[Reprinted from The American Scholar, Volume 52, Number 3, Summer 1983]
Bertrand Russell and the Eliots
“Such is precisely the case,” returned Eeldrop, “but I had not thought it necessary to mention this biographical detail.” – T. S. Eliot, “Eeldrop and Appleplex,” 1917
THE RELATIONSHIP AMONG T. S. ELIOT, his first wife, Vivien, and Bertrand Russell was a subject on which none of the principals was later willing to elaborate. On this, as on most private matters, Eliot, like Eeldrop, rarely thought it necessary to mention biographical details. His "impersonal theory of poetry" became a cardinal tenet of New Criticism. "The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice," Eliot wrote, "a continual extinction of personality." In his autobiographical writings, Bertrand Russell's account of personal relations could scarcely have been more forthcoming—with the signal exception of his friendship with the Eliots. He conspicuously neglected Eliot in his Portraits From Memory, and in his Autobiography dispatches both Eliots rather cooly: "As they were desperately poor, I lent them one of the two bedrooms in my flat, with the result that I saw a great deal of them. I was fond of them both, and endeavored to help them in their troubles until I discovered that their troubles were what they enjoyed." Correspondence appended to Russell's Autobiography suggests unusual intimacy and an inexplicable break.
The mystery of this relationship is perpetuated in the Dictionary of National Biography, where Russell is depicted as "supplying money to the husband and a not precisely discoverable degree of amorous affection to the wife." In T. S. Eliot: A Memoir, Robert Sencourt stresses the significance of the triangle: "It was to alter drastically both [Vivien's] hopes for the future with Torn, and her already fragile grasp on sanity [and was] the background of everything that Eliot wrote in verse or prose from 1915 onwards." Yet Sencourt has no idea why the friendship cooled and merely concludes that the whole story "remains fairly obscure." Ronald W. Clark's authoritative biography of Russell asserts that Russell and Vivien "did not ... become lovers" and attributes the waning of the friendship to the tensions of the mentor-disciple relationship. Other critics, examining the relationship between Russell and Eliot, simply note "strains at which we may only guess." Where scholars fear to tread, gossips enter, with less sympathy and less regard for accuracy. In his Diary Evelyn Waugh quotes Graham Greene as saying that Vivien's insanity "sprang from her seduction and desertion by Bertrand Russell."
Russell wished to quash such rumors, and with Sencourt he succeeded. On May 28, 1968, Russell thanked Sencourt for sending advance excerpts from his Memoir of Eliot: "Both the account of my relations with the Eliots and your understanding of the situation are quite correct. I never had intimate sexual relations with Vivienne. The difficulty between Eliot and Vivienne sprang chiefly from her taking of drugs and the consequent hallucinations." Sencourt was understandably inclined to take Russell's word: after all, in his candid, even indiscreet, Autobiography, he had demonstrated that he had nothing to hide. Russell undoubtedly hoped that his Autobiography would be, at least for some considerable time, the definitive word on the matter. Vivien had died in 1947, Eliot in 1964, and Eliot's papers are sequestered until 2020. Yet despite Russell's efforts and Eliot's reticence, it is possible to assemble a reasonably detailed and revealing story about this extraordinary relationship.
Bertrand Russell met T. S. Eliot in the spring of 1914; Eliot was
then a student in Russell's graduate seminar in philosophy at Harvard, where Russell
was visiting professor. Eliot first struck Russell as "very capable of a
certain exquisiteness of appreciation, but lacking in the crude insistent
passion that one must have in order to achieve anything." Later he
recalled that his pupil was "extraordinarily silent, and only once made a
remark which struck me. I was praising Heraclitus, and he observed. 'Yes, he
always reminds me of Villon.' I thought this remark so good 1 always wished he
would make another." Eliot subsequently wrote a poem about Russell
entitled "Mr. Apollinax," depicting his teacher
as a mythic and sinister force arousing bizarre reactions in
In 1914 Russell was forty-two years old. He had been raised by his
rigidly puritanical grandmother and married very young, partly to escape his
grandmother's dominion. After about six years of happy marriage with Alys, his first wife, he fell out of love with her, and
remained married but virtually celibate for some ten years. In 1911 he began a passionate
affair with Lady Ottoline Morrell, which by 1914 was
waning. Lecturing in
Eliot reentered Russell's life by chance in October 1914.
