Lyndall Gordon - The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliots Hidden Muse

Also By Lyndall Gordon

THE IMPERFECT LIFE OF T. S. ELIOT

VIRGINIA WOOLF: A WRITERS LIFE

SHARED LIVES

CHARLOTTE BRONT: A PASSIONATE LIFE

HENRY JAMES: HIS WOMEN AND HIS ART

VINDICATION: A LIFE OF MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT

LIVES LIKE LOADED GUNS: EMILY DICKINSON AND HER FAMILYS FEUDS

DIVIDED LIVES: DREAMS OF A MOTHER AND DAUGHTER

OUTSIDERS: FIVE WOMEN WRITERS WHO CHANGED THE WORLD

THE HYACINTH GIRL

T. S. Eliots Hidden Muse

LYNDALL GORDON

Copyright 2023 by Lyndall Gordon

First American Edition 2023

First published in the UK in 2022 by Virago Press.

All rights reserved

Extracts from Valerie Eliot, John Haffenden, and Hugh Haughton (editors), The Letters of T. S. Eliot: vols. 16 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), all writings by T. S. Eliot, introductions, and editorial material 1988, 2009 by Set Copyrights Ltd and all writings by Vivien Eliot 1988, 2009 by The Estate of Valerie Eliot, are reprinted by permission of Yale University Press. Excerpts from La Figlia che Piange, Gerontion, A Cooking Egg, The Waste Land and Elegy in the Waste Land Manuscript, Ash Wednesday, Animula, Coriolan, Lines for an Old Man, and Four Quartets from Collected Poems, 19091962 by T. S. Eliot. Copyright 1963 by T. S. Eliot. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

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Jacket design: Tree Abraham

Jacket photographs: John Loengard, T.S. Eliot, Cambridge,

MA, 1956, courtesy of Loengard Photography LLC; photo of

Emily Hale, 1914, Smith College Special Collections

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

ISBN 978-1-324-00280-2

ISBN 978-1-324-00281-9 (ebk.)

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

www.wwnorton.com

W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., 15 Carlisle Street, London W1D 3BS

In memory of three Eliot readers: Rhoda Press Walt Litz Helen Gardner

Section 1

Section 2

THE HYACINTH GIRL

As the greatness of T. S. Eliot spread, the public saw English women at his side: Vivienne Haigh-Wood, a flamboyant wife who ended up in an asylum; a church-going confidante, Mary Trevelyan; and, late in his life, Valerie Fletcher, a devoted secretary, who married him. These were his visible ties. Yet out of sight, by design, was an American called Emily Hale, an actor and drama teacher for whom he concealed a lasting love. She was the hyacinth girl in his poem The Waste Land, as he told her in a love-letter eight years later.

He sent in all 1,131 letters to her, more than he had written to anyone else, and insisted on the longest embargo, by far, on any of his writings: fifty years from the death of the survivor. These letters reveal a relationship at the core of Eliots creativity, spanning his life from the age of twenty-four to his late sixties. She was the first of four women to take part in the poets transformations as expatriate, convert and, finally, a man made for love.

Eliot protected his privacy in a male world of college, work, clubs and coteries. But these four women came closer and saw him in ways men did not. All recorded what they experienced. Most outspoken was Vivienne, an early supporter whose voice he came to fear. She left her autobiographical sketches and diaries to the Bodleian Library. His sturdy companion in prayer, Mary Trevelyan, was explicit in her memoir about falling in love with Eliot and her difficulties with him. And Miss Fletcher fulfilled all he asked of her and continued throughout her life to guard and perpetuate his legacy. These women felt a profound attraction no ordinary emotion that made for a permanent bond on their parts. Each of the four who entered Eliots private life was keenly perceptive and rare in her own way. This book tells their stories.

Foremost in his life, we now see, was Emily Hale, the hyacinth girl haunting the memory of a man whose life is a wasteland. Throughout his poems and plays he created roles for her as the Weeping Girl, the hyacinth girl, a Rose of memory, a Lady of silences, martyr and star of the stage. Emily was to live on as his creation, and heard from the poet where she was in his lines. She was the secret sharer of the hot moments of inception, the marvellous words that came to him, part of the drama he conceived and played out, before writing lines to last beyond his time. To read Eliots letters to Emily during the thirties and early forties is to enter poems in the making.

His letters to her grant a new lens: here is an Eliot who is intensely ardent. Among his love-letters are masterpieces in a form unexpected from a man so austere. It is as though he drew Emily into the hearth of a secret self, where he fired emotions vital to his art. He wished her to match his honesty, to call out an Emily of fire and violence, but violence, certainly, was not her style.

Her side of the correspondence he destroyed, except for eighteen letters. The full number of Emilys letters to Eliot must have been about the same as his own, for he expected regular letters, and if an awaited one did not arrive, he sometimes cabled her. There must have been, in all, a thousand from her, proof that the Lady of silences did utter opinions and questions as well as words of kindness and compassion, and we can hear this because Eliot often relayed what she said in his replies. With the appearance of these letters a curtain rose. She spoke.

Her voice was her prime gift: she taught speech as well as drama and that voice comes to us, ironically, through Eliots own letters. She was spirited, playful, sometimes hurt, always resisting idealisation, for she wished to be loved for herself.

Emily Hales friend Margaret Farrand married a Princeton professor, Willard Thorp. Together, the Thorps were Emilys guides as she mulled over what to do with the trove of papers by the great poet whod loved her. They persuaded her that Princeton would keep her treasure safe. In December 1956 the papers were placed in fourteen boxes, sealed with steel bands and stashed away for future generations. For Eliots sake, there was no talk, no announcement. Emily told the Thorps that only about eight people (including the two of them, two librarians and of course Eliot himself) knew of her donation.

Thirteen boxes of Eliots letters to Emily Hale, held for over sixty years in the archives at Princeton. A fourteenth box contains her papers, including a short memoir (drafted in 1957 and revised in 1965).

Eliot died in January 1965, Emily Hale nearly five years later in October 1969. So it was that in October 2019 the steel bands were cut, and the letters saw the light; they were opened to readers on 2 January 2020.

I first heard of the letters in 1972 when, as a student in New York, I went to discuss Eliot with the chair of the English department at Princeton. A. Walton Litz told me of Emily Hale and the priceless gift sequestered in Firestone Library. Then he brought in Emilys friend Willard Thorp, whose wife Margaret had died the year after Emily. The two women, Emily and Margaret, had exchanged confidences, the scholars said: these women had taken it in turn to write every fortnight, on an understanding that each would destroy the others letters. Walt Litz and Willard Thorp hinted more than they said about a mystery in Eliots life. I felt privileged to be there, a bit open-mouthed.