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Eliot’s Muse

“Each of the women in Eliot’s life brought out a facet of the enigma he presented.” Four women were in the public spotlight during Eliot’s life: Vivienne Haigh-Wood, Mary Trevelyan, Valerie Fletcher, and Emily Hale. Three were Englishwomen. Emily Hale was the lone American. Hale’s public time with Eliot was more substantially hidden due to the space between them and Eliot’s cultivation of his eventual posthumous reputation with his second-wife, Valerie, before he died. But as Lyndall Gordon reveals in her new book, The Hyacinth Girl, the recent release of 1,131 surviving letters between Eliot and Emily show they had the closest relationship of all even though never married. Emily Hale, not Vivienne, Mary, or Valerie, was Eliot’s muse.
Insights into Eliot’s poetry has a long and storied history; even before his death explorations and elucidations on Eliot’s poetry were captivating readers and publishers. Gordon’s book isn’t really a work of criticism or critical insight into his poetry. Instead, it opens insights into Eliot’s personal life, his life with women (especially Emily Hale), and how Eliot wrote passionately to his childhood Americans sweetheart destined to remain forever apart. He confided to her some of his innermost secrets about his writings—revealing just how much trust he placed in her and valued their correspondence.
Insofar that Gordon attempts to offer an insight into Eliot’s poetry, it is through reading his writings chronologically as “a spiritual autobiography” that is illuminated by his letters to Emily. Thus, the great value in Gordon’s work is revealing the extent of Eliot’s correspondence with Emily, how Emily influenced—both consciously and subconsciously—some of the characters and creative moments of Eliot’s most famous works. Emily really was Eliot’s Beatrice as he journeyed away from America and American Unitarianism to England and the Church of England.
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While at Harvard, “Eliot often saw Emily Hale at the Hinkley house.” She was a near perfect match made in heaven; so one would have thought. She loved art and drama and had an angelic singing voice. Eliot and Emily would even see Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde together at the Boston Opera House—how fitting, all things considered, in retrospect. One would have figured this artsy friendship would have blossomed into romance. Looking back on their early days, Emily Hale wrote in 1957 that Eliot claimed he loved her but never brought up courtship or marriage. Then he vanished.
When Eliot left America and ventured to England to continue his Harvard studies at Oxford (which he never completed), his desire to escape the American Gomorrah (as conceptualized by Eliot) led him to marry Vivienne Haigh-Wood, the sometimes crass, crude, and vulgar Englishwoman who would become Eliot’s estranged wife even during the early years of their marriage. In his letters, Eliot confided to Emily that he married her not out of passionate romance but out of a need to shed his American identity and embrace the English identity he longed for—marriage with an English woman with such deep and important cultural and intellectual connections was perfect for Eliot. However, it made him miserable. And in that misery he realized he was “still in love with Emily Hale.”
Eliot the American expatriate turned adopted Englishman is a story we all know. After all, America likes to claim him because of his birth. England claims him for his stature as a poet laureate and, arguably, for being the most important English poet of twentieth century who ensured the mainstream acceptance of modernist poetry. Yet the story of Eliot trying to escape his American past and embrace an English future, quite the turning on the head of the old trope of old country England and new world America, is complicated by the revelations of Eliot’s love for Emily, his yearning to see her and her him. The more he became English, the more he looked to the All-American girl that was Emily Hale.
Despite conversion and British citizenship, Eliot’s life remained in a rut. His marriage with Vivienne, as mentioned, made him miserable. Her illnesses, ailments, and medical expenses brought him to exhaustion—physically and spiritually. Though an acclaimed poet after the publication of The Waste Land, he was still working a day job as a banker. In this bleak melancholy of an insufferable marriage and a less than artistic career life, Eliot leaned on Emily and wrote a treasure trove of letters expressing his sentiment, his anxiety, and his comfort in her. She returned the favor. The fact that Eliot openly admitted such deep and personal truths about himself, ranging from his egotism to miserable love life, to Emily, shows the extent of trust and closeness of their relationship.