Traveling on Harvard's Sheldon Fellowship to
But dissimilar politics did not preclude a blooming friendship.
Under Russell's auspices, Eliot delivered a talk at
T. S. Eliot was at this point twenty-six. He had married Vivienne (or Vivien) Haigh, a middle-class British woman of twenty-seven, June 26, 1915. Within a fortnight Russell dined with the newlyweds and described the occasion to Ottoline.
I expected her to be terrible, from
his mysteriousness; but she was not so bad. She is light, a little vulgar,
adventurous, full of life - an artist I think he said, but I should have
thought her an actress. He is exquisite and listless: she says she married him
to stimulate him, but finds she can't do it. Obviously he married in order to
be stimulated. I think she will soon be tired of him. She refuses to go to
That the bride of a reticent husband would tell his renowned professor, "she married him to stimulate him, but finds she can't do it" suggests sexual tensions to which Russell, inevitably, was alert. Russell was also probably playing down her attractiveness. Sencourt, who knew her, describes Vivien as "vivacious ... mingling ... sparkle and sensitiveness with the sardonic and playful." She had an "undeniable seductiveness fragile, mercurial vivacity ... insinuating femininity." Vivien radiated sexual energy toward men and rather neglected other women. Aldous Huxley's first impression of the marriage was that "it is almost entirely a sexual nexus between Eliot and her; one sees it in the way he looks at her—she's an incarnate provocation…."
Vivien very soon provoked Russell. "I am getting very fond of Mrs. Eliot, not in an 'improper' manner—she does not attract me much physically—but I find her a real friend, with a really deep human feeling about the war, & no longer at all unkind to her husband. I feel her a permanent acquisition, not merely the object of kindness, as I thought at first." Russell's letters to Ottoline depict Vivien as prone to suicidal despair and morbid vanity. He wished to help the Eliots: "I want to give her some other outlet than destroying him." Doubtless Russell was consciously reassuring Ottoline, who was still coping with the distraught Helen Dudley. Russell's letters sound astute, controlled, but strangely disengaged. He seems to know a very great deal about Vivien's inner life but remains confident he will never give her very much of his own.
Meanwhile Eliot decided he had better return home to explain
himself to his family. He had married hastily, without informing his parents,
who were already upset by the vagueness of his career plans. So in August 1915,
Eliot made a solitary voyage to his family's summer residence in
He returned from this tumultuous encounter bereft and broke, and Russell,
typically generous, offered a room to Eliot and his wife in his
Russell perhaps felt toward Eliot a complex but not uncommon blend of the solicitude, gratification, and platonic affection that teachers often feel for their cherished students. He himself defined it as "an opportunity for giving a kind of affection that hitherto I have only been able to give in a slight, fragmentary way to pupils...." For Russell this attitude touched upon a related desire—his ardent, frustrated wish for children. At forty-four and without marital prospects, he probably feared he would never have a family. "It is quite funny," he mused in a letter to Ottoline, "how I have come to love him, as if he were my son."
He is becoming much more of a man. He has a profound and quite unselfish devotion to his wife, and she is really very fond of him, but has impulses of cruelty to him from time to time. It is a Dostojevsky [sic] type of cruelty, not a straightforward everyday kind. I am every day getting things more right between them, but I can't let them alone at present, and of course I myself get very much interested. She is a person who lives on a knife-edge, and will end as a criminal or a saint—I don't know which yet. She has a perfect capacity for both.
