Cheating on Tom

When TS Eliot met his first wife in 1915, she picked up his style of dancing quickly; he found her " charmingly sophisticated, without being hardened" and her name " amusing" (she was in two minds whether she preferred "Vivien" or " Vivienne"). They married within three months of meeting. He wrote to his brother a week after the ceremony: "I feel more alive than I ever have before". She seems to have been less invigorated, because the same letter adds, ominously: "Vivien is not very well at present."

They were married for 32 years, though Eliot formally separated from her in 1932 and they met after that date rarely, briefly and only on account of her impassioned persistence in the belief that he wanted, really, to return to her. Passing judgment on other people's relationships was a staple of polite society then as it is now, though they spoke of marriages as "unhappy" and we prefer more antiseptic terms such as "dysfunctional" for our tittle-tattle.

When the Eliots were alive, Vivien was usually the "scapegoat" for their failures in reciprocity, as Carole Seymour-Jones says with characteristic infelicity in her choice of words (a scapegoat had to be without blemish and carried a society's sins without having itself sinned). Their social circle revolved around him, and his friends took what they supposed to be "his side" in pointing the finger and arching the tongue at her.

There was quite a lot of room for adverse comment on her behaviour. Over the years, her early liveliness soured; she became erratic and panicky; her health (like his) was precarious and not improved by the array of medication with which she was dosed according to the "best available advice". She seems to have picked quarrels with him as avidly and haplessly as one might pick at a scab, hoping to draw blood from behind his ever more sedulous self-containment. I think he remembered what they had shared when in Little Gidding (1942) he alluded to the poisoned garment which ended the misery Hercules and his wife had made for each other:

Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove The intolerable shirt of flame.

And now Carole Seymour-Jones has appointed herself Vivien's champion and comes to set the record even more crooked in Painted Shadow by convicting Eliot of an assortment of horrendous misdemeanours. It has not occurred to this biographer that if Eliot was the arrogant, miserly, deceitful, careerist, misogynistic, closeted, exploitative creep who appears in these pages, then Vivien was either an imbecile or subject to severe delusions throughout the time she clung to him, from the age of 27 until her death. You cannot travesty him, as this book does, without demeaning her.

We are told, for example, that Eliot wrote in September 1914 that "the Germans are perfectly justified in violating Belgium" but not that he continued "the English are more than justified in turning to defend a treaty", nor that the previous sentence reads, "I am anxious that Germany should be beaten." Cheating like this, with reference to published sources is reckless, and diminishes to zero the confidence a reader can have in Seymour-Jones's claims about unpublished material.

She supposes Eliot was "jealous" of Katherine Mansfield's success; when you turn to the footnotes for evidence, you find only that " Virginia Woolf confessed: "I was jealous of her writing". It is said that Eliot "roundly condemned" his wife's "immorality"; there is no quotation to support this anywhere in the book. Seymour-Jones does find "withering scorn" in the depiction of a character she imagines is based on Vivien in Eliot's story, Eeldrop and Appleplex, but her reason for supposing Vivien to be Eliot's target is that the character longs "to burn ever with a hard gem-like flame" and these words "bear a striking resemblance" to something Vivien wrote. They bear an even more striking resemblance to the celebrated conclusion of Pater's The Renaissance, which Eliot is quoting and making fun of, and which Vivien had probably read, though her biographer hasn't.

Painted Shadow is often assisted to lurid hypotheses by ignorance. One of the reasons given for thinking Eliot was gay is that he often quoted from Saint John of the Cross, whom Seymour-Jones mistakes, despite the 1,500 years between them, for Saint John "the disciple whom Jesus loved" (and of course we all know what that means).

Her reluctance to read Eliot's writings with even a decent minimum of care skews her account of more than just the poet. "The recurrent image in The Waste Land, to which Eliot returns obsessively, is of Verdenal walking towards him in the Luxembourg Gardens, his arms full of lilacs," she informs us. Verdenal is her candidate for Eliot's great, lost, gay lover, or rather, she supports his candidacy which was first proposed nearly 50 years ago and which remains unsupported by anything but clamorous insinuation. The Waste Land mentions lilacs once and once only, in its second line, and there they are in nobody's arms, so Eliot does not "return" to this non-existent " recurrent" image, whether obsessively or otherwise.

Vivien, however, returned to Eliot's poems in ways her biographer fails to recognise. In the mid-1920s, Vivien was happier than usual, writing pieces for The Criterion which she helped Eliot edit. Seymour-Jones does not see how often these pieces quote Eliot, as Vivien's "settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl" in one of her Letters of the Moment quotes Prufrock. In bitter wretchedness a decade later, after Eliot had decided he would live with her no longer, Vivien wrote in her diary that she was "driven out to tramp the streets, this way and that until I get such a horror of the streets that the streets only understand".

Yet even then Tom had not abandoned her entirely, for these words of hers are also, as you will not learn from Painted Shadow, words of his, from more than 20 years earlier: "You had such a vision of the street / As the street hardly understands." (Preludes, III). In her mind, he was still talking to her, though, as usual, she didn't quite hear him right.