When Emily made her first visit to London, the love Eliot had for her was fully revealed. They not only shared star-crossed garden and city walks with each other, they eventually shared a kissed. “The sight of her,” Gordon writes, “dazed him.” Even in their respective mid-life crises, the two separated and agonized lovers clearly cherished the limited time they had with one another. Whenever Emily was in England or whenever Eliot was in America, the two never failed to reunite and reconnect. If one didn’t know better, one would have thought they were married.
This was the expectation of Eliot’s closest family members. With Vivienne’s mental health so deteriorated, Emily thought Eliot would ask her hand in marriage. So too did Eliot’s sisters. Eliot balked. His conversion to Anglicanism, specifically the Anglo-Catholic variety, meant that he went to great lengths to explain the sacramental theology of Anglo-Catholicism, how marriage was a permanent sacramental bond and how Emily’s Unitarianism (the same Unitarianism that Eliot grew up in) meant that they were spiritually very far apart. Eliot’s Anglicanism, more Roman Catholic than traditional (Reformed) Anglican, caused Emily a lot of consternation. She thought him fickle. Even after Vivienne’s death which freed Eliot for a new possible marriage, Eliot refused to offer his hand to her.
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After rebuffing Emily and preventing any possibility of marriage, Eliot’s relationship with Mary Trevelyan and Valerie Fletcher take center stage though Emily’s ghost still lingers in the background. In Mary, Eliot had a spiritual companion and not just an intellectual companion. Her Anglicanism mirrored Eliot’s unlike Emily’s Unitarianism, and their mutual love of art, drama, and poetry brought a happiness that was so often missing in his life. But just as Mary might have thought that Eliot would propose, the great poet married his devoted young secretary instead.
Valerie Fletcher was a fangirl turned second wife. An admirer of Eliot’s since her childhood, she secured her dream job by becoming Eliot’s secretary. With Vivienne dead and marriage with Emily out of the question, the aging and lonely Eliot found refuge with Valerie. Emily’s ghost, though, had not entirely vanished.
Marriage with Valerie offered Eliot an opportunity in “rewriting the past.” With Valerie by his side and a brief new vigor for life, Eliot’s marriage with Valerie allowed him “to take Emily out of his story and centre his new wife as the one and only partner and chosen carrier of his works.” The ghost of Emily Hale was brushed away. This is the Eliot we have largely known since his death. The letters to Emily Hale, however, reveal a different story. The Hyacinth Girl, so superbly written by Lyndall Gordon, tells that story.
From the Hyacinth girl of The Waste Land to Celia in The Cocktail Party, the letters of T.S. Eliot to Emily Hale and Emily Hale to T.S. Eliot reveal the extent of Emily’s heart and shadow over Eliot’s poetry and dramatic compositions. Even Eliot’s oddity of wearing a white rose (supposedly symbolizing his support for Richard III and the House of York), was actually motivated by his relationship with Emily, “Eliot’s mention of Bosworth Field shortly after putting an end to Hale’s future suggests that his white rose had more to do with Shakespeare than history.” Gordon’s splendidly written biography of Eliot and Emily reveals their unconsummated medieval romance. They were living a drama, a Wagnerian drama, a Shakespearean drama, a song sung by the Troubadours, a song sung by themselves that the world finally gets to hear and read.

 

The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot’s Hidden Muse
By Lyndall Gordon
New York: Norton, 2022; 512pp
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Paul Krause is the Editor-in-Chief of VoegelinView. He is a writer, podcaster, and the author of Finding Arcadia: Wisdom, Truth, and Love in the Classics (Academica Press, 2023) and The Odyssey of Love: A Christian Guide to the Great Books (Wipf and Stock, 2021). Educated at Baldwin Wallace University, Yale, and the University of Buckingham, he is a frequent writer on the arts, classics, literature, religion, and politics for numerous newspapers, magazines, and journals. You can follow him on Twitter: Paul Krause.

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