So my dear friend and podcast soulmate, Whiskey Jenny, recently made casual reference to “the TS Eliot batshittery,” and when we asked for more details, she sent a link that I will share with you shortly. First, some context: TS Eliot once had an… affair? with a woman named Emily Hale, over the course of which he exchanged many, many letters with her. He destroyed all her letters to him. She saved all his letters to her, and she donated them to Princeton with the stipulation that they should not be opened until 2020. I learned about this many years ago, and my imagination was captured by what it must be like to be a scholar of TS Eliot. Imagine knowing that over a thousand personal letters existed, written by the object of your study-slash-ardor, and that you could not have access to them until 2020. Wow.
Anyway, as you’ll have noticed, it’s now 2020. Which means it’s Emily Hale letters time RIGHT NOW. And “the TS Eliot batshittery” to which Whiskey Jenny was referring is the concurrent release, by Harvard, of a letter by TS Eliot that he asked to have released in concert with the release of his letters to Emily Hale. You may read it here. I translate select portions of it for you below.
It has come to my ears that [Emily Hale] has added, or is preparing to add, some sort of commentary of her own. It therefore seems to me necessary to place on record my own picture of the background of this correspondence, and my present attitude towards it.
This is the second sentence of the statement. I clasped my hands to my heart in the purest joy when I read it. Please never lose sight of the fact that TS Eliot is writing this entire statement for an audience of The Future. He died in 1965. When alive, he got anxious about what Emily Hale would say about him to The Future, and he wanted to make sure that the Future would receive his spin on his own words that he wrote with his hands. He doesn’t even know if Emily Hale is going to talk about him, at this point. He just thinks she maybe might. He is writing this statement to rebut his own letters.
I wish the statement by myself to be made public as soon as the letters to Miss Hale are made public. (I make clear a little further on what I mean by the term “make public”).
TS Eliot then spends 400 words carefully stipulating that he wants this statement to be made public if anyone anywhere gains access to the letters, or any portion of any one of the letters, or if Emily Hale ever talks about the letters, or if Emily Hale’s statements about the letters ever become public. He wants to ensure that no matter what else the chilly future may bring, nobody will read those fucking letters without reading his rebuttal of them. At this point, I was having to pause in my reading of these letters to wipe away tears of joy. “It’s like looking at the sun,” I said to Whiskey Jenny. “I can only glance at it for a moment.”
It is painful for me to have to write the following lines.
Is it? IS IT? Because it seems like you want nothing more than to write the following lines, my good sir.
During the course of my correspondence with Emily Hale, between 1932 and 1947, I liked to think that my letters to her would be preserved and made public after we were dead – fifty years after. I was however, disagreeably surprised when she informed me that she was handing the letters over to Princeton University during our lifetime – actually in the year 1956.
I, too, assume that all of my correspondence will be preserved and made public after I am dead. But not until then! Nobody must quote me until I am all the way dead, even though I do assume that everyone will want to heavily quote me. I am very, very fascinating.
She took this step, it is true, before she knew that I was going to get married. Nevertheless, it seemed to me that her disposing of the letters in that way at that time threw some light upon the kind of interest which she took, or had come to take, in these letters. The Aspern Papers in reverse.
“The Aspern Papers in reverse” killed me stone fucking dead. For those who are not familiar with this just-okay work by Apparent Novelist Henry James, it’s a novella about a guy who’s trying to gain access to some letters that a famous poet wrote to his one-time paramour Juliana, who is now an old lady. Juliana is a jerk. She is only interesting because she once banged a famous poet. The narrator is also a jerk. He is willing to do extremely sketchy things to gain access to these letters in which he has a prurient interest.
It’s such a nasty swipe at Emily Hale! Casting her as both the unpleasant woman whose only relevance is that a famous guy used to put his dick in her, and the unpleasant narrator who will do anything to gain access to the famous guy’s thoughts. T.S Eliot believed that The Future would read this remark and be like “wow, yeah, the only person relevant in this story is Famous Poet TS Eliot, everyone else is an unsympathetic and exhausting satellite to that guy.” Oh, TS Eliot. What an act of faith you have committed.
To explain my sudden marriage to Vivienne Haigh-Wood would require a good many words, and yet the explanation would probably remain unintelligible. I was still, as I came to believe a year later, in love with Miss Hale.
I hope that Vivienne Haigh-Wood is in heaven having every, every champagne drink. IT SOUNDS LIKE SHE REALLY DESERVES IT.
My meeting with Pound changed my life.
Ezra Pound was a fascist. I just feel like it’s important to never not mention this. Lest you fear that I am employing humorous hyperbole, Ezra Pound was a fascist in the sense that he produced a whole bunch of propaganda against the Allies during World War II. He was a fascist.
