{"id":83841,"date":"2015-11-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-11-01T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/domestic-disturbance\/"},"modified":"2024-03-26T14:18:30","modified_gmt":"2024-03-26T18:18:30","slug":"domestic-disturbance","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/domestic-disturbance\/","title":{"rendered":"Domestic disturbance"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

T<\/font>. S. Eliot edited The Criterion<\/i> from October 1922 to January 1939, when he closed it down, telling his readers that \u201ca feeling of staleness has crept over me.\u201d The fifth volume of the Letters<\/i> is almost entirely a record of his day-to-day efforts to keep volumes IX and X of The Criterion<\/i> going as a vehicle of European thought, not merely of English thought. But it never became European, despite his persistent efforts: he was not sufficiently in touch with European writers. As late as March 28, 1931, he wrote to Stephen Spender:<\/p>\n

There is a philosopher named Martin Heidegger\u2014a disciple of the great Husserl, who really is good, I think, though far from lucid\u2014whom I have been agonizing over.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He admired Jacques Maritain, Ram\u00f3n Fern\u00e1ndez, R\u00e9my de Gourmont, and E. R. Curtius, but those four swallows did not make a summer. To fill the journal with essays and reviews, he had to rely on the home team: John Middleton Murry, Herbert Read, Montgomery Belgion, Bonamy Dobr\u00e9e, Father Martin D\u2019Arcy, I. A. Richards, William Empson, A. L. Rowse, and a few more.<\/p>\n

As a correspondent, Eliot was hopeless. Nearly every letter begins with an apology. He discovered a hundred ways of saying \u201cI\u2019m sorry,\u201d sometimes adding \u201chumbly\u201d to ensure forgiveness. An instance: one day in October 1930, C. S. Lewis submitted to The Criterion <\/i>an essay, \u201cThe Personal Heresy in Criticism.\u201d No reply. Six months later, on April 19, 1931, he wrote to Eliot to enquire about the status of the essay. Meanwhile, on November 2, 1930, as Professor Haffenden reports, Lewis\u2019s friend and colleague Owen Barfield approached Eliot on Lewis\u2019s behalf. To no avail. Again, on May 28, 1931, Barfield pleaded:<\/p>\n

I dare not say that so helpless and unjustifiable a creature as a freelance contributor is \u201centitled\u201d to anything, but in the circumstances it certainly seems to me that equity looks to you for an act of grace.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The act came forth, half-heartedly. Eliot\u2019s \u201cDear Sir\u201d letter of June 1, 1931, started with an apology, followed by the suggestion that Mr. Lewis might care to submit the essay again in nine months\u2019 time, \u201cif you have not meanwhile published it.\u201d Lewis replied, the following day:<\/p>\n

I have no objection to waiting nine months: what I should like to be more assured of is the prospect I have at the end of the nine months. . . . I am quite prepared for the risk of your \u201ccorrected impressions.\u201d What I am less ready to lie at the mercy of is the mere richness or poverty of suitable contributions\u2014the fullness or emptiness of your drawer\u2014nine months hence, which nobody can predict . . .<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Having been so cheeky, Lewis relaxed to the extent of giving Eliot an account of the relation between the essay and the \u201cneo-Aristotelian theory of literature\u201d which the rest of the book, when complete, would enforce. The reference to \u201ccorrected impressions\u201d indicates that at least one further letter from Eliot to Lewis is missing.\u00a0In the event, it hardly mattered. Eliot did not publish Lewis\u2019s essay; it had to wait many more months than nine to be published in Essays and Studies of the English Association <\/i>(1934).<\/p>\n

Two of the letters in Volume 5 detained me. The first was from Eliot to Reverend Charles Harris on November 25, 1930, addressed \u201cDear Harris\u201d and marked Confidential. <\/i>It didn\u2019t stay confidential. Eliot intended writing something in reply to the Report of the Lambeth Conference (1930) and, before doing so, to discuss various issues with his ethical experts Reverend Harris, Reverend Francis Underhill, and the Bishop of Chichester. The discussion with Harris included the question of contraception. Eliot wrote:<\/p>\n

I agree with you about the actual odiousness both of idea and methods: it is one reason (among others) why in my younger and unregenerate time I found (without any sense of sin) adultery to be quite unsatisfactory.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He did not indicate when his younger and unregenerate time had ended: maybe it ended on June 26, 1915 when he married Vivienne Haigh-Wood, or on Shrove Tuesday, February 20, 1928, when he made his first Confession and, then or thenabouts, took a vow of chastity. He did not explain, in the letter to Harris, the additional reasons for finding adultery unsatisfactory. That is an awkward word to use even if we regard his sense of sin, for the moment, as null.<\/p>\n

The second ambiguous letter is from Eliot to William Force Stead, dated December 2, 1930:<\/p>\n

Could <\/i>you come up and lunch with me soon? I want to talk to you\u2014as for your suggestion\u2014my dear\u2014it has been put strongly<\/i> by my wife\u2019s R. C. doctor\u2014by Underhill\u2014and by others less qualified. But I shd like to talk to you <\/i>because you <\/i>know how difficult it is. I will say that I have now a certain happiness which makes celibacy easy for me for the first time. I think you will know what I am speaking of.<\/p>\n

