Over the previous four decades Eliot’s life had appeared irrevocably blighted
by his marriage to Vivienne Haigh-Wood. For a few weeks in 1915 Vivienne had
appeared to him as a delightful, talented and engaging flirt; the knot had
hardly been tied, however, when Eliot recast her as the cross to which his life
had been bound.
From this matrimonial disillusion sprang much of his best poetry — not least,
perhaps, the sexual disgust so evident in The Waste Land and other poems. At
times Eliot seemed consumed by horror at predator-women: “The sleek Brazilian
jaguar / Does not in its arboreal gloom / Distil so rank a feline smell / As
Grishkin in a drawing-room.”
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Vivienne became increasingly neurotic,
hypochondriacal and mad. Eliot separated from her in 1933; five years later she
was consigned to a mental hospital.
But misery had for so long seized Eliot’s being that he could not now shake
himself free. His conversion to a gloomy Anglicanism in 1927 had only reinforced
the mould. “Very yellow and glum,” Harold Nicolson noted of him in 1932.
“Perfect manners. He looks like a sacerdotal lawyer — dyspeptic, ascetic,
eclectic.” After Vivienne had been committed Eliot was more than ever wracked by
guilt, by 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.”
Nor did Eliot find release after Vivienne’s death in 1947. Two women — his
old Harvard flame Emily Hale and his forthright English companion Mary Trevelyan
— awaited a proposal. Indeed, Mary Trevelyan more than once proposed to him, but
to no avail.
“He is a man in prison, a prison largely of his own making,” concluded Mary
Trevelyan in 1950. Eliot was then living at 19 Carlyle Mansions, in Chelsea,
with John Hayward, a critic afflicted by muscular dystrophy, who kept pity at
bay with a barbed tongue.
Eliot himself was subject to anger. “I have noticed of late his [Eliot’s]
immense indignation with anyone who disagrees with him,” Mary Trevelyan wrote to
Hayward in 1955. “It is indeed a terrible strain on any human being to feel he
is a Classic in his lifetime.” The Classic remained impenetrable, alike as the
formally dressed public figure, and as the lodger who disappeared behind the
door of his room in Hayward’s flat. In the mid-1950s, moreover, his health
declined — he suffered from emphysema — and he became increasingly preoccupied
by death.
It seemed hardly possible that this remote, fastidious and tortured
intellectual might be returned to humanity. In fact, Eliot’s saviour had already
appeared in the shape of a Yorkshire girl. And if her qualities, in line with
her handsome looks, were essentially practical and down-to-earth, there was
something almost mystical in the call that she heard, and in the unswerving
faith with which she followed.
Esmé Valerie Fletcher was born on August 17 1926, the daughter of James
Fletcher of Headingley, Leeds, a manager of the State Assurance Company. (The
future playwright Alan Bennett, son of the local butcher, used to make
deliveries to the Fletcher house.) Beyond insurance, James Fletcher was
interested in porcelain, and concerned with both the Leeds Art Collection Fund
and Leeds Library.
Valerie was sent to school at Queen Anne’s, Caversham, near Reading, where
the ethos was sporting rather than intellectual. At the age of 14, however, she
was visited by a sudden illumination when she heard a recording of John Gielgud
reading Eliot’s Journey of the Magi. Thereafter her obsession with the poet
became a family joke.
The headmistress of Queen Anne’s may also have smiled wryly when Valerie
Fletcher told her, on leaving, that she was determined to become TS Eliot’s
secretary. For six months she worked at the Brotherton Library of the University
of Leeds, and then as private secretary to the novelist Charles Morgan. But her
aim, as she artlessly phrased it, was always “to get to Tom”; and in August 1950
she duly succeeded in becoming his secretary at Faber & Faber.
The essential prerequisite of Valerie Eliot’s final triumph was that she knew
better than to alarm her formidable employer with uncontrolled and gushing
admiration. Mary Trevelyan called Eliot “the Pope of Russell Square” on account
of the fawning respect with which he was treated at Faber & Faber; such was
his fear of women, however, that he would duck into the lavatory rather than
risk having to leave the building with a secretary. For years, therefore,
Valerie Fletcher’s office hours were consecrated simply to earning a formidable
reputation for efficiency.
“I can’t get to know her at all,” Eliot complained to Mary Trevelyan as late
as 1955, “she shuts up like a clam.” After their marriage he would acknowledge
that for a long time he was not even sure that she liked him. He had no notion
that, outside the office, the discreet secretary was building up a collection of
his works that rivalled his own. In whatever way the breakthrough was made, once
Eliot had discerned Valerie Fletcher’s unconditional love he did not hesitate.
It is said that he proposed by slipping a note into a batch of letters which
he gave her for typing. Only after Valerie had accepted did he wryly demand: “Do
you know my Christian name?” Still, though, Eliot maintained absolute secrecy,
while Valerie Fletcher wore a finger stall to disguise her engagement ring. The
sharp-eyed John Haywood, who never cared for her, had his suspicions, but still
fell short in his speculations. “There’s something more to that flower of the
Yorkshire marshes than meets the eye,” he remarked in May 1956. “The perfect
secretary has begun to see herself as the lady with the lamp.”
