An American college teacher of drama and speech, Emily Hale donated 1,131 letters — T. S. Eliot's side of their twenty-seven-year correspondence — to the Princeton University Library in 1956 with the provision that they be held under seal until 2020. Eliot destroyed her letters to him in 1957, after marrying, at age sixty-eight, his thirty-year-old secretary, Valerie Fletcher. From 1930, when his correspondence with Hale began, until 1947, when his first wife, Vivienne, died in an insane asylum (to which, against her will, her brother had committed her in 1938), Eliot gave Hale every sign that he would rejoice to marry her if only the Church of England, which he had joined in 1927, permitted divorce.If this collection were a work of fiction — an epistolary novel by, say, Henry James — the reader, though skeptical of the speaker's rectitude from the outset, might conclude from Eliot's letter to Hale of December 8, 1930, that an idea had come to him suddenly of a way to use an intimate correspondence with her to his posthumous advantage. At age forty-two, and only seven letters, on his part, into their correspondence, he informs her that he has arranged for their letters, at his death, to be given, in a locked metal box, to the Bodleian Library, on condition that it not be opened for sixty years. From Eliot's adding, in the same letter, that he does not worry much about his posthumous reputation, the reader gathers that he worries about it a good deal. His poetry, and also gossip about his relationship with Vivienne and hers with other men, had inspired allegations of misogyny and raised questions about his sexual adequacy and orientation. To say the least, Eliot's poetry was not considered life-affirming, nor his disposition hearty. Consigning to a tin box in a university library a vast romantic correspondence with a woman not his wife might be just the thing to shift the reception of his work in a more favorable direction.As if he kept a list of items that (for the benefit of later eavesdroppers on his correspondence) would need decontamination, Eliot made sure, as early as his fourth letter to Hale, to confess his single act of adultery — a one-night stand with an unnamed but notorious socialite (whom an editorial note identifies as Nancy Cunard). In his twenty-fourth letter, Eliot handles the topic of same-sex relationships by describing an occasion on which Lytton Strachey kneeled and kissed him, after which the poet laughed but then terminated their friendship. His letters, moreover, incorporate clues and pointers to help Hale and other readers of his work interpret it in ways that make it harmless to their souls and to his reputation. He asks her, for instance, to reread and compare two passages in The Waste Land (the “hyacinth girl” lines in part 1 and the “blood shaking my heart” lines in part 5) with, on the one hand, the lines about Pipit in “A Cooking Egg” and, on the other hand, the speaker's address to the Lady in part 2 of “Ash-Wednesday.” He asks Hale (and, I think implicitly, asks us) to see that his poems show how his steady love for her, beginning when he was an emotionally immature student in his twenties, had become increasingly (as he puts it, using Jamesian diction) fine. What he seems to mean is that she and his other readers should recognize how his attitudes toward women, sex, and human love had improved at each stage in the development of his writing (the completion dates of “A Cooking Egg,” The Waste Land, and “Ash-Wednesday” are 1917, 1922, and 1930, respectively) and how that change had improved him and drawn him away from skepticism toward Christian faith.The trouble is that such a reading — though flattering to the correspondents by linking them, as it does, with Dante and Beatrice — is not supported by the passages that Eliot asks Hale to compare. If the poet's maturation begins with “Pipit sate upright in her chair / Some distance from where I was sitting” and ends with “Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree,” he appears to have gotten nowhere. Pipit could well have been associated in Eliot's mind with Hale. He told her in 1914, as he set off from Harvard for Europe, that he was in love with her, but it seems she did not reciprocate. Three years later, he wrote a poem in Bay Psalm Book quatrains poking rueful, disappointed fun at Pipit — an “upright,” inexperienced girl who keeps her distance and whom the speaker says he “shall not want . . . in Heaven.” As the poem ends, “weeping multitudes / Droop,” while Pipit sits and knits. In “Ash-Wednesday,” it is the white leopards that sit complacently, “having fed to satiety / On my legs my heart my liver and that which had been contained / In the hollow round of my skull.” The marrow of the bones of