[Vivienne] persuaded herself (also under the influence of Pound) that she would save the poet by keeping him in England. To her, the marriage brought no happiness: the last seven years of her life were spent in a mental home. To me, it brought the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land. And it saved me from marrying Emily Hale.
Does Vivienne Haigh-Wood exist? Is she a person with her own thoughts about her own life? No, she is only a minor character in the life of TS Eliot, Poet.
Emily Hale would have killed the poet in me; Vivienne nearly was the death of me, but she kept the poet alive. In retrospect, the nightmare agony of my seventeen years with Vivienne seems to me preferable to the dull misery of the mediocre teacher of philosophy which would have been the alternative.
Like in case anyone is wondering why I fucking hate the whole thing of women as muses and supports for Great Men, it’s this. This reason. Because here’s so, so many words of TS Eliot assuming that every woman he ever came into contact with only cared about supporting him, a Great Man, and it’s such a vile and instrumental way of thinking about one’s fellow humans that I feel physically sick. I am so mad at TS Eliot that I want to read Strong Poison, a book in which a guy exactly like this gets arsenic-murdered as he VERY RICHLY DESERVES.
Upon the death of Vivienne in the winter of 1947, I suddenly realised that I was not in love with Emily Hale.
Yeah, so, reading between the lines, TS Eliot badgered Emily Hale for years until she was worn down and thought she might maybe be into him? And then when she was no longer Uninterested or Unavailable, he lost interest. TS Eliot. You have to have to have to recognize that writing this letter makes you look like the most humiliating cliche of a person doing romance.
I don’t want to be too extreme about this, and I know TS Eliot could not have predicted the advent of XO Jane personal essays and like online dating that makes it very obvious very quickly how dysfunctionally most humans approach the world of dating, and how easy it is to perceive patterns in that dysfunction, but ohmygod this is just all so predictable and cliche and I feel like as a Self-Appointed Great Man TS Eliot should strive to have a more interesting and original interior life. I’m so embarrassed for him.
From 1947 on, I realised more and more how little Emily Hale and I had in common. I had already observed that she was not a lover of poetry, certainly that she was not much interested in my poetry; I had already been worried by what seemed to me evidence of insensitiveness and bad taste.
This is the point at which my soul left my body and I ascended to an astral plane. Just in, like, self-defense. He fell out of love with her because he realized she had bad taste, and the way he realized she had bad taste was that she didn’t like his pomes. And he said that out loud and went to some trouble to ensure that the entire world would hear him say it.
She may have loved me according to her capacity for love; yet I think that her uncle’s opinions (her uncle by marriage, a dear old man, but wooly-minded) meant more to her than mine.
“She thought someone else was smarter than me. How ridiculous!”
I could never make her understand that it was improper for her, a Unitarian, to communicate in an Anglican church: the fact that it shocked me that she should do so made no impression upon her. I cannot help thinking that if she had truly loved me she would have respected my feelings if not my theology. She adopted a similar attitude with regard to the Christian and Catholic view of divorce.
“She refused to obey me when I issued gentle lectures on morality.”
I might mention at this point that I never at any time had any sexual relations with Emily Hale.
“PS we never fucked.”
Not that I ever thought that what Emily Hale was getting out of this relationship was wild and amazing sex, because I assume that most women in The Old Days were having terrible sex,1 but oh my God, Emily Hale, I can’t believe you were putting up with this and you weren’t even getting laid. Bless your heart, you poor patient baby.
But I came to see that my love for Emily was the love of a ghost for a ghost, and that the letters I had been writing to her were the letters of an hallucinated man, a man vainly trying to pretend to himself that he was the same man that he had been in 1914.
This is actually kind of relatable. I acknowledge that it is horribly embarrassing to know that evidence of Past You is just, like, out there. That’s rough. I can understand wanting to make the point that you are no longer That Person and you are now Present You and it’s different. If only there were a way to do it without viciously slagging off your past romantic partners. I dunno. Maybe the youth of today can shed some light on this matter, considering that every moment of their lives is on the internet forever. I bet they will do a better job, overall, than TS Eliot.
The world with my beloved wife Valerie has been a good world such as I have never known before. At the age of 68 the world was transformed for me, and I was transformed by Valerie.
That’s nice. I still feel sorry for poor Valerie.
May we all rest in peace
T. S. Eliot
MAY WE ALL REST IN PEACE. The most petulant mic drop I can actually imagine.
I have never, never, never been so happy. This is the stupidest and most petty act of word-doing that I have seen in all my born days, and it was perpetrated upon us by TS Eliot. He thought issuing this statement would be less embarrassing than just letting us read the letters and draw our own conclusions. When people mentioned TS Eliot, I used to think “great poet, shame about the racism and anti-Semitism,” but now I think “the most tragic OKCupid reviewer of all time, also wrote some poems.” A LEGACY.
- Evidence: So many women even in These Days Now are having terrible sex. ↩