In the same month Russell used the parental image to characterize his
attitude toward Vivien: "I shall be seeing a great deal of her—the affection
I have for her is what one might have for a daughter, but it is very strong, &
my judgment goes with it." He is the paterfamilias presiding over two
young people who have demonstrable need for paternal authority and affection. Perceiving
Vivien's symptoms and enjoying the role of teacher and counselor, Russell
steered a clear course, at least as far as he was aware. In the autumn of 1915,
while living at Russell's, Eliot taught at the
I am rather ashamed of the discovery.... It is that she is trustful & thinks me wise and good—at least as regards her & as regards her I have been. Partly this satisfied my love of despotism, and partly it makes me feel not such a wretch as I have always felt for a long time in relation to you. I have had moments when I have thought I might like a closer relation with her, but that is not the truth—the whole satisfaction I have depends on being useful both to her & Eliot, and would vanish if I began wanting anything inconsistent with that.... I shall never have a physical relation with her, which in any case she would not at all want.... The problem for me as regards Mrs. E. is this: All the faults you suspect exist but they are gradually improving. I have made her trust me & look to me & care for me to a considerable extent. In spite of her faults I have an affection for her. because I feel they spring from a root of despair & that she might become quite different. And apart from affection, I have incurred responsibility. The affection is not constant, but the sense of responsibility is. I don't want to quarrel--I think with time 1 can avoid giving her the feeling that 1 have played her false, without getting into any permanent entanglement. But it will want time.
In response to the Torquay holiday, Eliot was grateful—even, given his habitual reticence, effusively so. He must have been haunted by fear that he had made a disastrous mistake in his marriage and craved reassurance that his Vivien was both worthy and capable of progress. "This," he writes Russell, "is wonderfully kind of you—really the last straw (so to speak) of generosity. I am very sorry you have to conic back—and Vivien says you have been an angel to her—but of course I shall jump at the opportunity with the utmost gratitude. I am sure you have done everything possible and handled her in the very best way—better than I—I often wonder how things would have turned out but for you-I believe we shall owe her life to you, even." This letter Russell quotes in full in his Autobiography.
Eliot at this point was stretched to the breaking point. Revising
his decidedly anti-Russellian doctoral thesis, on the
philosophy of F. H. Bradley, he found a better position at
By spring of 1916, after his successfully received lectures, Principles of Social Reconstruction, Russell had established a regular social routine with the Eliots; he saw Vivien at lunch or dinner twice a week. Ottoline at last met, as she later recorded in her Memoirs, "the young American that Bertie met when he was at Harvard in 1914 and thought so clever and over-cultured." She added: "Bettie was obviously interested in [Vivien]. He was convinced that the Eliots were not really happy together, but by a little manipulation on his part everything would come right between them. By what he told me I was not convinced of this and felt doubtful as to whether he would not really make things much worse." Ottoline's first impressions of Vivien were predictably unfavorable. "The dinner was not a great success. T. S. Eliot was very formal and polite, and his wife seemed to me of the 'spoilt kitten' type, very second rate and ultra feminine, playful and naive, anxious to show she 'possessed' Bertie, when we walked away from the restaurant she headed him off and kept him to herself, walking with him arm-in-arm. I felt rather froissée at her bad manners."
Eliot was nevertheless introduced at Garsington and sometimes visited there without Vivien; occasionally, too, Vivien appeared
without her husband, once escorted by Russell. Russell was by this point more deeply
engaged than ever in political activity. In May I916 he publicly acknowledged
having written a "seditious" pamphlet protesting punishment of a
conscientious objector. On June 5 he appeared in court, made an impressive
speech, and lost. He was fined one hundred pounds, which he refused to pay, but
his friends raised the funds for him. Still, on July 11, 1916, he was removed
from his position at
Meanwhile, Russell became increasingly entangled, despite assurances
to the contrary, with the Eliots. He wrote Ottoline in June: "Last night I dined with the Eliots and discussed money. The passion of her life is
dancing & ever since I have known her I have paid for her dancing lessons
whenever she has been well enough. I don't suppose she will ever be any good,
because of her health, but it is such a passion that I can't
bear to baulk it if I can possibly help it. Of course it would save my pocket
if her husband got better paid work." He wonders if Ottoline can help place Eliot at the New States-man or the
By summer Ottoline became openly
resentful of the Eliots.
