spent an enormous amount of time together. Maybe that’s not altogether true as I recall our friendship and the significant (to me anyway) times he was with me. Maybe I misunderstood what love was. And Tom seemed very disappointed when I couldn’t reciprocate. Absolutely done in actually. I said I want you as a friend but nothing more. I wondered then, and I wonder now, whether had he returned to the US, I’d come to love him sooner and would commit to him as he had to me in Chestnut Hill. Although, to be fair, he hadn’t mentioned marriage at all.
I sometimes read the lines he later wrote ’and would it have been worth it after all, after the cups, the marmalade, the tea, among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me , would it have been worthwhile to have bitten off the matter with a smile?’ And I wonder now,did he mean us, or did he mean his later loves?
So you see, I was always part of his picture, our shared experiences not to say even our shared love, for I did grow to love him later, were all reflected and mirrored in his work.
In those early days, he told me a lot about one friend, Jan, a young man of similar age he’d met at the Sorbonne. Tom and he were together in Paris for just one year but their friendship made a lasting impression. Jan was a medical officer. He went to the war and died at Gallipoli, saving a wounded soldier. But before that tragic event I saw something Tom had written, I think it was to Jan; he used often to sketch his letters out before finalizing and here is what I found, it was really beautiful ‘now can you understand the quantity of love that warms me towards you, so that I forget our vanity and treat the shadows like the solid thing.’ And of course the way the man died made him a hero. How could any other friendship live up to that? That letter was so full of emotion it surprised me. How could the Tom I knew, who was fairly restrained emotionally, face to face, express himself in that way?
I began to admire Tom deeply the better I got to know him. Of course much later, having received a thousand letters from him over the years I kind of knew what to expect. Before he went to Oxford he had begun his Prufrock and when he let me read some of it, it opened up his character. It moved me every time. There is no doubt he loved his friend and woven into his poetry I could sense his futility of war. . I confess though that I had been a little surprised when he dedicated his Prufrock to Jan. But he was terribly cut up about his death. I think he loved him more than any of us knew.
And alongside that he described a growing awareness of loneliness, and of ageing, pinpointed by his lines ‘ I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. ‘
I was saddened by the final lines ‘I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me.’ It moved me to the point of tears the first time I read it. And why did he think they would not sing for him anyway?
I’ve shed many tears over Tom. I never wanted him to become one of those people who are saddened too deeply by the troubles of the world, love, loneliness and war in general. Or by a sense of his own inadequacy in particular. I think he probably was though.
In 1914 Tom left me and Harvard, both of us unfinished business! We had shared so many events together. Music as well as theater. In particular I remember well the stunt show which Eleanor wrote. It was an interpretation of Jane Austin’s Emma. So he was Mr Woodhouse, and I was Mrs Elton. Great fun. My stage career started ! And later he came to watch me as I took the lead role in ‘The Mollusc’ and he came to see me perform in ’Twelfth Night’.
Yes, he supported me by his presence but I never really knew whether he admired my performances or not.
He was, initially, supportive from afar also and would send flowers when I was performing so I’d know he had been there with me in spirit. After he left we kept in touch. To my delight he sent regular letters, but my conviction of his love for me shattered when I learned that five months following that unexpected declaration he met a young English woman in Oxford and that summer, after only several weeks of meeting, he had married her. Her name was Vivienne Haigh- Wood. So, he professed his love for me in November and by the following June had married a complete outsider!
An English woman whom no one knew or had ever heard of. Maybe I was the one he thought of when he wrote “If one, settling a pillow by her head should say: “That is not what I meant at all, that is not it, not at all”. But he never settled a pillow by my head so perhaps it was she.
Well he wasn’t coming back, was he now? He hadn’t really loved me had he now? Maybe he needed some anchor in a foreign land. Maybe he needed to be loved or maybe she swept him off his feet. But he wasn’t really a swept off feet kind of guy. At least I didn’t think so and I’d say I knew him better than most.
Fair play to him, he didn’t write much to me over the next fifteen years but he invited me to their lovely home in London in 1930. I spent a most entertaining and enjoyable evening ( enjoyable for us all I believe.) Tom wrote afterwards thanking me for my company and saying Vivienne liked me enormously ‘ quite infatuated’ were his words!
Viv was as vivvy as her name. Lively, dramatic, beautiful and good fun although a bit like holding a hand grenade. I did notice her slender pale arms, and thought of his lines ‘Arms that are braceleted and white and bare ( But in the lamplight downed with light brown hair)’ maybe Viv, maybe not. Anyway shortly after, Tom sent me three books and a most ambiguous letter where he begins by telling me ‘I’m heartily sorry for the mistake I made and sorry every day and every night of my life for the ruin it has made but I am not sorry for loving and adoring you for it has given the very best I have had in my life.’ My heart rose at the beginning and plummeted at the conclusion when he promised to write no more. Of course, you are beginning to now know that was not untypical of Tom. Whilst he wrote very little between the youthful days when he declared love for me and until we met again in 1930, he made sure I always knew he was there, like the solid shadow he wrote about in 1913. And following saying he would write no more he began to correspond in earnest. Letters arrived sometimes daily. With increasing regularity. In 1931 he wrote me ninety one letters! Ninety one! Can you believe it? And how l treasured those letters, thought them a private precious exchange between close friends, if not lovers. But I was somewhat confused when I read the lecture he gave at Yale ( in 1933) when he described the ideal letter writing companion as someone of the opposite sex but not someone with whom the letter writer is in love. He said “There should be sufficient understanding so that a good deal need not be said.” He made it sound as though letter writing was a form of therapy for the letter writer. I didn’t like that.