the speaker's corpse is said to chirp the following lines (and so it is best to read them in cartoon falsetto): “Because of the goodness of this Lady / And because of her loveliness, and because / She honours the Virgin in meditation, / We shine with brightness.” Meanwhile, the speaker's “guts the strings of his eyes and the indigestible portions / Which the leopards reject” are recovered when he proffers his “love / To the posterity of the desert,” while the “Lady of silences,” who has forgotten him, “is withdrawn / In a white gown, to contemplation, in a white gown.” The Lady, like Pipit before her, ignores the speaker, who writhes and droops nearby. Even if the speaker of “Ash-Wednesday” does not resent this woman, it seems to me that the reader may well do so.As for The Waste Land, Hale is unlikely to have been Eliot's inspiration for the “hyacinth girl.” It is an Ovid-saturated poem, alluding frequently to what the poet's endnotes call “vegetation ceremonies” — and of the three times that the word appears, the H in “Hyacinth” is capitalized in the final instance, when used as a modifier for “garden.” The speaker and his companion do not visit a but the “Hyacinth garden,” bracketed by ominous lyrics from Wagner's Tristan and culminating with intimations of death by water. In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Hyacinth is a young prince of Sparta with whom Apollo is in love but who dies accidentally by his lover's hand. “Deadly pale / the god's face went — as pallid as the boy's. / With care he lifted the sad huddled form” — and in Eliot's version, Hyacinth addresses the lover bearing his or her dying body: “Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden, / Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not / Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither / Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, / Looking into the heart of light, the silence.” The “heart of light,” the sun god, is silent but resurrects the boy as a flower, and the Spartans “celebrate his solemn festival” every spring. In iterations of the myth more ancient than Ovid's, Apollo brings the boy back to life, deifies him, and Hyacinth is then worshipped as a chthonic vegetation god of the type by which Eliot was fascinated.Lines 402 – 6 from part 5 of The Waste Land present a different sort of difficulty for the reader of Eliot's letters to Hale. It is not unimaginable that “My friend” in line 402 is Hale on the day in 1914 that her friend Tom made the mistake of confessing his love to her. But if Hale is the addressee of these lines, they become less impressive and daunting, indeed nearly comic — the record of a pratfall by a socially incompetent naif. If one had thought that The Waste Land was free of Prufrock and his hyperbolic response to women (who look away from his miserable earnestness toward any available window), then the poet's letters to Hale may bring unwelcome news. “My friend, blood shaking my heart / The awful daring of a moment's surrender / Which an age of prudence can never retract / By this, and this only, we have existed” would be preposterous if said to a sensible young woman by some Prufrock in the Harvard Yard. And should we conclude that the poet's first marriage was evidence of his acquiring “prudence”? More credible is that his hasty marriage to a woman he scarcely knew and could not love is his poem's — as it was his life's — act of “awful daring.”Such perplexities and complications mount as, for decades, the correspondence continues. How the author manufactures and manages them is what makes The Letters of T. S. Eliot to Emily Hale the one great epistolary fiction of the modernist century. Hale's late discovery that she was only a character or even a figment in it reminds the reader that Beatrice, though she also briefly walked the earth, would be, for a cruel posterity, no more than a character in Dante's poems. Eliot had Hale's letters to him burned, leaving nothing of her but the author's addressee, once he realized that it was not her but his young secretary whom he loved and who could bring happiness (of all things) to his final years. In any case, his marrying furtively a woman less than half his age meant that he no longer required the tin box in the Bodleian as proof of his virility. His dedication of The Elder Statesman, the last and least of his verse-plays, “to my wife” includes a phrase, “lovers whose bodies smell of each other,” that was inconceivable to readers of Eliot in 1959 as words that he would ever write. But the reader of today, who has the poet's fiction online, knows that he could never have written such words about Hale and that he had long craved to write them about somebody.
Jeffrey Perl (Thu,) studied this question.