Russell now felt emotionally overextended and became highly self-critical. Besides Ottoline and Vivien, he was flirting fairly seriously at this time with Katherine Mansfield. And Helen Dudley, while no longer a problem, had moved into Russell's fiat after the Eliots left. He "used" Vivien, so he told Ottoline, to detach himself from her. But this is too harsh and too narrow an assessment of his own behavior. He was not simply using Vivien; Russell tended to interpret himself solely in terms of the woman he was addressing at that moment. Russell also told Ottoline that "I never contemplated risking my reputation with her and I never risked it so far as I can judge." On this evidence, Ronald Clark concludes that Russell and Vivien were never lovers. Russell's romantic and political tribulations and Ottoline's extraordinary loyalty brought them closer; accordingly, he moved to extricate himself from Vivien. In September 1916 he writes: "l shall soon have come to the end of the readjustment with Mrs. E. I think it will be all right, on a better basis. As soon as it is settled, I will come to Garsington. I long to come."
Now, however, enter Lady Constance Malleson (Colette O'Niel), who eclipsed everyone else in
Russell's universe. They had met on July 31, 19I6, at the trial of Clifford
Allen, who was chairman of the No-Conscription Fellowship. Their affair began
September 23—a fascinating and complex relationship commemorated by Colette in
a novel, two autobiographical memoirs, and a collection of her and Russell's
love letters. Although the letters, now in the Russell Archives at
Colette O'Niel was twenty, beautiful, and an aspiring actress from an aristocratic Anglo-Irish family involved in what we would now, in the cant phrase, call an open marriage with the actor Miles Malleson. To Colette, Russell wrote with his characteristic blend of passion and candor. Almost immediately he told Colette about Ottoline; soon he delicately described his relationship with the Eliots. Within a few months, their affair deepened and became complicated by other romances.
The year 1917 marked a somewhat better period for T. S. Eliot. He found a new, less fatiguing position in the colonial and foreign department of Lloyd's Bank. Although kind friends more than once tried to rescue Eliot for poetry by raising funds, he preferred the security of his position and the promise it held out of a pension. The new job helped Eliot's morale considerably. "Vivien was very anxious about my health," he wrote his mother. "Now I am better and more cheerful she is much happier." Shortly after the bank appointment, he became assistant editor of The Egoist, a position (unbeknownst to him) partly subsidized by Ezra Pound. Vivien meanwhile gamely but vainly tried to find work, despite "sleepless nights and headaches."
The summer of 1917 marked perhaps the zenith of the Russell-Colette affair: they spent a fortnight together that each remembered ever after as idyllic. By autumn, however, Russell broached a new scheme to the Eliots. Since the Eliots wished some time apart, and he needed more constant companionship, why didn't he, Russell, and Vivien find a cottage in the country? Eliot could come out on weekends. Vivien was receptive to the idea and for a time it seemed feasible. Russell hoped this plan would not wound Colette.
In late October, Colette O'Niel suggested to Russell that they cool their affair into friendship. Russell was shocked into a revelation. He wrote Colette that he had intended platonic relations with Vivien Eliot but that she wanted more than that Russell led Vivien to expect more if the cottage scheme materialized. At last they made love, or so Russell notes in a letter to Colette, but for him it was hellish and loathsome. He disguised his antipathy and she seemed satisfied, but since then he has had awful nightmares that strip his self-evasions. He no longer wants to share a cottage if it means such physical intimacy. Sex with anyone else, he told Colette, was unbearable. Is she so thoughtless that she can't see his depth of love and suffering? The cottage scheme was an unsuccessful ploy to detach himself from Colette. He felt nauseated by corruption. Now he must repudiate Vivien and he can't face the responsibility. If only he could come home to Colette's arms, he might have the strength to do what he must.
In using Vivien as a pawn and finally making love with her, Russell violated the principles he had maintained scrupulously since June 1915. Why did he deny having sexual relations with Vivien in his letter to Sencourt in 1968? I don't think it was merely what Russell called (in another context) "the emotional unreliability of memory." More likely the old philosopher was being sophistical in specifying that they never had "intimate sexual relations"—meaning that their sexual relations were not truly intimate. Perhaps he wished to protect the innocent Eliot, whom in some ways he had loved as a son. Or perhaps he was trying to protect the guilty—notably, himself. He made love to a troubled young woman, found it unsatisfying, and instantly regretted it. He was forced to see himself as a hypocrite exploiting the trust of someone who needed his help. Like a bad child he sought Colette's forgiveness, in imagery that suggests a nursing baby, at the very time he asserted his greater wisdom and depth.