Eventually, we began to spend time together and he actually filed for a separation from Viv in 1933, which I heard made her even more volatile and unstable . And I wasn’t the only one who had felt that. Their friend Virginia Woolf described her as insane to the point of sanity. Sadly, it was not long before I heard that she had been committed to a sanatorium ,thereafter I think I felt he was less ’married’ than when they had been living together and so I didn’t feel the need to be so discrete about spending more time with him alone.
We were obscure as a couple. I needed to clarify our situation and in 1935 I wrote and told him I loved him. By then we had met many times, in Canada, Boston and England. We had known and loved each other in ways which were not altogether concurrent and to what degree we were ever intimate I will never tell you or anyone else.
A fly in our ointment was his newfound religion .In 1927 he had converted to Catholicism. Anglo of course, not Roman, that would have been a step too far for Unitarian Tom. It enabled him to declare that although his marriage was impossible ( poor Viv’s mental state was thought unlikely to improve) he wouldn’t be free to marry until she died , claiming divorce was impossible for a Catholic. Of course, this was only partly true. I well understood that although the Catholic church will not recognize a remarriage whilst the spouse is still alive, it has no hand to play in the legality of divorce. But that was Tom all over. He and Viv had married in a registry office, so the marriage was invalid anyway in the eyes of the church.
Maybe it kept him safe, gave him breathing space. But it didn’t deter me from declaring my love.
My uncle and aunt ‘ the Perkins’s’ had a home in Chipping Camden, Gloucestershire, England and he stayed there with us a few times between 1935 and 1939. We travelled to Chipping Norton once, when we were staying together in Chipping Camden, and he was inspired to write Burnt Norton, which he later told me was dedicated to me although I never saw a formal dedication. I think it was, like so much of our relationship, a matter between ourselves. I later spoke to him about the lines : ‘Down the passage which we did not take towards the door we never opened. Into the rose garden.’ But I never knew whether we were the rose garden or whether the poem was simply inspired by Robert Frost’s epic poem , The Road Less Travelled. That was around the time when he wroteOld Possom’s book of cats. I often wondered did he feel more frivolous and light hearted around that time?
Well naturally,during those years between 1930 and 1947 I was of the understanding that the only barrier to our shared, if not necessarily conjugal, future was Viv. Of course I was saddened to hear of her death in 1947 and unsure as to where that final act in the Tom-Viv story would bring us. When he wrote to me the very day she died ‘I am thankful I shall see you in April so that we can talk about the future, for a year hence’, I assumed from that our future would be together and I was filled with anticipation. At last! We both had declared love and we were both free to commit.
And of course there was to be no rose garden, at least not one which included me because a few days later, in fact the day of Viv’s funeral, he wrote a less promising letter ‘What has surged up in me is the suffering of the past, the bad conscience and the horror. With an intense dislike of sex in any form. I cannot, at this moment, face or think of any future except just going on.’ Had he been a husband who has just buried a much loved wife after a happy marriage I would say that was completely appropriate. But coming from Tom, hot on the heels of his continued and many years long of letter writing and loving visits to me, he sounded extremely conflicted. He may well have felt guilt I cannot say. But anyway that is what he wrote.
And throughout that year, the year Viv died, he wrote me over thirty letters and then at last he became clear. In 1945 he wrote again, reinforcing his earlier declaration, but more kindly ‘ I should never want to marry anyone else: that would be for me as impossible a change of personality as abandoning my Christian beliefs and principles. But there is nothing more to look forward to or hope for than what has been.’
I cried then. I knew ‘it’ was over, whatever ‘it’ had been. He said I was his muse, I think in many ways he was mine too. My love of the stage, acting, speaking the words of gifted playwrights, our mutual love of literature as well as our deep and sincere Christian faith had kept both of us steady. But I did cry and it took a long time for me to come to terms with the finality. I took me until 1947, on a visit to a dear friend, Emily, that I was able to put into words what I’d known for the past two years.
‘ he loves me, but not in the way of men less gifted. i.e. with complete love through a married relationship’. I understood it was quite clear that he had decided to live a celibate, single life. By now he was very famous, of course, the darling of the publishing house Faber & Faber, and his name was on everyone’s lips, he was a Nobel prize winner. But he had still been my Tom.
You can imagine my surprise then, when I learned he had married his secretary Valerie. Ok it was ten years on, but he was sixty eight then and she was only thirty. I heard she’d met him in 1949 and had been working on him ( and for him, actually) for eight years. What was he thinking? He married her when she was only a couple of years older than Viv had been when they married. Was he trying to redress some past mistake? Relive a youth he never really had? And what about this earlier declared aversion to a sex life? That’s hardly what a thirty year old seeks.
According to rumour she had been a fan of his since her early teens and once she left school had wangled herself a job at Faber & Faber so she could meet him. Do you reckon she had to work quite hard to turn him around from living the life of a sexual hermit? Whatever she had, I obviously didn’t.
Well anyway, I know very little about her and desire to know even less. I was heartbroken in 1965 when I heard he had died. And to learn, via Valerie’s announcement, that this wonderful, gifted, creative man whom I loved, should have spent his evenings ‘over cheese and scrabble’ in his later years is quite beyond me.
Because of course, the conqueror always writes the history. I fear the world may never know the truth behind the loves of Tom Eliot. She had all his letters from me, and chose what to release or retain. So she had the last word. If Valerie says ‘ he obviously needed a happy marriage. He wouldn’t die until he had it’ who are we to argue? “
Mary McClarey 2025.