Professor Haffenden\u2019s note reads in full:<\/p>\n

Gordon, T. S. Eliot<\/i>, 294, construes this letter thus: \u201cFather Underhill took it upon himself to advise separation.\u201d Seymour-Jones [biographer of Vivienne], 465, concurs.<\/p>\n

Haffenden doesn\u2019t say whether or not he too concurs. Celibacy doesn\u2019t necessarily entail separation. I concede that when Kenneth B. Murdock, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard, wrote to Eliot on October 27, 1931, inviting him to take up the Charles Eliot Norton Professorship for the academic session 1932\u20131933, Eliot did not delay long in accepting, and in deciding that he would travel to Cambridge, Massachusetts, by himself, leaving Vivienne to spend seven distraught months alone in London. In the event, the seven months extended themselves to nine, allowing Eliot to give a set of lectures at the University of Virginia and another set at Johns Hopkins. In the middle of May 1933 he wrote to his solicitor in London, instructing him to arrange a Deed of Separation from Vivienne\u2014a document which, presented to her for her signature, she refused to sign.<\/p>\n

In Thoughts after Lambeth <\/i>(1931), the word \u201cadultery\u201d does not appear, but \u201ccontraception\u201d does, as in Eliot\u2019s rebuke to the bishops for leaving unanswered the questions: \u201cWhen is it right to limit the family and right to limit it only by continence? And: When is it right to limit the family by contraception?\u201d He himself did not answer those questions in Thoughts after Lambeth<\/i>, but in a letter of November 25, 1930, to George Bell, Bishop of Chichester, he wrote:<\/p>\n

As for the Sex Resolution, my own view is very simple: I welcome the independence of the Bishops in not slavishly following Rome, and I only regret the insertion of the clause allowing private judgement: it seems to me to be distinctly the place for insisting that the laity should take spiritual counsel and direction\u2014and incidentally for gradually making the parish clergy prepare themselves for being able to give (perhaps with the collaboration of medical men) wise direction. You may find such suggestions impertinent from me, but these are among the matters which I should like to discuss with you.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Not for the first time, I am astonished by Eliot\u2019s creativity, in those two years, given the domestic turmoil with which it had to contend. \u201cAsh-Wednesday,\u201d \u201cMarina,\u201d and the two parts of \u201cCoriolan\u201d\u2014\u201cDifficulties of a Statesman\u201d and \u201cTriumphal March\u201d\u2014a translation of Saint-John Perse\u2019s \u201cAnabase,\u201d six BBC broadcast talks on seventeenth-century poetry, three further talks on Dryden, essays on Tourneur, Dryden, and Heywood, and Thoughts after Lambeth<\/i>: such an achievement disarms criticism. Not that the work is all of a piece. \u201cAsh-Wednesday\u201d and \u201cMarina\u201d issue from the same imagination under different propulsions, while the two parts of \u201cCoriolan\u201d adumbrate a different kind of poetry and an imagination in a virulent relation to itself. But I should report that Geoffrey Hill regrets that Eliot did not fulfill the promise of \u201cCoriolan.\u201d If he had continued the \u201cCoriolan\u201d sequence beyond \u201cDifficulties of a Statesman\u201d and \u201cTriumphal March,\u201d \u201che would have possessed an instrument of great range and resonance.\u201d \u201cCoriolan\u201d remains, as Hill writes in Alienated Majesty<\/i>, \u201cone of the major \u2018lost\u2019 sequences in English poetry of the twentieth century and Four Quartets <\/i>is the poorer for Eliot\u2019s having \u2018lost\u2019 it.\u201d<\/p>\n

As for the domestic woes with which Eliot, in those two years, had to contend: Vivienne was endlessly ill, bedridden much of the time, and, in the rare intervals in which her health improved, she was wild to a degree that raised a question of insanity. Eliot was patient and tender until his patience wore out and his tenderness sought relief in cruelty. I can\u2019t understand how he decided to go to Harvard for seven months and extended his absence for a further two months from the most vulnerable person in his world. The arrangements he made for The Criterion <\/i>and his duties as a director of Faber and Faber seem, by comparison, almost light-hearted.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1468,"featured_media":0,"template":"","tags":[745],"department_id":[561],"issue":[2955],"section":[],"acf":{"participants":{"simple_value_formatted":"","value_formatted":null,"value":null,"field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_65fd9fbaa0408","label":"Authors","name":"participants","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"user","value":null,"menu_order":0,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_647e2b3c6941d","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"role":"","return_format":"array","multiple":1,"allow_null":0,"bidirectional":0,"bidirectional_target":[],"_name":"participants","_valid":1}},"page_number":{"simple_value_formatted":67,"value_formatted":67,"value":"67","field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_647e2bc0c860c","label":"Page Number","name":"page_number","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"number","value":null,"menu_order":1,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_647e2b3c6941d","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"default_value":"","min":"","max":"","placeholder":"","step":"","prepend":"","append":"","_name":"page_number","_valid":1}},"featured_image_credits":{"simple_value_formatted":"T.S. 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