However we judge Russell's behavior, the whole, confused relationship with Vivien precipitated some of his most painful, probing introspection. Describing the "readjustment" with Vivien to Ottoline, when he still seemed to have things under control, he had reached a remarkable self-realization.
It is odd how one finds out what one really wants, and how very selfish it always is. What I want permanently—not consciously, but deep down—is stimulus, the sort of thing that keeps my brain active and exuberant. I suppose that is what makes me a vampire. I get a stimulus most from the instinctive feeling of success. Failure makes me collapse.... I had a sense of success with Mrs. E. because I achieved what I meant to achieve (which was not so very difficult).... The rare moments of mystic insight that I have had have been when I was free from the will to succeed. But they have brought a new kind of success, which I have at once noticed and wanted, and so my will has drifted back into the old ways. And I don't believe I should do anything without this sort of will. It is very tangled.
It seems clear from this letter, a full year before the confession to Colette, that Russell feared succumbing to "the old ways." He was rigorously self-critical; he saw himself as an insatiable vampire. In his Autobiography he called himself a "non-supernatural Faust" and elsewhere spoke of his "Satanic mysticism." Once Russell casually inquired of a correspondent whether he had read Eliot's poem "Mr. Apollinax." "He seems to have noticed the madness," Russell noted, which in context suggests sexual madness. With men, Russell turned his powers into argument that most found intimidating; with women it was more often turned into an imaginative sympathy most found irresistible. Even when the impulse was benevolent, as it was for so long toward Vivien Eliot, Russell feared that he was a "vampire." This is part of what Russell meant when he acknowledged a lifelong "sense of sin."
Passion for Colette O'Niel overpowered his will and he lapsed into using Vivien Eliot shamelessly. Worse, the tactic worked. Colette responded to his confession at once: she would come to him, and lie should not regret his urgent needs. As he will be exhausted by his impending interview with Mrs. Eliot, she adds comfort and sympathy. Neither Colette nor Russell sound much concerned with Vivien—who behaved admirably, especially for someone as disturbed as she is reputed to have been. Russell dreaded seeing her, but to his enormous relief, Vivien took the initiative in disentangling them; breaking the sexual taboo apparently enabled them to break their relationship. He wrote Colette that Vivien was saintly in transcending her own pain and helping him.
During the next six weeks, Russell's feelings for Vivien took another inexplicable turn. On January 1, 1918, he wrote Colette that he neither loved Vivien nor wished physical relations with her. But he cherished her companionship and selfless affection and would always appreciate her helping him through these difficult months. He described Vivien as an essential part of his life, but added that he was really making a despairing appeal to Colette to assuage his wounded pride. His very life, he insisted, depended upon her response. (Implied threats of suicide, incidentally, had also marked his relationships with Ottoline and Alys.)
Colette responded with remarkable poise for a twenty-year-old woman, married and involved with at least three men. She noted that Russell had been complaining about the Vivien complication for months, and that this liaison had unsettled his work quite as much as she herself had. Russell, reminded of his illegitimate or "vampirish" needs, now urged Colette to forget him and spare herself misery. His own life, he said, is imprisoned (one of his favorite metaphors) and brought hell to everyone he loves. But by March 29, 1918, he felt redeemed by Colette's love and saved from the self-loathing that haunted him always.
In the spring of 1918, Russell published a sentence construed as likely to damage relations with the American allies, for which he was tried and convicted in Brixton.* Through the auspices of influential friends, his incarceration was relatively civilized, except for his wild jealousy of Colette's affairs. Prison did not disrupt Russell's relationship with the Eliots. T. S. Eliot was listed as a preferred visitor at Brixton Prison, and Russell loaned them his cottage, Marlowe, for the summer. Prison, however, reinforced Russell's intention to break finally with Vivien. In early July 1918 he asked his brother Frank to tell Eliot that he would probably have to give up financial interest in the house, which constituted a polite notice of eviction.