“I don’t give Miss Fletcher anything,” Eliot rather naughtily informed Mary
Trevelyan in December 1956. “I don’t think it is suitable to give one’s
secretary presents.” The two old friends continued to meet regularly until, on
January 9 1957, Mary Trevelyan received Eliot’s note telling her that he was
going to marry Miss Fletcher the next day. Her understandably stunned letters of
congratulation prompted an angry reply from the poet, who accused her of “gross
impertinence”. They never met again.
TS Eliot duly married Valerie Fletcher at 6.15am on January 10 1957 in St
Barnabas, Addison Road. Apart from Valerie’s parents, and one of her friends, no
one was present. St Barnabas had been chosen in preference to St Stephen’s,
Gloucester Road, his habitual place of worship. Eliot was intrigued to learn
that the French poet Jules Laforgue, whose work had been an important early
influence on his own, had also been married there.
When the new-marrieds returned from their honeymoon in Menton, the change in
Eliot was startling. “You look as if, like Dante, you’d passed into Paradise,”
someone told him. “Exactly,” he replied. “I’m the luckiest man in the world,” he
would say, “I do not deserve such happiness.” If Valerie had to endure the
disdain of some of Eliot’s circle, she rejoiced that through unstinting devotion
all her intuitions were justified.
“He obviously needed to have a happy marriage,” she observed after her
husband’s death in 1965. “There was a little boy in him that had never been
released.” At parties the Eliots would hold hands and gaze at each other like
lovesick teenagers, in defiance of the 38 years that lay between them. Such
public felicity was rather more than some could stomach. “Tom Eliot is now
curiously dull,” remarked Aldous Huxley.
Certainly, after the first performance of his play The Elder Statesman in
1958, Eliot wrote no more poetry. The dedication to Valerie would be his last
verse, unremarkable as art, startlingly frank from such an ancient fossil. The
sentiment could not be further removed from the aura of Grishkin in her
drawing-room: “To whom I owe the leaping delight / That quickens my senses in
our wakingtime / And the rhythm that governs the repose of our sleepingtime, /
The breathing in unison / Of lovers whose bodies smell of each other / Who think
the same thoughts without need of speech / And babble the same speech without
need of meaning.”
Eliot said he felt younger at 70 than he had at 60. There was a rekindled
spark in his eye, and a new openness of manner. “I’m thinking of taking dancing
lessons again,” he told reporters. “He felt he had paid too much to be a poet,
that he had suffered too much,” Valerie later explained.
Notwithstanding the new radiance in Eliot, his health remained delicate,
necessitating winter trips to the Caribbean — generally tied in with visits to
New York. Eliot relished far more, however, their annual visits to Valerie’s
mother in Leeds. He got on well with Mrs Fletcher, who noted his “virginal”
quality.
The centre of the Eliots’ content, though, was their ground-floor flat in
Kensington Court Gardens. Occasionally, there would be notable visitors, such as
Igor Stravinsky or (more surprisingly) Groucho Marx; generally, they passed the
evenings alone together, listening to the gramophone or reading to each other.
In the afternoons they would walk in Kensington Gardens, Valerie gently
chivvying her husband along.
At all times she remained his guardian and protector. In the bitter cold of
January 1963, when Eliot was forced to spend five weeks on oxygen in the
Brompton Hospital, she was constantly with him. “Hurrah, hurrah, hurrah,” he
cried out as he was wheeled back into the flat, where Valerie’s “coddling” (as
he called it) won him nearly two more years.
Eliot died on January 4 1965. His widow lived on with her memories of him in
the Kensington flat, never slackening in either her devotion or her custodial
mission. Scholars would invariably be fobbed off with polite, formal and
uninformative replies; and even as respectable a biographer as Peter Ackroyd was
given only minimal permission to quote from Eliot’s work.
Occasionally she would be stirred to rebut a calumny. Thus she produced a
letter to show that it was Vivienne Eliot’s brother, Maurice Haigh-Wood, and not
Eliot, who had signed the papers by which Vivienne was committed to mental
hospital. She also dismissed the notion that there was some homosexual
explanation for the failure of Eliot’s first marriage: “There was nothing wrong
with Tom, if that’s your implication... ” she told a journalist.
On the whole, though, Valerie Eliot preferred silence. “That dreadful play”
was all she would venture on Michael Hastings’s Tom and Viv (1984). She became
as elusive as Eliot himself had once been. A neighbour who laid claim to her
acquaintance on the ground that his three-year-old son could recite one of the
Sweeney poems by heart was swiftly disappointed. “Who would teach a child to
read Sweeney?” she sensibly demanded.
In 1971 Valerie Eliot published The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of
the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound. This was an
admirably thorough work of scholarship, with an introduction which reflected the
depth and accuracy of her knowledge of Eliot’s youth.
She edited a volume of Eliot’s letters covering the years 1898-1922, and
co-edited three more — covering 1923-25, 1926-27 and, finally, 1928-29, which
comes out in 2013. She was a 50 per cent shareholder in Faber & Faber and
served as a non-executive director.
After 1981 the success of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats, from Eliot’s Old
Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, brought Valerie Eliot great riches, enabling
her to create Old Possum’s Practical Trust, a charitable body which has
supported charities and institutions including Newnham College, Cambridge, and
the London Library. From 1993 she donated the prize money (now £15,000) for the
TS Eliot Prize for Poetry awarded by the Poetry Book Society. Every year she
would present the prizes, looking, some thought, more and more like Lady
Thatcher.
Valerie Eliot, born August 17 1926, died November 9 2012
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/books-obituaries/9670663/Valerie-Eliot.html#