Meanwhile, the Eliots began meeting more
people—the kind of people who recorded their impressions. Leonard Woolf
recalled in his Autobiography that he and Virginia liked T. S.
Eliot very much when they met him in November 1918, "but we were both
a little afraid of him. He was very precise, formal, cautious, or even
inhibited."
In the early years of their marriage, Vivien elicited several favorable and sympathetic reactions. Stephen Spender said Vivien "wanted to enjoy life, found Eliot inhibiting and inhibited, yet worshipped him." Aldous Huxley wrote that he rather liked her: "She is such a genuine person, vulgar, but with no attempt to conceal her vulgarity, with no snobbery of the kind that makes people say they like things, such as Bach or Cezanne, when they don't." Sir Herbert Read recalled, "Posterity will probably judge Vivienne harshly, but I remember her in moments when she was sweet and vivacious; later her hysteria became embarrassing." Read adds that Eliot only once in correspondence discussed his marriage and that letter was destroyed, he thinks possibly at Eliot's request.
Other acquaintances patronized and disliked Vivien. Virginia Woolf
s first impressions, for example, were of "a washed out, elderly &
worn looking little woman." The photographs from Garsington hear
Nineteen eighteen was another terribly trying year for the Eliots: both suffered
poor health that winter. Eliot had lost fifteen pounds since
On January 18, 1919, Vivien wrote Russell that she disliked fading intimacies and wished to break completely. Despite Vivien's curt letter, Russell continued to write to her, indicating (at the very least) that his concern for her was more than that of a roving seducer. Eliot was deeply upset that Russell continued to write Vivien. Vivien's father had had two operations that year and she suffered a nervous collapse. Now in a doctor's hands, she was, Eliot announced, expressly forbidden to answer Russell's letters.
If Eliot did not know the precise nature of Russell's relationship with Vivien, he certainly knew that Russell upset her. In what must have been a very delicate and mortifying gesture, Eliot instructed Russell to cease and desist. Already guilty in his own mind of egregious insensitivity and exploitation, Russell saw his exit cue. But there was abundant guilt to go around. Although Eliot's correspondence is not yet available, and is unlikely to contain intimate revelations, his poetry is full of references to frustrated or failed sexual relations, animosity toward women, and the ecstatic agony of saints: "We each have the sort of life we want, but his life went straight to the death he wanted.... Because his flesh was in love with the pointed arrows" ("The Death of St. Narcissus"). Occasionally, Eliot's normally fastidious conversation is revealing. "Missing trains is awful," commented Virginia Woolf on March 22, 1921. "Yes," replied Eliot, "but humiliation is the worst thing in life." With the WooIfs, Eliot gradually became more candid, as for example confessing his Prufrockian deficiencies. After a weekend at Ottoline's Garsington, he remarked, "I behaved like a priggish pompous little ass." Virginia Woolf noticed his "anemia, self-consciousness," and concluded that "coldness at least must be a sore point with him."
In the summer of 1919 Russell fell in love with Dora Black, a
student at
From this point the correspondence between Russell and the Eliots becomes scanty, sporadic, and cryptic. The letters
from Eliot that Russell published in his Autobiography are tantalizing but
inexplicable without the history of their relationship. Russell returned from
By 1921 T. S. Eliot's health had deteriorated discernibly and required treatment. Whatever his literary friends thought of Vivien, Eliot needed her presence. To Richard Aldington he wrote, "I could not hear the idea of starting this treatment quite alone in a strange place, and I have asked my wife to come with me and stay with me as long as she is willing...." On November 6 he wrote: "My 'nerves' are a very mild affair, due not to overwork but to aboulie and emotional derangement which has been a lifelong affliction. Nothing wrong with my mind." Nor did he blame Vivien. On the contrary. He admired Vivien's spirit in combating her own ailments: "I have never known anybody stick to a thing with such persistence and courage, often with relapses which made her feel that the whole thing was useless." Friends such as Conrad Aiken agreed that it was no more Vivien's problem than Eliot's. "Poor devil," Aiken wrote G. B. Wilbur about Eliot, "cries out for analysis more than anyone I've ever seen. He's a perfect Gordian knot—he thinks he's god. A passion for perfection—etc. His wife's an invalid." Virginia Woolf described Eliot as "about to break down—infinitely scrupulous, tautologous, & cautious... he elaborates and complicates, makes one feel that he dreads life as a cat dreads water."
Eliot's letters in the early 1920s convey talk of unalleviated illness and misery. To Leonard Woolf he was especially forthcoming about his "series of calamities," because "we know what constant illness is, and I think very few people do" (June 2, I922). Desperately he hoped Leonard might have some insight and assistance to offer. Often he praised Vivien's efforts and never exonerated himself. He asked if Leonard knew a doctor "with psychoanalytic knowledge." and added: "This is obviously not for V. but for myself if for anyone."
Upon the publication of The Waste Land in 1922, Russell wrote to Eliot in praise. Eliot responded with particular pleasure that Russell liked Part V, "which in my opinion is not only the best part, but the only part that justifies the whole, at all." He added that Vivien had wanted to send Russell the unpublished manuscript eighteen months earlier, "because she was sure that you were one of the very few persons who might possibly see anything in it." Eliot's comment, and The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript, indicate that Vivien was more intimately involved with its composition and revision than had been formerly realized. For example, Pound considered this speech from "A Game of Chess" mere "photography"—that is, too clearly about Eliot's home life:
"My
nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
"Speak
to me. Why do you never speak. Speak. Speak.
"What
are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
"I
never know what you are thinking. Think."
Although usually persuaded by Pound's suggestions. Eliot left this passage intact. Perhaps he was encouraged by Vivien's enthusiasm: down the page she wrote in bold letters WONDERFUL. She also contributed to the Pub scene one fascinating line: "What you get married for if you don't want children?" At her request Eliot deleted one line about the game of chess: "The ivory men make company between us." Perhaps this is too "photographic" even for Vivien, who wrote YES in recognition alongside the line. Is this a submerged reference to Russell, using Vivien and Eliot as pawns in other sexual encounters? After Vivien died in 1947, Eliot restored the line from memory in making a fair copy of the text. In the flush of his success with the poem, responding to Russell's praise, Eliot must have forgotten his request in 1919 that Russell disappear: "We felt that you might prefer to have nothing to do with us: It is absurd to say we wished to drop you." He said that Vivien had nearly died of a frightful illness and asks if he might come to tea. "I should like to see you very much—there have been many times when I have thought that."
In April 1925 Eliot was once again despairing. He paid the Woolfs a "long gaslit emotional rather tremulous and excited visit," as Virginia Woolf noted in her Diary, in which he confided some of his marital woe. He asked Leonard if he knew anything about psychoanalysis and said that Vivien wouldn't let him out of her sight. If he had to go out, he would return to find her in a half-fainting state. "Tomorrow will be wretched," he said, "for he was now away from 8 to 11." The Woolfs advised another doctor. "But whether it's doctors or sense or holiday or travel or some drastic method unknown that's to cure that little nervous self-conscious bundle—heaven knows."
Obviously bereft and terrified, Eliot contacted Russell again the same week, this time seeking an interview. His old mentor was now happily immersed in family and writing. "I want words from you which only you can give," wrote Eliot. "But if you have now ceased to care at all about either of us, just write on a slip 'I do not care to see you' or 'I do not care to see either of you'—and I will understand. In case of that, I will tell you now that everything has turned out as you predicted 10 years ago. You are a great psychologist" In this terrible letter, Eliot almost seemed to be addressing his father as much as Bertrand Russell.
Apparently Russell was moved enough to reply at once but too wary to extend an invitation. Eliot wrote again on May 7. 1925:
As you say, it is very difficult for you to make suggestions until I see you.... I don't know to what extent the changes which have taken place, since we were in touch with you, would seem to you material. What you suggest seems to me of course what should have been done years ago. Since then her health is a thousand times worse. Her only alternative would be to live quite alone—if she could, and the fact that living with me has done her so much damage does not help me to come to any decision. I need the help of someone who understands her—I find her still perpetually baffling and deceptive. She seems to me like a child of 6 with an immensely clever and precocious mind. She writes extremely well (stories, etc) and [with] great originality. And I can never escape from the spell of her persuasive (even coherent) gift of argument. Well, thank you very much, Bertie—I feel quite desperate. I hope to see you in the Autumn.
Eliot's desperation increased over the next several years, during which he again lost touch with Russell. Vivien was frequently bedridden, incapacitated by mysterious ailments nobody could identify, and increasingly hysterical. In November 1930 Virginia Woolf recorded in her Diary that Eliot had "a leaden, sinister look about him. But oh—Vivienne! Was there ever such a torture since life began.—to bear her on one's shoulders, biting, wriggling, raving, scratching, unwholesome, powdered, insane. . . This bag of ferrets is what Tom wears round his neck." Eliot left Vivien in 1933; she was institutionalized for a period and died in 1947. Russell and Eliot apparently had no further contact until they exchanged brief notes in the 1950s, by which time both had become eminent and more serene.
The triangle, then, was neither as innocent as Russell wished us to believe nor as sordid as gossips imagined. Instead, it was revealing in the deepest sense—not simply exposing embarrassing facts, but providing significant glimpses of three complex personalities. Russell did not hastily seduce and ruthlessly abandon Vivien. He slept with her, possibly at her urging, only after an intense and protracted (if ambiguous) friendship. He did so out of quite compelling need, and regretted it immediately. His repentance seems to have been genuine—as far as such complicated responses can be assessed by anyone, including one's self. Russell's remorse touched his deepest fears about himself and provoked anguished self-reproaches. In his poetry Eliot imagined and articulated exactly what Russell experienced.
And
last, the rending pain of re-enactment
Of
all that you have done, and been; the shame
Of
motives late revealed, and the awareness
Of
things ill done and done to others' harm
Which once you took for exercise of virtue.
("Little Gidding," II)
We don't know whether or not Eliot ever learned what had happened between Russell and Vivien, although it seems likely that he suspected. Until Eliot's private papers are made available, we can make only the most tentative speculations about his feelings. Certainly he understood Russell's attraction to and repulsion from Vivien, since he himself struggled with it for some fifteen years. One pole of Eliot's complex attitude might have been expressed by Sweeney Agonistes: "I knew a man once did a girl in / Any man might do a girl in / Any man has to, needs to, wants to / Once in a lifetime do a girl in." And Harry in The Cocktail Party says that he killed his wife, although Charles speculates, "I suspect it is simply the wish to get rid of her / Makes him believe that he did." Another stance Eliot often takes in his poetry is the way of martyrdom, although the early glorification of self-immolation gives way to Becket's self-skepticism: he is wary lest he be too eager to achieve this other consummation. Eliot, like Thomas à Becket, heard the temptation to "Seek the way of martyrdom, make yourself the lowest / On earth, to be high in heaven."
In their writings, Eliot and Russell each planted allusions and clues to what had occurred. If Russell was unable to admit publicly what he had done, he was equally incapable of forgetting it. He used autobiography as an opportunity to suppress and imply what had happened. For an autobiographical narrator, he makes the strange and telling confession that he is prone to disguising things: "It became second nature to me to think that whatever I was doing had better be kept to myself, and I have never quite overcome the impulse to concealment which was thus generated." Eliot, of course, adamantly discouraged biographers, although he described The Waste Land as "the relief of a personal... grouse against life." One of his most resonant lines is repeated in Murder in the Cathedral and Four Quartets: "human kind / cannot bear very much reality." Bertrand Russell and T. S. Eliot each bore a burden of sexual guilt, though for opposite reasons, and both felt partly responsible for Vivien's sad fate.
* The sentence read: "The American Garrison which will by
that time be occupying
For permission to reprint, I gratefully acknowledge Mrs. T. S.
Eliot: the
Reprinted from The American
Scholar, Volume 52. Number 3. Summer 1983
Copyright 1983 by the United Chapters of Phi Beta Kappa